Marx on Communism | Red Plateaus
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- Опубліковано 24 вер 2024
- This is the fifth 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 Marx's views on communism, or socialism.
Full playlist: • Marx on Human Developm...
Series playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLfqdvDnX3lbCtADtZDCg0HQB3Nime4rVS.html
Thanks to everyone for watching! We just made a Patreon, where we will post transcripts of our episodes, literature lists and so on: www.patreon.com/redplateaus/overview
If you're looking for another worthy cause please consider supporting Anarchopac. She is a disabled trans woman who has been making invaluable UA-cam content for years. Her PhD will advance our common understanding of the development of anarchist revolutionary strategy. Link: www.patreon.com/anarchopac/overview
We live in a society
We like to start out strong here on this channel
My mind just got blown. This is not at all what we've been engineered to believe. Wow.
Just found out the channel via anarchopac, gotta say im pretty excited to binge watch all of your videos
Nice, hope you like'em!
All the CNT propaganda footage in this is what i nut- I mean live for
Thank you so much for creating these videos! We are reading animal farm and as part of the research we had to get facts on Karl Marx’s ideals of Communism. This has helped a lot!
That is awesome to hear! Hope you do well and stick around for our future videos. Hope you did well!
Helped so much with my assignment THANK YOU!!!!
Good series! Looking forward to the final episode.
One thing I've noticed in your videos is they're a bit quiet. If I'm eating while watching, the sound of my chewing can be enough to drown out your voice. I'll admit my speakers kinda suck, but that's true for many people. You should be able to raise the audio level in your video editor.
Edit: Oh, and that Marx thinking emoji! LOL XD
Edit 2: I googled the Marx quote "communism will be free or it will be nothing" and couldn't find it. Maybe you used a different wording? If you know how to find the actual quote, let me know. It's a great one!
Thanks! We'll look into raising the audio level. Glad you liked the Marx emoji. Oh that isn’t a quote. When we give a quote we put a source by it, and we didn’t there because that’s not a quote. We put that bit of text there to highlight the point we were making. But we'll put quotation marks of something around quotes from now on, not just add the sources, to avoid it seeming like we’re quoting when we’re not doing that.
@@RedPlateaus Thanks for clarifying :)
Good shit, keep it up
I learn from & enjoy your playlist as you mix Marx's quotes with pop cultural & historical references.
Let me put forth two possibly intertwined questions:
You elaborate Marx's quote at 8:53 by commenting at 10:06: "[it means] that people can decide for themselves what they want to do & how they want to contribute to society, subject to what those around them need."
Can people truly decide for themselves if their decision is subject to each other's needs & not solely their own needs?
Aren't we already making decisions in this way? In this historical stage, I can decide for myself which careers, activities & codes of conduct I may adopt, but I cannot, by myself, change careers, activities & codes of conduct themselves, which are extensions primarily not of my own needs but the needs of others.
Glad to hear it! And thanks for the question, we'll get back to this :)
What we were trying to get at there is basically how production will be organised, i.e. according to the real needs of people. Today, production is not organised around satisfying real human needs, but around maximising profits. Maximing profits often requires satisfying the needs of some individuals and organisations, but some needs get ignored entirely by capitalism (e.g. for a livable planet), some needs simply aren't properly catered for (e.g. appliances that are built to last - on this see 'planned obsolescence'), and the needs that people cannot pay to have met are left out altogether. The last part we almost agree with, but the needs of others that are a condition for most jobs in the private sector existing are the needs of capital or the bureaucrats who run most corporations, not necessarily those of all or most people.
@@RedPlateaus Maybe the Soviets were right and Marx was wrong. A communist soceity must have the productive forces built to such an extent where human labour does not become a necessity, where what remains is our subjective human passions. Humans take part in passions they would like to further, education aiding in voluntary learning of such passions in all round scale. An individual is truly free and not alienated from his labour, it's byproducts(the fruits of the labour) and lead to full flourishment of artistic, scientific or philosophical needs of a person. The individual is nourished with culture and is totally free to experience it. Truly communism......truly freedom.
@@sanjaykrishnannair8153 Then I have two questions for you: (1) Can you find somewhere where they claim to be rejecting this view of Marx's; (2) what's your argument for this being true?
Thanks for putting these videos out there. I guess I would be your target audience ("wtf is marxism and why should we care?").
I think I am already onboard with Anarchism (through 'Game Theory'). Mainly I am just trying to understand Marxism in as simple way as possible. From what I understand: -
- Marx thought demand should preceed supply (in demand vs supply) - going against classical economics
- Marx's objection to capitalists owning 'the means of production' was like putting all your eggs in one basket. But also, it reversed the common sense design process - the common sense way of designing and making something is to understand either your own or your customer's 'Need', and then fulfill that Need with a 'Solution' (like a tailored suit I guess). Capitalism - through owning all the means of production - dictates all the 'solutions' though... leaving costomers having to 'choose' between a range of 'product solutions' to satisfy their needs. Which can at best lead to excessive material waste, and at worst the kind of 'backwards bullsh*t' processes that caused the Grenfell Tower Disaster in the UK in 2017.
