Rev Left Radio - Philosophy Series: Hegel, Marx, & Modern Life (Part 1)

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Breht listens to, comments on, and expounds upon a public lecture by the late professor of philosophy Rick Roderick from 1989 on Hegel, Marx, and modern American capitalism. Along the way he explicates the Hegelian notion of Freedom, Right and Left Hegelianism, the End of History, Communism as the Dawn of History, Cognitive Dissonance among the American People, Moral Critiques of Capitalism, Contradictions within Ideology, Dialectical Inversions of Liberal Pretense, and much more. Part 2 coming soon!    outro music 'Antithesnails (spinstrumental)' by Spinitch find and support more of their work here: https://spinitch.bandcamp.com/album/boxorama-spinstrumentals ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/

Okay. In our last lecture, I ended up the history of ethics in a way, what would be a usual introductory to introduction ethics course, by discussing Hegel's view of ethics with what one might call it super concept of freedom. the very large concept of freedom as formulating those goals and desires of individuals in whatever given historical period, and the idea that freedom represents is to see those goals and obstacles and they're overcoming in that period and to name that activity and those sets of practices freedom. Now, that side of Hegel's philosophy, and Hegel is perhaps the most important philosopher in the 19th century, because the people that I will talk about today, at least the first two or three, react against Hegel.

So Hegel's view is very important. But the Hegel I gave you the other day is a very radical Hegel, where freedom is the central notion. But there's another side to Hegel, as many of you may have suspected, if you've looked at articles like Fukuyama's The End of History, something like that. There's another side of Hegel, a more conservative side, that argues that while his view, remains historical, that history is, as it were, the context within which all activities, truth, and so on gets its meaning in which human beings become what he calls spirit. The conservative Hegel, that reading of Hegel, he argues that the culmination of this long historical process is something like the Prussian state or on an updated reading like

Fukuyamas, and this is one that I think, perfectly fits what George Bush means by the New World Order. It means that history proper is at an end. This is a very strange notion because we still, I think, to some extent, think historically. History proper is at an end because the human race has found the right ideas. Namely, liberal democracy, by which we mean the televised pseudo-state, to try to speak, and VCRs. Once you have an economy that produces VCRs and stuff and a pseudo state that gives you the satisfaction of larding it over the rest of the planet with a social system that doesn't work, history has reached its end and there are no more battles over big ideas. That's the point.

That as long as the Cold War was going on, there were ideologies and battles between them, socialism, capitalism, and so on. But with the end of the Cold War, this is the updated version of Hegel's argument. Well, now, that's interesting already because it needed to be updated. See, since Hegel thought it was over in the 19th century, this more recent article argues that history ended in the 20th century, only to have the Gulf War come along. And if there's one sure sign in Hegel's philosophy of history isn't over, of course it's a war because they're embodied people in struggle with different views about what freedom is and how to live. So now there'll have to be another update about it being over. So I'm very skeptical about that claim and also as am I. And, you know, in Marxist terms, when we talk about the end of history or what is history,

you know, Marx not only flips the dialectic on its head in the Hegelian sense in that he turns an idealist approach to a materialist one, but he kind of flips history on its head because in the Marxist conception, History proper in the sense of our species coming to its full form and then developing from there is the end of class society, right? Communism is, among other things, the beginning of history proper, right? And all of the prelude up to communism is sort of a barbaric prehistory where humanity is still downtrodden, exploited, confused about its relationship with the natural world,

dominated by these arbitrary and stupid hierarchies of power and wealth, where you have colonizers and the colonized, oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited. This is, as Albert Einstein, as I often say, referred to it as the predatory phase of human development. And in the Marxist sort of tradition, we talk about the end of class society as the beginning of history proper, where human beings as cooperative egalitarians in a system, in a political and economic system that serves their interest and is controlled by human interest, widespread human interest and flourishing, right? That is the beginning of history proper. And in the economic system of capitalism, right, we talk about it in terms of the anarchy of the law.

market, the anarchy of production, and even advocates for the market and the invisible hand of the free market and for capitalist free enterprise, they admit implicitly or not that there's a disordered subservience there, that they talk about it and they often don't mean to talk about it in this way, but it comes across because this is actually what they're advocating, whether they're even aware of it or not, but that we serve. this market, that we subordinate ourselves to this economic system, that this economic system, and it's almost a religion, right, that this economic system, if just left untouched, sort of automatically produces good results and we can only violate it, right? Then the more that we try

to interfere in it and intervene in it, we violate it, we slow it down, we distort it. I mean, this is the explicit premise of right-wing libertarian. right of minarchism and anarcho-capitalism taken to its which is just libertarianism taken to its logical conclusion and that subordinates the human species to the machinations of this blind mechanistic like thing that that we subordinate ourselves and prostrate ourselves in front of and and whatever conclusions it reaches whatever results it produces is inherently by the fact that it produced them, fair and just, right? We reject that. What Marxists want is just as through the sciences, we've been able to learn the laws of how, let's say, biology and chemistry work

and then intervene into those processes because we understand them. And one day it's almost certain that if humanity progresses, it will be able to intervene meaningfully and in a moral way in the spheres of chemistry and biology, et cetera, and we're already doing that to some extent, that we would be able to do that in the economic system as well, that instead of subordinating ourselves and prostrating ourselves to this blind force called the free market, called the capitalist economy, we, by understanding its laws of motion, as Marx and Das Capital showed us, we can take conscious control over the economy and gear it towards human ends, right? as opposed to being left at the whims of it.

And there's analogs all throughout human history across the scientific realm. You know, before humans understood and we're just on the precipice of understanding climatology, but we have been historically at the whims of natural forces, right? We don't understand tornadoes and tsunamis and these things. For our ancient ancestors, they were acts of God. Like we can only explain them in supernatural terms. and we sort of anthropomorphized natural forces that we didn't understand. I mean, look at the Greek mythology, Zeus and Poseidon and Ares, right?

The god of war, the god of the sea, the god of the skies, of lightning, of thunder, of storms, right? These are things that people, in lieu of understanding them scientifically and in the face of being at the whims of them, anthropomorphized in an attempt to try to create some conceptual box. around them but they didn't have the scientific method and so they created mythologies around natural forces totally understandable if we lived back then we would do the same in the wake of the of the discovery of science which was not just a European phenomenon but the scientific method was produced and reproduced in many different civilizations at different time periods it got stuttery starts here and there and came to its full fruition in the in the last several

couple hundred years but in lieu of that we we were at the whims of forces we could not control. Now we're starting to understand, right? Darwin unlocked for us the laws of motion of biology. And now we understand ourselves as deeply inseparable from the rest of the biological world, the flora and fauna of Earth. We share 33% of our DNA with a dandelion, for God's sakes. We are intimately connected with all life on Earth.

