Rev Left Radio - Challenging Capitalism: Reading Michael Parenti on Marxism

Episode Date: March 27, 2021

In this episode, Breht reads through, and comments upon, a chapter from Michael Parenti's "Blackshirts and Reds" Purchase "Blackshirts and Reds" here: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100403620    LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. For today's Patreon episode, I'm going to read the last chapter or two of black shirts and reds by Michael Parenti. Many people are aware of black shirts and reds, and I've read, I think, a chapter or two of it before on Patreon, as mostly a counter-narrative against Cold War anti-communist propaganda and a real dive into the nuances and complexities of the different socialist states, the Western encirclement, the absorption of fascist after World War II by the West, etc. But at the end here, he actually kind of zooms out a little bit and talks about Marxism more broadly, talks about how it's treated in academia, and goes through some of his thoughts on Marxism as a science, what it offers, what its misunderstandings and misrepresentations are in popular culture, etc.

So I thought that was an interesting little chapter, and I wanted to read it. And as always, if I have something to comment on, I'll do an aside as I read through the text. But this is Chapter 8 from Black Shirts and Reds by Michael Parenti, and the chapter title is The End of Marxism, question mark. Some people say Marxism is a science, and others say it is a dogma, a bundle of reductionist unscientific claims. I would suggest that Marxism is not a science in the positive sense, formulating hypotheses and testing for predictability, but more accurately a social science.

one that shows us how to conceptualize systematically, moving from surface appearances to deeper, broader features, so to better understand both the specific and the general and the relationship between the two. Marxism has an explanatory power that is superior to mainstream bourgeois social science because it deals with the imperatives of class power and political economy, the motor forces of society and history. The class basis of political economy is not a subject for which mainstream social science has much understanding or even tolerance. In 1915, Lenin wrote that, quote, bourgeois science will not even hear of Marxism,

declaring that it has been refuted and annihilated. Marx is attacked with equal zest by young scholars who are making a career by refuting socialism and by decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of all kinds of outworn systems, end quote. Over 80 years later, the careerist scholars are still declaring Marxism to have been proven wrong once and for all. As the anti-communist liberal writer, Irving Howe put it, quote,

the simplistic formula of textbooks, including the Marxist ones, no longer hold. That is why some of us don't regard ourselves as Marxist, end quote. That quotes from 1986. Here I want to argue that Marxism is not outmoded or simplistic, only the image of it entertained by anti-Marxists, like how. All right, as an aside, this book is written, let me see here, just to make sure so you can have some sort of time understanding of what he's talking about in, so 1997. So this book was written in 97, so a lot of the stuff that he's going to be addressing,

the people, the names, they're not going to be overly familiar to folks born after that. He'll be talking about people in the 80s and 90s and not beyond that. So just to give you some temporal sense of where the text is coming from. Back to the text. Some durable basics.

With the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, announcements about the morebund nature of Marx's dogma poured forth with renewed vigor. But Marx's major work was capital, a study not of existing socialism, which actually did not exist in his day, but of capitalism, a subject that remains terribly relevant to our lives. It would make more sense to declare Marxism obsolete if and when capitalism is abolished, rather than socialism. I wish to argue not merely that Marx is still relevant, but that he is more relevant today than he was in the 19th. century, that the forces of capitalist motion and development are operating with greater scope than when he first studied them. As an aside, again, this is 97. So think about the cultural,

economic, and political sort of dogma of that time in the West. Very different than it is post-2007, 2008, even post-Iraq war, post-9-11, right? A lot of different things have been added into the mix. And after the great economic recession and now with this pandemic, after Occupy, after the bank bailouts, after skyrocketing in inequality, class analysis, Marxism, radical left politics are coming back into mainstream, I think political discourse. Even the Republicans and the Democrats have to talk about class, which really before Occupy in the 80s, the 90s, early 2000s, class was just not talked about. Some of you are fairly young. I was born in the 80s. I'm old enough to remember. Some of that, some of the difference about just the absence of any discussion

of class before the economic crash and then occupy bringing class to the forefront and making people talk about it. And now, especially during and after this pandemic, both the Republicans and the Democrats have to talk about it. You know, they do it in mystifying ways, of course, but they're forced to talk about it. So keep in mind that at this, at the time that he's writing this, the level of Marxism and the discussions of socialism with even like the Bernie level understanding of socialism, that was anathema at the time.

Like you could not imagine even a Bernie Social Democrat rising up in the 90s or the 80s. So also keep that in mind as we go through this. Back to the text. This is not to say that everything Marx and angles anticipated has come true. Their work was not a perfect prophecy, but an imperfect, incomplete science, like all sciences, directed toward understanding a capitalism that leaves its bloody footprints upon the world as never before. Some of Marxism's basic postulates are as follows. In order to live, human beings must produce.

People cannot live by bread alone, but neither can they live without bread. This does not mean all human activity can be reduced to material motives, but that all activity is linked to a material base. A work of art may have no direct economic motive attached to it. Yet its creation would be impossible if there did not exist the material conditions that allowed the artist to create and show the work to interested audiences who have the time for art. What people need for survival is found in nature, but rarely in a form suitable for immediate consumption. Labor, therefore, becomes a primary condition of human existence.

But labor is more than a way of providing for survival. It is one of the means whereby people develop their material and cultural life, acquiring knowledge and new modes of social organization. The conflicting class interests that evolve around the productive forces shape the development of a social system. When we speak of early horticultural societies or of slave or feudal or mercantile or industrial capitalist societies, we are recognizing how the basic economic relations leave a defining stamp on a given social social. order. Capitalist theorists present capital as a creative providential force. As they would have it, capital gives shape an opportunity to labor. Capital creates production, jobs, new technologies, and a general prosperity. Marxists turn the equation around. They argue that, of itself,

capital cannot produce anything. It is the thing that is produced by labor. Only human labor can create the farm and the factory, the machine, and the computer. And in a class society, The wealth so produced by many is accumulated in the hands of relatively few, who soon translate their economic power into political and cultural power in order to better secure the exploitative social order that so favors them. The standard trickle-down theory says that the accumulation of wealth at the top eventually brings more prosperity to the rest of us below. A rising tide lifts all boats.

I would argue that in a class society the accumulation of wealth fosters the spread of poverty. The wealthy few live off the backs of the impoverished many. There can be no rich slaveholders living in idle comfort without a mass of penniless slaves to support their luxurious lifestyle. No lords of the manor who live in opulence without a mass of impoverished landless serfs who till the Lord's lands from dawn till dusk.

So too under capitalism, there can be no financial moguls and industrial tycoons without millions of underpaid and overworked employees. As a side note, it is important to realize this, and probably most of you understand this, but the increase in wealth that capitalism creates, which is, you know, it's great sort of advantage.

It does create massive amounts of wealth. It comes part and parcel with a radical, unequal distribution. So you have the U.S. in 2020, the richest country to ever exist in human history. and you go to any of its major cities and what do you see blocks and blocks miles upon miles of people living in the street of people who are addicted to drugs people who have severe untreated mental illness people who are disabled and don't have money to afford health care while on those same major cities you will see skyscrapers you will see people drive by in Lamborghinis you will see people in Mercedes you will see people in

Mercedes-Benz with private drivers. You will see people with so much money they couldn't possibly spend it in hundreds of lifetimes. Look at something like Amazon. I've been to Seattle because my friend lives there. I go there every year. That's the headquarters of Amazon. Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, become multiple times richer during the pandemic itself. Seattle is littered with homeless people. My first trip to Seattle coming home at night to my friend's apartment, somebody walking down the street by themselves, screaming, leave me alone, get out of my head. Clearly somebody's suffering from intense mental illness that just needs help.

