History of Marxism | Vejas Liulevicius and Lex Fridman
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- Опубліковано 20 вер 2024
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Vejas Liulevicius is a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe, who has lectured extensively on Marxism and the rise, the reign, and the fall of Communism.
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*GUEST BIO:*
Vejas Liulevicius is a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe, who has lectured extensively on Marxism and the rise, the reign, and the fall of Communism.
*CONTACT LEX:*
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A brilliantly concise dissection of theoretical Marx. I look forward to hearing about Lenin's translation of Marx and Engel's theoretical work into actual revolutionary implementation by the "three who made a revolution" in Russia. How did Lenin's inner circle of revolutionaries modify Marx's theory which was designed to fit onto the contemporary European industrial revolution? Did they theoretically graft it onto the existing unrest within Russian feudal agrarian society? Were we seeing the death of Marx's historical inevitability at the hands of an opportunistic group of power grabbers led by Ilya Ulyanov, better known as Lenin?
Marx's favorite quote was from Faust. "Everything that exists, deserves to perish.". Let that sink in for a minute.
What a brilliant line!!!
Oh my God, an anti-bourgoise, anti-capitalist, anti-state thinker who devoted his whole life to the communist revolution actually cited that quote? Dear me, how surprising...
A true agent of Mephistopheles
A true agent of Mephistopheles
The joke is that both communism and capitalism is needed for true freedom. The world is just waiting for everyone to realize what everyone already knows.
Oh nice, a Lithuanian on the podcast!
Only the times change, the nature of mankind does not.
What did communists use before candles?
Electricity!
???? You should read more
Is that why the Soviet Union used primarily nuclear energy for eletricity?
Yeah, I'm no communist, but it's pretty well known that the Soviets were responsible for the mass electrification of the formerly feudal areas throughout the Russian and Central Asian countryside.
The Soviets were actually largely responsible for the electrification of the formerly feudal country side. I mean, I'm no communist, but this is pretty well known and undisputed by historians, as far as I know.
you should get a sense of humour
Great clip, great to see Lithuanian 🎉
Ikr, as soon as I read his name I was like "wait what? Lex has lithuanian on his podcast? 😮"
Useful idiots. ..
Marx sent Darwin a copy of Das Kapital, who didn't read it, as he had no German.
Darwin wasn't into sci-fi anyway
Wow, I learned so much on this particular segment of Marxism and very appreciate the unparalleled scholar who broke it down in very simple terms.
Thank you Lex and your outstanding guest 🫡
All I know is that people who hate Karl Marx know nothing about him nor his writings. Marx was simply a philosopher and economist.
“Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behavior as serving a desirable end.”
-Stanley Milgram, Obedience And Authority
The Verelendung is still under way
The discussion at the end of the video is our current situation which means Marx was right. The working class is miserable, the middle class is shrinking, the ruling class is becoming trillionaries. Revolution is inevitable which if you listen to every Trump supporter, they’re crying out every day for it but doing it for the billionaire capitalist not the working class.
Dictatorship of the working class only sounds scary to the current dictatorship of the ruling class billionaires.
The fiest 1 minute and 40 seconds is all Hegel
Funny how Lex focuses on Socialism and Marx but not John Locke....
Sounds appealing to me, got some things wrong but maybe we’ll still get there
It's literally the stupidest idea i have ever heard. History has a purpose hahaha
@@utdfortreble It's easy to find this idea ridiculous in the 21st century, but brilliant thinkers, authors and even common believed in it during the 18th and 19th century. It's actually a variation of the Christian idea of history as ultimately guided by divine providence - hahahah....
The flaw in Communism never accounts for human nature. The revolutionaries that seize power care more about its retention and elimination of its dissidents.
That’s a lie. Prepare for the most yap you’ve ever seen.
Human nature arguments boil down to the fact that the ruling ideology of society is shaped by the base economic relations. In other words, we perceive it as "natural" to work for monetary incentives because that's pretty much the only choice we have right now. It seems "natural" that there should be hierarchy because we have them at our jobs, in our democracy, in the home thanks to patriarchal family relations, etc. Humans seem greedy "by nature" because without money, we starve or can't pay for shelter, so it is in our interest to try to accumulate money in under the current economical setup. Capitalism literally compels capitalists to behave in a way that can be perceived as greedy, because if they don't, their competitor will and then they will be gobbled up or put out of business. It's the system that makes these things seem natural or essential.
