***** You know what is funny, Marx was the original person to use the phrase 'cult of personality' in a political sense, and the first thing that Marx did is denounce it. Here's a quote from Marx, when that phrase was first used: "Neither of us cares a straw of popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult [orig. Personenkultus] that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves [...] to accord me public honor, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity"
Studying business and accounting for 4 years then experiencing 22 years of labor in logistics and retail this quote converted me pretty quickly. "In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production." Currently 40% of food produced is thrown away. Overproduction devalues a commodity price below cost of production leading to bankruptcy and food is the most overproduced things. Overproduction, planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity and artificial consumption... capitalism is a mountain of contradictions.
During the last 20 years, as we know, there has been a concentration of capital by the formation of trusts such as Marx in his boldest flights of imagination could never have dreamed of. Especially is this the case in the United States of America, where we get the best examples of these giant undertakings. According to the latest statistics, no less than 8,664 concerns which were formerly independent are now amalgamated in a few Trusts with a capital of 20,000 million dollars. Of these seven of the ‘greater’ industrial trusts contain 1,528 concerns formerly independent, and possess a capital of 2,663 million dollars. The six largest railway trusts are even better placed; they have a capital of 9,017 million dollars!
+Foliorum Viridium Well, I have read the New Testament IN GREEK. You could read at least about Marx in English. Marx never claimed to have all the answers or to be God. He just wanted working people to have better lives than could be had at the time, or now. I don't buy that the Jesus of the Gospels is the historical Jesus, for many many reasons. Read Bertrand Russell's book "Why I am Not A Christian" if Marx is too tough for you.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Historically, before Marx there was NO labor movement. Weekends and the 8 hour day are some things you have Marx to thank for.
+Foliorum Viridium Your premise is that Marx should be dismissed, since everybody wants working people to have better lives. Ergo, your premise is utter tosh. Those behind the predatory lending, to name just one group, didn't give a damn about working people.
@@coulton-davisjazz2872 "Before Marx there was NO labor movement"... this is incredibly ignorant. I don't mean that as an insult, but as a fact. Class struggle has existed since societies have had classes. That's just reality.
People who know reality and in turn themselves are aware that Marx was a visionary who saw right through capitalism and it's inherent exploitative nature.
+Jasper Mercy Since Adam Smith, Capitalism doubled life expectancy in 150 years, gave us cell phones to communicate with people across the planet, and cars allowing us to have access to more goods than most wealthy people in history. He opposes that which has given us the most time saving devices, giving us the very leisure he sought out. Please reconsider your position.
All large-scale political and economic systems are exploitative inasmuch as all such systems treat humans as means rather than ends in themselves. However, this is not a bug; rather it is a feature of human society.
Obviously all the replies are from those who don’t fall under the categories I mentioned initially. “The Futurist”, who hasn’t read enough history evidently. No, exploiting one another is not an intrinsic feature of humanity at all 🙄.
People who understand modern (updated) Economics tend not to believe that way. In fact, statistics indicate more knowledge in Economics, less Marxism. Maybe visionary, but still defensor of problematic beliefs whose practical application was up to 100 million deaths. Have a nice day!
It ia impressive the amount of prejudices associated with the figure of Karl Marx. He had nothing to do with the comunist systems of the XXth century. His thought was appropriated by these systems. This is what Eagleton as a real reader of Marx has tried to show and it is not new!
lol, I mean I'm a socialist but it'd be hard to say that they had "nothing" to do with marx. I mean even if you think they perverted his ideas that's still something.
Claudio Costa really he was the first expressed the idea of a holocaust of the masses to erase class and race
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@n. фффвär What about PR China, North Korea, Kambodja, Cuba and on and on and on? Why cant somebody say that "Mein Kampf" had nothing to do with Nazism also? Its the same outrageous statement.
@Jim P This idea an underrated comment. You are absolutely correct. It's actually pretty scary to see how people still try to excuse or otherwise explain away the facts of a movement that is objectively responsible for significantly more deaths than the Holocaust (which they claim to abhor, ironically enough).
@@hansmuller4338 I've read everything in print that Marx wrote in English. "Capital?" Sure. Twenty years in the writing, it still stands as the only book he'd published. Overwrought with nonsense, it came across as a confusing series of postulations and predictions for the future of capitalism perishing within, while communism would thrive. That was his recurring theme. Historically, the exact reverse proved true.
Check his authoritative biography. He allowed his eleven year-old son to starve to death, while his poor wife ran begging in the streets of London for money to pay for her son's burial. His two daughters hated him, and refused to speak of him. Marx had a maid who lived with his family, and she's an interesting figure who worked for free.
The Communist Manifesto has nothing of substance in it really. Marx wrote so much good analysis and critique, but the manifesto is "only" a "combat organ". If you are looking for deeper thought the manifesto is not the way to go. Go for "the german ideology" "critique of critical critique" or of course most prominent "capital"
hans müller Das Kapital is his magnum opus but the Manifesto should not be so readily disparaged - it is an excellent introduction to the Marxist critique of capitalist production, the first chapter especially. Those who are not already acquainted with the Marxists critique should start with the Manifesto and then study Das Kapital which is a much more demanding work and probably too difficult for most people to really understand without some help.
conny lake Allow me suggest starting with the Manofesto - it’s an excellent introduction to Marx’s critique of capitalism - and then try reading Capital, which is his magnum opus but also a very lengthy and demanding work. Also, check out the Marx-Engels Reader, a compendium of their writings with samples from various works.
Someone wrote "socialism promises but Capitalism delivers," But Capitalism makes losers out of all but a few winners. Production should be according to social need, not private greed. Capitalism has a false promise built into it. You too can GET RICH!