Jeff Bezos, headquartered there in Seattle, Amazon, right, turns around and the city tries to come to a solution to the homelessness problem, right? There's tents on every off ramp, like there's tent cities everywhere all over Seattle. And they try to say, you know, maybe we should raise taxes on Amazon in order to deal with this homeless problem. Amazon comes in, blocks the legislation from going through. And so in that sense, you have side-by-side, extreme rich and wealthiness, alongside extreme devastating poverty, families with children coming out of tents on an off-ramp in the morning,

while people going to Amazon and their Tesla's drive right past them. That's what capitalism creates. Back to the text. Exploitation can be measured not only in, paltry wages, but in the disparity between the wealth created by the worker and the pay she or he receives. Thus, some professional athletes receive dramatically higher salaries than most people, but compared to the enormous wealth they produce for their owners, and taking into account the rigors and relative brevity of their careers, the injuries sustained, and the lack of

lifelong benefits, it can be said they are exploited at a far higher rate than most workers. Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty, wages, child labor, homelessness, unemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor. As a side note, one of the other things capitalism does is bulldoze culture. If your culture, if your traditional values, are not utterly in line with the marketization of your entire society, those cultures are bulldozed and discarded.

And the traditional values, the family, the sense of community, these things are devastated. The deaths of despair with the crack epidemic of the opioid epidemic destroys families. Migration crises destroy families. Bombs and, you know, dropping bombs on people's heads all over the world destroys families. What they mean by the family is rich, white, wealthy-to-do, upper-middle-class white families. That is what conservatives mean when they want to defend the family, a very specific type of family. They will butcher, slaughter, denigrate, and destroy anybody else's family, as long as it can maintain this thin upper crust of comfortable white upper-middle-class people

and their ideas of their families. That's important to note. Back to the text. All over the world, community and the broadest, in the broader sense, the geiman shaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized mass market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism's implacable drive to settle, quote, over the whole surface of the

globe, creating, quote, a world after its own image. No system in history has been more relentless and battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions and standardizing the varieties of human experience. Another as an aside, I've been thinking about this question lately. What is American culture?

Really, what is it? Today, in the present tense, the knee-jerk response by a patriot or a conservative or even a liberal would perhaps go back, you know, American culture is about freedom and democracy and look at what our founding father said and did. You know, all that's bullshit. At the very least, it's in the past.

Second of all, it's all over romanticized, rosy, tinted glasses, nonsense, idealism to the extreme. But today, what is American culture? Well, it's, it's Amazon. It's streaming services. It's sports, I guess you could add in there. It's the soul-crushing social media platforms. it's Marvel movies

It's mass shootings It is working every day for shitty wages Living in a constant state of precarity With no real communal bonds And on the weekends going out and getting trashed So as to forget the emptiness and vacuity Of your normal week life And the idea that you're forced to live life

In service of somebody you probably don't even know That makes money off your labor And you have little to no control over that and you're propagandized constantly to be told that you're the freest person that's ever existed in human history when everything about your daily life is the exact opposite. Like what are the good cultural things? You could say music and movies, but even today, that seems like it's not, it's a stretch. Like, sure, there were definitely periods of times when, you know, America created really

interesting music and movies, but even that is, I mean, they exist on the fringes and independent form you know you have to you have to really search to find these things they do certainly exist with the country of 350 million people of course these things exist but on a broad scale not even like they used to so america goes out capitalism goes out it settles over the whole globe destroys and pulverizes all forms of cultures and traditions which aren't just mere or can't be reduced to mere marketization and commercialization and even in its own culture there is nothing go to any town what are you going to find to make McDonald's, an IHop, a Walmart, go to the next town.

What are you going to find? A McDonald's, an I hop, a Walmart, right? It is a spiritual and existential graveyard. And you wonder why people suffer with anxiety and depression and OCD and addiction all over this fucking country. And everywhere where capital has really got a stranglehold. Of course people suffer. It is anathema to our human nature. as social beings, communal ties, where are our ceremonies, our coming-of-age rituals, our community

get-togethers? Those simply don't exist for the vast majority, and even in the context of church, right? Look at the megachurches. The megachurches, the white evangelical megachurches, have figured out how to strip community out of religion. The one thing that it really offers people you know it's stripped it out and now you're just another anonymous face in the mega church crowd listening to some rich fucking asshole who lies to you about how he does it how he lives his actual personal life presents this absolutely false persona and makes millions of dollars off of your desperation and you are again just another lost face in the crowd so even in that context religion is stripped of even being able to provide people with community i mean it's fucking sick

Back to the text. Big Capital has no commitment to anything but capital accumulation, no loyalty to any nation, culture, or people. It moves inexorably according to its inner imperative to accumulate at the highest possible rate without concern for human and environmental costs. The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. there prevails a rational systemitization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end. Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.

More right than wrong. Those who reject Marx frequently contend that his predictions about proletarian revolution have proven wrong. From this, they conclude that his analysis of the nature of capitalism and imperialism must also be wrong. But we should distinguish between Marx the Chileastic thinker, who may, made grandly optimistic predictions about the flowering of the human condition, and Marx the economist and social scientist who provided us with fundamental insights into capitalist society that have held painfully true to the present day. The latter Marx has been regularly misrepresented by anti-Marxist writers. Consider the following predictions. I was a little

aside really quick. I just want to point this out because it just popped up and I don't want to forget it. For all the things that Michael Parenti does and should be known for and applauded, for. One of the things is maintaining a love of and knowledge of and education about Marxism in the pits of the 80s and 90s. In the worst days for anything like a left in the U.S., he was holding, he was keeping the flame going. He was carrying that flame even though it flickered down to a candle-sized flame at times. He and others kept it going in the midst of those terribly dark times. And now, you know, living as we are in 2021, so many more of us are coming and throwing our little candles and that light is getting bigger and bigger and it's turning

into a huge flame once again. But as long as capitalism exists, there will always be people who carry that flame forward, sometimes when it's an enormous bonfire and sometimes when it's the last little flickering of a melted down candle. And in those dark periods of the 80s and 90s, Michael Parenti and others should be saluted for carrying that flame forward and still pushing back against the anti-Marxist dogma of the time, which would have been so easy to fall into, especially as an academic, right? Your career is not helped anytime, but particularly in the 80s and 90s, by being an outspoken, not only Marxist, but Marxist Lennonist? Come on. So salute to Perente for that. Back to the text. The latter Marx has been regularly misrepresented by anti-Marxist writers,

Consider the following predictions. Business cycles and the tendency toward recession. Marx noted that something more than greed is involved in the capitalist's relentless pursuit of profit. Given the pressures of competition and rising wages, capitalists must make technological innovations to increase their productivity and diminish their labor costs. This creates problems of its own. The more capital goods, such as machinery, plants, technologies, factories, fuels, needed for production, the higher the fixed costs and the greater the pressure to increase productivity to maintain profit margins.