We're beginning to understand and solve certain diseases. And obviously modern medicine is an outgrowth. and so many ways of our understanding of biology and, you know, mapping the human genome. And now we have CRISPR online, perhaps the most, depends how things play out, but perhaps the most important scientific discovery and invention of the 21st century is CRISPR,

which allows for gene editing, which, you know, if it's democratized and put in the interest of humanity and not just in the interest of an arbitrary class hierarchy, could become a solution to all diseases, right? on a large enough time scale, if these technologies are allowed to develop with human flourishing,

widespread egalitarian human flourishing in mind, they could become huge tools in overcoming needless human misery and suffering. And we would not be able to take control of genes and biology in that way if we didn't first understand its laws. And what Marxism and Marxist Das Capital allows us to do is to do that with the capitalist economic system.

to see what it is, how it works, how it arose, and how it will inevitably fall apart because it is literally unsustainable. And after that, socialism and then communism is humanity taking control of economics and putting it to our interests, widespread egalitarian interests. Put it toward the interest, not of profit maximization for a few, but towards widespread human flourishing. And with climatology, climate change is forcing us to understand the laws of motion of the climate system at deeper and deeper and deeper levels in humanity in 100, 200, 300, 400 years if we survive long enough, we'll have such an understanding of the climate system and its interconnectedness with all other systems on Earth that it will be able to make meaningful interventions into that system and become stewards of our natural world, of our biosphere and of our resources instead of consumers and exploiters and extractors, right? There's something adolescent, something undignified and infantile in our current relationship to the natural world. And that is why there is a crisis across the biosphere, across the climate system,

across basically every domain, including the economic and social ones of human existence right now, because the systems that we have lived on for the last several hundred years, European colonialism giving rise to industrial capitalism, giving rise to financialized consumer capitalism. This has brought us to the brink of extinction or at least civilizational collapse. And now we are being forced by our problems, by the very contradictions created by the system that we gave rise to, right? We're being forced by those contradictions to resolve them or be brought low by them. and that requires a taking over of the economic forces and no longer being subject to the invisible hand of the free market,

the anarchy of the market of production, and the incredibly arbitrary and harmful hierarchies of wealth and power that those things give rise to. Now, if you're at the top of that hierarchy, nothing more that you want than keeping that system in place. It gave rise to you as a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or whoever the fuck that you can live in opulence and luxury right of course you are interested in maintaining and rationalizing that system as not only just and fair but as natural and interventions into that

system would be unnatural and you'll hear anti-communists and antisocialists say this all the time it's it's a mistake for humans to try to intervene in the market and take it over every time humans do it all goes astray it all goes to shit the implicit idea is like no no no no this system this pristine, gorgeous system, if left completely unmolested, will produce good results, the good results, of course, being them continuing to be billionaires and soon trillionaires. Intervention in that perfect system, that God-like unfolding, well, that is just a recipe for disaster. Well, of course, they have to believe that. Because intervention on behalf of the rest of the fucking world would include them no longer being at that privileged.

and let's be honest, utterly arbitrary and luck of the draw position in the class hierarchy, right? There could be, I mean, you could slot in any of us in the right time with the right family and the right connections to be a Jeff Bezos. It's not because these people Zuckerberg and shit are uniquely intellectually gifted or are geniuses of unprecedented stature or certainly not morally, you know, exemplary figures in the, human species, no, through basically dumb luck, who they were born to, their kind of life path that unfolded, not consciously at all, but kind of unfolded in a certain way that put them in the right position at the exact right time. And there was a guy that's just adjacent to Jeff Bezos who wasn't in the exact right spot, but did just as much if not more quote unquote hard work to put himself there that didn't get, you know, the break that Jeff Bezos got, you know,

and Elon Musk and, you know, all these people. this is an arbitrary system this is a stupid, anarchic in the sense of disordered and chaotic arbitrary system that allocates extreme amounts of wealth and resources to a very tiny and very

undeserving elite while stripping, exploiting and creating lives of precarity and toil for the masses. So, all that is to say, we want to enter history properly. History is not over, you silly fucks. Hegel, you were silly as fuck to believe that. In the 19th century, Fukuyama has been proven to be silly as fuck for believing that at the end of the 20th.

Right. And the period of crisis that we are in, it's not national. It is global. It is international. And it calls on us to reform or revolt against every system that we have currently. Social, political, economic, they've all failed. They do not work anymore. And if we insist on slamming that square peg through the round hole of reality, we will,

will fucking kill ourselves. So no, history is not over. History marches on. And in fact, we, as Marxists, we want to transition towards history proper, where humanity gets up on its own two feet and enters its mature phase of its own development.

It's wise, compassionate, interrelated phase of human development, which comes after class society, after we topple this absurd system of class society, which is just refined slavery. from slave systems through feudal monarchies to modern day capitalist exploitation it's been a refining of the same basic mechanism small elite exploiting a large mass to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone and everything else and the techno developed tools that capital and the weapons and the modernity of post-industrial tools that capitalism has makes it not just a threat to its fellow human beings in a local

area makes it a threat to the very biosphere itself, that that same exploitative class system that is present in slave societies and feudal societies is also present in capitalist ones, but capitalism has developed the tools like AI, like nuclear weapons, and even in the sense of gene editing, the possibility of unleashing bioengineered pandemics onto people, the slaughtering of the biosphere, the destruction of the climate system, because of our pumping intuitive carbon and the greenhouse effect, right? Never before has humanity had such capacity to destroy itself and the biosphere. And that is precisely what we need, the science and stuff that produces that chaos in the

wrong hands is what we need to take control of and put it towards the right uses. And that requires a maturation for our species. What will that maturation be? How will it come about? Well, I'd like for it to come about the revolution before collapse. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it takes going through some sort of serious civilizational collapse, not full-on extinction, but some serious civilizational collapse for there to be the right amount of pressure in the broadest way for humanity as a whole to move in the direction that nature is pushing us to move into. It's basically holding a gun to our heads and saying do or die. And part of that is realizing our inseparability from everyone else and everything else on earth and radically changing our social, political, and economic systems to not only be in sustainable and harmonious balance with the natural world, which is the basis for all complex life, but also to reorganize all of those structures to promote widespread, sustainable human flourishing.

and that that flourishing has nothing to do with consumerism and more shit and the anarchy of production for profit maximization by a few no that future will involve less stupid shit less commodity fetishism less gadgets and and and huge box stores full of shit that we don't need it will require less of that and humanity will look back at this insane period and and it will be like the movie the hangover or some shit that this period of human history for some in the imperial core was like akin to the vomatoriums of ancient Rome of this just pure absurd excess that was clearly unsustainable and also a sign of inevitable decay and collapse modern day capitalist consumerism is the techno analog to the

vomatoriums of old and all of the nonsensical shit that monarchs of the old got up to, like the Nero's and the Caligulas of this pure and raw excess, but it now is on such a techno-boasted scale that it's a threat to our very species and civilization, not to mention the biosphere upon which we depend. Yeah, conservative Hegel, for other reasons, would not be my favorite. In any case, reacting to the philosophy of Hegel were a whole set of intellectuals, and he has an ambiguous legacy. There were right-wing Higalians and left-wing Higalians.