Very interesting, what people don't realise is that Marx saw man/woman as a creative force and the material progress that could be experience by the mechanisation of industry provided a chance for less labour and more time to explore creativity. Unfortunately, that old human flaw greed got in the way.
Marx’s idea of human nature (or ‘species being’ as it is more commonly translated) was naive and simplistic. Greed, for him, was a by-product of economic systems that favoured the greedy, but it is impossible to say that this must be the case. Greed is a property of humans, not a flaw (it is only conceived of as a flaw based on theistic moralities which prescribe charity and humility). There are reasons to be careful of excessive greed, but it is the excess and not the greed itself that is the problem. Many thinkers conceived of humans as creative, and Marx was not unique in this regard. What set him apart was his attempt to fuse Hegelian dialectic, theistic morality, Clauswitzian strategy and a generally optimistic sentiment into a historical model of social progress. Interestingly there has so far been no instances of a capitalist society transitioning into a communist one (all communist societies had been autocratic previously), and only one capitalist society has transitioned into a different form entirely: Germany in the 1930s. Lastly, Marx was very clear about how mechanisation would lead to alienation (of the worker from the product of their labour) and it’s difficult to see how this, for him, would be in any way desirable.
@@thefuturist8864 You're spot on. Marx thrived because of the superfluous artificial hypocritic Abrahamic religions. We Hindoos are nevee impressed by Marx. Because man is innately pestered by Kaama, Krodha , Moha, Madha ...and so on and these things drive him in worldly affairs. Lust, Vindictiveness , Pride, Obsession, Jealousy and other vices flock together and drive a man to work and love and have children. To escape from this you have to embrace spirituality but that's another story
You obviously don't know how difficult it is to get a loan, or the fact that 70% of all new businesses fail. Marxism is not state capitalism. Marxism is vehemently opposed to state capitalism. So you think lack of safety regulations helps the poor? That's the idiocy of Milton Friedman.
Capitalism is the only economic system we know of that can monetise, and profit from, its own detractors. It’s more adaptable than any other system, economic or otherwise. It’s not going anywhere. In fact, this could prove incredibly useful to activist groups who are becoming increasingly aware of how to use capitalism to help achieve various ends.
Great book by Terry Eagleton. Provides such an insight into the works of karl marx which I've gotten very into recently and have been a big influence on my own thinking
what strikes me at quick glance is just how illogical the arguments for capitalism are vs what is offered by ones who seemingly lean towards socialist or communist theories; indeed even the ones that are for capitalism that are logical, all seem to wish for more constraints on how capitalism operates today which would lend it's self again to socialism. i'm not offering an argument here, just a observation.
The poorest American is richer than the rich Indian. You can always save. Living expenses does not include Iphones and branded wear. Clothes are meant to be worn till the threads separate. You make your meals from scratch and run 5000$ cars. Booze and drugs is not a living expense nor are vacations.
@@scottandrewhutchins I never talked about welfare. Presently an Indian worker will get 4.00 $ a shift of eight hours. I make about 6,000 $ A YEAR. that makes me rich. Do the maths.
5:04: "one of the tragedies of the twentieth century ...socialism was most necessary where it was least possible...."; 8:43: "...the only image of the future is the failure of the present...."; 9:06: '...for Marx, eating a peach is production.... 10:30:...his ideal was leisure, not labor....".
its interesting to hear how almost any notion the average educated contemporary individual would have in marx is actually an opposite to the truth. Especially the part where eagleton says marx was not necessarily in favor of violent revolution over peaceful reform. That's so incredibly contrary to what we are taught about him that i'm still doubtful about that point
Well, you know, Marx had a history. As in, the old Marx did not believe in the same things the young Marx did. The Marx of the Communist Manifesto did believe in a revolution, which was not something communist conspirators instigated, but something which would be brought forth by the evolution of capitalism itself. The old Marx, as he had seen how the Paris Commune failed, thought that the proletariat could not simply take over power and impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. He even says so in the preface to the later editions of the communist manifesto. I'm not quite sure what the old Marx thought about revolution, he seemed a bit undecided on the point.
It is my understanding, and I've been reading Marx and about Marx for some time, that he didn't see revolution as something favorable, but as something inevitable. I mean if there was another way we could reach communism (for Marx the return to a natural status of living with no middle class or war or exploitation or ruling government) then of course that would be awesome. But revolution for Marx was a natural occurrence of things, it was an almost scientific law for him. And he didn't approve of what the communists were doing, that much is for sure. In the beginning he was with them, he supported them, wrote the Manifesto, but when he saw the direction it took, he was like no this isn't what I was talking about at all you guys are doing something else. It's what finally led him to declare that he himself was not a Marxist.
Mishima Concerning the revolution: Yes, that's precisely what I meant to say when I talked about the Marx of the communist manifesto, that's precisely how he formulated his point at that time. It is quite probable that he still regarded revolution as inevitable in his latter years, though I don't know whether he wrote about it... About his relationship to other communists: I really don't know about that. I know Engels mentioned in a letter that Marx said he wasn't a marxist... which I always understood in the sense of: I'm not infallible, so don't dogmatically "apply my teachings", continue to expand and refine my theoretical work instead. So, what's going to replace liberal capitalism? It looks like it'll be either authoritarian state capitalism (sort of like China) or a sort of Pinochet-meets-Bush capitalism, with little or no welfare state, class apartheid, repressive military and police control and a lot of privatization or a mixture of both. If we don't do anything, that is... seems like the good old choice of socialism or barbarism we last faced in the thirties. So, what will it mean to choose socialism? the 20th century idea of state socialism seems to be the quickest way to "capitalism with asian values". I still support the nationalization of health care, banks, energy companies, rail companies and heavy industry. But then what?