Since workers are not paid enough to buy back the goods and services they produce, Marks noted, there is always the problem of a disparity between mass production and aggregate demand. If demand slackens, owners cut back on production and investment. Even when there is ample demand, they are tempted to downsize the workforce and intensify the rate of exploitation of the remaining employees, seizing any opportunity to reduce benefits and wages. The ensuing drop in the workforce's buying power leads to a further decline in demand

and to business recessions that inflict the greatest pain on those with the least assets. Side note. So if demand slackens, owners cut back on production and investment. We know that. It's the second recession we've lived in in the last decade right now. The pandemic hits, people are laid off. We have the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression fluctuating all the time,

but as high as it's ever been, certainly in our lives and our parents' lives. And so that makes sense, right? Demand goes down because people have to stay home. They aren't buying as much. They aren't going out and consuming as much. So the owners of those businesses cut back on production. That's why your favorite restaurants and your favorite cities are all going away. That's why, you know, things like the Alamo, the theater house just went bankrupt

and is looking for somebody to buy them out. I mean, these businesses are folding all around us. And interestingly, as another side note, a side note within a side note, the loss of that, of so many small businesses specifically puts a downward force on the petty bourgeoisie, the small business owners, at least that aspect of the penny bourgeoisie, proletarianization, this downward force that often will make them not turn to a robust class analysis and class solidarity, will actually push them into more radical fascist politics, which is why we still see today that the primary class strata

of the fascist resurgence here in the U.S. is primarily petty bourgeois, and that cannot be separated from the proletarianization downward force brought about by the economic recession. And that's particularly why when capitalism is in crisis, fascism often springs to the forefront, not only because of the interests of the big bourgeoisie in maintaining social dissent.

and worker agitation, but also by that middle strata of the petty bourgeoisie who want to maintain their place in the hierarchy. They're not interested in overturning the hierarchy and joining hands with the poor. They see themselves as inherently above the poor, above the proletariat. They want to keep them down below them,

even as they themselves are pushed downward. And you can do that by a class, but you can also do it particularly in a disgusting fucking country like the United States via race, which we're definitely seeing right now and is not going away as long as capitalism remains. Back to the text. Marx foresaw this tendency for profits to fall

and for protracted recessions and economic instability. As the economist Robert Helbroner noted, this was an extraordinary prediction. For in Marx's day, economists did not recognize boom and bust business cycles as inherent to the capitalist system. But today, we know that recessions are a chronic condition, and, as Marx also predicted, they have become international in scope.

We certainly know that. You live through the Great Recession, you live through this current depression. We are very well acquainted with the arbitrary nature of the capitalist boom and bust cycle and the fact, interestingly, that it seems to be speeding up. The time between recessions is getting smaller every time. Worth noting, back to the text.

Capital Concentration When the Communist Manifesto first appeared in 1848, bigness was the exception. rather than the norm. Yet Marx predicted that large firms would force out or buy up smaller adversaries and increasingly dominate the business world as capital became more concentrated. Side note, do we have any businesses, as Marx would have predicted, any large firms that might force out or buy up smaller competitors and increasingly dominate the business world?

I can't think of any. Hmm. Just food for thought. Maybe one. Maybe one will come to mind. Back to the text. This was not the accepted wisdom of that day and must have sounded improbable to those who give it any attention.

But it has come to pass. Indeed, the rate of mergers and takeovers has been higher in the 1980s and 90s than at any other time in the history of capitalism. Growth of the proletariat. Another of Marx's predictions is that the proletariat, workers who have no tools of their own and must work for wages or salaries

selling their labor to someone else, would become an ever greater percentage of the workforce. In 1820, about 75% of Americans worked for themselves on farms or in small businesses and artisan crafts. By 1940, that number had dropped to 21.6%. Today, in the 90s, less than 10% of the labor force is self-employed. I wonder where that number is now. The same shift in the workforce can be observed in the third world. From 1970 to 1980, the number of wage workers in Asia and Africa increased by almost two-thirds,

from 72 million to 120 million. The tendency is toward the steady growth of the working class, both industrial and service workers, and, as Marx predicted, this is happening globally, in every land upon which capitalism descends. Proletarian Revolution As capitalism develops, so will the proletariat, Marx predicted. We have seen that to be true, but he went forward. further. With the growing misery and polarization, the masses would eventually rise up and overthrow

the bourgeoisie and put the means of production under public ownership for the benefit of all. The revolution would come in the more industrialized capitalist countries that had large, developed working classes. What struck Marx about the working class was its level of organization and consciousness. Unlike previously oppressed classes, the proletariat, heavily concentrated in urban areas seemed capable of an unparalleled level of political development. So as a little side note, again, the proletariat is now a huge oppressed class and they're forced into cities, right? So they're very close to each other. And further than that, especially throughout the mid-20th century, they're forced into factories or even, you know, before that

1800s, 1850s, 60-70s up through really the gigafocation of the economy and the financialization of the economy, which has sort of broken down some of these big places, but they certainly still exist. But you have this heavy concentration of people in these smaller and smaller areas, in a factory, in a city. Think of within slavery, slavery is spread

out, right? There'll be a plantation with several slaves on it, but there's no, like, technology to communicate to other slaves and other parts, etc. Under feudalism, a similar system prevails, you don't have millions of serfs, you know, stuck into cities or put

into the same factory building. So that process of enlarging the oppressed class, the proletariat, and then heavily concentrating them into smaller and smaller areas, was what Marx is talking about with regards to its level of organization and consciousness being able to grow because of those conditions. Back to the text. It would not only rebel against its suppressors as had slaves and serfs, but would create an egalitarian, non-exploitative social order as never before seen in history. In his day, Mark saw an alternative system emerging. in the clubs, mutual aid societies, political organizations, and newspapers of a rapidly growing British working class. For the first time, history would be made by the masses in a conscious

way, a class for itself. Spiratic rebellion would be replaced by class conscious revolution. Instead of burning down the manner, the workers would expropriate it and put it to use for the collective benefit of the common people, the ones who built it in the first place. Certainly, Marx's predictions about revolution have not fully materialized. There has been no successful proletarian revolution in an advanced capitalist society. As the working class developed, so did the capitalist state, whose function has been to protect the capitalist class, with its mechanisms of police suppression and its informational and cultural hegemony. As a side note, specifically with the neoliberal era, which we can understand as a evolution and adaptation of the capitalist class,

specifically following the falling rate of profit through the 70s, but also more broadly this consolidation of power, one of the strategies of which was the destruction of unions, the destruction of one of those main organizations, right? Those working class organizations that gave the working class organization and gave the working class consciousness. Those two things needed to be destroyed in this neoliberal, era. So with Reagan and Thatcher, that whole process was formalized, was given importantly

in ideology. That's mostly what Thatcher and Reagan did. They weren't necessarily the ones behind the push, right? That was the capitalist class more broadly. But they were the figureheads, and they gave it an ideology. And so, you know, here in the U.S., Reagan's like, you know, America is the shining city on the hill. We have to, you know, supply side economics, trickle down theory. He gave, and this is all very American, right? He gave it. And he gave it. it, that ideological spin that made it more or less digestible for enough Americans and similar to Thatcher. So that was a part of it also the complete media hegemony. I think it was actually during the Clinton administration where the regulations about companies owning media outlets

