Rev Left Radio - Philosophy Series: Marx on History, Communism, & Political Economy

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Breht listens to, reflects on, and critically engages with a public lecture by the late philosopher Michael Sugrue entititled "Marx on Alienation and Ideology". Professor Sugrue passed away recently, and Breht has always found his free, public lectures on philosophy to be helpful and really well done. In the spirit of free and open access to education, Breht offers his knowledge of Marxist philosophy alongside this offering by Professor Sugrue.  The use of this lecture series falls under the protections of the Fair Use doctrine.  Outro Music: "Steal for a Meal" by Bambu   Support Rev Left and get bonus episodes on Patreon Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. I, of course, am your host, Brett O'Shea. And today I think we're going to try something a little different. So I've had a long time sort of fascination with this philosophy lecturer named Michael Sugru. Unfortunately, he recently passed. But he was a philosophy for philosophy. professor that put a bunch of his philosophy lectures up online for free on YouTube. And they're really

wonderful in their own right. He's not like a necessarily ideological Marxist or anything. He's a philosophy professor. So he's going to explore different philosophies, you know, from the perspective of sort of a detached objectivity insofar as that's possible. But I really enjoy the way he introduces and walks you through the thoughts of major thinkers. And I've long wanted to do a sort of of philosophy episode series. Like I've done many episodes on philosophy, but I've actually gotten questions from listeners asking, hey, you know, I'm not into philosophy as much. I find it interesting.

I don't have any training in it. I'm not necessarily well read on it. Could you do like a series, like, of maybe introductory philosophy lectures? And although I have a degree in philosophy and I love philosophy, I don't know if I'm fully equipped to do an intro to many major thinkers. I could do a few for sure, but I don't know if I could, you know, do high quality introductions to a bunch of them. There is a wonderful podcast if you're looking for something like that called Philosophies This with Stephen West. I've been a big fan of for a long time. We've even talked a little bit on Twitter. I would love to maybe get

him on the show someday, but he's doing a really interesting series on Nietzsche's diagnosis of the death of God and the rise of various forms of nihilism. And then he's working his way out of nihilism through Greek tragedy and Zen Buddhism, et cetera. So it's an ongoing little thing he's doing over there that I really find interesting and worthwhile. So if you're into philosophy, you want to learn more. That's a great resource. But I also wanted to provide something here because I think as thinking human beings, not only should we be well read when it comes to our own political theory and tradition, which is something we're going to talk about here as well, but we should think and read and engage widely, even with thinkers that are well outside of

our tradition, or even hostile to our tradition. On Red Menace, for example, we have that whole series where we go through reactionary thinkers like Carl Schmidt and Julius Evela and walk through this. their work, critique it, but introduce you to it. And I love doing stuff like that. You know, figures like Nietzsche, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, these are all figures that I find personally very interesting, and I get a lot out of, even if it's not specifically political, that I think is still worthwhile for the thinking person to engage with. And philosophy is, in a lot of ways, the history of high human thought. And so when we engage in philosophy, we are

wrestling with the big questions that aren't answerable by religion or science and that don't have definitive answers, but through the mere process of engagement makes your mind more robust, more flexible, more nimble, and deep. And I think that's a worthwhile thing to do with our time on this planet, right, to think deeply and to feel deeply. So today I'm going to play one of his lectures. Again, Professor Sue Gru has passed away relatively recently in the last couple of years. He put all of his work out for free on YouTube. This is, of course, a free public episode, and everything falls under fair use because I'm not simply going to just play his lecture. I'm going to pause it, comment upon it, add on it, synthesize it with other ideas,

give examples, elaborate, and possibly even criticize certain things that he advances. So it falls under fair use. It's done in the spirit of knowledge. It's taken free from YouTube and put out for free on this show. And I think it's worthwhile and generative for us to listen to it together and for me to punctuate it with my own reflections. And hopefully the final product will be something that you find worthwhile, useful, et cetera. All right. So let's get into it. This is actually, let's start with, let me see here. So there's so many things we could do. But I figure if you like this, Let me know, first of all, that this is something that you think would be cool as a sort of sub-series on Rev Left. It's not going to be every episode, but once in a while I'll do episodes like this.

But I'm going to start with Marks, because it makes the most sense for this show. But I'm willing to go into Kierkegaard, into Schopenhauer, into Nietzsche, into Hegel, into these, you know, other figures that he gives these lectures on. So if you like this series, let me know, and I'll keep doing stuff like this. because I'm always trying to keep Rev. Left fresh. I'm always trying to keep it unique in the growing ecosystem of left-wing voices, which I love and I try to amplify and help facilitate the emergence of. I also like retaining Rev. Leff's unique voice in that ecosystem.

And so while interviews will never go away, you know, the solo Red Hot Take episodes where I rant on a timely topic won't go away, the Brett and Allison collaborations where we dive into a text or a current event won't go away. And this is just another layer, hopefully, of uniqueness and utility that comes out of, out of the show. So this is going to be Michael Sugruh's lecture on Marx and the problem of alienation and ideology. So this will be, I think, a great refresher for a long, longtime Marxists, a great introduction for people that are relatively new to Marxism and want to learn more about it. And then you'll also have my commentary to fill it out as well. So let's get

into it. Marx's contribution to philosophy is one of the most important achievements of the 19th century, and what's important about it is the fact that he's attempting to do what may well be impossible. To synthesize, in this case, not the tradition of Athens and Jerusalem, Marx's project is to synthesize and unify the disparate elements in a number of different philosophical trends, but its most important consideration is synthesizing the English tradition of skeptical, empirical, political economy that comes from Hume and Adam Smith, and unifying that with the Hegelian tradition of idealistic interpretations of human history as a progressive series of developments. And he connects those two elements up with a third

element, French utopian socialism, the kind that gets developed by Comte and other early 19th century writers who were interested in fundamental changes in the structure of society. So a quick recap, we have English political economy, we have German Hegelian history, and we have French utopian socialism. Now, of course, we have episodes on all of those things on Red Menace and Rev left as well. So if you want to hear the intro to Marxism, political economy, we have that. We have a couple episodes discussing Hegel's philosophy more broadly. And then I think Allison and I, yeah, of course, one of our first episodes ever on Red Menace was socialism, utopian, and scientific where we also discuss these utopian, you know, social theorists that came before Marx and who Mark certainly picked up on, but then materialized, right, made more scientific, lopped off the utopian aspects of it, demystified the utopian aspects, and turned it into what we now would refer to as. scientific socialism.

Marx read and was conversant with all of these trends, and he wanted to synthesize in a way that wasn't unacceptably eclectic, the disparate elements, elements which, at least in part, appear to be so disparate that they resist synthesis. In the first place, Marx makes borrowings from English political economy. When I lectured on Adam Smith, it was very clear that there were some elements in his interpretation of the Industrial Revolution and the division of labor and the effect of the machine age on human society

that I described as proto-Marxian. Let's think of a few of these proto-Marxian elements in Smith, the parts of Smith that Marx incorporates into his own views. First is the labor theory of value. Smith, of course, borrowed the labor theory of value from Locke, but the labor theory of value, the idea that the value of a commodity, is directly related to the amount of work that goes into acquiring that commodity

is a fundamental borrowing that Marx makes from the English tradition of political economy. You find the labor theory of value in both Smith and in Locke, and Marx thinks that it's a good idea, it's a sensible way of interpreting the nature of value, because it is essentially naturalistic in its orientation. What Marx likes about the English political tradition is it is very this-worldly. It tries to avoid metaphysical formulations. It tries to steer clear of mysticism.

It tries to eliminate mythology from their interpretation of both science and society. Marx likes that hard-headed, essentially realistic, skeptical element that you find in Adam Smith. And what's kind of interesting there is you have the British empiricism, Going back to like David Hume as an epistemological approach to reality, you have the French rationalist going back, at least to René Descartes, I think, therefore I am, right, orienting the fundamental orienting principle in the mind, right? And then you have, of course, German idealism, which culminates in Hegel, but had many sort of advocates and advances. And so you have these three elements that, you know, form up some core aspects. of Western philosophy that Marx is learning from, incorporating, attempting to synthesize various aspects of it. But certainly this political economy comes out of this, you know,

British empiricism. And Locke himself, when he refers to Locke, you might think, well, I know Adam Smith as a political economist, but Locke is more of like this libertarian political philosopher. What did he take from him? But if you remember, if anybody has read anything of Locke, you've probably read something like his story about the apples on the ground, right? Nature naturally produces something like an apple. And then with a human mixes their labor with that natural state of things by, let's say, going and picking up those apples, right? Or maybe even planting an apple tree that then they harvest, they collect,

then they take to market and sell. And it is this collecting, this planting, this human labor that is infused into the natural world and sort of mixed in with it that it's very empiricist, right, using your senses, your sense and your hands and your body to go out in the world and to engage with it and thus change it. And then it also gives rise to this Adam Smithian idea of the labor theory of value because Locke asserts that you mix your labor into the natural processes of the world to create something new.

And so that's sort of this philosophical basis in England, or in the UK, in Britain, more broadly, of the labor theory of value. In addition to that, Marx borrows from Adam Smith the idea that the division of labor divide society into antagonistic social classes. I talked at some length in the lecture on Smith about the consequences of the division of labor. One of them being, or perhaps the most important of the consequences of the division of labor, is the fact that society fractures along lines of economic status. The fractures between those

who own the means of production, what Adam Smith calls the masters or the employers, and the wage laborers, the people who are employed by these masters. They have different interests in society. And Smith recognized that fact, saw that the potential

for social tension was there, Marx incorporates that idea into his theory, of historical development, he thinks it's one of the great contributions that Smith made in addition to the fact that Smith developed the theory of the division of labor and its significance for society. So there's a clear borrowing from English political economy, and not just from Adam Smith. One of the things that Marx borrows from the English intellectual tradition is the naturalism,

the naturalistic orientation that we find in someone like Hume. Hume doesn't like metaphysics, doesn't like to drift off into airy abstractions, which is so characteristic of, for example, of some parts of the French and almost all of the German Enlightenment. Marx says this world, a naturalistic approach to ontology, is the basic orientation he wants to take. Hume was fundamentally skeptical of, you know, epistemologically skeptical of any assertions about metaphysics at all. He was like sort of a forerunner of atheism and naturalism in that he casted deep skepticism towards many things, including inductive reasoning itself, cause and effect, etc. But he cast doubt on the idea that anybody could know metaphysically the structure of the cosmos, and he would say things like, if anybody goes off talking to you about metaphysics, cast their book into the fire, you have no need for it.