AgentHomer I think you're a little mislead. if you first look at the dictionary definitions of free market capitalism and state capitalism, and then at the facts about countries instead of looking at the ideology taught in school, the only real capitalist countries are third-world countries that got liberal capitalism imposed on them by groups like the IMF (who grant loans to states on the condition that they liberalize. oh gosh, guess which states are the suppliers and which are the recipients of these loans. also, a loan is a power relation), while western corporations can dominate developing markets (that are now liberalized for them) and benefit from economics of scale by producing subsidized goods (aka colonialism - the same principle that transformed Asia from an industrialized and technocratic society into the shithole it has been in the 20th century. Fun fact: Bangladesh in 1800 produced steamers and railroads for the British to fight Napoleon with. Europe could only impose these measures because it had a greater tradition of war and violence, not anything else). Now you get why a media war is being waged against countries like cuba and iran, because their closed markets mean they might have an actual chance at development and sovereignty. The west does not tolerate that. First world countries today are extremely state-capitalist. This is also true domestically: the vast majority of our technology and products resulting therefrom originate in and profit from state investments (one of the many examples being electronics). A corporation can officially be 'private' but they blackmail western (national or regional) governments into giving them tax exempts and sudsidies by threatening to outsource themselves, thus endangering short-term domestic employment which wouldn't last forever but would last about a presidential term. the difference is that the people of our glorious democracies don't get a vote in this, while accountability is nonexistant (because god forbid, might a corporation actually intentionally do something that would actually benefit the population masses on spaceship earth?). Of course you can think of other fun things corporations do with this politcial influence, be it in the field of media, foreign policy or education. The ''free market vs. nationalisation'' debate that education emphasizes is plain propaganda for the sake of misdirecting the public. to summarize, our education in economics does not account for the fact that corporations will stop at nothing to get their profits (because it is required of them by law), even if this means they have to destroy everything. Prosperity is sometimes an unintentional phenomenon in a free market, not an intention. all this can only be changed by revolution, because there can be no benevolent corporate manager ; he'd just get fired by the shareholders. In economics, silly things like 'progress for humanity and a sustainable human community'' are just geeky side-note externals,
AgentHomer I should definitely take the chronology of his writings into account and research the issue further, as it definitely has relevance to the issue. I know I myself have changed my opinions radically over the years (though I am in my twenties and I guess that's only expected), but I would hate for people to hold me to exactly what I believed even five years ago, as I was kind of an idiot back then (and maybe I'll be saying the same things 25 years from now). But yeah, Marxism as it was practiced by Stalin and Mao really looked nothing like what Marx would have called communism. He was pretty vague on what that would look like, but it is pretty clear it would have looked nothing like, what (I think it was Foucault who said this) ended up becoming nothing more than a kind of State Capitalism, with the replacement of one upper class for another. As for his feelings regarding reform, it is my understanding that he did not believe it would work, like you correctly pointed out, because any change from within would simply get scooped up in its own ideology and become more of the same. And so revolution from outside could only incite real change. But of course, as I've just expressed, even this ended up being more of the same. Which has led many neo-Marxists to say stuff like "Capitalism always wins, it will always absorb everything into itself" and that kind of thing. I don't have an opinion here yet (still sorting out all the arguments in my mind and weighing them against each other) but it is just very interesting to me all the same.
I read (listened to an audio book) the communist manifesto a few days ago, the first part is sublime. Everything is true, nothing invented nor biased. You can feel the honesty and passion behind every word chosen. The best part? I ALREADY KNEW what Marx was going to say, all he did was confirm my ideas. That to me, proves 100 % that ''Marxism'' (or communism, economic justice, call it whatever you want), is eternally true and just. No one can ever justify that somehow one person deserves more money then he knows what to do with, while millions starve.
@@thefuturist8864 It confirms every rational thinking human's beliefs about basic economic justice, not just mine, so yes it is very true in that case.
Eagleton is a genius, and he explains the genius of Marx lucidly and wittily, both in this talk and in the book. Just as he did for the potentially arid subject of literary theory in `Literary Theory: An Introduction`.
You made heck of an assumption. Take for example food. People would produce it because it has value, that value being they need it too survive. Profit however would not necessarily mean they'd have an extra reason to produce food. If they produced too much food the market would decrease it's profitability (inflation). This gives the producer an incentive to produce less if not minimum to maintain profit rather then use. Profit is not a one way variable.
It’s not always the case that producing more of something *necessarily* leads to its value being lowered. There are a few ways in which this can be mitigated, such as reserving certain items considered to have, or indicate, higher social status. If it’s a particular commodity rather than a general one it can be harder to produce this outcome, but not impossible (such as how supermarkets might take a quarter of a particular foodstuff and sell it as a ‘finer’ version). Where money itself is the commodity, a modern economy allows for more currency to be added without lowering its value so long as steps are taken to reinforce the general belief that the money is, in fact, worth something.
So interesting that the imagery of Marxs ideal system is almost the antithesis of what we have always considered communistic life to be...i.e dull,grey,austere, grim and souless
The propaganda has been FIERCE! Marx has become a boogie man for the Capitalists to draw discord among the masses. It's especially obvious in this comment section how little people actually know of Marxist thought (ie SO many ad hominems and garbled concepts)!
What I love most about Marx is his writing? Incredible mastery of the language, literary genius. We in the present stand on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Marx. We know nothing of the depth of his thought and writings. He championed capitalism as he saw it a stepping stone to communist society, whether it is a necessary step is the drama of human history? I was also impressed to learn and had verified that the earliest document that is socialist in nature was the Celtic Book of Laws 15th century. People like you and I have the benefit of access to the real documents digitized in virtual libraries of the major libraries in the world through the Internet is how i find stuff to study and learn.