was scrapped and therefore there was a consolidation which we're still living in the middle of right now of media outlets owned by fewer and fewer and fewer corporations. That's true for cable television. That's also true, of course, for the radio. Sinclair Group, who owns, I think, most of the AM talk radio stations across the country. The AM talk radio stations here in Omaha are uniformly well to the right, absurdly to the right, because Sinclair Group has that pressure and that force and that right-wing worldview. So these mega corporations were also able to do cultural and informational hegemony through the consolidation. validation of these media outlets. Now that process is slowly being chipped away at with things like

this, right? Finally, the technology to be able for working people to talk trickle down to some working class dumbass like me so that I could put out my voice and put out a little media chunk that people could engage with, reframe narratives, and that's happening on YouTube, that's happening on podcast. It hasn't happened on cable TV yet. There are attempts to do that and we'll see where this process develops we're in the early stages of it still but i think that's an important part of pushing back against this neoliberal era and about capitalism more broadly is the breaking down of the informational and cultural hegemony that that the neoliberal era and the big media corporations have been able to have a strangle hold on for so long and of course that won't

get us anywhere if it doesn't also come with a revitalization of working class organizations and of class consciousness. We need unions at the very least. And we need a bunch of other forms of political organization, including communist parties, you know, socialist organizations, mutual aid organizations, community defense, all these little things popping up. You know, they weren't very prevalent. You know, they weren't as widespread as they were in the 80s and 90s. You know, they're much, they're happening now, and this is a slow protracted process. But there is reason for some level of optimism. Although I myself have my pessimistic days.

Back to the text. Of itself, class struggle does not bring inevitable proletarian victory or even a proletarian uprising. Oppressive social conditions may cry out for a revolution, but that does not mean revolution is forthcoming. This point is still not understood by some

present-day leftists. In his later years, Marx himself began to entertain doubts about the inevitability of a victorious workers' revolution. So far, the prevailing force has not been revolution, but counter-revolution. the devilish destruction reeked by capitalist states upon popular struggles at a cost of millions of lives. Marx also underestimated the extent to which the advanced capitalist state could use its wealth and power

to create a variety of institutions that retard and distract popular consciousness or blunt discontent through reform programs. Contrary to his expectations, successful revolutions occurred in less developed, largely peasant societies such as Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, though the proletariats in those countries participated in sometimes, as in the case of Russia in 1917, even spearheaded the insurgency. Although Marx's predictions about revolution have not materialized as he envisioned, in recent years there have been impressive instances of working-class militancy in South Korea, South Africa, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, and dozens of other countries, including even the United States. Such mass struggles usually go unreported in the corporate media. In 1984 through

1985, in Great Britain, a bitter year-long strike resulted in some 10,500 coal miners being arrested, 6,500 injured or battered, and 11 killed. For the British miners locked in that conflict, class struggle was something more than a quaint, obsolete concept. As a side note in 2020, we could add to that India. We could add to that the Philippines. We could add to that many more places as well that have continued to have uprisings and successful revolutionary energies and formations and organizations. Back to the text.

So in other countries. In Nicaragua, a mass uprising brought down the hated Samoza dictatorship. In Brazil, in 1980 through 83, as Peter Worsley observes, quote, the Brazilian working class has played precisely the role assigned to it in 19th century Marxist theory, paralyzing Sao Paulo in a secession of enormous mass strikes that began overbred and butter issues, but which in the end forced the military to make major political concessions, notably the restoration of a measure of authentic party political life, end quote.

Revolutions are relatively rare occurrences, but popular struggle is a widespread and constant phenomena. Side note, popular struggle, that's occurring everywhere. There's no doubt about that. belly of the beast here in the U.S. This entire past summer was an eruption of really groundbreaking popular struggle all over the country that bled out and became international. And so insofar as the U.S. has an outsized influence on the rest of the world, when that

outsized influence is a outgrowth of something like these massive racial protests over the summer, that's a beautiful thing. it's rarely that it's always like the mass you know exportation of like popular culture or corporations and u.s. hegemony but in rare cases our popular struggle gets partially globalized and that's nice too so just remember that you know revolutions are one thing and as he says they're relatively rare but popular struggle is an ongoing thing and for specifically indigenous people for immigrants for black folks in the u.s for poor people for struggling working class people that popular struggle can't ever end it's part and parcel with existence because it means fighting for your right to exist in this country and on this planet back to the text more wealth more poverty actually really quick before i go into this next little subsection i just wanted to summarize some of those things so he's talking about um some of marx's predictions right and so

just to summarize business cycles and the tendency toward recession. That was a prediction that has not only come true in the 90s, but has been more true even since the 90s. And again, those boom and bus cycles have shorter periods of time between them, which is interesting. Another prediction is capital concentration. We're seeing that everywhere. In almost every main sector of the American economy,

there are four to five corporations that own the market, and there's no such thing as competition. Who's going to compete against Amazon? Who's competing against Google? Who's competing against Facebook? These are, for all intents and purposes, monopolies. That is capital concentration. It's been happening and it continues to happen.

Another prediction, the growth of the proletariat. That's absolutely true not only in the U.S., but all over the world. And in fact, after recessions, after periods of crisis, this downward pressure forces even more people into the proletariat. So that's, you know, that is a prediction that's become true. and then lastly a proletarian revolution it certainly happened not in the way and on the timeline that marks and angles would predict it and there always is this heartbreaking optimism from radicals and revolutionaries all throughout history since Marx and probably even before where there's this idea that the revolution's right here the revolution is just around the corner

and at certain periods of time you can certainly understand why people thought that if we were living in the 60s with this decolonial explosion all over the the third world with these radical movements rising up in places like the U.S., Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, American Indian movement, union movements, communist movements. You could be forgiven for thinking like, shit, it's here. This is happening. And if you go back and listen to radicals in the 60s, they thought that. They never saw Reaganism coming.

And that is a testament, again, to the adaptability of capitalism overall. You know, it's not a mistake. It's not a coincidence that Reaganism and Thatcherism came on the heels of this worldwide decolonial movement and these internal uprisings and formations, real organizations that could actually challenge power, at least in some ways, at least locally. You know, that was part of that counter-revolution of the neoliberal era, as well as, as I said earlier, a response to the falling rate of profit throughout the 70s. So in many ways, you know, there are plenty of things that Marx predicted that are insanely true and are becoming only true every single day. Since this book, all of these predictions have only become more true. So that does speak, I think, to the predictive power of Marxism on some level. You're not going to be able to predict the specificity of it because with something as unyieldy and unpredictable and as many variables as entire societies and history.

and global civilization, you're never going to have the specificity of prediction that you will in physics or in biology or in chemistry. That's why, you know, Prenti says it's a social science. But it does still have this ability to generate hypotheses and some general predictions, right? These general patterns will definitely hold the specific forms they'll take are unpredictable, largely given the immense varieties and the complexity of the thing being studied, which is no less than human civilization and its evolution through history. So when that's your objective study, you're never going to be able to have the precision

of the quote-unquote hard sciences. And why would you even expect it? Back to the text. More wealth, more poverty. Marx believe that as wealth becomes more concentrated, poverty will become more widespread, and the plight of working people ever more desperate. According to his critics, this prediction has proven wrong. They point out that he wrote during a time of raw industrialism,

an era of robber barons, and the 14-hour workday. Oh, God, I wouldn't want to live in an era of robber barons and long work days where you might have to work two or three jobs just to get by. God, so lucky that that's a part of the past, right? Through persistent struggle, the working class improved its life conditions, from the mid-19th to the mid-20. of centuries. Today, mainstream spokespersons portray the United States as a prosperous middle-class society. Yet one might wonder. During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, from 1981 to 1996, the share of the

national income that went to those who work for a living shrink by over 12%. The share that went to those who live off investments increased almost 35%. Less than 1% of the population owns almost 50% of the nation's wealth. The richest families are hundreds of times wealthier than the average household in the lower 90% of the population. The gap between America's rich and poor is greater than it has been in more than half a century and is getting even greater. Thus, between 1977 and 1989, the top 1% saw their earnings grow by over 100%, while the three lowest quintiles averaged a 3% to 10% drop in real income. This is written in 97. Again, these things have only become more true with time.