- (edit) That capitlaism has a momentum to it all it's own, perhaps beyond the will of humanity to control it?
But I am still unsure of what 'Materialism' means as opposed to 'Idealism' - and how, if at all, this relates to Marx's approach to revolution and post-capitalism (other than my simple attempts above) other than that: -
- Idealism seems to be rooted in 'Rationalism' (i.e. Renee Descartes Rationalism)
- While Materialism seems to be rooted in a 'Spontaneity' that opposes the 'Rationalism' of 'Idealism'.
But I am not sure at all?
I am not coming into this video series with complete unknowns though. For a start, I studied engineering design at university - so I know the world, in essence, that Marx is describing and how much freedom it takes to innovate for example (I guess a cliche is the difference between China and 'The West' in terms of human freedoms and human rights and the apparent effect this has on people's ability to innovate and make human progress).
I have also this last year tried to look into philosophy (you can thank Philosophy Tube for this - yes, the first video of his I watched was in his series on Marx.... journey: Russell Brand/Artist Taxi driver onto Owen Jones onto Novara Media and then onto Philosophy Tube).
Marx was too heady for me to understand in any detail (and in anyway someone as cynical as Sargon of Akkad might be able to convince me was just an idealist fantasy - not that I watched any Sargon of Akkad... I have my own internal turgid voices voices). So I tried to understand Existentialist philosophy first.
My main aim for understand Existentialist philosophy was not to give me the philosophical tools to see where Marx was coming from (though it kind of did that) but because Existentialist philosophy was easy to understand in terms of it's context (opposed to fascism of world war 2) and not as abstract as PostModern philosophy (I wonder if PostModern is really just a feeling rather than anything more than that? - like realising that the 1990 film 'Ghost' starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore was a total satire from the director of 'Airplane' and the 'Naked Gun' series?).
My main aim was to understand prejudice against transgender people - and why there is such an academic opposition to the existence of transgender people. A clue seemed to be in Jean-Paul Sartre's treatment of homosexual people - that basically he didn't believe someone could be 'gay'. Homosexuality being an objective description and 'gay' being a more subjective description.
I got into Heidegger mainly. But on a basic level. It seemed to me that his concepts of 'ready to hand' and 'present at hand' fitted the model of the brain used in the Dorsal-Ventral Brain hypothesis (I had been looking into the 'neuroscience of transgender' for about 3 years already btw): -
'Ready to Hand' - Dorsal activity: working memory, movement and position perception, implicit awareness ('blind sight'), grey scale perception.
'Present at Hand' - Ventral activity: emotional memory, form and colour perception, conscious awareness, pain perception.
The above may not be accurate. But it's roughly correct. 'Ready to Hand' being the engagement with the 'Existential'. While 'Present at Hand' being more of an 'Essentialist' engagement. This also helped me see Renee Descartes 'mind-body dualism' in a different way than what I had been led to believe by many.
Something that stood out to me (though it is difficult to pin down the cause) is that too much ventral activity leads to greater depression. However, too much dorsal activity can render one in a trance like state and make them easily influenced (through hypnosis for example).
I saw pain of ventral activity in the brain as being like the meaning we all crave (like for example in Albert Camus' 'Myth of Sisyphus' as I understand it anyway - grinding away pushing a boulder up hill... while just watching the boulder role down hill would engage more dorsal activity).
As far as 'Time' goes. Heidegger's use of 'Anxiety' (or 'Care) was really helpful. 'Fear' is something 'objective' and past-orientated. Whereas anxiety is more of an empty room and regarding the future and the unknown... in this way I looked at sexuality and gender identity (aware of how 'fear' and 'anxiety' had been used - wrongly - as components in causing homosexuality and/or transgender in the approach of 'conversion therapy' but also it seems in the treatment of homosexuality in Jean-Paul Sartre's 'No Exit' for example).
My concern is that Materialism could have the same hurdles for a Transgender person as Existentialism does - in that it - Materialism as an approach - strips a person's essential nature from them. But of course Idealism - with it's Rationalism - cannot comprehend the irrational existence of Transgender people in the first place.
I think the importance of Transgender people, for example, is in that they confront us with the reality of our world. In a sense a transgender person's existence can only be told through narrative. And maybe narrative is really the only truest approximation we can have for anything?
Great video, but one thing. At 2:14 you say: "unifies them [workers] under common interests". I've heard this a lot from socialists, but I have a hard time getting my head around this concept. How are their interests unified? What exactly are their interests? What is meant with "interests" here? Could you elaborate on this idea?