I read (listened to an audio book) the communist manifesto a few days ago, the first part is sublime. Everything is true, nothing invented nor biased. You can feel the honesty and passion behind every word chosen. The best part? I ALREADY KNEW what Marx was going to say, all he did was confirm my ideas. That to me, proves 100 % that ''Marxism'' (or communism, economic justice, call it whatever you want), is eternally true and just. No one can ever justify that somehow one person deserves more money then he knows what to do with, while millions starve.
I wanted to ask you by the way, about a question that crossed my mind. What would happen even if capitalism is abolished and the means of production are not private, what would happen to the independent workers? For example a garbage man that works for no company but rather for himself, would he still be poor since people will seek the cheapest work out there because there is a lot of ''potential'' garbage men? And same goes for a doctor that works for himself, people will have no choice to pay what he asks (a higher price), since there is not so many doctors. Would we simply remain in a system where your income is based on how replaceable you are? And if so, what would be the solution then?
I would suggest reading Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, written in 1846 Edited by C.J. Arthur. Your questions are close to the questions this book addresses as part of the development of the criticism of capitalism. Dissolving the class nature of production abolishes both capital and wage-labor in production. Production is no longer divided along class distinctions with workers on the one side as hired and managers on the other side as capital. If wages as the main form of income for workers is abolished their independence as a 'free worker' is also abolished, along with its opposite, capital is abolished. What is left? Production and 330 million people, they all work for themselves and families and for society as a whole? How much time does an individual work? This answer varies with the state of science and technology. Some societies could have a 40 hour work week for individuals because productivity is low. Some per capita a 20 hour work week because productivity is high. Labor is no longer the measure of value, people are not used as the specific means by which one can become super rich. Labor is labor, useful labor, and anyone who can perform it is regarded indispensable. Industries do not produce according to demand they produce according to need. A doctor's compensation for his/her labor is the health of their patient not the social status of their income. Many, many doctors would leave the US as individuals unable to adjust to a loss of a life luxury consumption. Worse yet, the super rich individuals who have no useful skills of their own, as people who do not work, that is, would launch with their capital a counter-revolt to defeat a socialist society unable and unwilling to adjust to a life of luxury abstinence. But go read the GI, its a great read for more of its implications. Be well.
I just arrived from Jordan Peterson's channel where Marx is being described as someone flirting with satanism and here I hear that Marxism is about love... Mad world 😂
@@AcceptfactsNreality haha. I think the man has some good ideas from time to time. But I've been a bit disappointed with him because he uses some dirty rhetorical tactics to win the arguments when he interviews people. Also, it seems he uses his podcast interviews only to sell his own thoughts and he's not really interested in the ideas of the people he invites. It's frustrating.
@@rodrigoffdsilva did you see JBP's 'debate' with Zizek? JBP admitted that he's only ever read PART of the Communist Manifesto. That was fairly recent so you know how shallow his understanding of the theory, despite his extensive, word-salad rhetoric.
So "Marx Was Right" was he? Well, everyone is bound to be "right" about a few things once in a while. But when you supposedly create theories about economics and you get something so basic as the theory of value so absolutely wrong that it's laughable, then there's not much to account for you being "right" overall in your general conclusions. Marx was so fundamentally wrong about the value of goods, the potential for abundance, and just basic human nature that he's merely a relic of history.
Marx loved Mozart (step over the millions of dead bodies via socialism and communism) and was on the side of the worker (forget the Gulags & killing fields) but was right about capitalism (despite the fact poor people in Capitalist nations are the wealthiest people in the world).
You can't logically equivocate Marxism to any regime that called themselves Socialists. Even if places like the SU and PRC were Socialistic, and they weren't, (as the revolution failed in an industrialized country like Germany, unindustrialized countries had to Industrialize themselves, and elected to do so through a system known as State Capitalism, whereby the state owns and controls Capital like a private firm would with wage labor, workplace hierarchy etc...), then you still can't say that they're the same. Material conditions are radically different in different places and different times. Political oppression was a result of the Russian and Chinese situations, not some magical property of Socialism.
+Keith Knight you can't hold marx responsible for these things! he didn't advocate for the gulag or sovjet-style communism, nor do they follow logically from his views. (they may in practice, but that's empirical data marx didn't have.) you should not dehumanize the guy. and no, i'm not a marxist.
The same old tired rhetoric... *"Those countries just didn't do it right! But trust us, when WE do it, it'll be perfect!"* Marxism fails to recognize human nature, because the moment any marxist did, they would have to abandon marxism as untenable. And so, like all utopian ideologies, they simply pretend that human nature is not in fact what human nature undeniably is, and that all of the character traits inherent to human beings which illustrate why their ideology could never work, are merely 'a product of the current system'. But as soon as we switch over to our glorious system, these traits will magically vanish.
RileyKaiSeeker Firstly, human nature isn't static, or unchanging. It's dependent on external conditions, look at any epoch of history or even radically differing contemporary societies. Secondly, Communism isn't predicated on some childish notion of "altruism". It is just as applicable to greed as Capitalism. For many reasons (that this argument isn't about, but that I'd be happy to go into more detail about in the future), Communism would bring up standards of living, making it more rational even when operating on the presumption that people are soley motivated by greed. Marx strongly opposed and developed his philosophy in opposition to Utopian arguments for Socialism and Communism, namely those of "Utopian Socialists". That's why Marxists and many post Marx Anarchists are referred to as "Scientific Socialists", as opposed to "Utopian Socialists". "Scientific Socialists" because they use scientific analysis to arrive at conclusions about the material world we specifically DON'T use emotion in Marxian analysis, that's the point of Marxian analysis.
First Name Last Name Human beings, just like the other 3 great apes, are hierarchical, they are competitive, they seek social status to stand out of the crowd and they need to be incentivized. These character traits, observable in virtually every mammalian species which live in social groups, have been evolving in us for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years and, yes, are unchanging and static.