The New York Times in 1996 reported that income disparity in 1995, quote, was wider than it has been since the end of World War II, end quote. The average income for the top 20% jumped 44% from 73,000 to 105,000 between 1968 and 1994, while the bottom 20% had a 7% increase from 7,202 to 7,000. 762, or only $560 in real-time dollars. But these figures understate the problem. The Times story is based on a Census Bureau study that fails to report the income of the very rich. For years, the reportable upper limit was $300,000 yearly income. In 1994, the Bureau lifted the allowable limit to $1 million. This still leaves out the richest 1%. The hundreds of billionaires and thousands of

multi-millionaires who make many times more than $1 million a year. The really big money is concentrated in a portion of the population so minuscule as to be judged statistically insignificant. But despite their tiny numbers, the amount of wealth they control is enormous and bespeaks an income disparity a thousand times greater than the spread allowed by the Census Bureau figures. Thus, the difference between a multibillionaire who might make $100 million in any one year and a janitor who makes 8,000, is not 14 to 1, the usually reported spread between highest and lowest, but over 14,000 to 1. Yet the highest incomes remain unreported and uncounted. In a word, most studies of this sort give us no idea of how rich, the very rich, really are. The number living

below the poverty level in the United States climbed from 24 million in 1977 to over 35 million by 1995. People were falling more deeply into poverty than in earlier times and finding it increasingly difficult to emerge from it. In addition, various diseases related to hunger and poverty have been on the rise. There has been a general downgrading of the workforce. Regular employment is being replaced by contracted labor or temporary help, resulting in lower wages with fewer or no benefits. Many unions have been destroyed or seriously weakened. Protective government regulations are being rolled back or left unenforced. And there has been an increase in speedups, injuries, and other workplace abuses. Side note, this is in 1997, and he says regular employment is being replaced by

contracted labor or temporary help. Today, what do we call it? We call it the gig economy. So this is Prenti in the 90s, pointing to this pattern that was developing, even in the 90s, and saying this pattern is already occurring, and it's likely to get worse. And of course, he was correct. It's worse than it's ever been. All of these things he just said are now worse today than they were when he was reporting them. And my God, were they bad when he was reporting them. Back to the text. By the 1990s, the growing impoverishment of the middle and working classes, including small independent producers,

was becoming evident in various countries. In 20 years, more than half the farmers in industrialized countries, some 22 million, were ruined. Meanwhile, as noted in the previous two chapters, free market reforms, have brought a dramatic increase in poverty, hunger, crime, and ill health, along with the growth of large fortunes for the very few in the former communist countries. The third world has endured deepening impoverishment over the last half century. As foreign investment has increased, so has the misery of the common people who are driven from the land. Those who managed to find employment in the cities are forced to labor for subsistence wages. We might recall how

enclosure acts of the late 18th century in England fenced off common lands and drove the peasantry into the industrial hellholes of Manchester and London, transforming them into beggars or half-starved factory workers. Enclosure continues throughout the third world, displacing tens of millions of people. In countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru, per capita income was lower in 1990 than it had been 20 years earlier. In Mexico, workers earned 50% less in 1994. than in 1980. One third of Latin America's population, some 130 million,

live in utter destitution, while tens of millions more barely manage. In Brazil, the purchasing power of the lower income brackets declined by 50% between 1940 and 1990, and at least half the population suffered varying degrees of malnutrition. In much of Africa, misery and hunger have assumed horrendous proportions. In Zaire, 80% of the people live in absolute.

Pannary. In Asia and Africa, more than 40% of the population linger at the starvation level. Marx predicted that an expanding capitalism would bring greater wealth for the few and growing misery for the many. That seems to be what is happening, and on a global scale. A holistic science. Repeatedly dismissed as an obsolete doctrine, Marxism retains a compelling contemporary quality, for it is less a body of fixed edicta and more a method of looking beyond immediate appearances to see the inner qualities and moving forces

that shape social relations and much of history itself. As Marx noted, quote, all science would be superfluous if outward appearances and the essence of things directly coincided, end quote. Indeed, perhaps the reason so much of modern social science seems superfluous is because it settles for the tedious tracing of outward appearances.

To understand capitalism, one first has to strip away the appearances presented by its ideology. Unlike most bourgeois theorists, Marx realized that what capitalism claims to be and what it actually is are two different things. What is unique about capitalism is the systematic expropriation of labor for the sole purpose of accumulation. Capital annexes living labor in order to accumulate more capital. The ultimate purpose of work is not to perform services for, or consumers, or sustain life in society, but to make more and more money for the investor irrespective of the human and environmental costs. An essential point of Marxist analysis is that the social structure and class order

prefigure our behavior in many ways. Capitalism moves into every area of work and community, harnessing all of social life to its pursuit of profit. It converts nature, labor, science, art, music, and medicine. into commodities and commodities into capital. It transforms land into real estate, folk culture into mass culture, and citizens into debt-ridden workers and consumers.

Marxists understand that a class society is not just a divided society, but one ruled by class power, with the state playing the crucial role in maintaining the existing class structure. Marxism might be considered a holistic science in that it recognizes the links between various components of the social system.

As a side note, he's calling it a holistic science, which is completely fair. Another term, of course, is a dialectical science, right? Holistic, what he says, recognizing the links between various components of the social system, including the links it has to its past. It is, in some sense, a dialectical approach to this problem, not isolating anything, not siloing anything off from everything else, but understanding everything in relation to everything else, historically and presently. Back to the text.