In fact, one of the origins of right-wing-left-wing was not simply where people sat in a French theater, although that's another origin of the word. One has to do with these two schools of readings of Hagell. The right-wing Higalians took Hagell to be fundamentally right, and their only task was to apply his method of investigation to subject after subject. In other words, you know, just investigate the Prussian state, spell out explicitly what he hadn't quite said enough of, said enough about.

The other school of Hagalians were the left-wing Higalians, one of whom later became very famous and he will be the first person I'll discuss today as we move beyond what I consider to be rather narrow ethical concerns. While the problems we discussed in the last few lectures, I consider important, there are much narrow concerns than the best kind of social arrangements within which human beings can realize their character and so on. So by Hagell's definition of freedom, it involves not the liberal sense of political freedom, but self-realization, self-determination, right? Rational, conscious participation in ethical and rational life.

And this true freedom, this ability for humans to be brought up to this level of self of full self-determination and self-realization happens through social institutions, okay? Right-wing Higalians are saying they're by, they're conservative by nature. They want to conserve the status quo, right? So Hegel himself, you know, believed that the Prussian state was like sort of this, the instantiation of this idea in practice, right? And right-ring Higalians like Fukuyama, who just two centuries later was kind of doing this conservative Higalian thing and saying that actually his socioeconomic system that

he happened to be born into is the penultimum pinnacle of this movement towards freedom, thus the end of history, that democratic capitalism was the end of history. Just as in a previous time, right, Hagellians believe that the Prussian state or the Christian religion represented the culmination of reason capital R, history, capital age, right? This is conservative right-wing Higalianism, and it's always wrong. It gets always lost in the mist and fog of its own time and taking its own situation, its own historical moment as the culmination of all of history to entrench and defend the status quo that happens to benefit them, right?

And you can see why people in very comfortable positions within a society, could fall prey to write Hegelianism. Yeah, everything that, like, all the systems that got me into this super comfy job and this super comfy life that I live, yeah, let's keep those, because those are the pinnacle of human development, right? Left Hegelians, they took Hegel's actual dialectical method. And, of course, I assume he's going to, I haven't listened to this lecture yet, right? I'm freestyling extemporaneously as Rick Roderick goes on and gives this lecture.

I've never heard it. But I assume he's going to go into Marx, right? That's the obvious shift for left Hagealians who are taking Hegel's dialectic method and then applying it critically to religion, society, economics, politics, right? The belief here as diletticians we know, history is still in motion, it hasn't culminated, history is not over, self-determination and self-actualization for all people, has not and cannot exist under a model of exploiter and exploited, colonizer and colonized, that in order to reach, even Hegel's real conception of freedom for all would require the toppling of all of these exploitative oppressive systems, including colonialism, including imperialism, and certainly including capitalism and class society as a whole. So, well, I'm coming to you from a tradition that stems from leftagalianism that we embrace dialectical materialism, you know, vis-a-vis Marx turning Hegel on its head and from idealism to materialism. and we embrace historical materialism and we laugh in the face of anybody past or present that says history is over we've done it guys absolutely not if there's one neck under one boot

history is not over or in the marxist sense history cannot begin and those that lead to a whole larger set of issues so those are the ones we'll discuss today those are the ones that were raised by hegel under the word freedom and as i say the most famous left-wing Higalian to take up the challenge of giving a richer concept of freedom, I've already mentioned, was Carl Marx. Marx's name, of course, is not used much anymore. We use it. I mean, this is supposed to be what happened in the last 15 years, is that definitively his

view of the world has been refuted and so on. Very funny, obviously bullshit. By the way, I think this was done in 1990. So you have to understand, maybe this lecture, yeah, this is in 1990. And when he mentioned Bush, he was talking about the first goddamn Bush. I think so. It was uploaded 12 years ago. Either way, it's an old-ass lecture from a previous era.

So there was, obviously, in the 90s, early 2000s and through the 80s, a lull in the imperial core of, like, robust Marxist critique. And as capitalism has, you know, passed 9-11, and then after 2008, capitalism has decayed and decayed and decayed. um you know these perspectives are given new life because the very system at play is is decaying around everybody and becoming more obvious to everybody and stripping more and more people of a future and basic comforts while a fucking few people become trillionaires um and so that is the material reality that forces people to wake up and capitalism was always going to decay and so far as it provided a reasonable cushion for americans between 1950 and nine and two thousand that was always going to be a temporary state of affairs

and even then was premised on profound oppression across the global south and the world and even here at home. So, you know, racism and the exploitation, the labor aristocracy and all of that stuff. So, you know, the Francis Fukuyama Hegelian, right Hegelian idea that these are the basic systems are already in place.

We just need to tweak them was always going to be wrong. But it was easier to believe in the 90s. You know, it was easier to believe for a previous generation of, relatively comfortable middle-class people. That mythology can only be believed at a certain time in history. That is a historical materialist account for how that idea became prominent at a certain time. God, Marxism rules.

I would like to warn against these relatively premature judgments, especially in the long scope of history. Correct. After all, communism is an ideology in the Soviet Union. the first communist state began in 1917 and it is hardly a long historical run to go from 1917 to 1988 and to win hearts and minds and two-thirds of the world and then all and be over like that that is the kind of so yeah he is talking 1989 1990 I was born in 1989 folks but yeah he's making a great point here like everybody thinks that Marxism is over calm

down history still unfolding it's been a relatively short amount of time and these communist movements socialist movements like the bolshevik revolution they only happened at this point 75 years ago or so like this is a movement that is still in its infancy historically speaking so don't be too quick to to shudder this idea that socialism and communism can make a comeback and here we are now 36 years after this lecture was given and um it is making a comeback right It is making a comeback, no doubt. And even if people don't know that Marxism and socialism is the answer, they're searching for an answer that is there. People across the spectrum, they have their own ideas about what the solution is and, you know, right-wingers want to bring back racism and misogyny and all this stupid shit.