Bravo Terry Eagleton! you clarify many ideas about Marx thoughts on capitalism; reforms and revolutions; proletarians; environment aspect of economy and Marxist theory . I think you have well explained the essence of Marxism; better than, may be the best economist in the world: in any case you attract my attention, to read your book for this summer holiday, when Capitalism will face its final challenge phase in its historical trends
People still profess to believe in astrology, either because they are simple minded or because a money making scam they are running is dependent on it. Despite Marxism being utter nonsense, scams based on this ideology are still extremely lucrative. If astrology and astrologers are still with us, even though this system of belief was superseded by astronomy hundreds of years ago, why would you expect Marxism to disappear overnight?
1.) perhaps you could be more specific, as my understanding of that debate is that its still undecided even among capitalists. 2.) I don't see how this is an issue nor how it contradicts his theories. Marx was well aware of how the progress in society was dramatically effecting the scales of production. Cheap goods is by no means a counter to his theory. Perhaps you should be more specific.
delivers to who? your (presumably) privileged middle class ass? does it deliver to the millions of working class people worldwide that slave away and die to make all of materials you love in capitalism? does it deliver to the entire continents that have been colonized and imperialized in the name of capital? fuck off with your "capitalism delivers" bullshit
commie ... i lived in your fantasy world not on paper but in real life and it sucks .. it promises the sky but delivers only oppressiom and poverty.. spit your bulshit propaganda to someone who cant think ... i was one of the slaves you are talking about and was able to better my life dispite shills like you without stealing from others, all trough voluntary contracts and exchange. so go troll somewhere where no critical thinking is required they will believe you
riiiiiiiiight .... they were not true sociaist/communists ... spare me this non-argument... don't get offended but really please come up with some more original argument.. this is getting tiresome. The resource is SCARCE by default/nature and the best system yet known to man is private property, voluntary contacts and the free market to manage this scarcity. Any top-down approach be it Socialism or Fascism is prone to bring only misery and poverty. You don't have to be rocket scientist to figure that. Let me really simplify it.. No private property no incentive to better yourself => no division of labor => no trade => no price. No price no way to do economic calculation. No calculation, No way to manage natural scarcity. This in short is called the Calculation problem (look it up on in Internet) was posed to Socialists ~100 years ago ... not a satisfactory answer yet. That is 100 years, hellooo !!! Then there is even more hard Knowledge problem which discredit all the current schemes of Social Democracy, Crony capitalism and such... Socialism is logically impossible if you simply apply basic economics principles, not to mention all the incentive problems (who will take the trash) ... etc. Then you have all the 20th century disastrous experiments ... I'm still wondering how ppl bend their minds to believe in this suicidal ideology. That is the reason I said what I said : Socialism looks good on paper but all experiments of making it work killed millions of ppl in the mean time the partially-free-market took billions of ppl out of poverty in last 50y including me. So I stand by what I said : Socialism promises, Capitalism delivers. yes it is abit catchy, but I like it ;)
I don't think he's quite right on how listening to Mozart is productive labour. Marx writes "Productive labour, therefore, is labour which - in the system of capitalist production - produces surplus value for its employer or which converts the objective conditions of labour into capital, and their owners into capitalists, hence, labour which produces its own product as capital" - though he does also write that every act of consumption is an act of production, stimulating future supply.
Terry Eagleton is a fine literary essayist, no doubt about it, making his best in convincing the audience no less than himself how cool Marx's marxism´really was. However is obvious he lacks any training in economics whatsoever. That’s why he takes for granted that an overarching holistic approach in dealing with economic processes is the best thing in town. It is a clumsy way to do it. A botanist does not need a whole grandiose conception of life in conducting her trade, nor an engineer on how the cosmos works. Holism is metaphysical quasi theological assumption, a child in this case of the first half XIX century German monumental philosophy. In economics you do not understand macro processes if you lack an understanding of microeconomics ones, not the other way round. The holistic approach has, besides, empirical consequences: to discard off hand the value of piecemeal cumulative changes in improving a society. A thing that Marx, notwithstanding what Eagleton says, regarded at best as a mere tactical value in pursuing the transformation of a society in its totality if not dismissed as palliatives when not considered outright illusory, being this more often than not how Marx considered both civil and political liberties and their institutions. When a political agenda is drawn from such an holistic view consequences are unavoidable: a violent maximalist disruption and distortion of all layers of human interaction, so no corner of social life is left untouched with a cascade of unintended effects. The historical totalitarian consequences of Marxism in the XX century were not merely bad luck or something to blame on what was implemented in backward countries with an authoritarian political culture: it was embedded as well on how the theory approaches social reality. These attempts to save Marxism from its real historical consequences are self-contradictory in a theory that idolizes historical verdict. To sever the connection between theory and its empirical consequences is to fall back to an endless cycle of speculative reinterpretations on what Marx meant and intended: same thing with horoscopes if things didn’t work out as enunciated. Reinterpretation on the face of facts is typical of pseudoscience as Karl Popper Pointed out. Pseudo sciences are unfalsifiable because it is like playing poker with a gambler that has an infinite number of cards under his sleeve; each one a new reinterpretation so never to lose. Eagleton also needs to be persuasive in Marxist terms on why Marxist ideas had such a huge impact despite its materialist tenets. To concede that ideas are present in the very texture of historical facts demands a non-Marxist approach. In other words, Marxist theory has problems in explaining its own success in terms of influence and stubborn endurance till now. Marxism phenomena and why is so seductive amongst intellectuals attests to its incompleteness. And finally, Marxism is also a self-contradictory theory in the extend it aims to draw the trajectory of the future of social change in one hand and in the other insisting that the state of the art of science and technology (“the development of the productive forces” using its terminology) is at the core of this trajectory. One thing cancels the other because unless the social theorist could foretell the future of inventions and their consequences even before they are either discovered or invented you cannot say anything on the possible future affairs of the world. Scientific-Technological change makes the future more uncertain, not less. Marxism cannot have both ways (a vision of the future compatible with an affirmation on what drives it). That’s the central paradox of Marxist historicism or the so-called Popper-Taleb paradox. Summing up If Marxism failed in a such embarrassing scale as no other modern political philosophy never has and if it did with tragic consequences to this day is because the grandiose theory always has been the wrong, awkward tool in addressing human affairs in a way attainable to both social practices and social change; and approach with serious blind spots in understanding the true nature of power and also what makes a given economy deliver or not. But above all there is no historical innocence anymore. We know better now once Marxism has been tested by History and cannot remain in such a denial.