It's this very naturalistic, kind of atheistic, empiricist approach to the world that is looking out of using your senses to see what actually exist in the natural world. Of course, you know, Marx appreciates that. He's interested in a material analysis of societies and their evolution over time. And it's also why, you know, Marx and angles were very interested in Darwin's theory of natural evolution via natural selection, right? It's non-metaphysical. It is naturalistic. It's, as I made very clear in my dialectics and liberation speech, which you can find on the Revleft catalog, is dialectically materialist, right? It is dialectical and that everything is intimately interconnected. There is no organism without its environment. Evolution itself is this process that emerges out of the contradiction between an organism and its environment and it's materialistic in that it is fundamentally rooted in the natural world. You do. not need to bring in any metaphysical, supernatural explanation for this process. Of course, it flew in the face of religious idealism and metaphysics, which suggests that there is a supernatural realm that can at least be known on some level, a God that can be known, and those

are the things that lots of thinkers in this era are getting away from as they develop through the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. So all of that gets borrowed from Adam Smith and from the English political and intellectual tradition as a whole. He borrows from French utopian socialists the idea that a radical change in society is both possible and necessary, that society is developed to the point where it is practically possible to institute fundamental social change based upon a pre-arranged plan for reorganizing society. Most of the utopian experiments in socialism in the early part of the 19th century were dreadful failures. Marx believes that these were failures not because the idea itself is absurd,

the idea of a fundamental and immediate restructuring of society. Marx thinks that they failed because they lacked what Marx can offer them, a scientific theory of history. Professor Staloff in the last lecture made clear the scientific elements in Marx's theory of history. Marx believes that when this scientific conception of human development is added to the mystical or utopian elements in French socialism that you have established the potentiality for radical and immediate social change. The third element in Marx's philosophy, the third important borrowing, is, the tradition of Haleigh-Hagallian historical investigation, or the Hagellian treatment of history. Many people who were writing at the time that Marx was were ardent critics of Hegel, and there

are many good reasons to criticize Hegel. Marx himself was one of the leading critics of Hegel, but he was also willing to state that many of the critics of Hegel did not completely appreciate or understand his conception of history, and Mark said, let me say it now in public, in print. I am a follower of that mighty thinker. So Mark's... Continuity and rupture, right? Or another way to say that, transcendence and inclusion.

This is a sort of dialectical spiral of evolution, by which things build on things that came before them, while also at the same time rupturing from them. So Mark's putting Hegel on his head, stripping Hegelian idealism of its idealism, but taking the fundamental notion of, a certain evolution of society and human civilization over time and then materializing it is both a continuity with Hegelian historical understanding, as well as a rupture from it.

And this is sort of core to dialectics. He thinks very highly of Hegel, but he thinks that Hegel has made some profound mistakes in his conceptualization of human history and of human social development. Let me just make another point on that. Sorry, if the continuity of this conversation gets chopped up by it. But we can see this process in evolution. We can see it in our own bodies by which the transcendent and including takes place, right? We have in us the reptilian brain system at the core of the brain.

We have the mammalian limbic system that is emotional and instinctive on the mammalian level. Then we have the prefrontal cortex, which is sort of our ability to become self-aware, to be linguistic creatures, to think abstractly, to be able to reason. in ways that those lower animals can't. But even in the brain itself, the construction of the brain is a continuity and a rupture, a transcending and an including. It's building blocks from these previous eras of our evolutionary history, building on top of one another. And so, you know, in evolutionary biology, once again, we can use it as a wonderful way to highlight some of these rather abstract or difficult to pin down ideas.

Hegel takes history to be the progressive realization of the idea, the geist, the spirit of human freedom and rationality. In that respect, Hegel is a metaphysician, and Hegel makes demands upon our credulity that in the mid-19th century Marx is not willing to accept. So what he wants to keep from Hegel is the idea that history represents a progressive development, that it has a telos. telos is Greek for purpose. What that means is that it has an end. It has a point to which it is going, to which it is developing. And Marx thinks, like Hegel,

that he can discern that point. Again, this is one of the characteristic difficulties of all philosophers that want to be philosophers of history. It always leads up to them. So Marx believes that he knows what the end of human history is, and the end of human history in this case

turns out to be the end of alienation and the end of social injustice based upon the organization of society with regard to production and consumption. In other words, Marx thinks that the Industrial Revolution has created the technological, practical capacity for the elimination of the problem of scarcity, and that that means that the real problem in establishing just, rational, free in, again, the German idealist conception of freedom, free social relations, is the problem of distribution, is the problem of paying back to labor that which labor produces.

Now, let's take some extrapolations from these borrowings. Instead of making his main theme, the thinkers in a given society, as Hegel does, Marx chooses an alternative set of... Quickly, Hegel thinks of thinkers as the units insofar as in his idealized form of history. It is reason with the capital R or spirit that is trying to manifest itself through history. And so through the thinking history, the history of thinkers in human civilization, this reason with the capital R increasingly manifests itself and emerges through that. And you can see why that's idealist, right? It's fundamentally oriented and rooted in the machinations of the mind, idealism.

And that is precisely what Marx is going to strip away. And instead of putting the onus or the emphasis on thinkers throughout history, he puts it on classes, the working classes, the exploited classes, means of production, material economic, productive forces. people as the universal class, as the most important set of people in every society. Instead of focusing on the thinkers the way Hegel did, Marx is going to focus on the doers, the people who actually make the things that allow people to survive and exist, the ones that create the satisfaction of human needs. And this is the working class. For Marx, the working class is that segment of society that comes in,

to being at the division of labor, who produce all the things that the people in the society need, but who get back only a fraction of what they produce. This is the idea of surplus value. This is an extrapolation from the labor theory of value that we found in the English tradition. The idea of surplus value is basically this, that all the things, well, it actually comes for, it's a way of stating what King Lear says to the fool, that nothing comes from nothing. is saying is that all the good things in human life come from work. None of them appear there magically on their own. You have to go get them. If you want a hamburger, you must make it. If you want something else, you must go get that. It involves activity, work on the part of human beings

in order to satisfy their natural biological desires. So nothing comes from nothing. And what that means is that all the good things in life come from work, which is a fairly common-sensical idea, actually. The problem is this. In the earliest stages of human development, at I guess the hunting-gathering stage of human development, there is no division of labor. Everybody's just cruising around, looking for roots and berries, and whatever it is that hunter-gatherers live on. At some point in time, there's a break from that hunting-gathering tradition, and sedentary agricultural life develops. And one of the key elements in the development of human society and the development of human productive forces

is the division of labor, which comes in very early in history. And what this means is that there is a hierarchical set of producers and exploiters in all human societies from the earliest and most primitive division of labor on into the middle of the 19th century and Marx himself is writing.

In other words, the division of labor is nothing new, as Adam Smith more or less suggests in his book. In fact, the division of labor is a very early thing but because of the fact that it's not backed up by machines and technology and of course since the market is so small the division of labor can't continue on very far

what that means is that although the division of labor is very old in terms of the increase in productivity that it creates, at least in its earliest phases it's negligible. The really important part about the division of labor is the fact that it creates hierarchical social structures some people do the stuff that needs to be done

in order to put food on the table and clothes on your back, and some people stand around and watch them. The group of people that do the exploiting, and what we mean by exploitation, is taking from the socially produced goods and services that a society generates, taking what you need, and giving back to the actual producers-only a fraction,

what the exploiters are doing in that activity is extracting what Marx called surplus value. The idea is something like this, because surplus value is really central to market. Marxism. The product of human labor is the total amount of goods and services that a society can generate. But the laborers in a society, after hierarchical social structures are created, after the initial division of labor, the laborers in a society, regardless of whether they're slaves or serfs or wage laborers, in every case, they produce everything that people live on. They produce all

the goods and services because nothing comes from nothing. And at the same time, social relations are established, hierarchical social relations, in fact, that prevent the laborers from getting back everything that they produce. In other words, they produce 100% of the stuff that we have, and they get back something less than 100%. The spread or the gap between what labor gets back of its product, and the total amount that they produce is called surplus value. The ruling class of every epoch skims off the cream of society's productivity and keeps it for itself without actually contributing anything to that productivity. They sit around and watch the slaves work.

So the idea then is that hierarchical social relations, relations in this case of oppression, are built into every human society that has the division of labor, which is to say that oppression is a concomitant of the division of labor insofar as it allows the extraction of surplus value. What Marx wants to know, his primary concern then, is what is the fate of industrial society, now that we are in the machine age, we're in the age of technology, which creates a new and unprecedentedly productive set of social relations, what sort of political or social hierarchy will be generated from that?

And in addition to that, how should we think about this? Is it possible to improve the human condition so that we can eliminate the exploitation of one set of human beings by another? And what Marx wants to do, what he sees as the end of history, is the end of the exploitation of one human being by another. He thinks that human beings should pull together in a sort of common effort to exploit exclusively nature to satisfy their desires. And what Marx means by oppression, or the technical term is hegemony, domination, what he means by oppression is the extraction of surplus value by a ruling group that doesn't actually produce anything. He believes that in every epoch, the class that rules the society is, in fact, a parasitic group of people who live off the real doers. and they exploit these people in order to satisfy their own desires

and not only that in every case the ruling ideas of an epoch here we hear echoes of Hegel and the idea of the geist in every age the ruling ideas of each dominant class are in fact those ideas which reinforce the social relations

which allow this kind of exploitation to continue so it should come as no surprise for example in the ancient world when the dominant social relation of exploitation is the relationship between master and slave, that someone like Aristotle believes that there are some people are natural masters and some people are natural slaves.

His entire political theory, or not the entire political theory, but a large chunk of his political theory, is organized around legitimizing hierarchical social relations. And remarkably enough, he comes from a society that's dominated by hierarchical social relations, and remarkably enough, he benefits from these hierarchical social relations. So, in other words, Marx thinks that there's an element of heteronomy, there's an element of passion which distorts people's thinking

in favor of legitimizing social relations that benefit them, and that the entire history of human consciousness has been a gradual movement from one conception of a right political order and a right morality to another conception of political order and morality and that these changes are not arbitrary or not chaotic and they do not come from some metaphysical geist. They come from a change in the mode of production. And they are not causes their effects, right?

They're this secondary superstructural outcome of the way that the society is organized around producing and reproducing the necessities of life. And of course we see that in ancient Greek society with Plato, naturalizing, right, naturalizing the hierarchies of exploitation that exist. One of the best thinkers in Western philosophical history, certainly one of the best thinkers of ancient Greece, and he can't see through this sort of ideological reality. And, of course, he benefits from it, for there to be a Plato who can sit back and think

and have leisure and ponder, or a Socrates to walk around all day questioning people, about the meaning of justice, other people have to be working and actually doing the things that keep the society afloat. And so that's another problem with Hegel centering thinkers throughout history is those thinkers, as Marks very quickly realized, are able to sit back and think and write precisely on the backs of those who actually produce the necessities, the shelter, the buildings, the transportation, the food networks of production and distribution. that allow those people to sit back and think.

And so there's already a natural tendency towards not wanting to challenge the system that allows you, Mr. Philosopher of the 17th, 18th, 16th century to sit back and have the leisure time to think. But also it takes extra work to be able to see those ideological trappings. And one of the great liberatory aspects mentally, cognitively, of Marxism, is for us to be able to understand this dynamic, to. understand that the mode of production, in our case, you know, financialized monopoly capitalism, but capitalism more broadly, we'll just keep it simple, produces the dominant strains of thought.

