Marx on Freedom and Human Nature | Red Plateaus
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- Опубліковано 1 лют 2019
- This is the second 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 freedom and human nature.
Full playlist: • Marx on Human Developm...
Twitter: / rplateaus
I've started reading volume one of Capital with a friend. I'm finding the early chapters difficult to read and that his writing could be more accessible, but otherwise he's a really good analyst. I look forward to seeing your future videos. This was really clear and your visuals are great.
That's great! Glad to have you watching our videos. The first few chapters are notoriously difficult. We won't be getting to his political economy right away, but if you haven't looked into them yet we found Heinrich's 'An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital' and Harvey's commentary very helpful.
I'm so glad I found this channel. It's so hard to find an intelligent, well-informed explanation of Marxism that seeks to educate but also doesn't assume you're a complete idiot. Thank you for doing these!
Thank you so much! We hope you'll find that we continue to deliver!
Thanks to everyone for watching! We do not have a Patreon, but if you're looking for a 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
I think I'm gonna academically cite this video in an essay about compositional systems, particularly Marx's quote about the architect and the bee.
you deserve more subscribers!
Glad you think so!
I think that the term 'agency' captures nicely what Marx meant by freedom - the ability of self-directed activity.
This is such a good channel. Your work is greatly appreciated comrade. Shared.
Hey Red Plateaus, this is a well researched video, and very lucid as well. There are, however, a couple of concerns I had with your (and probably Marx's) argument.
Firstly, the notion of 'consciousness' should be further elaborated upon if one is to qualify it as that which marks humans separate from other species/animals (and as a result, its relationship with social organisation of production and reproduction). In his essay, 'The Animal in the Study of Humanity', Tim Ingold argues that it is not our consciousness per se that makes us standout - rather, it is our capacity for 'thought' (as that composed of symbols, signs, and language). Many species, other than our own, are conscious of their surroundings and in fact respond to specific situations by assessing them thoroughly. They are not driven purely by an instinct that commands a pre programmed set of actions, for no species would be able to survive if that were indeed the case. Their actions are thus in tune although not completely determined with what they are conscious of. I thus think that 'consciousness' requires further discussion.
Secondly, are all humans conscious? And conscious in what sense? Those suffering from mental disorders may have incoherent thoughts, or no thoughts at all. A child is not capable of thought till a certain. Is she still 'human'? What is our basis for creating this population/species called 'human'?
I guess I am just prompting you to clarify these in order understand whether the whole thesis of freedom/species-being/so on rests on unqualified or qualified grounds.
Hey Srijan, thanks for your questions. We’ll get back to them in a Q and A, but here’s what we have for now:
1. Basically, we agree with your first point about further elaboration being needed today, especially in light of the major advances done in the study of human and non-human animals since Marx’s day. We didn’t try to do this in the video, because we wanted to keep the length down and focus on accurately portraying what we can piece together from Marx’s works as they stand. We haven’t read Ingold’s essay, but it sounds like they might be using ‘consciousness’ in a slightly different sense than Marx. We suspect that Marx would conceptualise consciousness in a way that includes explicit thought, which would include what you say Ingold calls ‘thought’. In general, we do think that Marx underestimates the behavioural variation and plasticity of at least some non-human animal species, and that a contemporary version of Marx’s view would probably need to take a more precise and graded view of what ‘consciousness’ is and how what humans have of it differs from what non-human animals have of it. Interestingly, however, we also don’t think that this causes problems for Marx’s argument, because (unlike many other thinkers) Marx doesn’t base his concern for human beings on whether they have consciousness, and because it doesn’t affect his claim that humans’ consciousness is what enables us to be free. Even if his views on consciousness were rejected completely, his concept of freedom would still work - it just wouldn’t be possible to ground it in these views on human nature any more.
2. In terms of general motivation, Marx’s idea seems to be driven by the Spinozist idea of distinguishing species by their powers, and when doing so focusing on those of the vast majority of the adult members of a species. The fact that some members of a species may not have these powers, or have them to a lesser extent, is not taken to be a problem, in the same way that describing humans as ‘bipedal’ is taken to be consistent with a number of humans having 1 or 0 legs. This is another place where we think a more graded and complex understanding of what ‘consciousness’ is is important today, since we think that this sort of position (which, we should note, Marx never finds the time to sit down and pursue more systematically) needs to be further developed in light of contemporary scientific advancements.
@@RedPlateaus looking forward to that. :)
This is a brilliant introduction into Marx's philosophy. I really love the way you spend a lot of time looking into the metaphysics/ethics of Marxism, therefore making his economic thought seem more well grounded.
This was worth every second of my life, thx!
Thank you so much! And what a magnificent apple that is
@@RedPlateaus just asking do you have a discord server I can join?