I think he's referring to social darwinism. The term ascribed to people who advocate competative social system, these people often over-estimate how meritocratic our current system is and I believe the reference to George Bush was intended to refute the idea that it is meritocratic.
Capitalism is a named coined by Karl Marx, over 200 years ago, to describe the, horrific by today's standards, factories and sweatshops of the day. Marx made a living from these folks, donated to him by factory owner/friend Freddy Engels, yet Marx coined the word capitalism to describe those workplace/market dynamics, but took the money. Marx, from a very wealthy family, didn't ever practice law, his PhD. Instead, as a violent thug, he was banned from Europe and lived in London, all his life. Marx was sure that the working poor would rise up and make a revolution, because he didn't know that these folk were happy to have work and had come from far worse and starvation conditions, on the farm. His predictive 1848 Communist Manifesto with its 12 points, failed to come near to reality. Most of Marx's economic ideas were plagiarised from great economic pioneers Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx sincerely thought he had the answer to the world's problems, but his handling of his only employee, the maid, whom he made pregnant, says it all.
I knew it wouldn't take long !! At around 5min.30secs he says that Marx recognises the poverty and deprivation capitalism has caused. That is absolutely nonsense, its only through capitalism that we now live in a world with the least amount of global poverty human history has ever known. The wealth that capitalism has brought has given us a world where life expectancy has risen from around 38yrs of age in 1800 to around 80yrs of age now . Marx spent most of his life in London poncing off his mate Freidrich Engels who himself lived off his inherited wealth . As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and just like socialism it has never worked and will never work. As Margerat Thatcher once said " socialism is great until you run out of other peoples money "
While it’s certainly true that we live in a world where capitalism is the dominant economic system and where absolute poverty has been lowered, it doesn’t follow that the former is the cause of the latter, and it *definitely* doesn’t follow that the latter could only have been caused by the former.
Well , there is a lot of missunderstandings in your arguments. Profit is not value and value is social abstraction - not money. Marx talks about profit also , but it would be a great missunderstanding to link this to value in any other way then the fact that value is the fundation of profit. Profit will always float and also over time establish itself on a level regardless of its origin. It will seem like profit live its own life and has been created in the prices.
One of the most fundamental question neglected in any suave speech on Marx is how actually money is generated _ a topic with which Simmel deals more profusely in The phiosophy of money . The point is also think about what happens within college and universities where teaching posts are few and most students resort to some kind of 'sexual labour' to make money . Its truth which academia can never address and be comfortable with . All great literatry or marxist theory boils down to basics . Bodies trade for money, money trades for wares and people are much like in the position of commodities . Do professors benefit from this ? :)
has anyone ever made the comparison between Muhammad and Marx? two guys who had grand visions of paradise on earth if only people would listen to him. their followers praise the ideology and elevate the man as a prophet chosen by god or history to change the world for the better.
People love trifles like football, video games, Music, movies, etc., and these kinds of things should be marketed in the most libertarian way possible with the minimum taxation and state restrictions; now housing, basic food, medicine and education BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS. To say that every human being has the right to life, without giving the BASIC RESOURCES FOR SURVIVAL as a universal right is pure demagoguery. Or are you in favor of life or you are in favour of capitalism, impossible to be both.
That's good in general, however think about what has to happen for those values to balance in the market. The market isn't like a pendulum. It's more like two pendulums tied with a rubber string trying to keep each out in equilibrium but never quite succeeding yet getting close at times. However without government influence on the stability of the system, the market will go from periods of profit to periods of extreme failure. At least the current system minimizes the boom and bust.
I don’t understand why those who are listening and present are laughing , is this lecture on Marxism is stand up comedy , or they think they know better and have condescending attitudes towards common people
Well that's interesting. Because that will also mean less money to buy the cheaper goods with. Thus where is the increased standard of living to come from? Not to mention that all commodities have different amounts of labor in them. They wouldn't all scale equally with a lowering of wages which further adds to the problem.
Capitalism is totally shameful. I have a B.A. in English and communication, an M.A. in film and media, a 3.48 GPA, and I live in a homeless shelter because I am medically limited to a desk job. I have written a novel, three stage plays, five screenplays, and various shorter works, and I have been blogging about my homeless experience and been an activist with Occupy and Picture the Homeless. I have $58,000 in student loan debt. We need to implement Marxism ASAP.
Capitalists don't have to make consumers happy, they have to increase their profits. These do not necessarily overlap: for instance, marketing forms roughly 9% of the GDP, creating misinformed consumers. Under roughly free market principles (ignoring Catallaxy and encomia to Somalia) there is a left skew away from a Pareto distribution as compared to the right skew the economist actually ignored in his data - lowering purchase power for the poorest.