And we see that all across our society, that certain things are just taken for granted. In the medieval period, during monarchies, you know, monarchist feudalism, how did they naturalize those unnatural in some sense hierarchies, unnatural in the sense that they are, you know, exploitative in nature. Well, they talked about the divine rights of king, right? They connected it up with the metaphysical order of the cosmos and saying, that guy is your king, not because of contingent historical processes, which led him out of this hereditary line to take the throne, not because this whole system is built on

the exploitation of the bottom and, you know, power and wealth is siphoned from the bottom and middle to the very top, to perpetuate the system that really only enriches and benefits a few while other people suffer and toil away their entire lives. It's because God has ordained things to be this way. And so you can see that superstructural idea of the divine rights of kings manifesting from the mode of production, the base of society, which is monarchical feudalism. And so just immediately seeing that, of course it's true. And then a plan applying it to our own society is the first step that we can take to break out of the ideology of our time, which can broadly be called liberalism. That includes conservatism, various forms

of reactionary politics, libertarianism, philosophical liberalism, which is the ideological superstructure of capitalism. And what are one of the things that it holds sacred? Private property. It's taken for granted that private property should exist. that it's a human right like all the others, that it would be tyrannical for that to be infringed upon. But of course it does, because the mode of production, i.e. capitalism, is utterly centered, rooted, and necessitated by the move to private property,

where some people can own the means of production, thus creating the entire downstream effects of surplus value extraction, alienation, domination, oppression, inequality, etc. And so when you're locked inside the liberal mindset, You can't see outside. You don't have a meta perspective from which to criticize it. And that's one of the initially liberatory moves made by Marxism. And he was talking earlier about this capitalist class being a parasitic class. And of course it is. Society could function if all the capitalists were to disappear tomorrow. Society could not function if all the workers, all the toilers disappeared tomorrow. The wealth that prop up. the elite that give them their comfort and their luxury, their otherworldly luxury, is premised on the day-to-day toil and brutalization and exploitation of working people who actually make the world go around. And then what did the capitalist tell us? Oh, we create jobs. You create jobs.

There are things that need to be done. You might create some superfluous jobs, and certainly under the capitalist arrangement, there's a sense in which you create jobs, but how are jobs created? Well, they're created by the deployment of capital, right? Capitalists are those who have, invest, and deploy capital through the anarchy of the market, right? Not in any rational, planned way, not in a way that meets people's needs, but in a way that maximizes profit accumulation for the capitalist. And so they say, well, we invest capital. That's our contribution. We put the money where it needs to go? Well, the socialist would respond, we can collectively deploy capital. We can democratically and collectively deploy capital. Does capital need to be

deployed in certain instances? Yes, do businesses need to be invested in? Do certain processes in the material realm need to be invested in, even if they don't immediately create, you know, a profit stream or not even a profit stream, but create a revenue stream that can compensate? do we need, you know, to infuse industries with certain amount of capital? Those things are all necessary, especially during socialism. Those things can be deployed collectively in the interests of the collective, in the interest of everybody, not in the interest of the individual capitalist who is investing capital specifically and primarily because of the expectation of a return and more than that

of a healthy profit margin. And so when you have an entire society that is organized structurally and fundamentally around the accumulation of profit by a few, you're going to have exploitation and inequality. Those are inescapable. And so what we want to do is democratize these processes, collectivize these processes, so that a small elite cannot rapaciously live off the toil and work of everybody else while robbing those people. so that they can live a life of luxury and comfort and non-work, but so that money and resources and talent and all of the things accrued to us through millennia of human struggle and toil can be deployed for the betterment of everybody,

for the human flourishing of everybody, not for the nauseating enrichment of a few, while the rest of us, even in the imperial core, even in the centers of capitalist extravagance, live lives of extreme precarity and people in the global south outside of the empire live lives of brutalizing meaningless toil so that the system can be propped up this is fundamentally wrong on a moral level it's irrational on a practical level and it's exploitative on a political economic and social level. It creates divisions in society. It overuses resources in stupid fucking

ways so that we have 100 types of deodorant. We can go buy big screen TVs. We get a new iPhone every year, but we don't have fucking health care. We can't fucking secure housing for people. Why? Because the deployment of capital by capitalist interest in profit accumulation do not dovetail with human needs. It dovetails with extraction and exploitation and profit maximum so it's actually more profitable to deny people health care and to make human beings suffer to create an industry called the health care industry that can extract profit from it it's actually more profitable to have a huge pharmaceutical corporations overcharge for drug prices making regular working people who suffer from life-threatening diseases even more economically

exploited brutalized oppressed so that they can extract profit from it it's not profitable to make sure that every human for individuals, it's profitable for society as a whole, but not for a capitalist, to ensure that everybody has high quality accessible housing, to make sure that every human being has access to high quality education, to make sure that every human being has access

to health care, no matter how many dollars they have in their bank account, those things aren't profitable. Guess what's also not profitable? Peace? It's not profitable for the world to be. be in a state of peace to those who profit from weapons manufacturing, from the selling of weapons, from the people who profit from endless motherfucking war, from opening up new sites of exploitation

and domination and resource extraction. This is a fundamentally irrational and immoral system, and it's bringing our biosphere to the fucking brink of collapse. That is how voracious and rapacious it is. Ancient slave societies lasted for millennia. The Roman Empire? I mean, 2,000 years? Crazy. Monarchical feudalism, 1,000 years? In a couple hundred years of liberal capitalism, we've brought the planet to the brink. And this is a sort of escalation in this broad thing that we call class society. And so Marxism holds out the possibility, the human vision, that we could transcend the division. The division of the division. of human beings into classes where huge swaths of people at the bottom have to

toil away their one precious life day in and day out the vast majority of their working hours handed over to something they would never voluntarily choose to do in order to make a relatively small amount of people on this planet incredibly

incomprehensibly rich that's an irrational system and anybody that tries to justify it, argue for it, well, technically this and this. They're just caught in the ideology of the system they were born into. They don't have the philosophical, intellectual, and moral tools to think outside the confines of their own societal superstructure. That's a profound contribution to human philosophy and to human political movements. That's a profound contribution. And we can't think marks and angles enough for

for that there's three questions posed earlier that I just want to leave on the table and to think about I was going to pause it but I was pausing it too much back then but three questions he brought up in the beginning he was talking about the French socialist utopians

and he brought up this idea like is it possible to organize a society along rational moral and planned lines like can human beings take into our collective control the construction and structures of our own societies

or must that attempt as the anti-communist and the anti-Marxist and the naysayers will tell us over and over again is that attempt to organize society along rational lines inherently require tyranny of some sort well to the capitalist yes it will but is it but just that question that philosophical question of can societies be rationally organized or must they always be

organic processes outside of the control of the collective of the societies that they structure? That's one question. Obviously you know our answer but just think about it in your own terms. The second question is going along the Hagellian line

the development of history it may not be linear And I resist an easy, wiggish, liberal, linear notion of history, which is a little too neat. But is history progressive in some sense? Is it possible that society develops towards, not an end goal necessarily, but towards a horizon? because I think there's a liberal, whiggish, progressive understanding that certainly would say, yes, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice, this idea that we are making progress, moving in the right direction, we can, there's lots of different schools of thought within this broad idea that progress is possible, that societies do evolve, in the same way that the end goal of biological evolution is not human beings. it's not a destination that evolution started out trying to get to and in fact it's not done yet as nietzsche said we are a transitional creature caught between beast and god

which of course we have to be we're not the pinnacle of evolution we are in the process of a process that existed before us and will exist long after us if we survive so that inherently means that there's a development towards something there's increasing complexity increasing consciousness with regards to self-awareness, increasing ability to self-organize as a society and ultimately a civilization, certainly we would say that 2024 human civilization is, in some ways, developed in a way that society 5,000 years, wasn't.

So there's something there. But then the reactionary counter to that idea, whether it's liberal, Marxist, or anything else, is that, and you hear this from Oswald Spangler, you hear this from Julius Evela, almost every reactionary today who engages with meta history is going to probably make an argument in some way, shape, or form, that history is not linear, it's not progressive, it's not developmental, it's not teleological, it's cyclical, that actually we exist through these cycles and that we return to the way things were

in some way, shape, or form. All these thinkers have different ideas about exactly what that means. means. But reactionary conceptions of history can't be progressive because they're reactionaries. They reject this idea that progress is possible or desired. And so that's the second question.

First question, is it possible for human beings to rationally organize society for human flourishing? The second one is, is history fundamentally progressive and developmental and evolutionary, or is it fundamentally cyclical? And then the third is, and he talked about this with the industrial revolution, is it possible to secure everybody's needs now? Perhaps in the past there was such scarcity, such limited resources that the vast majority of human beings couldn't rise to a dignified, decent standard of living. But post-industrial revolution, perhaps post-artificial intelligence, post-quantum computer,

post whatever, you know, line in the sand you want to draw, but certainly post-industrial revolution, isn't it at least possible that we can meet human needs in a way that doesn't necessitate the brutal, naturalistic struggle over limited resources? Isn't this the idea of a post-scarcity society? I think right now, with our capabilities as a human civilization, our resources, our networks, of production and distribution that we could provide a decent, dignified quality of life for the 8.5 billion people on this planet. But that would, of course, require that a small elite doesn't take up 50, 60, 70% of those

resources. They're not going to hand that overwillingly, of course. But that's a question you should ask yourself. Is it possible to reach post-scarcity? How close are we to reaching? that post-scarcity, and do we now have the capacity in the 21st century to provide a decent and dignified life for every human being on the planet? And so those are three philosophical questions that Marx is answering in the affirmative, yes, we can organize society in a rationally and

planned way for human flourishing. Yes, history is developmental and evolutionary and moves in a certain direction towards certain ends and goals. It's not merely cyclical. And yes, post-industrial revolution we have within our abilities as a human species the capacity to provide for everyone if that society going back to question one was organized rationally and around the impetus of human flourishing instead of profit maximalization but those are questions that you have to ask those cut to the core of the Marxist and socialist tradition and any intelligent interlocutor or opponent of our position will almost certainly shed some doubt on those three possibilities, and we have to at least be thinking through those

things and be ready to respond to those arguments. What he means by a mode of production is the characteristic way of producing things, and as a concomitant of that, there is a characteristic way of extracting surplus value. In the ancient world, the mode of production was called slavery, and the societies were divided into the free and the enslaved, masters and slaves. And amazingly enough, in the political theory of the ancients, slavery is taken to be basic and a fine institution. It turns out that that's in the interest of those who created the intellectual activity of the ancient world,

and what Marx is saying is that that's a distortion, that that is ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, that these people are alienated. What we mean by alienation is necessarily false consciousness in defense of class interests, in defense of the interests of the people that have a parasitic relationship to the real workers. In the ancient world, Aristotle tells us that slavery is natural, and we should anticipate it in any well-regulated social order. When we come to the Middle Ages, if we look at someone like Thomas Aquinas, we'll find that there's a divine sanction, a divine support for the monarchs of the Middle Ages. God creates some, not for all of them, but for at least the righteous monarchs, there is in fact divine sanction. There are some monarchs that breaks God's law.

We can make exceptions for that. But generally speaking, political order is legitimized in the Middle Ages by referring to the will of God and by saying that aristocrats are aristocrats because God wants them to be. Why else would he have made them aristocrats? The king is the king because, well, the king rules by God's dispensation. The serfs, in fact, almost everybody else,

are serfs because that's the way God organized the world. Aquinas, in other words, in his political theory, is legitimizing the particular exploitive social relations characteristic of the society he just happens to be living in. Marx says that this is no accident, that the ruling elite in every society is never going to support and encourage and make possible the extension and elaboration

of political theories and moral theories, social theories, that undermine the organization of society which benefits them. We get to the point in capitalism where they start equating capitalism with human nature. See how they naturalize it? So in feudalist monarchical societies, they talk about the divine rights of God, divine rights of king or divinely ordained by God rulers, because that was the ideological superstructure that time,

the Christian religion in particular. But now in the post-Darwinian age, right, the scientific age, under capitalism, we talk about it being synonymous with human nature. And to infringe upon something like private property rights would be to, in their estimation, impede upon human nature itself. Again, all these are different ways of naturalizing the social hierarchy and the exploitation that it requires.