@@theredapple3402 Not really no, but we might do the typical thing of tying a server to our Patreon at some point. We haven't really set it up yet though
I love your videos and use them for some of my university research, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind linking some of the studies you reference if they are open sourced, just a suggestion. Thanks alot
The symptoms that result from Marx's "unfree labour" bear an uncanny resemblance to Nietzsche's infamous "ascetic ideal" (exemplified by the figure of the Priest in his "Genealogy of Morals")
It's by no means a 1-to-1 correspondence (then again, what is?), but there's a good reason so many of us like to read these two thinkers "side by side", as it were. Creates a nice dialectic of external/internal - a nice tension to get you working through some of these ideas.
Gracias, es un contenido excelente el de este canal
Really nice work!
Glad I found your channel really interesting stuff
Thanks!
Great vid 👍🏽
the background is so astonishing
thank you for the videos comrade
Thanks!
Thanks for a good presentation. My question is what is the human essence according to marx and how can a person live a good life?
The first question we answer in this video, though it's worth noting that Marx's term Gattungswesen can be translated as species being, species nature, and species essence, since the German noun 'Wesen' is pretty broad. There's some general literature on the latter question, but it's all based on a fair amount of speculation based on his ideas about human development and freedom, coupled with how he lived and raised his children. He doesn't ever, as far as I know, lay down clear guidance for how people in general can live good lives, I think because his focus is elsewhere and because any anwer to that question is ultimately best determined by people themselves and would vary a lot according to their natural, social, and historical context.
Well said comrade
Sorry if this is a redundant question, I'm fairly new to this. Obviously there is a lack of freedom under capitalism where you have to work to survive and often times you are forced to take upon jobs where you don't enjoy or even despise the work you do.
But would not this same situation, this robbing our freedoms, exist under a socialist system? There would still be jobs no one wants to do, and people that don't want to do any work.
I guess resources being distributed more equally would mean the avg person would have to do less undesirable work which would mean more freedom.
Hey Red, how is your day? :)
Hey Taha, our day is excellent :) Hope yours is too!
Very difficult
3:00 I remember Paul Cockshott did a video refuting this exact quote that Marx. I’m curious on your thoughts on it.
ua-cam.com/video/tkx528BQPTs/v-deo.html
We don’t see any refutation there. If you take “purpose” and “goal” to be the same word, then it looks like he’s using it differently than Marx, but that’s the closest thing we could find and that’s not a disagreement on substance. Unless we're missing something (and if we are, can you tell us what the argument is)?
What about children?
Thank you for your question! Let us copy-paste part of our response to Srijan, as we believe it should answer your question:
In terms of general motivation, Marx’s idea seems to be driven by the Spinozist idea of distinguishing species by their powers, and when doing so focusing on those of the vast majority of the adult members of a species. The fact that some members of a species may not have these powers, or have them to a lesser extent, is not taken to be a problem, in the same way that describing humans as ‘bipedal’ is taken to be consistent with a number of humans having 1 or 0 legs.
@@RedPlateaus Since Marx pulls from Feuerbach who pulls from Spinoza, can I suggest a video explaining how Marx took Feuerbach's notion humanism and moved it forward through economy?
@@Sazi_de_Afrikan Sorry we missed this. We'll actually get to this a bit in our next season, which will be on Marx's theories of praxis, society, history, and social change.
@@RedPlateaus Cool. I don't usually see channels dive into the influence of Feuerbach on Marx as they mostly believe that Engels or whatever showed some "break" in his thought.
@@Sazi_de_Afrikan In that case you'll find our next season interesting, since we think that even the fairly early Marx has more sophisticated ideas on human beings, society, and ideas than Feuerbach did, and that it's these more sophisticated ideas that help us make sense of the things that get called dialetical and historical materialism and the role of ideology and consciousness-raising in social change.
Quiero recomendar un vídeo que trata lo mismo conceptos, esta en español pero tiene subtítulos en inglés (English Subtitles) ua-cam.com/video/nLaaQU0Vifc/v-deo.html
Come on, at 9:13 you equate your voluntary relationship with a boss at a job that you choose -a relationship that you are both free to leave-, with your 'relationship' with State political leaders, who claim a right to your life (ie, military conscription) and to the fruits of your labour (ie, to tax you), under threat of force, violence, and incarceration.
We're not equating them, we're comparing them as sharing one important feature, namely being unfree. Being formally free to leave a contract doesn't mean that you're free in it, just like being able to leave a totalitarian dictatorship doesn't mean you're free while you're living under it. It also doesn't mean very much when you're still materially forced to work for some employer under threat of things like poverty, homelessness, starvation, and so on.
@@RedPlateaus -The qualitative and semantic differences between one person coercing another and depriving him of liberty, and the reality that someone must work to produce the the food that we need to survive, has been amply and aptly differentiated elsewhere.