So they're finding the wrong conclusions as of yet, but they're struggling toward the realization that this economic system is doomed and dying and is actually to blame. You can deny that. You can try to talk about culture and become trad and go back and find a romanticized version of the past. You can wiggle in worm and squirm. But the fact is the economic system, you're so hesitant to critique, is the fucking problem and is going to be transcended. And when we transcend it, we move beyond it, we take control over the economic for the widespread human flourishing, which is now a necessity forced on us by the contradictions of capitalism. that will be called socialism, and your grandkids will be socialists. Historical view of culture might have if that culture's view of history was based on mini-series,

because then you could go, well, that was kind of like a mini-series in this longer story. But as a matter of just historical fact, the text of Marx is a classic text. William Bennett agrees it's a classic. It's in the great books, so there you go. It's a classic, okay? No more argument needed, right? Bennett, you know, Bush's hash, his man says it's a classic, so it's a classic. And then in the historical sense, it's still an ambiguous legacy.

Because throughout the history of Marxism, based on this Hegelian mode of thought in which concepts change as people change, there was an ongoing criticism, which as we know today in Eastern Europe has led to the overthrow of certain governments, an ongoing criticism within the communist states of communism. That didn't appear obvious to us over here until these dramatic events as though they hadn't been prepared for by a long historical process of criticism. Of course, we were blinded to that on our side of the border

for Orwellian reasons, for strictly Arwellian reasons. But now we see, by this period of history, we see that there were quite important social movements, movements that do deserve the name democratic movements in a way that very few movements in this country deserve the name. I mean, a movement that's serious for democracy in the United States would have to be

either associated with dangerous African Americans with strange ideas that have made bizarre off-the-record remarks or something or else, in some other way, ghettoized. Real movements for democracy are oddly, enough most threatening in nominal democracies. That's a principle of Hegelian discourse. In other words, if you live by an ideology, the most dangerous ideology to you is your own,

because someone may expect you to do what you say. So in that sense, communist ideology, as many of you know, was never a real threat in the United States, right? Very few communists got elected to Senate and so on. It's not really popular. On the other hand, our own ideologies of democracy, freedom, and equality have been a great danger to our own society. So that's a dialectical truth and leads me into Marx, and Marx's criticism of capitalism,

because there's a wide misunderstanding, and I need to explain why a criticism of capitalism is a criticism of Hegel. Because for Hegel, if that was the highest expression of humanity, was this advent of capitalism, the liberal democratic state and so on, then a criticism of that state, you know, which had been based on the previous French Revolution and so on, would be a criticism not just of Hegel, but of the state of affairs his philosophy represented. And that was Marx's real point, not just merely to interpret Hegel or criticizing, but use him as a vehicle to criticize the actual state in terms of the degree to which it, at first, it's an internal criticism. It's a criticism. It's a criticism of the gap between the promises of the bourgeois state and its practices. And that

criticism is launched in terms of the economy. The argument is rather elegant and rather simple. And I'm not, I mean, Marx has many complicated arguments. I'm going to stick to a few from this book, the economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. And just very quickly, let's go through some of those dialectical inversions of liberal philosophy. We support democracy. All right, but look how liberal democracies actually manifest in the real world. Because you support capitalism and thus private property, you create hierarchies of wealth

that then translate immediately into power and corrupt whatever possible democracies could be there. So your democracies are masquerades. They are facades. They are sick jokes calling themselves democracies. Furthermore, if you would like to actually have democracy, democracy would

have to be a way of life. Therefore, it would have to infiltrate down to the community level, and that requires infiltration into the workplace. Socialists understand that real democracy would have to be present in the workplace. And what that looks like on a national scale and a global scale is democracy in the economy. These are anathema to liberals. So liberals, they say they support democracy. In fact, you ask any liberal, what's your core political commitment? Many of them will say democracy. A socialist dialectically looks at what liberals say they believe in and how their systems actually

function and we say you say you believe in democracy here's all the ways in which you don't and how it doesn't manifest in your politics and how you seem to defend an entire order that is anti-democratic to the motherfucking core so by your own standards you have failed to live up to them we seek to actually live up to them right we actually believe in real democracy you don't freedom liberals we believe in freedom you know it's so important to us we come out of monarchy and feudalism we believe so deeply in freedom. People should have the right to free speech, should have the right to free assembly.

They should have freedom to become who they want to be. In practice, freedom is denied for the vast majority of humanity, who have to spend the vast bulk of their waking life toiling for less money than they actually produce, just to be able to survive the basics. Survive the basics that you're always hiking the price on, by the way. It's your wonderful economic system is always hiking the price on. They have to afford the basics.

just to get by so they can do it all again. What you actually mean liberal when you say freedom is freedom for the few. Freedom for the people that have so much money through the exploitation of their fellow man that they can liberate themselves from toil and precarity completely.

But that liberation is always a false one because it's never total. It's never universalizable. It is always the freedom for an elite to do what they want, to exploit who they want, to take what they want at the cost of the free. freedom for the many. There is no freedom in the colonized. There is no freedom in the exploited,

in the poor, in the impoverished, in the oppressed. Your freedom is a false facade of freedom. It is a sick joke of freedom. It is the freedom of the slave owner and the monarch to have opulence and luxury and endless infinite privilege for themselves only. We believe, as socialist and communists, in real freedom. We believe that wherever there is poverty, there is un-freedom. And in order to solve that unfreedom, you unsolve poverty. Wherever there is exploitation, extraction, oppression, colonization, there is unfreedom. And we seek to overturn those systems of unfreedom to create the possibility of real freedom. And dialectically, we understand that nobody is free until everybody is free. You cannot build a system of freedom

wherein only a few people have it and the vast majority are robbed of it. So again, one of your core beliefs, liberals, is a facade, is a fake, and we intend to actually make good on it. Are there any more? We can talk about human rights. I think you mentioned another one. I don't want to take up too much time. We can go down the list. But clearly, liberal philosophy, freedom and democracy are two core values, and we can, in just a few seconds, demolish the liberal pretense to them by using the actual systems that liberalism

produce against them, bring out the full meaning of the concepts they pretend to stand for, and then state claim to them. We actually are the torch carriers for freedom and democracy. You are a threat to freedom and democracy everywhere on earth in practice, except for a tiny global elite. Marx, it's an inexpensive little book. The problem is that the democratic state is, and Marx uses a rather strong word here, contradiction with the imperatives of the capitalist economy.