And this is what we mean by ideology. You know, when we talk about capitalist realism, I mean, what was Mark Fisher talking about? In so many ways, he's talking about the trap of ideology. That it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Because, precisely because, of the ideological superstructure

that arises out of the base that Marx is pointing to and making very clear for us, demystifying how these things actually work, how the highfalutin ideas of a culture are actually rooted in the material basis of how that society

produces and reproduces the necessities of life. And again, I find that incredibly profound and a truly unique and essential contribution to human thought. And when Marx says, that philosophers have hitherto only interpreted society, the point is to change it. This is a necessary step in the building up of the capacity to change it. In seeing how the dominant ideas

structure and maintain the fundamental unit, the fundamental mode of production and the fundamental structure of that given society. What that means is we have a sort of feedback loop here between the economy and culture. There's a connection, a connection of heteronomy, of self-interest, not again on the basis of individuals, although that's sometimes the case, but we go back to the German idea of the collective subject. For Marx, the collective subject are social classes. The bourgeoisie has an interest.

The slaves have an interest. The serfs have an interest. They form a sort of collective subject. So the history of economic development, the movement from slave labor to serfdom, the movement from serfdom to wage labor, carries with it changes in the productive forces of society, and as a necessary concomitant of that, changes in the structure of society, and as a necessary concomitant of that, changes in the way in which societies are legitimized. in the age of slavery, political theory established slavery.

In the Middle Ages, we established serfdom. In the age of Adam Smith, in the age of English political economy, what did, at least in Marx's view, what did the English political economists do? They legitimized the society they happened to be born into because they were intellectuals. They were the hired guns of the exploiters. That's what the whole history of Western, or not just Western, of global cultural development amounts to. In every society, there's a group of exploiters and a group of producers that are the vast majority of the people.

Among the group of exploiters, there's a group of people that don't actually do manual labor, that don't do the kind of labor that actually makes the world go. They do intellectual labor, and their function in society is to shore up and legitimize the particular kinds of evil social relations characteristic of. of a society divided into exploitors and producers. Marx thinks that the time has come to eliminate this. The time has come for the heteronomy which exploitive economic relations introduce into our political theory and into our theory of history the distortions created by alienation, by necessarily

false, I thought, in defense of class interests, the time has come to abolish that. And as you may have guessed by the connection to the Hegelian system, when we finally abolish alienation, we will finally abolish classes. When we finally abolish classes, we will have finally abolished exploitive social relations. When we finally abolish exploitive social relations, there will no longer be false consciousness in defense of class interests, and we could finally see what we really are. History, as we have known it prior to this, will be over. We can begin the truly human epoch in human life.

When there is no longer false consciousness in defense of class interests, alienation will be gone because the whole human family will understand that they are part of the same species, that they have one interest, the human interest, and that the alleged interest of one segment of society as opposed to that of another, is in fact an illusion created by the education that we got growing up in a society divided into hierarchical producers and exploiters who necessarily have false consciousness in defense of an evil society. In other words, we are going to have the secular apocalypse. This is the end of the world.

It's not that people will cease to exist. It's just that all of human history will have turned a fundamental corner. This goes on quite a bit in the remainder of the 19th century and all, partially the 20th century. This is, for me, human beings growing. up. I often think that the development of human intelligence over our species history is condensed within our individual developments. So like when we're very young, when we're toddlers, when we're young children, we have these superstitions, we're scared of the dark, we attribute natural forces to you know fantastical and mythological creatures you know there's this this smallness of our of our world

and our understanding and as we grow up we develop we develop into our adolescent years a little bit more informed a little bit more self-aware but still kind of childish in many ways and we can kind of see you know the previous epochs of human development the development of human consciousness it's replayed in the individual growth and development of a human being. And we can continue to grow and grow throughout our lives and reach just higher states of awareness, including more in our awareness. And I do fundamentally hold out that vision for our species future that we're probably something like, if we're going to run with that analogy even further,

in the late adolescent stage of our human development. Right. Coming into our own, certainly having mature adult capacities, but still mentally and emotionally being immature in ways and being fundamentally reckless. So, you know, we're no longer infants. We're no longer little children. We've grown up a lot as a species. But we're in those risky, wobbly adolescent years where things could break either way. You know, we could fundamentally destroy ourselves. ourselves with our recklessness, our heedlessness, our inability to see long-term consequences of present actions, or we can grow the fuck up and mature, which collectively would be represented by our species growing up beyond needing to separate human beings into the haves and the have-nots, this fundamental idea that some humans should sit atop the pile

and should exploit everybody else for their own personal benefit, right? There's something fundamentally childish about that idea, let alone structuring our human civilization around it. And just like trying to structure society around the whims of an adolescent, it's bringing us to the brink of catastrophe. Right. So we have to grow up or we're going to fuck up our lives. That's something that we all face individually as we're coming out of adolescence. What does it mean to grow up? Who am I?

how do I take responsibility for my life and for others, right? How do I mature emotionally? How do I see things from somebody else's perspective? How do I balance my current behaviors with its long-term consequences? This is what it means to grow up as a human being. And I think as a species, there's something analogous that we are reaching this end point of adolescence, which is inherently volatile, right? We have these capacities that we've never had before.

And we can use those capacities for mature development. and growth, or we can use them in the worst, most selfish, most myopic ways possible. And that's kind of the analogy that I see. And so this Marxist vision of what we would call communism is just the development of the human species beyond that predatory, exploitative, irrational, immature, childish phase by which we structured societies hitherto. And so I have to hold out that vision because what is the alternative? that we are going to have this absurd, irrational, insane way of splitting up humanity forever, that we're somehow going to be worthy of traveling the stars and perhaps even meeting other intelligences in the cosmos

where we still have billionaires and homeless people, rich people and poor people, masters and slaves? Anybody that thinks that capitalism is more or less the end goal of human civilization, the end of history that we're more or less fine where it is socialism communism these are dead ideologies of the previous century that we're just going to kind of do this but with more technology forever that's their infantile view of the future that's their horizon for our species that will forever have people in suits walking over homeless people in the streets on their way to go extract more profit from somebody else that we'll have kings stepping

over serfs on their way to their golden thrones, that we'll have masters stepping over slaves on their way to a life of luxury and comfort. I want more for our species, and I believe that if we don't kill ourselves through our adolescent recklessness, and we survive long enough that our species will mature to that point. And that is fundamentally the communist vision for the future. People can disagree. that we can talk about it. But that is my position. And as a communist, that is yours. Now, alienation can be combated only by adopting the position, the intellectual position, of the exploited. In other words, you have to look at human history from a critical perspective,

which points out the heteronymous, and here's a Kantian element, self-interested parts of the ideologies that have been generated in order to shore up these exploitive social relations. This critical analysis of society, this ruthless critique of everything existing, is called Marxism. And Marx believes he is the first man to penetrate the veil of Maya, the veil of illusion, and say what human history really is. Human history is a combination of our greed, of our unenlightened self-interest, and our credulous willingness to believe whatever fantasies are generated by a particular social structure, by our unwillingness to take things to their logical, ruthless conclusion. So autonomy and heteronomy, fundamental conceptions for Marx, not in the

Kantian sense of a kind of metaphysical freedom, which we derive simply by virtue of being free rational agents, he wants a this-worldly rationality. He wants heteronomy in this world, which allows us to see that all human beings have a common interest. The elimination of exploitation, which is the same thing as the elimination of injustice. When we finally eliminate exploitation, there'll be no longer any hierarchies. Everyone will be equal, in the sense that everyone will be required to work. And all the exploitation that we do will be the exploitation of nature through the technical advances that we get from modern natural science. Few social theorists have been as involved and as impressed by the development of modern natural

science as Marx. So for the equality point, this is a point I really like to point out because you'll often hear arguments saying like this idea that all human beings are equal, it's bullshit, it's childish, we reject it. And I just want to make clear that the communist idea of equality, equality is not that every fucking person is equal in their talents or their capacities. It's not that every single person should be made to be the same, this fucking stupid 1984 vision of communism where everybody wears the same clothes, it's the same hair.

I mean, that's just fucking stupid. Marx didn't believe that. No communist in fucking history has ever believed that. What our difference is is to say that the natural inequalities that exist, i.e., this guy, funnier than that guy. This girl is smarter than that girl. This person is a really great singer. This person makes really emotionally provocative art.

This person kind of sucks at art. They might want to be doing art, you know, be an artist, but they're not very good. And, you know, blah, blah, those natural inequalities, those will always exist. And that's the beauty and the diversity of the human species, that there are these differences in these unique capabilities. What we're saying is that those innate inherent differences in talent, in interest, in capacities, whatever they may be, they can be appreciated, right? The most beautiful singer on the planet Earth under communism is still the most beautiful singer on planet Earth. But that inequality does not and will not, under our system, translate into an nauseating inequality of economic access to resources.

that you can have different people that excel at different things in different ways we can fully not only embrace human diversity expand it let people actually find out who they are what they're interested in pursue their capacities try to develop their skill sets but it doesn't mean that some people should have five homes and some people should have no homes right that the way that that inequality cashes out can be social that guy's just funnier than that that guy. He makes more people laugh more of the time. That woman is just a smarter chemist than this other guy. Okay, that's just, and we need chemistry. So honestly, yes, she should have the position, whatever.

But that doesn't cash out in economic inequality. And that's what liberal capitalism does. First of all, it annihilates the basis of equality of opportunity. It pretends, it supports it. It absolutely does not. You know, being born into a family with wealth and resources and connections is always going to give you a hundred steps ahead of the person born into a broken family, an impoverished family, a family in Palestine who can't focus on pursuing or self-actualizing their own interests or capacities because they're dodging American bombs. So there is no equality of opportunity under liberalism anyways. And then on top of that inequality of opportunity, the way that the differentiations cash out is that person has a private jet, five homes, and a Bugatti, and that person who was

born with mental illness who they don't have enough money to routinely go to a therapist or they were sexually traumatized and abused as a child or fill in the blank that that person is now doomed to a life of poverty and immiseration and toil and poor health and an early grave because they were born in a certain circumstances that they didn't control so no we do not have a vision of every human being being exactly equal that would be fucking absurd. That would be a dystopia if it were even possible. What we say is those social inequalities can cash out in social capital. There could be people that are better than other people at certain things. And those people were rewarded by people liking to listen to them or going

to their shows or having them be their favorite athlete or however this cashes out. But it doesn't cash out in the form of access to resources that every human being by virtue of being a human being gets access to the products of human civilization. Not just the current ruling class or the current working class that have made the things, but all the classes before us, all the toilers, the workers, the peasants, the serfs, the slaves before us that made modern human civilization possible. It goes all the way back to the first fucking humans that crawled out of the trees and started walking on two feet, that they laid the groundwork for what we have now. And that, product, that final product of millennia

of evolution and toil and work cannot be usurped by a small elite. No, sir. We reject that idea. It is the natural bounty of the human species and all of us are equally obliged to it. So Marx is in fact

an unlikely combination of disparate intellectual traditions. This idea of alienation, this necessarily false consciousness and defensive class interest is probably his greatest contribution to philosophy because it gives us the possibility over an overall critique in a somewhat more rigorous and tough-minded way than Hegel offered us when we looked at the history of Western philosophy.