But Engels and Marx and others disproved these things about human nature by looking at history. Among many native nations in the Americas, there was no money. How, then, did anything get done if money is the only incentive to work? There is also a ton of evidence that humans, for millions of years, operated more or less communally, with little or no hierarchy. If it was innate "human nature," how could this be so? How could greedy humans cooperate and survive during these millions of years of scarcity if they were all so greedy and purely self-interested by nature?
To attribute contemporary human behavior to "human nature" without looking at history and without considering the effects of the environment and social relations that necessarily shape human behavior is simplistic and unscientific, and it is usually an excuse made by the politically faint of heart or those who benefit from the current economic system.
I would point out that there is a massive propaganda effort to control this narrative and force it into our minds. But real heart of the matter, that Marx would tell you, is that it is because the system (capitalism) forces those conditions upon you. In order to succeed in capitalism, it often pays off to behave greedily, and many situations arise where to not behave greedily is to fall behind and risk losing. And to lose in capitalism is to be made a debt slave, if not then to be homeless, broken, hungry, and in a word, oppressed. And here's where Marx ideas get really powerful. If you want to change this behavior - to act greedily - then you need only change the system that the person is in. If you have a system (socialism), where you will always have a home, always have food, always have medical care, always have water - then there is no need to behave greedily in order to survive and have a life of dignity and purpose. Marx would argue that greed will pass from the human condition. Poverty and war too. This was Karl Marx's dangerous idea - you wouldn't just change the world, but all of humankind.
@@Fredles128 Speaking of propaganda..Someone needs another booster !
@@SunTingWong wow you really got me. I love name calling and not responding to what i said.
@@Fredles128 Wow.. Gaslighting !
What name did I call you?
UA-cam must have removed it or you’re lying…. 🤥
I’m not calling you a liar.. I saying the factual evidence dictates YOU ARE lying which by definition means you ARE a liar!
I address your statement by pointing out only someone severely vaccine injured would say such nonsense….
@@SunTingWongare you mentally challenged?
Karl Marx saw the working man and not the business owner as the savior and liberator of all.
After reading his work it’s my opinion that the exclusion of a metaphysic standard of some kind, an ethic beyond the human/material realm , is fatal to the theory. Just an opinion. I believe in logical/spiritual truth. Perhaps I am wrong or missing something. Humility is critical to critical thinking
This guy doesn’t know shit
It’s strange that we talk about what Marx specifically said, when there been like 200 years or so of advancement since then. It would be like criticizing Darwin’s exact words to prove evolution wrong or incomplete
Advancement beyond thinking communism makes any sense.
How so?
We’re constantly looking backward and trying to apply today’s standards….
Apparently society is so great we have go backwards in time to find issues to resolve?
@@AWOL401 I’m saying the words of one dude do not convey the nuances of an entire ideology, he is one person out of hundreds. Capitalism today is much more complex than Adam Smith’s words about it conveyed hundreds of years ago, it would be silly to super analyze him and say you’re getting the whole of capitalism
And that’s without value judgement. You can understand an ideology without accepting it as correct
@@SunTingWong it’s strange to talk about one guy hundreds of years ago, rather than the modern ideology, like how evolution today is a complex scientific theory which is more complex and supported/nuanced than what Darwin wrote about, it’s similar with communism
Marx in his writings, and Marxists I have spoken to, have never managed to describe to me what they mean by 'contradictions' in the physical world. I have a background in analytic philosophy, and a contradiction is a logical relation between two statements. It has nothing to do with the real world. There could not be a contradiction in the real world, it seems to me.
I suspect Marx used words like 'contradiction' because he was aiming to dress up his ideas as a form of pseudo-science; to use the vocabulary of deductive logic in order to make his arguments seem logically valid, when he in fact pulled them out of his ass.
Idealista? Materialista es Hegel, o sea aristotelico 😊
Just unnecessary content Lex, come on. Analyst’s take on the topic, and the softball angled questions/comments as a whole, were subpar from any measure of intelligence; dare I question, is this dishonest media as this is presented without any expertise on the topic being discussed. Your gift to viewers is covering the ever necessary history & philosophy type context Lex they love you for it. Blessings
What’s shocking is how much on his content is merely opinions with pretense of science and scholarship.