Now, I'm not sure many people would even want to disagree with that anymore. I think that we're used to living in a sort of televised environment in which contradictions don't bother us as much as they used to. They just make us twinge. In other words, we'll see a huge picture of rubble on TV, and a spokesman will be saying there was no rubble, and the rubble's behind you. and we're used to that now we've lived through periods where

Richard Nixon would come on TV and say I am not a liar and his eyes would drift off you know so we're more used to contradiction than they were and take it less seriously we expect it even more so I mean look at COVID and the anti-masker movement people are dying around us as a global pandemic

it's obvious to anybody with the brain half of America is convinced it's a fraud and a con and refuse to wear masks because that is an infringement on their freedom. The freedom for you to die, for you to be susceptible to a global pandemic, that's my freedom to subject anybody and everybody with that so that I can have the luxury, the comfort of not having to wear something that's slightly annoying around my face for a few fucking months to a year or whatever it may be, however long the pandemic goes on. And then in Gaza, look at us straight up and say, there is no. genocide actually we can read the textbook definition from the geneva convention of what genocide is and see it matches perfectly is Zionists will come to you and say there's no starvation in in Gaza we see the fucking starving human beings with our own fucking eyes every goddamn day they'll come into you

and say hey we actually are giving food but Hamas is stealing it we look we look on our screens and see Israeli families bringing their kids out to block aid from entering Gaza because they want the children and the disabled and the elderly and the women, men, and children, and infants and toddlers to starve and die a horrible, violent death because then they can take their fucking land. So the phenomenon that Rick Roderick is getting at here in 89-90 has only intensified, has only intensified and become more extreme. Like, do you actually believe it?

Look at the Maga cult. You know, the whole thing about save the children and we're pro-life. We want to, you know, protect families and children. And then he leads not only a genocide and a Holocaust of children, but is now very clearly about to pardoned Jelaine Maxwell, a child predator, right? A child rapist and was best friends for 15 years with Epstein at the peak of his activity, at the peak of Epstein's criminal activity, side by side to him. His BFF was Donald fucking Trump. And so the Maga Colt is now forced with this. Are you still in the cult?

We're going to laugh in your face. We're going to spit in your eye. Everything that you said you believed in. Everything we said we believed in, we're showing you right now is a big pile of bullshit. And we are laughing at you and we are mocking you. Are you still on board? And the ones that say yes, they're locked in.

They're locked in. They are in the cult, baby. Throw your hands up and close your eyes. You are in the cult. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Whatever daddy says, we do and believe. It's a loyalty test. Like how much insanity can you accept?

How much obvious bullshit and lies and misery and devastation can you adapt yourself to? And the people that are still in the vote blue no matter who or the MagaCult, they have said you can do anything. You can do anything to, you can kill a million Americans, you can do a genocide of children, you can lie straight to our face, you can make fun of us to our face. We're still on the team. that's a scary aspect of that's a dark corner of human nature our cultural artifacts of our period like Twin Peaks make a joke

out of our ability to accept contradiction they use it in a way as a kind of irony on our society that we can accept it with very little difficulty but this wasn't true in this period so it was an important criticism if Marx could show that the imperatives of the economy to accumulate human labor which for Marx was the key to

capital, not accumulating money, because money was a medium, right, that was used to accumulate living labor. That's what is the fundamental meaning of the alienation of labor for Marx. To put it in its, in really basic terms, it's this. The secret to capitalism is moving from a society, and this is why it has ethical implications that I'd like to draw, moving in a society where the question is, what, are you you to a society in which the question is, what do you own or have? What do you do in the sense of a career, a job, or whatever? Once human beings are re-described in that way, they're

re-described in terms of their work time, which is not voluntary. I mean, Reagan recognizes that right. He distinguishes volunteerism from work. He's that smart. And we all know when we're at work, We're not volunteering. And one way you can not. By the way, he mentioned Reagan, right? Isn't it so funny and actually speaking exactly to Rick Roderick's point of holding contradiction in our head that the two presidents in our lifetimes that argued, well, some of you are much younger than me, but, you know, that argued that their presidential slogan was make America great again. And although every single U.S. president is a criminal and a scumbag and deserves to be tried at the Hague for crimes. against humanity.

It's hard to find presidents that have made American life worse than Trump and, um, and Reagan. I mean, what Trump is doing right now, unleashing pollution. The head of the EPA is a protector of pollution, right? They're trying to reintroduce asbestos. Like, just in your face, like, just give more money to the rich, take away health care and food from people, do a fucking genocide, cover up the Epstein files. Everything is the exact, if you were just objectively like, not.

even ideologically, but you could somehow extract yourself from ideology and just say, objectively, how do we make America great, whatever that means? This country, how do we make it better? Trump doing the exact opposite. And we look back historically and we see this period of neoliberalism as just this carnivorous attack by the elites, this dismantling of the New Deal, especially post-Sovia Union when there was no international threat to capitalism, imperialism anymore. Just this voracious, greedy, taking of everything, unleashing of corporate power, dismantling of democracy. And it goes technically back to Jimmy Carter as the prelude to it, but it was Reagan that gave it its full force and function here in the United States and gave it

an ideological sheen so that people would actually cheer it on. That was Reagan. And Thatcher was doing the same thing in the UK. The two men that ran and secured two terms as presidents and ran on the slogans make America great again in every single way, unless you're in the top 1% or top 3% made life in this country worse and worse, objectively empirically. Another contradiction that Americans just fucking swallow. No matter how much you love your job, everybody always tells me I love my job, that very few people, when they're given two months off at full pay,

decide to come in every day and work their butt off. It's just, we Americans may love their jobs, but they may also have deep psychological reasons to believe that compensatory thing, namely that they do really love it. They may, in fact, be devious in some respect. It's deeper than a conscious one, which we'll discuss we get to Freud. So for Marx, the crime, as it were, that... That is an important thing about the unconscious. It's like so many psychological processes, regardless of what you think of Freud in particular,

psychoanalysis, et cetera, the introduction of the unconscious as a psychological mechanism where people do behave, say things that on some deep, unconscious level that they don't have access to are, are betrayals of who they actually are, or in contradiction to who they say they are, or even who they want to be, that there's this reservoir of unconscious activity burbling under the surface of our conscious minds that drive people into certain self-defeated. feeding self-sabotaging sick behaviors right there's that famous james baldwin quote that if people really had to sit and examine their hate they would find that underneath it is a deep layer of pain and i truly believe that under the emotions of hate and anger there is fear and pain that that