Mark says, look beneath the surface. This isn't God's plan working out its way in history. This is just the human condition and human nature operating under certain contingent circumstances. The plan of human history is in fact the recreation of what we were before the initial division of labor. Remember that for Marx, hierarchical social relations and as a concomitant to that ideology and false consciousness, all that, is a product of the division of labor. But prior to the division of labor, we have what might be described as primitive communism, no conception of private property, no conception of personal ownership, no conception of legitimate exploitation

of one person by another. So Mark says, in other words, this division of labor thing, it's just a phase. We entered into it at a very early phase in our career as a species, and the ultimate finality, the final act of this drama, will be going back to that earlier primitive communism in which exploitation of one person by another is no longer allowed, but it will be with the addition of an enormous amount of productive capacity. It will be with the elimination of scarcity through technological means. And that means fundamentally our condition will be changed. We will have returned in some respects to the earlier Garden of Eden, to the pristine moral

condition of true humanity when we don't make a distinction between upper and lower classes. We will go back to what we really are by nature. So what Marx is doing then is not forcing us up to a sort of reconciliation with heaven. Quite the contrary. And here comes the naturalistic orientation of the English political and philosophical tradition. He wants to get us ultimately back to nature. Not nature as it's red in tooth and fang,

but nature as human societies are before the introduction of evil, social relations, before the introduction of exploitation. Returning to community, returning to communism, returning to nature, but at a higher level, having gone through the process of development required to return to it at a higher level, in the same way that you could be, you know, whatever, I could, a million examples, but we'll just use mental health, right? You have your

mental health, you lose your mental health. In the process of losing your mental health, you have a deep gratitude for your mental health when it's there. You fight through, the mental illness and you return ideally hopefully to mental health but at a higher level you've now gone through the despair you now know what depression is you now know what anxiety is maybe you've recovered from it but there's a different you were healthy before and you're healthy after but the being healthy after is deeper more enriched and more wise for having gone through the shit and so in a similar analogous way we had primitive communism it was our natural state as human beings in a state of nature, right? We went through the process of

separation, of individualization, of the division of labor, of class societies, and social hierarchies, right? We went through that. And going through that process also helped us develop in various ways, right, to reach higher and higher and higher levels. But now we're going to return to that state of health, having gone through the state of unhealth, having gone through and transcended the predatory phase of human development and coming back with all of the wisdom, all of the technology, all of the capacity earned through those millennia of struggle and sacrifice and oppression and we returned to community at a higher level. We return to our natural state now at a higher level. That's a reasonable idea for understanding how the development of

human civilization occurs. It fits right in with my analogy with ages, right? From childhood through adolescence, up to a wiser self. Or in Buddhism, we talk about transcending the self, but needing to develop the self first, right? The animal and the infant are pre-self. They have not developed a sense of a separate self, right? And there's a certain calmness in that. If you look at an owl sitting on a tree or a lion, you know, relaxing after a meal or an infant, you know, in their mother's arms, there's no anxiety, there's no crippling self-awareness, there is no self there. They are one with what is, right? Then having gone through the development of the ego, the construction of a self, the feeling of separation, all the neuroses that comes

with it, but also the growth, right? And then returning, in a Buddhist example, at least, to going to an enlightened state, you're kind of returning to a no-suffer. self-state, but at a higher level, right? Having gone through the development of a self, the enlightened Buddha is not the same as the infant or the owl, right? The enlightened Buddha, having gone through egoism and separation, has rejoined oneness, but at a higher level. And that is a sort of dialectical evolutionary development. And there's a million ways to make analogies, some are better than others, but you kind of get the point. And, and I, and, I I mean, what could you say to that?

That's impossible, that we're just doomed to class society forever, that will never return to a sense of cooperation, to a sense of, hey, let's, like the tribe anciently, let's all work together for the benefit of all of us. We are all in this motherfucking shit together in a state of nature. Life is inherently precarious in the cosmos, all right? I'm not going to exploit you to create a little throne and a castle on the hill while you live in a shack that's decaying. we're all human beings, we're all coming together and we're cooperating to create the highest quality of life for all of us. That's growing up as a species. That's returning to our natural state, but at a higher level. There is a yearning for lost innocence here. And it's not hard to see why Marx would think that. Think of the time and place where he has been living. He is living

in Western Europe, moving from one place to another, because he's often hunted by the agents of the state who view him quite properly as a subversive, and he spends a great deal of his time in England, quite a bit of time in London, and England is the country that has developed the Industrial Revolution to the greatest extent. Like Charles Dickens, and of course there are many similarities between the critique of capitalism offered in Dickens, something like hard times, and Marx. The moral impulse in both Dickens and Marx is the same, but what Marx wants to say is that the answer here is a return to nature. that we can get beyond that.

He sees, unlike Adam Smith, primarily the downside of the Industrial Revolution. And he's right about that. I mean, let's not pull any punches about the social conditions characteristic of the working class in the middle of the 19th century in England. They were honestly wretched.

If any of you get a chance to read something like Engels' piece from 1844, I think it is the condition of the working class in Manchester, you'll realize that there is a legitimate and very serious problem here, and you have to be really morally obtuse to be unable to see that fact. Marx is full of moral passion about that, and it's quite understandable. Starving children, an enormous increase in productivity, and at the same time, a general impoverishment of a large percentage of the population, people for the first time moved off the land

and a relatively secure, almost organic connection to the seasons and nature, forced into urban areas. urban slums grow up, problems with sanitation emerge, all the problems of urban industrial life are there in full force, but there is no governmental agency, like, for example, the welfare state, to take care of the problems generated by capitalism. Marx, in fact, thinks that the nature of the system, the ruthlessly exploitive rationalization of society, that's a concomitant of capitalism,

prevents the amelioration of the conditions of the working class, except by a global proletarian revolution. Workers of the world unite. What that means is that all across the world, Marx has one architectonic system which allows him to offer a program of political reform at a fundamental level to every society. This is a large part of the appeal that Marxism had

in the late 19th and for a good part of the 20th century on a global level. speaks to real, both moral and political problems, and he offers a solution to people that despair of ever finding a solution. And it's entirely understandable how they might think that. One of the real tragedies in human life, one of the real horrors about the condition we find ourselves in perhaps now, is that in order to develop the comfort, the wealth, perhaps even the luxury that's characteristic of contemporary American society, contemporary, industrial society, also in Western Europe, is that it is necessary to sacrifice two or three

or four entire generations of human beings. In other words, there is a necessary element of exploitation in the development of capitalistic social relations. And this exploitation cannot be avoided. We may be able to ameliorate it by creating things like minimum wage laws, by creating health and safety regulations, but it can't be eliminated because what Adam Smith calls profit is what Marx calls surplus value, and it's built right into the system.

So Marx thinks that this is not susceptible to gradual reform. It would be nice, perhaps, if it was, but the chances are that the ideology of the bourgeoisie, which is the people that Adam Smith calls the employers or the factory owners, makes them blind to the true condition of human beings. As a result, they have an ideological distortion.

They are alienated, so they are unable to grasp the true human condition. They are unable to grasp the real trend of history, so the chances of actually explaining to these people, rationally, Marx thinks, what they ought to do to change society to make it truly human are nil. He certainly underestimated the capacity of capitalism to alter its conditions to meet at least the most pressing and immediate problems. Capitalism as a system, I would say, adopted a system of what we might call Berkey and piecemeal reform.

All right, well, we'll go back to this and let's see if he takes this in a different direction that needs and requires critique. But the thing that was said there about reforms, right, Marx obviously is a revolutionary. He's not a reformist because he sees that reforms can only get you so far. and Michael just talked quite articulately about how the exploitation is built into the system. So from a liberal perspective that wants to maybe a progressive social democratic perspective that wants to reform away the evils of capitalism, the problem is you can do a couple things in certain contexts, in certain environments to reform certain aspects of capitalism. You can raise the minimum wage a little bit.

hell, you can even do free health care for people through funding it by taxes, et cetera. But the more and more reforms you do, the closer and closer you hedge toward that fundamental contradiction, the right of private property and the right for some people to accumulate profit at the expense of others. And so there's only so far, one, that the reforms can ever even go without actually challenging power, and there is always and everywhere, even in the face of successful reforms, the very real possibility and almost the inevitability that those reforms will be clawed back and undermined by the capitalist class, who have all the power, who have all the wealth, who have all the leverage, and maybe in one certain context, historical

moment, these reforms for various reasons were able to be advanced. At another, they become very inconvenient. We can even look at the New Deal in the United States and the rise of neoliberalism. for a while post-World war two conditions were such for many reasons that i don't have time to go into here but i'm sure you can probably start thinking about them were such that u.s power and economic force were unrivaled in the world and there was a moment of such abundance of such hegemonic domination that even the national i mean they fought it tooth and nail right fDR talks about i welcome the hatred of the big bankers and the big moneyed interests and there was a class war that happened and there were communist movements on the street and so all

these things were not simply a question of reforms being advanced and capitalists giving the thumbs up these were hard fought for but they were in a specific historical moment where they could at least be stomached by the ruling class for a time that time came to an end at the end of the 1970s the rate of profit was falling wages are too high because workers have got it too good there's too many unions, this needs to be dismantled. This whole New Deal era, it worked for a time, and we were able to say, okay, we could stomach it for a time. We can't stomach it anymore. Along comes Reagan. Along comes Thatcher. Along comes Clinton. Along comes Milton Friedman. And in Hayek and Mises and all these ideas, very popular, very in vogue, right? These ideological structuring of the new,

what we now call the neoliberal era, which can be. seen in many ways as the dismantling of the New Deal era. And so even those reforms, the peak of American reforms, isn't saying much, but God damn it was the best that America's ever did with regards to concern about the quality of life for the

average working person, setting aside its deeply racist dimensions and the fundamental compromise of the New Deal, which was to not step on the toes of Southern Democrats who wanted segregation to stay as it was, and to not empower by enriching

black people right that was a huge part of the fdr's new deal that compromise was made in order to push through the new deal as it was because of this coalition of the democratic party at that time so i don't want to i don't want to wrinkle over any of that bullshit that's deeply also embedded in the american experience right the deep racism that comes from founding a society on slavery and genocide and we're still living with the consequences of that but that just shows that even robust consensus reforms.

The New Deal era was marked by a consensus across the political spectrum that these things were okay, that the New Deal

politics, Republicans and Democrats, accepted New Deal politics and that worldview. Fundamentally,

Nixon supported it, right? That's why we looked back and like Nixon was doing some weird shit. Like he was

a fucking piece of shit for a million reasons, but here's like this progressive legislation that

he passed. And yeah, they were operating within the New Deal. And then with Jimmy Carter as a prelude and then Reagan as the instantiation and Clinton as the bipartisan cementing of it as a new consensus, we get neoliberalism, which is the fundamental deconstruction of the New Deal era for the interest of capital. So this is why we have to be revolutionaries because we understand that a break from this system cannot come from within its own logics. and it cannot be attained through its own constructed barriers and avenues of redressing grievances because you will eventually hit that fundamental limit, and also they're always subject to recall. So let's see what he's going to say here, though. I'm not exactly sure where this goes.