I was reading before I entered preschool and pegged as a genius when I entered kindergarten. The last wave of standardized tests I took (10th grade) put me in the 98th percentile for cognitive skills, 97 percent and above in all language arts areas, 86 percent in mathematical concepts, and 74% in math computation. My SAT scores were 620 verbal and 490 math. No intelligent person would claim that I should be a field laborer.
That’s only because an intelligent person, aware of the is/ought gap, would not argue that you ‘should’ be anything in particular. Do you feel like you *deserve* to be something other than a field labourer?
I reckon anything attached to Marx should be held to the same scrutiny assigned to oh, let's say Christianity. A smattering of Christian guilt and the whole colossus is demolished. How much more so is Marx culpable.
"How is it that as we speak that those in Greece are rummaging through garbage cans" Probably because they thought that good can come from through compulsion. The same reason in the age of religious dominance most lived in abject poverty. The use of force helps one group; those who control the force.
All societies that don't interfere with interest rates are Capitalist societies, from hunter gatherer societies up to the present day, and in the present day we are witness to the economic sabotage central banks cause with policies that promote ludicrously low interest rates, thereby retarding capital formation that would be used for new business ventures. The deleterious effects of low interest rates are apparent to those who rely on interest payment dividends from a Certificate of Deposit to supplement a major proportion of every day living expenses. As the interest rate declines on longer maturing CDs to abysmally low levels, many are forced out of CDs because the dividend of the longer maturing CD is no longer covering the living expenses it once did, and consumers need the principal now. Others transfer to shorter maturity CDs, just in case the principal is needed. This results in less capital available for business projects that require relatively longer time periods to begin to pay back loans. To illustrate the difference between productivity increases that net (new) capital formation accomplishes and consumption-based investments (old investments that are currently selling consumption goods), let's take a look at two hunter gatherer tribes that live near to each other, then we'll take a look at what happens when a central bank intervenes by artificially lowering interest rates... Tribe A saved more by looking for food less, placing that saved time into creating a net that would increase the catch of fish. We can say that Tribe A has a greater productive edge than does Tribe B, whose members are still using sharpened sticks to catch fish--very laborious and relatively unproductive. Now Tribe A decides, due to its higher productivity/wealth, it can afford to save more time, adding this saved time to the saved time it used for making fishing nets, and build a boat that will allow their nets to catch even more fish. Being busy building boats, Tribe A teaches Tribe B to build the nets--a less productive venture than the new boat-building venture is. Now imagine that a central bank enters the picture, and instructs Tribe B to construct less productive (less needed) tables and chairs instead of the critically needed and more productive fishing nets. Well, not only has Tribe B wasted precious time, it's now starving along with Tribe A. A table and chairs are consumption-based wasteful goods, while a fishing net and boat are a critical investment in the future greater abundance in food. Is the picture clearer now? You see, in the modern economy the money we save is the "saved time" that Tribe A used to construct nets/boats, but since interest is being intentionally kept low by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, there can be no new capital formation (money that's used for new long-term productive investments) in Western economies (nor Japan) for new productive ventures, because the lure for such new investments--the higher rate of return that higher, market-based, interest rates offer--is non-existent. As such then we see that Capitalism exited during the hunter-gatherer era, and witness the negative effect on that era's economic development should a central bank come into existence that lowered our hunter-gatherers' interest rates by artificially lowering the amount of "saved time" used for new productive enterprises. When Marx deduced the Law of Value he forgot that Laws must explain phenomena for all eras, not just the narrowly defined age that Marx believed is the Capitalist era. The Law of Value doesn't only exist in Marx's arbitrarily defined Capitalist era, but for all eras of human existence. For more on this subject, read my articles "The Poverty of Karl Marx's Dialectical Materialism" sites.google.com/site/deanjackson60/the-poverty-of-karl-marx-s-dialectical-materialism ...and... "Capitalism Needs Higher, Market Based, Interest Rates; Mercantilism Needs Government Sanctioned Low Interest Rates" sites.google.com/site/deanjackson60/capitalism-needs-higher-market-based-interest-rates-mercantilism-needs-government-sanctioned-low-interest-rates Then for the explanation why the West's central banks are sabotaging their respective economies with capital formation retarding low interest rates policies, read my article, "The Marxist Co-Option Of History And The Use Of The Scissors Strategy To Manipulate History Towards The Goal Of Marxist Liberation" sites.google.com/site/deanjackson60/the-marxist-co-option-of-history-and-the-use-of-the-scissors-strategy-to-manipulate-history-towards-the-goal-of-marxist-liberation
Understanding MARX makes mankind becoming humans. (Could a native speaker translate this please into proper English? - or did I have luck in formulating this ? :-)
No that wasn't my point at all. My point was that your 'profit' has negative as well as positive characteristics. As for technology yes that's how that work. Capitalism works. However it's flaws continue to undermine progress. What's profitable is not necessarily good. Tell me this. How far can technology progress until it's benefits undermine capitalism (ie robotics)?
Not quite. I'm not expecting to be "persuasive" in 2 sentences. But I AM mentioning 2 specific areas in which Marx "sucks." (1) his "labor" theory of value; and (2) his failure to anticipate the potential for producing cheap abundance that is available to "the masses" on a scale that couldn't be imagined in the 1800's. If you'd care to defend this ridiculous "labor" theory of value, ww w. marxist. com/marx-marxist-labour-theory-value. htm I'd be interested in seeing what you have to say.
There's no such thing as a darwinist. If you mean people who accept the theory of evolution, they are called bioligists. And that subject has nothing at all to do with Bush. You need to ask a politician.
Why marx is wrong on the death of philosophy, the very fact that we are discussing his philosophy on that is a philosophy, so in reality she killed Karl Marx she has had influence and still has influence in the the world if you use scolastic philosophers and other religious philosophers such as Confucius as refrences. lady philosophy is still alive because of the idea of continental philosophy, lady philosophy was not happy when self righteous Karl called her a dead woman.