cannot be looked at that are unconscious that are not brought up into the conscious light and dealt with in a mature way and that's why i find for example meditation practice so enriching and also challenging is that if you do it right and you do it long enough it is a bringing up of the unconscious a forcing of yourself to to consciously and emotionally process things that your conscious egoic mind tries to keep in the under the surface ocean of the unconscious right and when in when too many things are shoved down when when the lid is put on too many things it comes out in grotesque ways it comes out as neuroticism it comes out in behavior that is antisocial or self-sabotaging we all know the guy in our life who when you're just hanging out with him sober he's decent enough when he gets drunk this really ugly insecure angry side of him comes out because alcohol has lowered inhibitions and weakened the conscious gatekeeping of the psyche and so this ugliness that is that is often pain or unexamined trauma or some deep fear,

insecurity that is not addressed or faced in any, let alone process in any healthy way, it comes out in this grotesque, a monstrous way under the influence of alcohol. We've all seen that person. Yeah, okay. The concept of an unconscious, I think, is crucial and true, regardless of what else you think about Freud in particular.

And Freud was wrong about a lot of shit. But he introduced that idea, and he made it a mainstream idea, and it really does allow for a deeper analysis. And the Marxist conception of ideology in conjunction with some of those classic psychoanalytic ideas can be very fruitful and generative and create and generate more insights.

And it's not a, I shouldn't even use the word crime, because it's purely systemic and it has dual effects, one of which is incredibly positive. The negative effect it has is to reduce the rich amount of human needs, to needs that can simply be bought and sold on a marketplace. Another words, to make us understand our needs in terms of marketable needs.

And this is almost a boring lecture now because our need for love, compassion, understanding, for social relations, and so many other needs now are all merchandisable. I mean, even if you, even, one of the kinkiest things people used to do, which is to have intimate sexual conversations with one another, Now that's telephoneized, and you put it on your visa, right? I mean, just think of that one example about telephone sex. This is how far capitalism can go in rationalizing what at one time was a very intimate personal exchange without the mediation of money into one that becomes marketable.

And now we're about to see the dawn of AI sex bots, 35 years after he's talking about phone sex in the late 80s, early 90s. Think about how that logic has developed and progressed where the most intimate relations of human beings, sex, romanticism, the vulnerability of opening yourself up and making love with somebody and getting naked and having, making love with one another. It's like one of the most intimate, incredibly vulnerable things a human being can do and capitalism can commodify even that. Pornhub, only fans, AI sex bots, fleshlights. Oh my God. This is a demonic monstrous system. So if you're watching USA on television late at night, which I sometimes do, it's got all those stupid B movies on it, then here come on a whole stream of lovely young men and women saying call me up, $5 a minute.

So if you're lonely, sad, tired, one of friends, there's one on the market. That's the way in which Mark saw relations, as it were, between things. because commodities are things, even when it's us. You know, if you're in a room full of people who sell insurance and you're trying to hire one of them and you're the executive, you're choosing between commodities. Now, someone will immediately object, of course, one of the people there may have a better personality.

Great! That means that that's a feature of that commodity that's attractive to you as a buyer. That's why the person may get the job. So for Marx, that was the violence that committed. the violence it committed was it not only commodified our relations but our lives and and put the pursuit of things in the in the place of a whole host and he i mean in place of a whole host of other needs desires in fact the desire just for social relations themselves which today is is a real desire just the desire for a genuine social relation or two one or two genuine social

relations. He's talking in 1990. That trend, the hyper loneliness epidemic has only increased by an order of magnitude in our society. And that's proven by every year. He's talking to 1990 about a trend that then would seem marginal at best and has now exploded to become one of many central problems of our society and these red beeping warning signs that the whole way we structure this fucking thing is antithetical to basic human flourishing alienation writ large alienation amplified to ten and so i mean honestly it's it's quite remarkable that uh rick roderick who is this you know wonderful lecturer and philosopher is using marxism even though i don't think he would say that he was a marxist at this time

but is as a philosopher taking marks seriously and using marks to point out these trends that 35 years later have only become more grotesque and have only become more amplified and he's speaking in the beginning of neoliberalism, right? The late 80s or the 90s, right before the collapse of the Soviet Union and 10 years into the neoliberal austerity turned and he is seeing these trends. So now that was the bad part

on the social relations side for Marx. That's where capitalism was at loggerheads with the great ideals of freedom and so on is because such human beings under such an economic system because of competition with one another for what jobs were available in order to survive within such an economy

where working could only be called free labor as a kind of a joke. In other words, whether we work or not, whether we make that as a choice is sort of a joke, right? Well, I can choose not to work. Well, the streets last night, as this city froze, were full of people who, I'm sure many

didn't choose not to work, right? I doubt that a lot of them are lazy. Like Jesse Jackson, I don't think that that's the problem with poor people, is that they're lazy. But in any case, if you choose not to work, you may very well find yourself under a bridge at night. One way you can find out, by the way, and this is simple to cut through a lot of the crap you usually hear about class analysis, and there are no classes in America. Here's a little empirical test for the audience to try. Don't work for eight years.

Stop working. And if really bad things happen to you, you were in the working class. If at the end of the eight years, everything's fine and dandy, you still got a house and a car and a nice place to live and a lot of nice friends, then you were okay. Otherwise, you were in the working class. But if you stop working for that long and you're in deep trouble, you were a worker and didn't know it. That's a not.

Hell, try to stop working for two months. If I didn't get a paycheck for one month, I would be homeless. And that's true for the vast majority of people listening to this as well. Pericle test, and I challenge any of you to try it. Someone who denies that their classes can always give this one. By the way, sign up to patreon.com.com slash revel-luff radio or bybeeacoffee.com.4. Reflage Radio, keep my ass alive, please. It's a way to find out if there are, really find out.

So those are some of the downsides. Classes are produced with unequal power. Social relations become, as it were, reified, frozen, phony, if you will. The upside is the upside that, where Marx, I think, praises capitalism in terms beyond those ever used by William Buckley, as a system that had produced from nature, more wonders, more technological wonders than the whole previous history of the world had seen. In other words, the good things capitalism did was to build railways, medicines, and even more importantly, new needs. See, many of you may think that all this sort of negative talks kind of, oh, left-wing, all whining after Bush.