I haven't actually heard this lecture, so I'm riffing in real time. Maybe you like that, maybe you don't. Capitalism as a system, I would say, adopted a system of what we might call Berkey and piecemeal reforms. First, limiting things like child labor, then limiting things like the labor of women, then limiting things like health and safety conditions, then putting together things like minimum wage laws, all things like this are attempts to kind of round off the sharp edges of a system which has, at bottom, an exploitive element to it. There's no getting around that fact.

So what Marx is trying to do is explain what he thinks the future. process of human history will be. Instead of a reconciliation of God with man, we are going to have a reconciliation of one segment of humanity with itself. We are going to have a reconciliation of the producers and the exploiters. It may unfortunately be necessary to kill all the exploiters, but the process of history is often rather grim, gruesome. You can't sugarcoat that element of it. But when you consider the fact that Marx, like Hegel, is projecting this trajectory on to an infinite amount of temporality, well, and the sacrifice in this generation, at this time, of an exploitive class that really has this terrible comeuppance coming to it, may be justified, given the

enormous benefits this will create for all of humanity throughout all the rest of human history. This sort of thinking, in some ways it is attractive, is also extremely dangerous because it gives people a license to sacrifice this generation to the next. not this generation I mean a certain ruling elite that is intransient in the face of us powerfully telling them this is how it's going to be you're not going to exploit us anymore some of them will accept it some of them will be brought over some of them will resist it with every fiber of their being because they want to hold on to their own power and their own wealth and at that point yes violence is necessary but we must always every time juxtapose and keep together the violence of a revolutionary anti-eastern oppression movement with the violence required to maintain the status quo. And there is no doubt that revolutions are bloody and horrifying and tragic and murderous at times. Look, a quick glance at revolutionary history will show you just that. It's also no doubt that the maintenance of the

status quo actually is so violent that it could literally result in the end of our species. whether it's nuclear war complete biosphere atmospheric climatic collapse a million different things we have brought ourselves to the brink of genuine extinction such that continuing with the status quo advocating for the continuance of the status quo in the face of these daunting and mounting problems and crises is a form of extreme violence it is a form that says the whole world will go down before this relatively small fraction of the human species gives up its inordinate and radically disproportionate power and wealth. We will murder the entire species and all the other ones

before we allow every human being to live a dignified and decent life. Okay, well, then you can't moralize about the violence of a movement that seeks to turn that around, just like you can't moralize the violence used by Palestinians and equalize it with the violence used, by Zionism. There's no equality there. We hear it all the time. Just turn on a cable news show and you'll hear somebody talking about Israel's right to defend

themselves, about how the Palestinians are terrorists, how this violence is unacceptable, how October 7th was the start of all of this. Israel has to do what it has to do. From the Palestinian perspective, the daily grotesque grinding violence of Zionist occupation, is unbearable, it's unlivable. And like capitalism, imperialism is bringing our whole species to the brink, Zionism seeks to bring the Palestinian people to the brink of extinction, of collapse. And so they engage in violence to fight back against their oppression.

And then those who are invested ideologically are material in that impression, point to them and call them terrorists. Just like the rulers of capitalism, imperialism, have and will continue to point to socialist, communist, anarchist, revolutionary movements of the left, and call us tyrants, dictators, bloodthirsty murderers. In the same way Zionists do it to the Palestinians, the oppressor pretending to be oppressed by those that he actually oppresses. So that's the thing.

And then now we've got to think deeply about what Mark said about the ruling ideology of a given era as the ruling ideology of that material basis. And we have to think, of course, the status quo of Zionism is rooted in the domination, oppression, and elimination of the Palestinians. So they see that as natural and normal in a process that must take place. And the fighting against it, that violence is emphasized as unacceptable. The violence of the status quo, that's fine. That's not even violence. The violence of those fighting back, that's unacceptable levels of violence.

Those people are terrorists. They're criminals. Kill them all. The same exact thing happens on the level of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism and imperialism. And I think it's important to think like that. And I don't know if he's going to do it, but you hear it a lot. They'll move in that direction immediately. They'll talk about the violence of revolutions.

They'll talk about the horrors of Mao and Stalin. But they never fucking utter a peep about the violence and brutality of the status quo. and even in the imperial core he's talking about the quality of life being brought up for people and now we have safety and health regulations and we have OSHA and we have a minimum wage law now and you know all the what about the periphery what about the people in the global south who this entire system is built on brutalizing and exploiting and extracting from and murdering for 500 years you have to take that suffering into account as well it's not as simple as The average worker in America can have a 60-inch TV and afford a refrigerator.

How bad are things really? That's Fox News level of argumentation. Look at the system in its totality. And even those workers in the Imperial Corps that do have more access to resources and do have more things still live lives of extreme precarity and there's still a strata within the Imperial Corps that is utterly and completely emiserated to the point of homelessness to the point of death

even within the Imperial Corps now he's talking I believe in the early 90s and the good professional upper middle class liberal of the 1990s they're the ones that would buy into a Francis Fukuyama's end of history notion right? Things are pretty good

for us right now yeah Marx was talking about the industrial working class in England and the 1800s yeah that was brutal but not anymore but hold on didn't we talk about Marx talking about how relatively privileged and comfortable people within a dominant order will regurgitate the ideology of that dominant order? Isn't it at time as a university professor at Princeton? I'm not calling him out personally. I'm just giving a specific

example to look in the mirror and think through that lens. What interest do you have, professional, middle, upper class person in the 1990s in maintaining a status quo and explaining away the Marxist critique of capitalism because from your point of view, things are pretty decent. You have a nice new car. You have a good ass house. The internet's being created. That seems hopeful. I live in a leafy suburb. No crime. Okay, I'm not stuffed into tenements in the fucking cramped, you know, apartment buildings of 1860s Manchester. So actually capitalism is progressing. Capitalism, yeah, it was pretty brutal at the beginning. Now it's kind of

easing out and creating a high quality of life for everybody. A rising tide lifts all boats, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It can easily lead to things like Stalinist abuses. Oh, God. As a matter of fact, it did. So the danger here is that we don't sufficiently... What about capitalist

imperialist excesses and tyrannies and brutalities? What about what's going on in the Congo to extract minerals for green technology? What about what's going on in in Palestine to make sure that Western imperialism has a colonial outpost in West Asia. What about all of it? Right? Appreciate what economists call the time discount, that we don't appreciate whatever wisdom Burke has to offer us.

Instead of hoping that there'll be some pie in the sky improvement, that'll be permanent and wonderful and fundamentally alter human life, maybe the gradual approach to the alteration of human society is, in fact, the wise one, because the potential. for abuse in a revolutionary situation, has many of the qualities that Berk talked about. Okay, okay, that's liberal incrementalism. Let's hold on. Let's not do revolutionary rupture because it's incredibly violent. It'll cause a lot of suffering. Let's gradually and incrementally work our way up towards the abolition of this system, because I mean he's taking on board the Marxist critique of capitalism, saying that it is at its roots fundamentally exploitative

and unjust. But then the idea that you could work within the mechanisms that capital, capitalism has provided to overcome capitalism speaks right to my point that eventually you will hit the core interests of the ruling class and that is when they will put up the stop sign and say no more and we'll go full fascism if this movement for equality and justice gets too out of control right you'll see the hitlers emerge you'll see the mussolini's emerge right fascism is capitalism under threat from mass movements from below it turns to fascism it becomes fascist to reassert itself. And then what? Do you keep gradually, incrementally trying to reform fascism? Now you're a Nazi Germany. You're going to keep voting? You're going to keep

incrementally and gradually moving towards a better world? No. You can gradually and incrementally only go so far. And the moment you bump up against their power and profit, you will be met with the barrel of a motherfucking gun. And then violence from that point is inevitable or completely surrender and subordination is inevitable. Those are your two paths. That's what the Palestinians are given. That's their option. Complete and total balls to the wall resistance

or complete and total whimpering subordination. Those are the only two options in the final instance that power will give you. And I think utter and complete subordination is immoral. So there is a certain wisdom to that. Marx can be thought of, and I know this is kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it can be thought of in some respect as the last great Christian heresy in the sense that it internalizes the value judgments of Christianity, equality, kindness to one's neighbor, concern about the feelings of other people and about the livelihoods of other people, with the scientific elements of the 19th century, particularly with English political economy and with the tradition of German.

idealism. So although it's kind of facetious because Marx is such a rigorously atheistic thinker, Marx, of course, thinks that ideas like God are alienation, our ideology, are the product of a group of people that are trying to legitimize unjust social relations. When we get to the global proletarian revolution, to the secular apocalypse, we will be able to dispense with religious formulations of our conception of the world. But Marx understands himself as a the harbinger as the sort of messenger of a new change in the world, which will allow us to reconcile not man and God, but man and man. Not only will it do that, but in the process of eliminating exploitive social relations, connecting all of human society to one common endeavor, in addition

to that, it will, for the first time, free us from our heteronymous conceptions of society, Free us from the illusions created by our own self-interest. Free us from making exceptions to our general moral understanding of society that apply only to us and to the class we represent. Marx thinks, in other words, that his philosophy is the system by which we can discern the truly liberating human self-understanding. This is a borrowing from Hegel. Marx is essentially talking about the gradual development of human self-understanding, of human self-consciousness. But the key group, the key sociological stratum in comprehending the process of human development is not the thinkers, but the doers. And the reason why, again, this is a contribution or a borrowing or an outright theft from the English philosophical tradition.

It's pragmatic, it's practical. Does it work in everyday human practice? Mark says that practice is the ultimate standard by which we judge any theory and that's clearly not the kind of thing that he borrowed from the German intellectual tradition that's very much in English borrowing. Now what are the problems with this? There are lots of them.

Here we go. In the first case, it's not entirely true that ending capitalist social relations creates a unified classless society. In practice, as a consequence of most of the Marxist revolutions of the 20th century, we've changed the domination of one class for another.

Instead of having the capitalists run things, generally speaking, intellectuals do. Very few members of Marxist ruling elites lack college degrees. Very few of them are, in fact, common average, everyday manual laborers. They're almost exclusively not proletarians. Now we have to understand that as a process of socialism. socialism is the transition out of capitalism using the everything that capitalism creates as the starting point and then moving out of capitalism which is inherently a class society still which inherently will be riddled with contradictions and problems there have been multiple

experiments like the Soviets wherein the intellectual vanguard class and the toiling working class tried to create institutions where working class power could be expressed. Those were also externally faced with an immediate onslaught, which created a sort of inability to experiment freely and widely and had to require hypercentralization and a defensive posture internally and externally for all the ways in which capitalism, imperialism will try to dismantle you. But socialism, again, is an imperfect transitionary process, and these experiments are just that. humans have never accomplished this. So the idea that right out of the gate, socialism would immediately result in a classless society or that it would be free from contradictions. I mean,

Mao himself said that contradictions increase during socialism, not decrease. So we have no problem accepting the messy contradictory affair that is called socialism. And anybody that says this represents a failure of communism doesn't understand either socialism or communism. We haven't had communism. Communism is a global end state by which humans outgrow the rotted cage of class society. Socialism is the fucking all-out struggle to move in that direction and to rip capitalist exploitative structures apart. And that comes with a whole bunch of issues and contradictions and problems. And this society advances the ball a little bit, shows us some things that work, tries and shows us some things that don't work, excesses happen, the weight of the past weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.

