Marx on the Impersonal Domination of Capitalism | Red Plateaus
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- Опубліковано 24 вер 2024
- This is the third video in a series that talks about Marx's views on human development, freedom, alienation and socialism, and the connection between them.
In this episode we discuss the impersonal domination of capitalism, or alienation from product.
Full playlist: • Marx on Human Developm...
Series playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLfqdvDnX3lbCtADtZDCg0HQB3Nime4rVS.html
Thanks to everyone for watching!
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The use of "the invisible hand" as the invisible oppressor was really powerful.
You're doing LeftTube a great service here, Red Plateaus! Keep it up
Great work!!
Not only do we stay at work for harmful reasons because they have power over us. If we tried to unionize a corporate capitalist workplace it will simply close that location and open a new one
Or even have us shot.
Only channel I saw about real Quality content about marxism. Thank u. Can u pls put link to the books and would be glad if u can explain those marxs' phrases in more digestable language with easier examples. Love this channel.
Thanks for the kind words! We just made a patreon where we'll post transcripts and literature lists. patreon.com/redplateaus We'll try to keep that in mind :)
Damn I'm gonna share this with my unstudied marxist friends! Solidarity from America and keep up the good work comrade.
Wow I just discovered this channel and this is probably one of the most clearest cut on Marxism, backed up with quotes throughout of all of Marx's work. Very good job, subscribed!
Nice, your videos keep the quality, I like it^^
very good
brilliant, thanks!
Please do read Moishe Postone on 'impersonal domination' in capitalism. It is a brilliant rereading of Das Kapital.
thougth the same ! :D
@@NicNacHero One of us did that a couple of years back. Found it quite useful for emphasising this kind of stuff, but ends up (unlike Marx and most of the rest of Marxism) not having much place for the revolutionary agency of the working class.
It's out :)
Great vid 👍🏽
Very nice! What movie are the clips from 6:13 - 6:28?
Metropolis!
@@RedPlateaus Thank you. And keep it up, very nice and iformative video!
Bite the invisible hand that feeds you sh*t
That guy with sunglasses looking at advertisement from which movie is he
They live
What's stopping us from creating your own co-op ? No one is stopping any of us from joining or creating a co-operative community, organization, or workplace. So, maybe we should stop complaining about it and just join or create our own. It's not ethical to force all of society to live in the way we desire. But, anyone can voluntarily join our co-operative organizations.
Coops have their advantages over capitalist firms, but as the video explains, they don't seem able to overcome the impersonal domination and thus unfreedom of certain kinds of competitive markets. We don't pick the economy we're born into, whether it has capitalist type competitive markets, more limited markets, central planning, de-centralised democratic planning, or what have you.
@@RedPlateaus yeah you have no choice about the birth lottery. That's just a fact. But, you have a choice in how to play the hand you are dealt. So, why not today, start a co-op community with like-minded people? Whether it be a worker co-op, co-op housing with your apartment complex, co-op child care, co-op anything. If it's mutually voluntary participation, go for it! There is nothing stopping the organic creation of grass roots organizations based on mutually voluntary participation.
@@Strife40k There are often a lot of very real obstacles, like banks and other capitalist corporations being unwilling to offer good terms, legal hurdles, and so on. However, and relevant to the video, it's not clear that just replacing capitalist firms with cooperatives will be able to remove the impersonal domination of these kinds of competitive markets and the ecological devastation they cause. Cooperatives are subject to those just like capitalist firms are. But if all you're arguing is that coops are better places to work than capitalist firms, we'd very much agree.
@@RedPlateaus well of course there will be hurdles to negotiate while starting our own organizations. What else would anyone expect? There is no such thing as a free lunch.
But, if that's what we want, we need to stop complaining about the world being unfair and just get on it. We need to work our asses off and take the required financial risks for it to work. We need to prove it works empirically while taking the required risks ourselves, because we all know that the world has seen enough socialist disasters already. We need to prove it's possible in an organic,100% mutually voluntary basis. And yeah, of course the majority of organizations will fail at some point. Why would anyone expect a co-op to be any different than any other organization in that regard?
People have been in competition for status since before they were even humans and no socialist system will ever change that. There will always be some measure of status that humans will compete for. And there will always be a scarcity of highly desirable breeding partners which will select on a basis of some form of status. So there is no escaping that. Period.
But, at the very least, we can perhaps create voluntary modes of engagement with the world which are better than the systems we have today.
Coops are still capitalism though
You made a great engaging video on an important topic, yet you got a key concept quite wrong from your start.
Adam Smith introduced his metaphor of an invisible hand in his book ‘The Theory of _Moral_ Sentiments’, in reference to how individuals, following their own self-interest without any intervention, efficiently allocate resources across the whole society and toward an optimal equilibrium, thus bringing social benefits that no individual had planned.