Capitalism is not just an economic system, but a political and cultural one as well, an entire social order. When we study any part of that order, be it in the news or entertainment media, criminal justice, Congress, defense spending, overseas military intervention, intelligence agencies, campaign finance, science and technology, education, medical care, taxation, transportation, housing, or whatever, we will see how the particular part reflects the nature of the whole. Its unique dynamic, often buttresses, and is shaped by the larger social system, especially the system's overriding need

to maintain the prerogatives of the corporate class. In keeping with their system's sustaining function, the major news media present reality as a scatter of events and subjects that ostensibly bear little relation to each other and to a larger set of social relations. So, side note, this is, you know, I don't want to be too hard on, you know, John Oliver specifically, but this is called the John Oliver effect because he does it with a particular

clarity every week. It is oftentimes, you know, legitimate, not when he's talking about global South socialist movements, but when he's critiquing American society and different aspects of it, they're often like penetrating and worthwhile dissections of serious socialists. social problems, right? But they're never linked up. They're never combined to show how these are all part of a deeper, more foundational system. That system is capitalism, imperialism. And when the news, and that's John Oliver, who is actually good compared to mainstream media, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, like John Oliver's analysis is better than all of them. And he falls very well into that pattern so

much so that it's like called the John Oliver effect. But this is obviously much bigger. And this is how one way that the capitalist system defends itself, which is obscuring the underlying cause of all these individual problems. Well, yeah, we have mass shootings. And yeah, there's a lot of poverty and inequality. And sure, we have a problem with racism. And, you know, we do spend a little bit too much on our military and damn we have more prisoners than any other country in the world that's just the freest country in the world i guess right like yeah these are all problems oh well you know we should just address them one by one here's a bill i have to address the over incarceration of people here's a bill i have for marijuana you know illegality here's a bill that might raise um the wages from

utter desperation wages to mere poverty wages hey let's clap and dance for this historic reform we made right there's no connection to the deeper problem and so what you end up doing and this is what reformism is under capitalism this is what the democratic party does it treats the symptoms without ever identifying the disease you know here here's an outbreak of this problem let's solve it with that band-aid let's rub that cream on that issue that's an ugly rash well what's the underlying autoimmune disorder giving rise to these things right there's no attempt to do that sometimes it's unconscious. They are just educated and programmed and conditioned by the system to not be able to link things up, right? They don't have a dialectical approach to things. They don't understand

historical materialism, but sometimes it's very conscious. And the higher you get up, the class ladder in the U.S., the more class consciousness actually prevails. It's probably true at the very low ends as well, but like the rich, the very rich, they know their class interests and they are ruthless about pursuing their class interests at all costs, even at the costs of the stability of the society in which they live and of the very earth out of which they bubble up and upon which they utterly depend for their own family's health and safety. And that is the pathology, the utter pathology inherent in the capitalist system. And so any good person in media, any person that wants to actually understand society, must

must understand its specific symptoms in relation to the underlying disease which gives rise to them, or else there is no hope of even solving those symptoms. Back to the text. Consider a specific phenomenon like racism. Racism is presented as essentially a set of bad attitudes held by racists. There is little analysis of what makes it so functional for a class society. Instead, race and class are treated as mutually exclusive concepts in competition with one another. But those who have an understanding of class power know that as class contradictions deepen and come to the four,

racism becomes not less, but more important as a factor in class conflict. In short, both race and class are likely to be crucial arenas of struggle at the very same time. Hmm. Now let's take an aside and think about that. What does he say? But those who have an understanding of class power know that as class contradictions deepen and come to the four, racism becomes not less but more important that is precisely true what has happened in this last year alone we had a global pandemic and subsequent economic shutdown we have this huge economic crisis people

are getting evicted homelessness rate is rising inequality is skyrocketing the very rich are becoming much richer as the rest of us lose everything and at the same time we had this huge outburst of black lives matter and black power black liberation protests all throughout the summer in response to police brutality. These things are utterly and deeply connected. And what you see forming on the liberal left, which again is a, you know, the Democratic Party is an ideological state apparatus, liberalism is not trying to contend with overthrow or transcend capitalism, it's trying to maintain it inherently.

And what you see the new strategy being adopted for the last several years is to use identity, not in relation to class, to come to a deeper understanding of, both, but rather using identity as a bludgeon against any specter of class critique and critique of imperialism. And so you will see like, fuck, even in the most absurd way, like, there's a little time where the liberal media was trying to paint Bernie Sanders, when it looked like Bernie Sanders was doing good, right? Try to paint him as anti-Semitic.

We certainly saw it happen with Corbyn, right? Bernie, they tried it out on Bernie. And we still see it all the time. Kirsten Sinema doing the thumbs down on a minimum wage hike, right? The first thing that her defenders in the Democratic Party do, how dare you critique a woman for what she wears? And what she does. So using identity as a bludgeon against this deeper materialist class critique.

And that's been the strategy of the last several years and will continue to be the strategy for the coming years of the Democratic Party as a whole and of liberalism as a whole. And so whether it's the right wing weaponizing and just being full out white supremacist and racists, that strategy of dividing people by race, or this attempt, which is much more subtle by the liberal democratic side, to take on board much of the woke rhetoric and the identity politics, but to use it as a bludgeon against class and anti-impeer. socialist politics. Very interesting, and that will no doubt continue for the years to come. It's for the foreseeable future, as far as I'm concerned. Back to the text. Marxists further maintain

that racism involves not just personal attitude, but institutional structure and systemic power. They point out that racist organizations and sentiments are often propagated by well-financed reactionary forces seeking to divide the working populace against itself, fracturing it into antagonistic ethnic enclaves. Marxists also point out that racism is used as a means of depressing wages by keeping a segment of the labor force vulnerable to super exploitation. To see racism in the larger context of corporate society is to move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it as a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system.

By rational, I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it. Lacking a holistic approach to society, conventional social science tends to compartmentalize social experience. So we are asked to ponder whether this or that phenomenon

is cultural or economic or psychological when usually it's a blend of all these things. Thus, an automobile is unmistakably an economic artifact, but it also has a cultural and psychological component and even an aesthetic dimension. we need a greater sense of how analytically distinct phenomena are often empirically interrelated

and may actually gather strength and definition from each other. So this is really important overall. This is important as a corrective against class reductionists, right, who actually want to not do this understanding of things at different levels and bringing in these different analyses, but to reduce it to one thing. And on the other end, in the liberal end, you have identity reductionism, which is to do the same thing, but in the opposite direction. And recently, I talked about fascism and how to understand it on multiple different levels.

I don't know the episode precisely that I talked. Maybe it was the psychology episode. But I basically made the argument that it's very important to understand, it's essential to understand fascism materially, economically and politically. You have, that's the core basis of your analysis of fascism. But it doesn't hurt, and in fact, it helps to also understand it psychologically. right and so whatever phenomena culturally right whatever phenomena that we're discussing there is always the material basis but there's also these different levels of analysis that you can that you can employ to come to a greater understanding of the thing as a whole and you can even zoom out and think

about how do we understand nature in science you have quantum mechanics understanding at the level of subatomic particles. You have astrophysics and cosmology, understanding the universe at its biggest levels possible, theoretical physics, right? You have understanding it at the earth level, the level of life and biology, the level of chemistry, the level of social and political analysis, which is another way of understanding nature at a certain level. Now, you don't want to just take one of those things and try to dominate the other categories with it. You don't try to understand human civilization through the lens of quantum mechanics, you're not going to get anywhere. You have these different frameworks that you analyze things at different levels

and then you bring those different levels of analysis into as coherent of a full picture as is possible. And that process leads to a greater, broader, and more widespread understanding of the phenomena and works against reductionism one way or the other. Back to the text. Marxists do not accept the prevalent view of institutions as just being there, with all the natural innocence of mountains, especially the more articulated formal institutions such as the church, army, police, military, university, media, medicine, and the like. Institutions are heavily shaped by class interests and class power. Far from being neutral and independent bastions, the major institutions of society are tied to the big business class.