So you're coming out of, let's say, a czarish regime in Russia that for millennia has only known extreme authoritarian, hierarchical, anti-democratic political processes. and trying to jump into socialism, that's going to, you know, be rife with its own contradictions. There's a historical and cultural legacy that every society has that they have to fill out and work with as they continue to try to develop their societies, right? It would be a miracle, unprecedented in human history. If out of Tsarist Russia,

a beautifully democratic bottom-up society, was created in a hundred years. That would be an unprecedented miracle of history. Should not be expected, much less use as a whip against the socialist and communist movement more broadly because it happened that way. Again, amazing leaps forward, tragic failures, unacceptable excesses, and everything in between. What else would we expect?

The transition out of ancient slave societies to monoccal feudal societies, what was that period like how long did that take how seamless was the transition from feudal monarchies to liberal capitalist democracies countless wars countless revolutions civil wars uprisings counter revolutions of monarchs after fiddling with a democratic or republican experiments right and so you can't sit in the 1990s and say hey we've seen all we need to see out of this but thinkers. In addition to that, the idea of a time discount, the apocalyptic millennial element in Marx, is extremely dangerous because it gives us license to devalue the here and now because we are playing for ultimately important stakes. The entire future of humanity rests upon the appropriately ruthless prosecution of our political platform right here and now. It is very easy to see how this can slide over into the legitimation of totalitarian political practice. In fact, that is what it has done in many cases.

Think of Tiananmen Square. In addition to that, this is implicitly teleological. For all of Marx's naturalism, for all his disdain of metaphysical formulations, he... It's amazing how Tiananmen Square has held up as this uniquely evil. act, as if every single Western capitalist liberal democracy don't have incident after incident after incident where that exact thing has happened. I mean, it's just, it's incredible that, I mean, it comes with Orientalism and xenophobia and this sort of Western patronizing of non-Western societies. But the fact that Tiananmen Square has held up is this great tragedy

in human history, while the real tragedies of Western imperialism and colonial, and capitalism are brushed over if addressed at all is just another product of ideology and racism and a colonialist patronizing attitude toward the global South more broadly. Am I saying that I love Tiananmen Square? A whole episode could be done on it, right? It's a historical event. Things fucking happen. But to hold that up as a unique example of a terrible historical tragedy coming out of the

blood-drenched halls of the West. I find it ironic, at least. It really does think that history has a telos. It has a purpose. It has an end. And he has discerned that. In my estimation, this is a mythology. It is a moving mythology. It is a very intriguing mythology.

But what it is is a holdover from the Christian intellectual tradition from the idea that God has a providence. But it's given a physicalistic twist, which makes it more or less consistent with the tradition of modern natural science. Marx, in other words, is attempting to square the circle. He is attempting to unify a metaphysical intellectual tradition with an essentially physical intellectual tradition, with a transcendental and a mundane intellectual tradition. And the problem is, I think, ultimately, that the tensions pull the system apart. It helps explain why there are so many

diverse interpretations of Marxism. One of the reasons is, is that the ambiguity of Marxist thought allows both people whose basic orientation is naturalistic and people whose basic orientation is transcendental or metaphysical to both read Marx and think that they're understanding it as Marx really meant it. And that's a problem with any individual human mind, right? The interpretation based on your own limited worldview and knowledge base of any given set of arguments, of any given philosophical doctrine,

of any political movement. That is why knowledge is constructed communally, and that is why practice and bottom-up movements and organization of the masses is required in these things. We're not depending on the minds of a couple people here. We're not turning this all on the interpretation of Marx's words by this or that leader or thinker. We are building mass movements, and in the process of communal practice, we generate knowledge. and so your specific interpretation doesn't matter as much as the actual practical work of mass movement building and class struggle through which we actually are able to build

collective knowledge that can be used so yeah this guy reads marks and thinks that trotsky was right that girl reads marks and thinks that lenin was right that person reads marks and thinks that marks was wrong and becunin was right i mean that's fine it's through the process of collective communal practice and struggle that actual knowledge that can be used universally is developed, not by the interpretations of any one person, anyone party, any one group of people. And given the starting point of every society being different historically, culturally, economically, the way that Marxism, communism, socialism manifests in a given society is also going to be different based on those pre-existing conditions,

of which the socialist struggle is born. That's not a refutation of socialism. That is completely in line with what we would expect out of these nationalistic struggles in a given place in time with a given culture and history. The real reason is because there are tensions, simple contradictions in Marx's thought, which never get resolved.

And the reason is that I think ultimately they can't be resolved. Ultimately, you're going to have to choose either or. You're going to be a naturalist or you're going to be a metaphysician, it is very hard to be both. When it comes to class struggle and revolution, it doesn't matter, ultimately, whether you're a naturalist or a metaphysician. What is happening here and now? Our project is a political one rooted in social, political, and economic realities, concrete, material reality here and now. There could be a god. There could be several gods. Reincarnation could be true. You tell me

your metaphysical belief about the structure of the cosmos, and we can argue about that. A Christian and a Buddhist and an atheist can struggle side by side for their shared material, political, social, and economic interest, despite having those metaphysical differences in how they interpret the cosmos. So I don't think that that contradiction is really as core or as fundamental or as rupturous as it's made out to seem sort of flippantly and briefly in this, in this, in this criticism. I don't think, I mean, if Marx was atheistic, which of course he was, that was the tone of intellectualism at the time turning away from Christianity and toward new things like

the development of science. Scientism and the scientific way of seeing things was of course picked up by the radical thinkers of the time from Nietzsche to Freud to Marx to all the scientists that were operating at the time. And with the development of science also came this real excitement by thinkers in various domains of knowledge of adopting the scientific method. So there's a sort of over-enthusiasm for science as it's emerging with all the hopes that it makes possible. And then given 200, 300 years of hindsight, we can see that, yes, science is amazing in so many ways. It also has severe limitations. And scientism is a thing, by which I mean the belief in science as the ultimate arbiter of truth when science is a really wonderful

arbiter of truth in a specific third person objective strip of human knowledge right um and certainly science is an ally to building a society a post scarcity society we're going to need technology and science right absolutely i mean just the idea of a planning an economy um Back in the day in the Soviet Union before the Internet, how do they even think about doing it? Now imagine trying to plan an economy with quantum computers. Changes the game a little bit. Make something that was once possible but difficult,

exceedingly more possible and exceedingly less difficult. So that's another thing why I downplay atheism and shit. It played a historical role in the modern world, given where we are, I don't think emphasizing atheism is a core part of the Marxist. struggle. I don't care what you believe about what happens after you die. I don't care what you believe about God or not. What do you believe about society, economics, justice here and now on this earth? We can sit back once communism is achieved and have all of our discussions about religion

and metaphysics. It doesn't actually dictate or change the struggle here and now. And religion itself, I think far from completely disappearing under communism hypothetically, it would just continue to change and evolve. Because even in a communist state, and even given Marx's point, that religion and the ideas around religion are often super structural products of the mode of production, that human beings fundamentally will still have a psychological, emotional, and existential question mark when it comes to life and death in the cosmos and eternity, And all of those questions, no material process here on earth, including science, is ever going to answer those fundamental human questions that any self-aware thinking species that must die

is going to inevitably struggle with. Communism doesn't solve the problem of death. Communism doesn't solve the issues of mortality and the infinite and what to do with the life in the limited time we have and what comes after. No human system could know those answers. Those answers, I think, are fundamentally cut off from us. They'll forever be philosophical questions of interest and inquiry. And religion is just a language we use to try to wrestle with the questions

that philosophy proper and science proper and art proper don't address head on. And so there will be a place for religion writ large, broadly conceived, but it would certainly look very different from the religions of ancient slave societies, the religions of medieval feudal monarchy societies, or the religions of liberal democratic capitalist societies. Naturalism, you can keep the laws of history, the Marxian iron laws of progress,

that Professor Staloff talked about in the last lecture. That's the naturalistic element in Marx. If you want to believe that history has a progressive tendency, If you want to believe that history is the gradual realization of human liberation, if you want to believe that there is an end point to the process of human development, you can't do that without metaphysics. It's implicitly Hegelian. And you can't jive that idea unless you essentially believe that there is a plan either intrinsic to nature or in the mind of God or intrinsic to human nature or intrinsic somewhere that can be discerned that has some very queer ontological. differences from a natural entity so he's saying to have a teleological endpoint is inherently metaphysical that some brain some mind some process somewhere that has to be active if it's going to lead to something he talks about the end of history um you know this end point that all of history is geared towards communism and once communism's achieved there's no more machination

or movement and i don't think that's the communist ideal right i don't know know what comes after communism. What problems will we face? Right? What technological developments are on offer? Do we make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence? Right? What does that do to human civilization?

There are a million and one questions that will continue to exist after communism if it were to be achieved. It is not a teleological endpoint. It's not like humans struggle for millennia. finally they achieve global communism and everybody is happily ever after heaven on earth has been accomplished no human life is not so neat problems still exist issues still need to be resolved new problems we can't even fucking fathom right now will emerge it is simply that the economic structure of society is no longer separated into an elite few who have access to everything

and the broad toiling masses who have nothing but their labor to give over so that other people can live lives of comfort and luxury on their back. It's just the end of class society. Did primitive communist societies face problems? Did they face issues in their natural environment? Of course they did. They just didn't have exploitative social hierarchies. So this idea that Marxism is a religion, it's teleologically aimed at this end point called communism, that history will finally end when we get to communism, that no more problems will occur, no more contradictions will exist, no more jostling between various interest groups will ever occur, I just don't see that in the Marxist tradition, and I don't hear Marxists arguing in that way.

if we did then maybe this criticism would have a little bit more bite but in the same way that evolution has led to humans but humans aren't the end point we could say that that social evolution is aimed toward this or destruction it could go either way the common ruin of all classes right we could enter a dark ages period where capitalism tries to be shoved down our throat the communist fail we're brought into an eco-dist fucking fascist regime for a hundred years. Who knows? Right? We could go extinct. We could have nuclear war. And then humanity is just done. And then this idea that we were all going towards communism the whole time. No, we just, we died. Right? But given that we survive, given enough time, it seems reasonable to think that we will move in that direction or that we, that's at least a real possibility. Just like evolutionarily, we can look back. and look at all the processes that led us to this point. And we can imagine a whole bunch of processes in the future that the human evolutionary tree could take many different ways. We could do

this integration with technology that people talk about. We could begin to separate and colonize the various planets in the solar system, such that given the natural environment of different planets over many, many, many generations, human evolution takes on different trajectories where we're all descendants from humans but those living on Titan have whatever developed longer bones or you know look at the expanse the series of the expanse

and you can see the workers on the on the Kuiper belt or whatever they develop these interesting physiological cultural traits right we could think of a million trajectories that human evolution could take and similarly we could think of a couple trajectories that human societies

could take and one of those has to be the outgrowing of class societies. But that doesn't mean it's the end of history or that's some heaven on earth. Problems will still exist. You know, interests will still diverge, et cetera. It just won't cash out in the form of economic classes in a brutal, exploitative social hierarchy. I think, in other words, we have the ghost of metaphysics rattling its chains back there somewhere. That's why, for example, it's possible to create in this century things like liberation theology, a combination of Christianity and Marxism. If you adopt the naturalistic reading of Marx,

nothing could be more implausible in liberation theology. It's totally incoherent. On the other hand, if you adopt the quasi-Higalian, idealist, metaphysical reading of Marx, what could make more sense? We're really getting in touch with the geist. We're really moving on to the point where everyone will be nice to each other. We're going back to the Garden of Eden.