Your characterisation of Smith’s metaphor as denoting a hand of coercive power -and pertaining to some individuals- that ‘brands us with an employee badge, and forces us to work for them; the hand that controls us every day’ (from 0:13) misses and misconstrues his point terribly.
…You seem like a very bright and motivated individual; so rather than focusing on where we see things differently, let’s pick something that we agree we should change, and work on improving it. I’d like to hear your suggestions as to where we ought to start -you (a Marxist, I take it), with a voluntarist anarcho-capitalist.
You're misunderstanding the point we're making here. We are not talking about specifically Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand here, because he uses that concept very sparingly, and in ways that don't quite fit how that concept is often used today. Because we're not talking about specifically Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand here, we're also not getting that concept wrong. What you call our characterisation is actually a clip from the TV show Mr Robot, where a fictional character uses the metaphor at one point in season 1, episode 1, and again it's not clear that that's a reference to Adam Smith's ideas either.
As an example of how Smith's use of the invisible hand metaphor differs from the one being used today, what her writes in TMS (where, as you rightly point out, he does use it - though it also appears in his History of Astronomy and Wealth of Nations) is as follows:
"It is to no purpose, that the proud and
unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought
for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the
whole harvest that grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb,
that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than
with regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion
to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that
of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among
those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself
makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is
to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the
different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the oeconomy
of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice,
that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have
expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil
maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is
capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is
most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor,
and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they
mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they
propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be
the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide
with the poor the produce of all their improvements.They are led by an
invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries
of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into
equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending
it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society..." (Smith, Adam. 2002. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 215)
Smith's reference to 'he proud and unfeeling landlord' here is to essentially aristocrats who live off the rent of land, not what we would call capitalists (what he calls 'merchants and manufacturers') or ordinary workers (on this, see the chapter by Sen and Rothschild in the Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith). It's actually not in reference to what individuals, in general, do, nor does it make reference per se to efficient allocation or optimal equilibrium, but rather to distributing the 'necessaries of life' as well 'had the earth been divided into 'equal portions among all its inhabitants'.
Where it makes the most sense to start working to make the world better depends on your situation or context, which we don't know. In general, we think the climate movement and other social movements taking direct action to make it so, such as unions, are very important, especially the more radical ones. We have a (very short and imperfect) video about strikes here: ua-cam.com/video/T5EReau1cjA/v-deo.html
@@RedPlateaus Great quote.
Surely you heard in it Smith's distain for those who seek 'gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires', as he observed that such selfish acts unwittingly bring about good consequences for others.
@@kourakis Very much so. I think Smith is perfectly consistent in his negative views of landlords' moral character (unlike his views on working class people, which are far more positive) while at the same thinking that they end up distributing 'the necessaries of life' very (though not entirely) equally. Of course that's one aspect of his thought which no longer seems plausible today. And note again that he's not referring to the effects of selfish acts in general, nor even to the acts of the vast majority of people under capitalism (who are, in his view, not landlords, but labourers and merchant and manufacturers) there.
@@RedPlateaus
For the sake of analysis, here I accept the premise that the necessaries of life will not be distributed very equally if people go about their lives solely in peaceful self-interest.
What alternative to people living in peaceful self-interest do you propose?
What will you do with a peaceable individual who, going about his life, fails to demonstrate sufficient and proper interests apart from his own?
@@kourakis I have no objection to people living in peace or being self- and other-interested, as they are in various ways. Of course, capitalism, as we know, is far from peaceful, with its history of policing the poor, violently enclosing the commons, imperialism, colonialism, and two world wars. What we object to is people not being free because they are subjected social powers - e.g. the power of other people and institutions - which they cannot control, like monarchs, slave owners, and CEOs. We have some specific ideas about what that might look like, in particular a model called Participatory Economics, but we're not going to get into that here, because this sort of comment section isn't really the place to explain that sort of thing, but google it if you're interested.
Since this is in the comments section to a video with an argument about how people are subjected to powers they can't control, making them unfree, if you want to continue this discussion why don't you focus on what we're talking about here?
P. S. Hope you're staying safe and healthy.
Its too bad Mr robot ended up being so disappointing.. Lowkey red scaring over China.. Then embracing the powerlessness of it all, and no talk of class struggle , occupations etc
Yeah, one of us still thinks it's good despite these flaws and has fairly high hopes for the ending, but then we all saw how Game of Thrones worked out...
🖤🖤🖤
where are the black & white factory clips from?
There are a couple different ones: some from an instructional welding video; the rest are from the old movie Metropolis
@@RedPlateaus Thanks, I'm pretty sure I was thinking of the Metropolis clips.
I'd imagine so. Happy to help!