I see how we can and should morally condem and live without the former unfreedom. How do you propose that we free ourselves from the requirement that we produce food and eat it?
@@kourakis We're not proposing the latter. We're pointing out teh obvious fact that bosses dominate workers, thereby depriving them of their liberty.
@@RedPlateaus -Surely you don't think every employer-employee relationship is one of domination and enslavement. Or do you?
If we accept the premise that all such employment dominates and enslaves, we must logically reason that no one can morally hire an employee, no matter how eager the would-be worker be to collaborate.
If we think that at least _some_ employer-employee relationships do not entail domination and enslavement, then by what criterion have we judged and separated the acceptable contracts from the immoral dominate-and-enslave ones?
@@kourakis You can find Marx's argument here: ua-cam.com/video/ec-wDiI-Y1Q/v-deo.html
Domination negates freedom. Not all contracts are the product of, or result in, relations of domination. But all contracts which subject someone to the uncontrolled (by the receiver) power of another are contracts which result in domination. Insofar as they result in domination, they also result in unfreedom. Capitalist wage labour typically involves bosses having just this sort of power over workers (i.e. they have power over workers which workers cannot control), which means that the former dominate the latter, rendering them unfree.
There's a more complex argument about the impersonal forms of domination wielded by capitalist-type competitive markets (not, however, all kinds of markets), which we talk a bit about here: ua-cam.com/video/9GyMETAcFj0/v-deo.html.
as a star wars nerd and gender bent freakazoid with a love for the shitty and bad, i proclaim that u made this video 11:38 long because of the George Lucas film THX 1138. i will die on this hill. no u cannot convince me. i shall now go inhale vapor-like swarms of nanobots and become enlightened by their tingly tinkering
You played Freddy Mercury at 1:31. Do you think Queen would've existed, flourished, and composed such great music under Marxism, with no private ownership of their means of production?
Yes, especially if it's like this: ua-cam.com/video/9jAeu60yx4s/v-deo.html
Marx excluded animals. 😓😓
As far as we can tell, there's nothing in Marx's work that precludes animals from consideration, since he doesn't make the move of taking consciousness to be necessary for it. He just thinks that only human beings have consciousness (or have it to a certain degree) and that being able to use one's consciousness to self-direct their activities is important for humans. However, he certainly doesn't have very much to say about non-human animals and their conditions for development and flourishing. We mention that a bit here: ua-cam.com/video/PfNM2k9PwVo/v-deo.html
Bunk.
In free-market capitalism -also known as free trade- individuals are free, by definition.
Your assertion (at 10:53) that this freedom makes them unfree, contradicts itself.
Just because someone calls something free doesn't mean that it by definition is, much like calling North Korea 'democratic' doesn't mean that it's democratic by definition. It's perfectly possible for capitalism to be unfree and for its advocates to call it free. If you're interested in Marx views on this, you might be interested in these:
ua-cam.com/video/9GyMETAcFj0/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/ec-wDiI-Y1Q/v-deo.html
@@RedPlateaus -Thanks for the links, I'll be glad to take a look.
You cannot assert, however, that it is perfectly possible to for people in a free market to be unfree; that would be non-sensical and would require us to negate the very definition of free.
If your claim is that capitalism need not entail a free market -well, that's a matter of defining terms. And that's why I specify free-market capitalism, in contradistinction to, say, the immoral distortions that are crony-capitalism, mixed-economy capitalism, and any other adjective-modified form of what would have been freedom.
In the end, however we denote it, it is freedom -and the morality of non-aggression- that interest me and that I advocate in free-market capitalism / laissez-faire capitalism.
@@kourakis We're not claiming the latter. And yes, we can consistently deny that capitalism, despite some people calling it a 'free market system' is in fact unfree, e.g. because it involves bosses wielding arbitrary power over workers, thus dominating them and rendering them unfree. Just like people can deny that North Korea is democratic, even though it's officially called the 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea' without contradicting themselves. Labelling something 'free' or 'democratic' doesn't automatically mean that the thing labelled in this way in fact is these things. Rather, if we want to make a judgment we need a definition of freedom (two different examples include (a) being free in an activity if and only if one self-directs that activity and (b) one is free if and only if one is not subject to the uncontrolled power of another) and show that a social relation or institution is in fact free or unfree according to that definition. We' probably agree that one of the common differences between supporters and critics of capitalism is about whether it's free or not. And whose arguments one finds more compelling will in turn rely on which concept of freedom or liberty we find most plausible and how we think capitalism in fact operates.
You can be free even living as a slave. Freedom is mental and not physical.
That depends entirely on which concept of freedom you're operating with. If you define freedom as self-directed activity, as Marx does, than you can't be a slave and free at the same time.