We shouldn't whine like that. We should be really happy about it. You know, a thousand points of light, that vision thing. But the upside of this is that new needs get produced. And for Marx, that was a revolutionary process. Because the system would never, as productive as it is, there'd be no way it could ever catch up to the level of need produced by it. Have you ever noticed that?

Now, think about, here's another example to think about, please. remember how good stereo sounded when you first got it instead of mono you know mono just played just one sort of flat music and monos sounded okay when you first got it because it was better than that scratchy thing like this and you got your first stereo and it was so exciting and nobody even mentioned that the tapes you played on your stereo had a little hiss in them but now to just put a tape in something you hear that hiss and you think about your friends that have a CD and they don't have that hiss there's a new need now for hissless music all around music a whole new need

now apologists for the system want to say well that need you know we didn't create that need well that seems highly dubious think of commodities like the hula hoop does anyone remember the hula hoop movement in the United States where people went around demanding hula hoops and then the capitalists went we'll make them for you well no no that movement didn't occur see there was no social movement called the hula hoop movement who went around hula hoops are death hula hoops are death no some some jackleg went you know I'll bet you if we make these things like this put out a few records people will be sweet and the next thing you know people needed them and you just have to be

nostalgic not to say they needed them I mean I heard someone the other day in in the video story, like, I need this VCR. And it was just as dramatic a statement for that person as someone in one of the third world countries that we plunder saying, I need rice. I mean, it's a new need. So capitalism's upside is it creates vast new technological abilities which extend the power of the human species, extended until we can like to, you know, go to the moon, build a CD that doesn't hiss and so on. That's the upside of the system. Now, the problem Marx solved was that those two imperatives can come into contradiction.

The imperative on the one hand of the economy, which now I'm going to state in its blunt Wall Street farm, which is to make a profit, which you do by accumulating labor, capital goods, land, and so on. That imperative to create a profit versus the imperative. imperative to fulfill all these new needs. So for example, and this is another classic example, solar energy, which is technologically available. And so it comes in conflict with the imperative, however, for profit. In other words, there are ways to make it. And when you hear these words, you know you have a contradiction of the kind Marx discussed. When you hear the words, we have that technology, but it's not cost effective. That phrase means we have the social forces of production to build it, but it is not consistent with our social relations based on profit. And what does that apply to? That applies to universal health care. That applies to affordable housing. That applies to debt-free secondary education. That applies to well-funded public schools. That applies to

sustainable long-term 21st century infrastructure and public transportation, right? We have within our means the ability to produce those things for everyone, but they do not and they cannot make a profit for a few. Therefore, we have pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, you know, everybody has to have their own car. And so we have a huge flourishing car industry. And we have a manic debt for just to just for the, just for having the goal of not being born rich. and trying to educate yourself to advance your life, $100,000 in debt. Just for thinking, you fucking peasant,

that you had the right to get educated and not have rich parents, $100,000 debt. Good luck paying that off. Oh, by the way, in order to pay that off, you're going to have to work really shitty jobs under really shitty conditions, and we will never forgive it

so that you will always be subservient and obedience. So yes, we did make the mistake of over-educating our proletariat, but don't worry, we've accounted for that by hanging the albatross of unpayable debt with insane interest reigns around their neck. So they'll be good little obedient workers nonetheless. They'll be more miserable than ever before. But they'll still show up to work because what else are they going to do?

So again, this is the sort of core contradiction. We have the ability, the medical science, the technology, the ability to communicate instantly across the globe. and new technologies all the time. We have the forces of production necessary to create high qualities of life for everybody, right? But the relations of production are still stuck in capitalism where the people in charge of making those decisions

actually would rather extract a profit from you so they could live lives of luxury and opulence forever. And so you don't get those things. Sorry, it's the free market, it's the invisible hand up your ass of the free market. Oh, the invisible hand of the free market happens to be flipping you off and choosing me. Sorry. It's all nature and blind forces and laws. It would be a mistake and a real pity to try to intervene in all of that. So those things aren't profitable to a couple people. What is profitable? Blackstone private equity, buying up huge chunks of the American housing stock, driving prices through the roof, making houses unaffordable for most, you know, working class families across America and then becoming a corporate landlord so they can extract rent from you in perpetuity. That is profitable. So that's what we're going to do. What's profitable

in the health care region? It's for us to insert ourselves as corporate entities between you and your doctor and extract money from you for having the gall to want to get help when you're sick. If you want to get help when you're sick, if you don't want you and your loved ones to die prematurely or suffer forever, you're going to have to come through us, a corporate entity that does nothing. We don't give you health care. We don't have doctors that come and check you or anything like, no, we extract money from you on your way to seeing the doctor. And if the doctor wants to give you medicine or perform a procedure on you, they're going to have to. call us up and some dumb fuck that works for a health insurance company gets to decide whether or not you really deserve that. Treatment or medicine. Oh, you do need medicine. Oh, that's interesting.

We have a whole thing called the pharmaceutical industry that loves to extract billions and billions of dollars of profit from your need for medicine. So if you want your medicine, oh, you have diabetes, boo-hoo. That's going to be several hundred dollars a month to get insulin so you don't die. Because, well, that's profitable for the pharmaceutical. It's not good for you. It's not profitable in any moral or health sense for you. It doesn't actually benefit you at all. It sucks ass for you, majority of human beings in this country. But for them, they prefer to be able to extract billions of dollars every year as opposed to just, I don't know, giving. you medicine and health care in the richest country to ever exist in human history? I think I've made my point. That's all not being cost-effective means. It doesn't mean the technology isn't better, won't meet more needs, won't be safer,

won't be better for the environment. It just quite simply means that you have a contradiction between social relations that need, have these needs, and the way that they're controlled by an economy that won't profit and solar energy is only one among many of similar examples you know there's all of these sort of old truck driver stories about the ball bearings they use at NASA you know I don't know if any of those are true you know you always hear these sort of stories well at NASA they have ball bearings that are practically frictionless and if we had them in our cars we'd get 7,000 miles a

gallon well I don't know if that's true but it could be because clearly our technology we can get to the we could build a better ball bearing that would like triple gas mileage. That seems fairly clear, that that's within the capability of our technology, and much else besides, that won't be pursued because it's in contradiction with these economic imperatives. Now, what does all this have to do with the kind of lives people lead and morality? Well, everything.