We are redeeming ourselves. History becomes the story of salvation. And I've heard this before. It's in the Bible. All right, so liberation theology, as well as alternatives to that sort of formulation of Marxism, the positivistic formulation of Marxism, characteristic of some Marxist interpreters like Placanov or recently G.A. Cohen wrote a book, which has a very positivistic slant on Marxism. All of these takes on Marxism managed to do what they do by doing their best to shelve

or to send away the metaphysical stuff, by reducing the talk about freedom and alienation to the early Marx. The really interesting marks for these guys is the Marx that wrote capital in the Grundriksa. Okay, they're still interpreting the world. The point is to change it. Yes, we haven't changed the world. So intellectuals that engage with the Marxist tradition will have different interpretations, they'll have different ideas, they'll emphasize certain things and deemphasize others. That's all fine, but the point is to change it. And that only comes about through mass struggle, through class struggle, through proletarian struggle. And so, yeah, in the the meantime, you hand the philosophy of Marxism to 10 different people, and you'll have 10

different interpretations. That's not a disqualification of Marxism or a dilution of it. That's just a product of it not having been put into practice yet. Once it's getting into practice, that's what we really pay attention to. What G.A. Cohen thinks about Marxism is interesting. What Al Thuzeir thinks about Marxism is interesting. Let's read it. Let's think about it. theory informs practice for sure but ultimately it's going to be cashed out in the struggle in the mass movement for socialism and toward communism and these interpretations will rise or fall away depending on their utility to those actual material mass movements that's when this shit gets cashed out under capitalism sitting here as intellectuals reading marks we can have a million

different interpretations how does it cash out in struggle in practice stop interpreting start changing. Hard, linear, deterministic marks. The tensions between freedom and necessity, between determination and autonomy never really get resolved in Marx. And the reason is, is that he touches upon the Kantian antimonys of pure reason, and he wants to have it both ways. That's what makes it moving, that's what makes it possible, that's what makes it popular, and that's also what makes it incoherent. When you get down to bedrock, he wants to do contradictory things. That's both the strong and the weak point. It appeals to a lot of people, makes it accessible and practical as a revolutionary theory. The difficulty with it is that when you work out the

implications of it, you can't make it all jive. You can have this part, you can have that part, but you can't make both parts work. You can think of the metaphysical and the naturalistic elements in Marx as being essentially something analogous to an algebraic simultaneous equation, I can solve for one of these variables, I can solve for the other variable, but you can't solve for both variables at the same time. And Marx kind of papered over these problems, made gestures at saying that someday we'll solve these problems, or I kind of have solved these two variables, and here's where it comes in, but he never completely satisfactorily does. Again, we can solve it through practice, but fundamentally I just don't see.

this contradiction between metaphysics and a naturalistic approach or these various interpretations being as fundamental of a contradiction as he is implying it is. I was hoping he's going to give, and maybe he will, more examples of what exactly he means that. There are fundamentally contradictory ideas that prevent the actual expression of socialism and communism, right? Like what exactly are those? Oh, there's this naturalistic and metaphysical contradiction. Okay, we can work through that. That is not insurmountable by any means. And again, in practice, we work through those problems. We see if they're even as relevant as you think they are. What else? What other core fundamental contradictions prevent Marxism from getting up off the ground? What other contradiction?

Give me a couple more examples that you think are terminal. And I'm just not hearing it. The reason why is I think it's impossible. Now, I think it would be a, not entirely fair to to finish with an elimination or a criticism of Marx and elimination of Marxian philosophy. Okay, he's going to be sympathetic at the end here, but again, what criticisms leveled there from an incredibly intelligent person

acting an incredibly good faith, for the most part, ideology accounted for? Right? You're not going to hear a lot of opponents of Marxism understand it at this level. and in order for those people to generate good criticisms you have to understand it at this level and after listening to this full lecture we can certainly say with charity in our hearts

that Michael understands Marxism pretty fucking damn well better than 99.9% of the people out there in the world that don't like Marx and communism and socialism understands it a million times better than somebody like Jordan Peterson who is like the conservative guru when it comes to anti-communism because he read the gulag archipelago by Solzsche Nietzsche once and thinks he understands communism

or he flitted through the pages of the communist manifesto and got sunned by Zhijek in that debate so certainly we can look at him and say okay this guy at least he understands what the fuck he's talking about and then we hear his criticisms and you listen to him too you don't have to agree with me what there was damning beyond

reconciliation? What criticism was devastating to the Marxist project? I see nothing there that is insurmountable or a fatal flaw within Marxism. And this is somebody who understands it and wants to criticize it. In practice, Marx has taken a thorough enough beating in the last 10 or 12 years or so. So it's kind of superfluous. I would say that Marx is one of the great social theorists of the 19th century, first of all, and that's to be said in his favor because the 19th century was a great time for social theory. In addition to being one of the great social theorists of the 19th century, he is, almost by indirection, the source of many of the progressive and I think morally praiseworthy changes in contemporary advanced capitalist society. Unless there existed critics on the left who saw

and who were morally sensitive to the problems generated by the division of labor, it seems to me that we would have had something like this strictly classical treatment of capitalism, and many people would have suffered needless and horrific hardships as a consequence. In other words, the development of the welfare state is homage to Marx. And I think that no sensible person wants to get rid of it. Certainly no presidential candidate wants to get rid of Social Security. And this is a way of saying that Marx was at least partially right. If he exceeded his evidence, if he is occasionally incoherent, take that with a grain of salt.

He has added to the vocabulary of our political discourse and the shape, the actual form in which we put together problems of public policy. And that's the kind of contribution that will not die with the particular totalitarian political systems that have been connected with it. And that's the advantage to knowing something about Marx. You get to understand the origins of contemporary public policy and discussions about public affairs. All right. So that's it. So, I don't know, I hope that's useful. What I like about this is instead of me coming on here and just, you know, by myself off the top of my head, doing an episode on Marks,

it's good to be in dialogue with somebody as clearly informed and knowledgeable as Professor Asugrew, who again has passed away, rest in peace, my friend. He put out all of his lectures again for free on YouTube. I'm putting this episode out publicly for free for people to take advantage of and to learn all in the interest of education and learning about this stuff at a deeper and deeper level. And I hope my commentary alongside the lecture

deepened the lecture itself and added substantially and meaningfully to this discourse and to this conversation. And I hope it was educational. I hope people walk away from an episode like this thinking deeply about issues and coming to their own conclusions, and you can disagree with me, you can disagree with Professor Sugru, or you can disagree with both of us, but I still hope it's generative, I hope it's worthwhile. I hope people on the socialist left find stuff like

this worth it, you know, generative in the appropriate ways. And again, I like this stuff. So, you know, kind of as an homage to Professor Sugeru to continue to do these lectures on different figures, as I said, Kierkegaard Nietzsche, you know, Schopenhauer, he does many, many different people, Marcus Aurelius, et cetera. I could keep this as a sort of sub-series on Rev Left where I'll go through and, you know, engage with and respond to and drawl out ideas and synthesis and points particularly relevant to the Socialist Left from these various different types of thinkers and his lectures on them. So if you like that, please find a way to let me know. And if you really want to contact me and to be in continual engagement with me,

the one place I set aside that I always check the comments and I respond is the comment sections of our Patreon. So you can go to patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio for $5 a month. The cost of a cup of coffee a month. You can support me, my family, work like this, and you can get all the bonus content that we put out, over 300 bonus episodes on our back catalog, episodes like this and many more types of episodes every single month only for patrons and in the comment sections where I post the public episodes as well as the Patreon exclusives, I try my absolute best to engage with every comment, reply to people asking me questions, et cetera. So if you are so inclined to support the show and you find those benefits interesting and worthwhile, it's $5 a month.

And it means the world to me and my family. I have three children. I have tens of thousands of in student loan debt. I don't have a savings account. I don't have health care. But I pay my bills and I take care of my family and the supporters of this show make that possible. And for that, I will eternally be grateful and appreciative of all of you. So check that out if you're so inclined and to everybody that already supports the show. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. It means the world to me. All right. Talk to you next time. Gotta eat And when they get hungry

It ain't shit funny My friend Gotta eat Who's the real thugs, Killers and gangsters Set the revolution Let the things bus and think Oh

Hey yo sorry I'm bad with faces My bad I'm bad with names If I mistake you for someone you ain't We gonna have to blame my old dad brain Plus I smoke a lot of bud So if I fail to say what's up Why you give a fuck I'm too busy trying to navigate

the genocide the trip. I'm busy trying to make sure I can make the monthly rent without having to be one of them Philham celebrities, especially the kind of just take pictures like Tee-he-he-he. Philippines to Philistine, they quiet as fuck. Philippine press, he was killing people for drugs.

Now the current one is burning on historical docks. He don't want us to remember about his murderous pops. They like to use the ethnic car to schmooze with elites, but ethnic cleansing get to happen and they don't make a peep. Me? I'd rather spend the time in public eyes. You putting them all on notice.

That's typical bamboo, baby. Steel for a meal, they've been stealing from yaw. Homie, for real. They've been ill. They've been gigging off y'all. The inevitable toppling are all of these laws to put the power in the worker, let the greedy ones fall. Steal for a meal, they've been stealing from your,

homie for real, they've been ill, they've been gigging off y'all. The inevitable toppling are all of these laws to put the power in the worker, let the greedy ones fall. Progressive politics within the capitalist frame, Move needles just a little, but keep business the same. The point is, a cup of groceries that get took. Don't compare to all the people they exploit off the books. We can draw you up a diagram to help be illustrated.

Migrants seeking refuge from the damage you're created. Ain't no wondering why, no surprise, surprise. Got families risking lives to hit the American side. I tell them steal for a meal if that check ain't enough because they've been stealing for forever and it's never enough. They want you to enjoy being exploited, stabbing your own. Come back like your arm double join it while the profits possibly go to a missile over rifle. Yes.

Boycott also burn that motherfucker. I curse every dollar that's a rubble out of Gaza. Yes. Boycott also burn that motherfucker. Steal for a meal. They've been stealing from yaw. Homie for real. They've been ill.

They've been giging off yaw. The inevitable toppling on all of these laws to put the power in the worker let the greedy ones fall. Steal for a meal they've been stealing from yaw. Homie for real. They've been gigging off y'all The inevitable toppling all of these laws To put the power in the worker Let the greedy ones fall

The basic needs should be free I've been saying that shit Sounds to me I've been saying that shit The basic needs should be free I've been saying that shit Yeah I've been saying that shit The basic needs should be free

I've been saying that shit Sounds to me I've been repeating that shit The basic needs should be free I've been saying that shit Sounds to me Like that old robber Yeah, stand still, don't blink, don't fold, don't run.

Bunk them in their shit with an empty water drum. Homie, stand still, don't blink, don't fold, don't run. Bunk them in their shit with an empty water drum. Stand still, don't blink, don't fold, don't run. Bunk them in their shit with an empty water drum. I used to real thugs, killers and gangsters. Set the revolution, let them things bust and think. Hey, yo, steal for a meal if you're low on a dough, but please steal from a business with a CEO.

It's getting hella zero zero zero zero's on a check While the worker worker worker getting shitty benefits Baby steal for a meal if that money is thin But please steal from a business with executive men It's getting bonuses while workers work through holiday breaks Big bank take little, that's the American way