Thank you! This is a very good question. We'll try to address at the very least it in the post-season Q&A, and I believe it may be reasonable to talk about it in the next season as well.
Class interests. They share the same material conditions (being poor/no capital, selling their labour, etc)
Your best vid yet! So good, thank you for this.
Thank you so much!
Thank you for your content.
Good video but I feel like you misunderstand us ML's, you speak of the Soviet Union like it was supposed to be a communist Society it was not it was a socialist society building communism it was the first stage in the transition to Communism. I do not understand this Viewpoint that communism can just be directly installed after revolution? how do you expect to combat external capitalism/imperialism? how do you expect to combat reactionaries? how do you expect to combat the power that existing capitalist would still have in a post-revolutionary country or area? And most importantly how do you plan on transitioning Society without a state? This is not me being rude I believe this is a good Channel and pretty good videos but I do have this disagreement.
Long story short, we agree with you that they weren't trying to directly or immediately install a communist society. One of the things we were referring to there, but didn't make explicit (since we thought it would be a bit of a detour to explain it for the uninitiated), was the idea that even by all the standard ML theory the USSR was never communist in their and/or Marx's sense. We plan to say something about this in the Q and A, since oddly some MLs have seemed to misunderstand it the other way (i.e. think that saying that the USSR wasn't communist is somehow anti-ML) too.
As for the transitioning directly to communism without any intermediate step and/or state, that's not something we argue for in the video.
@@RedPlateaus
I would like to clarify, you do disown the reperession of the USSR and PRC right?
I enjoy your explanations but would like to clarify thia point.
@@napoleonbonaparteempereurd4676
Hi, I know a video where chunk talk about the later view of Marx about socialism and communism, a think is a good video ua-cam.com/video/rRXvQuE9xO4/v-deo.html
Great vid 👍🏽
I have reservations about communism only from below. It seems to me that this would require constant political engagement. This is not an original or new concern, but it is one that troubles me.
To some extent we think that this is true, just because any truly democratic system requires people to actually rule themselves. We're not sure this is really a problem though.
I suppose one argument could be that if people don't want to bother with being engaged in constant political decisions, they are welcome to go off and do whatever they want. But if they do want to engage in political decisions, then they should always have the ability to do so.
2:55 Can't decide if this is a dig at leftcoms or a dig at people, who straw man leftcoms.
11:25 Phew, saved yourself from scaring away a significant part of your potential audience.
Fantastic video, keep it up :)
Let's go with both, hehe.
It's a tricky landscape to navigate and we're not going to please everybody, but of course according to Marxist-Leninist theory these weren't and aren't communist societies but its own notion of socialist. Hopefully even people who disagree or have objections with our take can forgive our momentary bombast.
Thank you!
Red Plateaus
Didn't Marx come up with the dictatorship of the proletariat that Lenin later called the socialist phase (Ik it's supposed to be democratic) as I understand it Marx believes the state only withers away when class antagonisms are gone even if the USSR wasn't democratic it still had a planned economy that didn't bend to market forces so calling it 'state capitalist' like many anarchists do is untrue
And I am really curious on your stance do you guys consider yourself orthodox Marxists
@@RR-nf3qh As we understand it, Lenin’s distinction between a first phase of socialism and a second stage of communism comes from Marx’s distinction between a higher and lower phase of communism mainly in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat Is not quite the same thing as the different phases of communism, but it is also something that Lenin picks up on. The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is fraught with misunderstandings. For one, Marx’s Dict Prol is very clearly a bottom-up democratic one, which is reflected we think in Lenin’s State and Revolution but less so in the structure of the USSR (Hal Draper has a whole volume on this and Hunt’s book on the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels has a really good discussion of it if you’re interested). It’s also worth noting that post-1871 Marx’s model for what the transitional state would look like is the type of bottom-up democratic structure developed by the Paris Commune, outside of the capitalist state apparatus, and that it’s this kind of distinct political apparatus that he thinks will wither away. (Pre-1871, e.g. in the Communist Manifesto, his views are a bit different, which he himself points out in the 1872 Preface to the latter.) We’re planning to talk about this in a later video talking about Marx’s theory of transition, probably in the next series we do after this one.
When it comes to labelling the USSR that’s also tricky of course, but we think we agree. We don’t call it state capitalist, mainly because there’s lots of disagreements about what that means and about how accurate a label it is. We find it fairly inaccurate because it makes it sound like the USSR’s system was a kind of capitalism, which we don’t think that it was. Fun fact, calling the USSR state capitalist is also common among Trotskyists, who have developed a number of different theories to analyse it with. Some anarchists call it state capitalist, but our impression is that most don’t - but we don’t have a good survey here so maybe we’re wrong.