Corporate representatives exercise direct decision-making power through control of governing boards and directorships. Business elites usually control the budgets and the very property of various institutions. A control inscribed into law through corporate charters and enforced by the police powers of the state. Their power extends to the managers picked, the policies set, and the performances of employees. If conventional social science has any one dedication, it is to ignore, the linkages between social action and the systematic demands of capitalism, avoiding any view of power in its class dimensions and any view of class as a power relationship. For conventional researchers, power is seen as fragmented and fluid, and class is nothing more than an occupational

or income category to be correlated with voting habits, consumer styles, or whatever, and not as a relationship between those who own and those who labor for those who own. In the Marxist view, there can be no such thing as a class as such, a social entity unto itself. There can be no lords without serfs, no masters without slaves, no capitalists without workers. More than just a sociological category, class is a relationship to the means of production and to social and state power. This idea, so fundamental to an understanding of public policy, is avoided by conventional social scientists who prefer to concentrate on everything else but class power realities. Side-in-up, this is true for sociology. This is true often for philosophy. This is certainly

true for economics, right? Economics is just the art of obscuring the class power relationship. It is a field of thought meant to naturalize the capitalist order, and importantly, it's social relations. And so you'll never hear discussions. of how differentiations in class result in differentiations in power in an economics department. It's just taken, the assumptions of capitalism are just taken on board, and then it's worked from there. And it serves to naturalize capitalism. Economics can be said to serve the same purpose in capitalism that priests served in feudalism, namely one of naturalizing the process.

priests the church well yeah the divine right of kings this guy has the right to rule over everybody else because god picked him and his child will rule over your children because that's the divine right of kings and that's his lineage in the same way but more nuanced and with way different rhetoric right economics departments and the media and the political institutions and everything else in popular culture work to naturalize the capitalist system and its social relations often above and beyond the comprehension and consciousness of any one individual engaged in doing just that. Sometimes, of course, it is conscious, but often it's unconscious. They are trained in the very same ways of thinking that they then turn around and propagate to others.

And that is why education is essential to socialist organizing, to socialist state building, to socialist societies, and any hope of getting beyond capitalism. it is a part of the popular struggle to educate away from these ways of thinking to dive deeper and to see things for how they actually are to demystify the processes and relations of capitalism and historical materialism and dialectical materialism are the ways to engage in the methodologies

of engaging in that demystification process back to the text it is remarkable for instance that some political scientists have studied the presidency in Congress for decades without uttering a word about capitalism, without so much as a sidelong glance at how the imperatives of a capitalist political economic order play such a crucial role in prefiguring the political agenda. Social sciences cluttered with community power studies that treat communities and issues as isolated autonomous entities. Such investigations are usually limited to the immediate interplay of policy actors with little

said about how issues link up to a larger range of social interests. Conservative ideological preconceptions regularly influence the research strategies of most social scientists and policy analysts. In political science, for instance, one, the relationships between industrial capitalist nations and third world nations are described as a dependency and interdependency and as fostering a mutually beneficial development rather than an imperialism that exploits the land, labor, and resources of weaker nations for the benefit of the favored classes in both the industrial and less developed worlds. Two, the United States and other quote-unquote democratic capitalist societies

are said to be held together by common values that reflect the common interest and not by class power and domination. Three, the fragmentation of power in the political process is supposedly indicative of a fluidity and democratization of interest group pluralism, rather than the pocketing and structuring of power in unaccountable and undemocratic ways. And four, the mass propagation of conventional political beliefs is described as a political socialization and education for citizenship

and is treated as a desirable civic process rather than an indoctrination that distorts the information flow and warps the public's critical perceptions. and that is something that I always talk about when it comes to the ability for mass conditioning to make people think certain things but convince them that they came to their own conclusions and this undergirds all of liberal and conservative rhetoric all of these ideas that are vomited out you know socialism is against human nature socialism killed a hundred million people freer the markets the freer the people america is the freest most democratic

democratic society on earth our institutions are beautiful and deserve to be defended at all costs you know what are our national down the line you can go down the line forever people vomit up opinions that are just the conditioning that they've passively absorbed their entire lives but they do so with the deep internal conviction that these ideas are the result of their own thinking and not pre-packaged formulas of conditioning beaten into them since the day they were born. And that's probably the most insidious aspect of ideology. It convinces those who parrot it that its conclusions are actually their conclusions. And that's why it can be so frustrating talking to somebody who cannot shine a light on their own conditioning. They don't

have a meta perspective from which to understand how they came to those conclusions. And so they really feel that they are, quote unquote, free thinkers when they're the exact opposite. Like so much in our society. We want to talk about Orwellian, the opposite of things that are true. We're the freest country in the world. Sure, we have more people in cages than any other country in the world. We're the most democratic society in the world. We vote on a handful of rich people every four years and the elections are radically cheated and distorted and the people that inform people on media lie to them all the time and give them distorted ideas about what people actually stand for and the Senate itself exists as a minoritarian institution to protect the ruling elite and to act

as a bulwark against the anarchy of the House and the Supreme Court is always the final stand of conservative I mean down the line everything that we say everything America tells itself about itself, often the exact opposite is true. And that is also a part of the absolutely pathological nature of our entire society. And as the myths and lies that America tells itself about itself are falling apart and less and less people actually believe them, there will actually be an increased violence in the defense of those ideas, precisely because it comes with the insecurity of seeing those lies and those myths slowly start to dissolve. slowly start to be beaten away.

People just don't buy into them anymore. You just can't say with a straight face something like pull yourself up by your bootstraps. For the vast majority of people now, they will laugh in your fucking face if you say that. Or poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough and rich people are rich because they work harder than everybody else. Like you'll just be laughed out of the fucking room.

If you go into most communities, talk to most people in societies, nobody believes it anymore. And so, yeah, so it's an interesting time to be living where all of these mythologies are slowly, and my God, is it slow, but are being chipped away at always from the grassroots level, always from the most radical elements that seep in to the mainstream. And that's an important thing to remember as well. Back to the text. In each of these instances, mainstream academics offer version A, not as a research finding, but as an a priori assumption that requires no critical analysis upon which research is then predicated. At the same time,

they disregard the evidence in research that supports version B. By ignoring the dominant class conditions that exercise such an influence over social behavior, conventional social science can settle on surface factualness, trying to explain immediate actions in exclusively immediate terms. Such an approach places a high priority on epiphenomenal and idiosyncratic explanations, the peculiarities of specific personalities and situations. What is habitually overlooked in such research, and in our news reports, our daily observations, and sometimes even our political struggles,

is the way seemingly remote forces may prefigure our experiences. Learning to ask why. When we think about Marx's perspective, that is, without considering class interests and class power, we seldom ask why certain things happen. Many things are reported in the news, but few are explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail. Devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we are left to see the world as do mainstream media pundits, as a flow of events, a scatter of particular developments and personalities unrelated to a larger set of social relations, propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, and individual ambition, never by powerful class interests, and yet producing effects that serve such interests with impressive regularity. thus we fail to associate social problems with the socio-economic forces that create them,

and we learn to truncate our own critical thinking. Imagine if we attempted something different. For example, if we tried to explain that wealth and poverty exists together not an accidental juxtaposition, but because wealth causes poverty, an inevitable outcome of economic exploitation both at home and abroad, how could such an analysis gain any exposure in the capitalist media or in mainstream political life. Suppose we started with a particular story about how child labor in Indonesia