Yes, but that's the case with nearly all social theories from the 18th century to mid-20th century.
That's unfortunately the case for all of these systems. Capitalism, communism, etc etc. They all rely on asserted "truths" about human nature and behavior but rarely ever have any evidence of it. So you have to take them as mostly opinion.
Bankers created marxism, with or without Karl
Soviet ZZZentral Bank ,,Gosbank,, (first Russian ZZZentral Bank) go look it up who is the first Head of Bank, same ``thing`` as always
In his hystrionics, bias and wrong focus Vejas Liulevicius has missed the point of Marx.
Marx didnt thought that history has a direction or a destination, its the dialectical relationships of its material relationships that produce changes...
Marxism as a theory was a combination of french utopian political theories,german based philosophy and british economics school of the time.What this guy is presenting here is the principles of crude marxism of stalin.The Marxism in itself is way more complex but this guy clearly lacks knowledge in economic theory and philosophy.Also his take is standard biased pro-capitalist one.
Marx was right about history moving in that direction but wrong about it needing special individuals to move it there.
It will move there on its own. Humans innately want to provide for everyone if reasonable. Ironically, capitalism was needed to get to where Marx wanted to go. Capitalism will provide the wealth needed to make providing for everyone a trivial matter. Instead of making everyone equally poor, we will make a few people extremely rich and everyone else only merely rich. The poor of today live better than the King of France 300 years ago and the poor of tomorrow will live better than any Saudi prince today.
Yup, anyone doomering in 2024 is privileged af. We live in the most spoiled time in human history. Capitalism has a ton to do with that, even with all of its flaws.
I'm afraid the Capitalism Marx described died in the great depression, and the second world war marked a shift to something else.
This was after the Soviet successes, and collapse of Europe.
Up until the 1960s or so Soviet Communism had a better track record on economics than what the West was doing.
It looked like Stalin was going to take all of Europe!
So, we went with something different than Capitalism.
Now we have a large social safety net, rigged markets, and funny money.
These "Capitalist" politicians have clearly failed at dismantling Socialism.
What they've done parallels the corruption of the Soviet state in its later period.
What comes next is post Communism.
I'm hoping for democratic revolution of course, but we'll see about that.
The political economy game isn't Marx's, we have a very different set of issues.
What we need is something more sustainable, that isn't so easily captured by autocratic tendencies.
Under capitalism, I am poor. Under socialism, I am wealthy.
I am part owner of Yellowstone, the highways system and the treasures of the Smithsonian.
Think about that.
@@ocumstweezers You'll find that you can do more with the mere products and services afforded by capitalism than you can with the fractional ownership of a park, road or museum afforded by socialism.
Tell that to someone working 12h shifts in a mine and barely providing his kids with shitty food and not much else. Not everyone is lucky as we are.
Capitalism is I think definitely most 'natural' and with comparetivly great results (I'm also pretty lucky), but it surely needs more regulations.
There is much room for much needed improvement.
There is enough wealth around to provide every child a chance to be healthy and smart. Some places have (or had in past) such bliss. Somehow, it doesn't last long, seems to be a natural occurence like a sine wave function.
Anyways, still good to think and debate about it, if you care.
Wish there was more discussion on the social Democrat and later Communist divide.
I mean it was the Marxists that helped get workers improved conditions. The idea of revolution vs reform plays out among Marxists too, obviously 1917 is the big moment/split.
PhD Liulevicius has excellent survey courses available at the Great Courses. Shop them very hard. They have gone to a carnival pricing model.
Avoid anything to do with American 'race'. All are absolute clown shows. The older lectures are usually of much higher content quality.
i wouldnt call progressive taxation and adequate welfare systems utopian or very revolutionary.
So youre descriing star trek and the federation😅
"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are".
Henry Hazlitt
You just spouted an uneducated reductionism paired with pride and arrogance. A dangerous mix
What a terrible misreading. It's more like, "Everyone should be free."
Not exactly. Marx in fact starts off praising capitalism as one of the progressive forces of history and then he proceeds to break down the system, its problems and contradictions that make it unstable and then he views capitalism in the greater context of history and what comes after capitalism or what could possibly come after if man decided to no longer be shackled to it.