There are numerous kinds of orthodox Marxism, or at least things that get called orthodox Marxism (2nd international Marxism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism), which are all rather different from each other (weirdly, not everyone on the internet seems to realise this), so you’d have to be more specific about which one you’re referring to and what you take it to consist in for us to be able to say whether we fall in that box or not. We tend not to insist that we’re orthodox Marxists, though we agree with Marx a whole lot, because it’s unclear what ‘orthodox Marxism’ is supposed to be and we prefer to argue about what Marx thought than about which box we and others deserve to go in. Right now, we’re focusing on laying out what Marx thought, which we think pretty much anyone should be interested in, regardless of how they choose to categorise themselves.
Red Plateaus
Thx for your response
you are right what Lenin wrought in State and Revolution mostly wasn't applied in the USSR like how he thought the police would function but I think that was due to the conditions of Russia in that time
And Ik that a lot of trots refer to the USSR as state capitalism and Ik that not all anarchists call the USSR state capitalism I probably should have been more specific
You are right putting yourself in a box can be limiting (I am not a centrist) and I appreciate what you are doing it's quite interesting
and I assume you don't mean the 2nd international
When you said '2 international Marxism' because Ik trots are in the 4th and Stalinists and Maoist are in the 3rd
Anyways I am looking forward to your future videos : )
No we mean the 2nd international there. As in, 2nd international Marxism was one thing that's been labelled orthodox Marxism, Stalinism is another, and so on. It considered itself Marxist and many people in it for a long time did as well. This of course includes people like Kautsky, Lenin, etc. before the split that led to the creation of the 3rd international. The 3rd international early on actually included a bunch of non- and anti-Stalinists too, like Trotsky, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, and so on. Trotskyists later set up a rather large number of different 4th internationals. There's actually a whole strand of early council communism (especially people like Pannekoek and Gorter) who diagnose Leninism essentially as a feudal deviation from proper Marxism and argue that the revolution was doomed both because Russia wasn't sufficiently developed at the time and because the resulting socialist movement remained too feudal and authoritarian (to be clear, we're not saying we agree with this).
The argument that the reason State and Revolution wasn't applied in Russia at the time being due to the conditions in Russia at the time is common, and often what people have in mind is things like the civil war (including foreign invasion by capitalist powers). It's perhaps worth pointing out that neither Lenin nor Trotsky ever said this. Lenin in the relevant volumes of his collected works writes that there is ‘absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals’ and insists on ‘iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work’. This in 1918. Later on, in 1920, Lenin describes this period as ‘seemed as if we could proceed to the work of peaceful construction’ and the ‘[c]ivil war had not yet begun’. Trotsky for his part said that they would have achieved one-man management in production sooner if it hadn't been for the civil war getting in the way. Trotsky in Terrorism and Communism: 'if the civil war had not plundered our economic organs (…) we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner, much less painfully’.
THANK YOU
Thanks for your effort. I share with you the idea that what happened in Russia, China etc. Was not real communism. Although they have achieved a lot when you think how they progressed from a feudal economy and society to become advanced industrial societies. What got closer to the idea of communism Marx had is still Catalonia in the years 1936 to 1939 in my opinion. Before it was destroyed by the fascists. Anyway, if something didn't happen in the past doesn't mean it won't happen in the future. Take care and keep up the good work ✊🏾🌈
nice!
Thanks!
Which commune do you live in?
Which commune don't we live in?
Marx it's very Anarchist 😮❤️
3:12 is that rojava?
Yes.
so, i guess you will be, contra althusser, stressing the continuity in marx's thought?
Right, we'll be critically examining various theories of epistemological breaks in Marx. Implicitly we've done some of the groundwork in the series by demonstrating how the various notions we've discussed over the episodes show up over the whole span of Marx's works. There are definitely changes and developments as well which we'll also try to talk about.
@@RedPlateaus yeah, great. i'm really interested in althusserian notion of epistemological break, the ways that it is influenced by earlier french philosophy of science (bachelard, canguilhem, cavailles) and ways that althusser makes it his own, so to say. maybe you won't be focusing on althusser that much, but the topic (developments and continuities in marx's thought) itself is interesting.
anyway, really dig the series, keep up the good work. inspired me to go back and reread lukacs' history and class consciousness.
@@261guitar We find those ideas very interesting as well. Unfortunately, we probably won't explore them very much, but a bit of discussion about Althusser will be in the video.
:)
Reddit is dunking hard on you.
Glad to hear people are engaging with our videos, hope they drop by if they have any questions or comments!
The question is what subreddit.
Not anywhere we've been able to find but it would be interesting to know so we can address whatever questions or criticism that showed up in the QnA for season 1, given that they haven't come around to present it themselves.
How could anyone believe this
By rational thought.