Because, as I tried to argue throughout the course, you give one society sort of Greek tragedy, Greek tragedy, the theater, and so on, and Greek ideals is a sort of model for how they live, and you get one kind of human being, Renaissance art, you get another kind of human being and other human projects, and then you get the Brady Bunch, you get another kind of human being and another set of human projects. Now, the vicious way to describe that situation is ideology, but it's an empty term. It simply means that if you want to know how someone thinks, look at how they dress, who they hang out with, where they live, right, the kinds of folks they went to school with, sort of how big is their bank

account, and you'll pretty much know where they're coming from, which is the banal West Texas way of stating Marxist theory of ideology, and it's right. It's true you pretty much do. And it's not a rigid theory. It's not like you're never surprised, but you're rarely surprised. It's the best rough generalization about social relations that I know of. And it is supposed to remind us that moral dilemmas of the kind I discussed last time, which now I'm going to distance myself from by calling them merely philosophical dilemmas, have to be understood, and this is the point I want to draw from Marx today, in terms of being different for different classes. In other words, depending on what social situation you come out of, a moral dilemma may be quite

different. The moral dilemma about whether to steal, you know, an extra $25,000 on your tax return is a different kind of moral dilemma than the moral dilemma about whether you're going to rob a 7-11 to have enough food for the next month. And you'd have to be a moral imbecile not to see that there are important differences, right, between those decisions. They may both be decisions concerning theft, but their important moral differences based on those decisions simply by virtue of something that to us today seems, I think, slightly unfair. Circumstance. I mean, in our country, it's really horrible to say this, but to call someone poor is not an insult. You haven't said anything about them. You've talked about their circumstances. It's a wonderful line in a play

by Tennessee Williams, where Deborah Carr and her old father, who's the poet, the play is Night of the Aguana, I think some of you may have seen it, she and her father come up, and they go, yes, we're poor, and she goes, well, you say it as though you're proud of it, she goes, I'm neither proud nor ashamed. It's not what we are, it's just what has happened to us. It's really a hard way to think in our country, because one way we allow ourselves, and now I'm going to stray from Marx for a moment, because I just use his text. I'm not, I don't really care if it's right. Because I think that to the extent we get something out of books,

what we want to get is something out of them that we can use. And I haven't found any books where I can use all of it, or even most of it. That's certainly true with this one too. But to stray from the text of Marx just a little bit, in our country, one of the ways that we can stand to have a society that's so, opulent and it's impossible to drive into this city and not feel it into this Washington DC and see the Pentagon in these amazing buildings and then just see the bridges line with people sleeping under it at night how do we accept it as

people who think that we're still human how do we accept it and begin even cynically to accept it well part of the reason for that at least part of the reason is that at some level we must believe and this, now back to this freedom thing again, that it was their own sort of choices that got them there. So they're sort of, in some sense, to blame for being there. Now, I'll admit that no one ever quite spells it out that clearly. But in political discourse in our country,

the implication is fairly clear. The implication was there, and we accepted it for years when Ronald Reagan used to hold up the want ads in front of TV they don't have to be their look you ever looked at the one ads and what's on it they're like 14 jobs if you want in this dollar porn business

okay there's a job for you 28 or 9 jobs at McDonald's and for the rest of them you have to be able to read that puts a lot of people under bridges already right at night so a notion of freedom and a society that can become so callous to the minimal demands of what Marx called human requirements.

Human requirements. There's not utopian to demand human requirements. That's the standard objection to any time you use the word mark. So that's why I'm sort of getting away from it now. And funny enough, I was listening to, he's making a beautiful point. And again, only has gotten worse, the homelessness epidemic. Rest in piss, Ronald Reagan, you piece of demonic shit. But I was listening to Bill Maher.

I know I'm a fucking masochist. I can't fucking stand that show. I don't understand how anybody can. And I don't know why it's force of habit, momentum that I still tap in, just to see where psycho fucks like Bill Maher and his guests are on a given topic as a gauge for a certain sort of the elite in this country and where they are ideologically. But they were talking about Zoran Mamdani. And of course, you know, everybody on the panels is an insane fucking Zionist.

And Bill Maher is flabbergasted. that such a figure could possibly emerge and how disgusting it is. And he said a line that I thought was so revealing. He was like, I mean, this guy is talking about like to each according to their needs. I mean, I mean, that is straight out of the communist manifesto. That is pure Marx. Bill Maher said that. It's like, what a horrifying sentence to each according to their needs.

I mean, if we took that seriously, we'd be like people deserve food and, oh my God, think about it. homes and maybe health care like no way can we can we can we allow such extremism to take over says the guy worth 50 million dollars who's never produced anything of value to society except his own smug self-satisfied churned out right down the middle of corporate consensus opinions you know in bill mars world the idea that that that to each according to their need, that people that have need for food and housing and health care could get that is an extremist terroristic threat to the very foundations of civilized Western society. But somebody like him who farts out the most mundane, corporate, okayed, Zionist, mass

murderous, genocidal opinions to his fawning flock of 70 IQ fucking audience members who laugh at every fucking syllable that comes out of his dumb, smug fucking face, he deserves $50 million. He deserves to live in a mansion and have other people go and shop for his groceries for him, right? That's right and just and natural. But this Zoron guy is talking about to each according to their need. Can you imagine the moral travesty of such an idea?

Holy shit, we need a revolution. all right but i also in addition to needing a revolution my wife has to go to work and if i don't leave right now i will put that in jeopardy so i'm going to wrap this up this is part one so i will return with the part two finishing out the rest of this lecture we got through 27 minutes of the lecture the lecture is 40 minutes long um so consider this um part one of of this wonderful lecture by rick roderick which is very generative and gets us lot to think about and and i absolutely love the time difference. I love that this is 1989, 1990. You know, the year I was born, 89, 89. This is Marx and he's applying it to American society, the year I was born. And then 36 years

later, I get to, you know, take this lecture and expound on it and elaborate on it and update it to the time that we're living in here in 2025. And it's so prescient, right? Wow. Whether he's a Marxist or not, he is using Marxist concepts to make sense of his world, and 35 years later, they are as true as they've ever been, more true than ever. They were prescient. They were way ahead of his own time. The mainstream media and mainstream consensus opinion then, as it is now, finds all of this anathema, but it's objectively correct, historically, existentially, intellectually, morally, ethically, it's correct.

Wow, it really, that seems to be a point in favor of Marxism as an analytical tool to understand your world so that you can more adequately change it. Well, that's what I believe. Anyway, thank you everybody to so much who supports the show. I really appreciate it. Got to go.

My wife has to go get her surplus value extracted by a capitalist, so I will be back with Part 2 soon. Love and Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. It's okay, right? We'll go with you.