Faltó Hegel
Hey lex
Schopenhauer > Hegel
Marx was violins, born out of envy. The current oligarchs exploit this envy.
Very accurate
Until you understand Marx and his works then you'll never understand anything. Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto were his most famous works but he has many others that are just as interesting and compelling. It took me years to understand what Marx meant and i had the same misconceptions as most people but once i understood his works then it truly changed the way i look at the world. Everything starts to make sense. I urge you not to prejudge what he wrote. I promise you that you'll begin to agree with alot of what he says.
@@deezeed2817 He wants to take other people's stuff by violin 4ce. What else do I need to know?
@@diogenes9295 The capitalist system is violent. You cannot impose private property without violence or repression. The contradictions within capitalism would cause violence regardless. The revolution is meant to eventually end these contradictions that exist and eventually the need for violence itself would end if social stratification and class division ended once and for all. You have to understand the context otherwise it won't make sense to you.
@@deezeed2817 My spleen, my kids, my labor, my means of production, and my home, are all my property, without which I would be subject to the mob. I'm not interested in joining in with the luting of others.
That’s what a proper scholar who has studied Marx sounds like. Not the Jordan Peterson’s “Marx was a satanist” bullcrap.
Jp said way more that that about Marx and even read the manifesto, took his points and attacked them on stage for 30min. Watch the debate On February, April 19, 2019, with philosopher Slavoj Zizek. It's very dishonest to represent it as if that's all he ever said.
@@progamer-df3be I did watch it and have rewatched it, actually. His reading of the Communist Manifesto was elementary imo, very few sound points. Also, his choice to critique a thinker as board, brilliant and contradictory as Marx by reading what's in essence a political pamphlet is quite problematic, to begin with. I don't think my take on him is dishonest. JP describing him as a "satanist", as a thinker "of a Mephistophelean ethos" etc., is reflective of his reductive and biased approach towards Marx. He's equally simplistic on postmodernism, environmentalism, or anything he regards as his political enemy (i.e. anything left-wing), but suddenly, when it comes to Christianity or the "Biblical corpus", the very same man becomes ultra-sensitive to all sort of nuances and extremely forgiving to all sort of controversial positions or "divine" justifications of violent events.
What did Marx think about immigration?
That’s a complicated question and I probably won’t do it justice. But, I’ll try. Genuine question have you ever wondered why immigration is such a huge political issue? It’s not really what most people think. By making it hard to immigrate and become a citizen capitalist can pay these immigrants less money. For example, if I owned a farm and needed labor to keep it going. I could pay that migrate 50-70% less money than minimum wage. Why? Because you can threaten to call ICE and get them deported. Most migrates coming from the global south are often denied their labour rights and receive wages far below the national average. This then comes into Marx’s important idea of the reserve army of labour. These are workers who earn less than the average or minimum wage and who can be fired en masse without major political consequences. The capitalist system needs a huge amount of “disposable workers” to maintain a growing accumulation of capital. This reserve army does two very important things, depresses wages ( I’m talking about actually citizens of the that country), and makes people fearful of being fired because someone can replace you. By making it hard for people to immigrate, it lowers Americans wages since immigrants will do it for cheaper. By making people afraid of immigrants the ruling class get to have cheaper labor. This is why that type of rhetoric is so scary. Capitalists (I’m talking about rich ones not poor ones) use our own tribal tendencies from our biology against us. (That last sentence is me not Marx, he’d probably agree though)
This guy would be a whole lot easier to follow if he was Dan Carlin.
Had Marx been born a century later he would have been a free-market advocate even more to the right than Friedman.
DUDE. you still haven't had an Austrian economist on the show???
He did back in 2021 or 2022
@@thecastaways2 do you know which episode? or who it was?
We need class consciousness now more than EVER. You can’t say Marx was wrong…
Marx was wrong
Marx was wrong.
Marx was wrong
Oh yes I can
Critical consciousness in the context of Marx’s ideas leads to division and destruction. It’s flawed at the root.
First comment
Marx is my dude
If so, psychiatrist should be your dude
I can smell you through this comment
Nerd!
I salute the ideological capitalists in the comments section that completely missed the point…🫡
7:30 O_o