is contracted by multinational corporations at near starvation wage levels. This information probably would not be carried in right-wing publications, but in 1996 it did appear, after decades of effort by activists, in the centrist mainstream press. What if we then crossed the line

and said that these exploitative employer-employee relations were backed by the full might of the Indonesian military government? Fewer media would carry this story, but it still might get mentioned in an inside page of the New York Times or Washington Post. Then suppose we crossed another line and said that these repressive arrangements would not prevail were it not for generous military aid from the United States, and that for almost 30 years the homicidal Indonesian military has been financed, armed, advised, and trained by the U.S. national security state. Such a story would be even more unlikely to appear in the liberal press, but it is still issue-specific and safely without an overall class analysis,

so it might well make its way into left-liberal opinion publications like the nation or the progressive. Now suppose we pointed out that the conditions found in Indonesia, the heartless economic exploitation, brutal military repression, and lavish U.S. support exist in scores of other countries. Suppose we then crossed that most serious line of all, And instead of just deploring this fact, we also asked why successive U.S. administrations involve themselves in such unsavory pursuits throughout the world. And what if then, we try to explain that the whole phenomenon is consistent with the U.S. dedication

to making the world safe for the free market and the giant multinational corporations, and that the intended goals are, A, to maximize opportunities to accumulate wealth by depressing the wage levels of workers throughout the world and preventing them from organizing on behalf of their own interests and B, to protect the overall global system of free market capital accumulation. Then what if, from all of this, we concluded that U.S. foreign policy is neither timid as the conservatives say,

nor foolish as the liberal say, but is remarkably successful in rolling back just about all governments and social movements that attempt to serve popular needs, rather than private corporate greed. Such an analysis, hurriedly sketched here, would take some effort to lay out and would amount to a Marxist critique,

a correct critique, of capitalist imperialism. Though Marxists are not the only ones that might arrive at it, it almost certainly would not be published anywhere, except in a Marxist publication, or on Rev. Left Radio. We crossed too many lines, because we tried to explain the particular situation, child labor, set of social relations, corporate class power. Our presentation would be rejected out of hand as

ideological. The perceptual taboos imposed by the dominant powers teach people to avoid thinking critically about such powers. In contrast, Marxism gets us into the habit of asking why, of seeing the linkage between political events and class power. A common method of devaluing Marxism is to misrepresent what it actually says and then attack the misrepresentation. This happens easily enough since most of the anti-Marxist critics and their audiences have only a passing familiarity with Marxist literature and rely instead on their own caricaturized notions.

Okay, side note. Remember when Jordan Peterson debated Jizek, and it just became incredibly clear that Peterson, who became famous by railing against postmodern neo-Marxism, literally didn't understand Marxism at all? somebody whose career is made in part by critiquing what he sees as cultural Marxism disguised in other terms because that might be too

directly anti-Semitic doesn't know anything about Marxism and this is true for 99% of the critics of Marxism even those on the ostensible radical left they don't understand it but they are so able and so confident and given all social advantages

to critique it as lazily and sloppily as they want and they will be patted on the back for it. To be a Marxist, on the other hand, as many people have pointed out, you have to know philosophy, you have to know economics, you have to know history,

you have to know social science, you have to understand your own society and other societies, you have to be unfailingly, precise and nuanced and complex in your thinking to even get taken seriously. You have to force people

to take you seriously through an overpowering intellect And if you don't have that or you can't quite articulate it right or maybe you're a little weak on history or you could learn more about economics, any weakness will be used to discredit everything else that you say, everything else that you believe. And of course, those different standards would appear. And one more thing too, because I wanted to say this earlier, about the Indonesian little example that Parenti gave and walked us through. I recently came across a meme that showed the Indonesian military in fatigues marching past an outside jail

and a bunch of shirtless men on the inside of the jail and the meme it was a right-wing meme and it says communism ideas so good they have to be what implemented by force something like that is anti-communist meme and somebody in the comments immediately pointed out and it became a meme in it of itself

that the people in the jail were the communists, and the people on the outside of the jail were the U.S.-backed, fascist, Indonesian military. So literally, an example of communists being persecuted for their ideas turned into a right-wing meme about how communism persecutes people for their ideas. Chef's kiss. Back to the text.

So I'm just going to start that little part over. A common method of devalue in Marxism is to misrepresent what it actually says, and then attack the misrepresentation. This happens easily enough since most of the anti-Marxist critics and their audiences have only a passing familiarity with Marxist literature

and rely instead on their own characterized notions. Thus, the Roman Catholic pastoral letter on Marxist communism rejects the claim that, quote, structural, read class, revolution can entirely cure a disease that is man himself, nor can it provide the solution to all human suffering, end quote. But who makes such a claim? There's no denying that revolution does not entirely

cure all human suffering. But why is that assertion used as a refutation of Marxism? Most Marxists are neither chialistic nor utopian. They dream not of a perfect society, but of a better, more just life. They make no claim to eliminating all suffering and recognize that even in the best of societies, there are the inevitable assaults of misfortune, mortality, and the other vulnerabilities of life. And certainly, in any society, there are some people who, for whatever reason, are given to wrongful deeds and self-serving corruptions. The highly imperfect nature of human beings should make us all the more determined

not to see power and wealth accumulating in the hands of an unaccountable few, which is the central dedication of capitalism. Capitalism and its various institutions affect the most personal dimensions of everyday life in ways not readily evident. A Marxist approach helps us to see connections to which we were previously blind, to relate effects to causes,

and to replace the arbitrary and the mysterious with the regular and the necessary. A Marxist perspective helps us to see injustice as rooted in systematic causes that go beyond individual choice, and to view crucial developments not as neutral happenings, but as the intended consequences of class power and interest. Marxism also shows how even unintended consequences can be utilized by those with superior resources to service their interests. So is Mark still relevant today? Only if you want to know why the media distorts the news in a mostly mainstream direction. Why more and more people at home and abroad face economic adversity while money continues to accumulate in the hands of the relatively few. Why there is so much private wealth and public poverty in this country and elsewhere.

Why U.S. forces find it necessary to intervene in so many regions of the world. Why a rich and productive economy offers chronic recession. under employment and neglect of social needs, and why many political office holders are unwilling or unable to serve the public interest. Some Marxist theorists have so ascended into the numbing altitudes of abstract cogitation that they seldom touch political realities here on earth. They spend their time talking to each other in self-referential code, a scholastic ritual that Doug Dow described as, quote, how many Marxists can dance on the head of a surplus value.

end quote. Fortunately, there are others who not only tell us about Marxist theory, but demonstrate its utility by applying it to political actualities. They know how to draw connections between immediate experience and the larger structural forces that shape that experience. They cross that forbidden line and talk about class power. This is why, for all the misrepresentation and suppression, Marxist scholarship survives. While not having all the answers, it does have a superior explanatory power, telling us something about reality that bourgeois scholarship refuses to do. Marxism offers the kind of subversive truce that cause fear and trembling among the high and mighty, those who live atop a mountain of lies, or as I would say, a mountain of corpses.

And that is the end of Marxism, question mark, by Michael Parenti, the eighth chapter in black shirts and reds. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you got something out of that. And again, salute to Parenti for carrying that flame of Marxist analysis through some of the darkest times. Talk to you later.