When Marx talked about the death of philosophy (which isn't an important thesis in his work and he didn't really sustain it), he really meant German speculative idealism, the philosophy of the young hegelians and so on.
@15:40 I take issue with "business ethics is an oxymoron". That is only true for people who are so opposed (or unsuccessful themselves) to successful business owners that they don't even stop to analyze whether their success is legitimate and non-coercive. I have heard Marxists argue in the past that "all workers are exploited". I' m not sure if that statement is correct or not, but for me, that is like saying all carnivores are murderers. Marx was not anti-capitalist, but terry obviously is.
It’s a misunderstanding of the meaning of ‘ethics’. In everyday language people assume that ‘ethical’ means morally good. Leaving aside their assumption that they somehow know what moral good is, they don’t understand that ‘ethics’ refers to an idea of how a life should be lived, such that ‘business ethics’ is nothing more than a set of guidelines on how to do business.
This is extremely superficial, I was disappointed. Pace Eagleton, Marx is utterly utopian in that he posits an inevitable future communism that he claims will be possible due to a future economic superabundance; but he does not explain how superabundance will be produced or how that alleged future society will work and what its economics will be. He does't have a theory of socialism or communism that goes beyond a vague wishful optimism. The idea of superabundance is utopian, and as is the idea that there will be a "world revolution" brought about by "objective laws of history," as well as the idea that you can have an efficient communist economics under which the workers own the means of production.
He didn’t say anything of the sort. It’s like if I thought Jesus said the richer I am the more god loves me, it just ain’t true no matter what prosperity doctrine Hillsong pastors quoted.
Capitalism has always functioned this way. Corporate fascism is only the natural extreme of capitalism, which seeks to subordinate the working masses to the will of a tiny ruling class for profit.
I know for a fact that Marx read Roussea's Social Contract and his other one about "The Origins of inequality among men". Marx would also know, that in ch 9 of the Social Contract Rousseau clearly declares that those who have previously agreed with it, but who now disagree..should be given the death penalty! That was the ideology behind Robispierre's mass murder of Priests and supposed Aristocrats but ended up being his closest allies and friends... until they tweaked to the "Next it will be me" idea and disposed of him. Unfortunately for mankind....the problem is not..NOT 'the system'..... our problem with inequality and injustice is ourselves.. our greed, our lust, our passion for power and control.. you know..like a Male lion! "Biff Punch Scratch Bite" ... I WANT THOSE FEMALES..then you kill the offspring of the lionesses.. impregnate them and continue through life expanding your gene pool...and if you do not believe in a Created world, no matter how much you will deny it...'that' is where you are philosophically and politically left...and perhaps I should say "Left".... The Political Left is like a Mormon or Jehovah's witness..they really DO believe they have the absolute truth.... THE truth... but.. the Left is left languishing in the quicksand of wishful thinking and fantasy by reality. You see... all you deluded atheists, marxists, socialists, anarchists... by your view it's all about 'genes' whether you admit it or not. You see.. the science is clear...even if your oxytocin and vassopressin challenged minds are not.
wow....this is the biggest pile of B.S. I've heard since reading Marx. Yeah, he wasn't an egalitarian, he was an elitist--this guys literally says this as if it's a good thing. This is the most ignorant thing I've heard in a long time
Sorry. I don't believe you've actually read, Marx. Marx's entire premise is based on the dissolution of CLASS and the fairer distribution of political power and engagement. I'd love to see the evidence for your claim!
Then please head over to Venezuela as an average person and live there. Since 1988 Venezuela has plummeted very low. Secondly Marx butchered Hegel. Thirdly Marx made mistakes on Capitalism. Fourth suggest to check Ayn Rand on Capitalism. Lastly Capi like the word Capo means boss but also head in Latin, as a human being you have sovereignty as Boss/Head of finances rather than someone coming into your life and deciding now they own your wealth. If you still enjoy communism please place your ban details for all of us to use. Sharing means caring for the wolves in sheep clothes.
To advocate capitalism is to assume responsibility for the outcomes of your life. "Externalities" are mere excuses for all those that want to avoid such responsibility. Many hard working citizens have gone from rugs to riches by tackling their inner problems namely the subsequent misery from attributing everything to external factors is a major hurdle in the course of psychological maturing of the individual. Communists are predominantly lazy, irresponsible human beings (young individuals tend to be so) that were led by an equally lazy irresponsible human being by the name of Karl Marx. Just looking into his life is enough to distill that he's no good. Especially when it comes to moral advocations and the "common good" (who knows what is "common good" anyway? How do one defines the term?). For crying out loud the man lost 4 of 7 of his children from neglect, fathered a son with his maid (who he never paid as a worker) and never recognised it, never paid his dues from receiving goods and services that sustained him, never returned borrowed money (at some point he was forced by his loaners to sell the beds in his house to pay them back - at the time he was receiving a substantial yearly amount - yet he was incapable to manage his economics, a failure in every aspect). I give it to him he was quite photogenic just like the butcher Che Guevara - one could say "their only real success in life".
Michael Jackson was a kiddie fiddler which is why his music is awful and rubbish - that’s essentially the argument you’re making. Personally, I like MJs music but have issue with his personal morality *and* I have the ability to distinguish and hold both positions in mind at the same time.
@@davespanksalot8413 Not really! Marx was a journalist that wanted to be seen as an economist but couldn’t even manage his home economics (which led to the ultimate demise of many of his kids).
@@C_R_O_M________ So according to what you’re saying because he wasn’t good with money and was awful to his family his analysis of the contemporaneous sociopolitical economic structures are invalid?
@@davespanksalot8413 I don’t know! Would you trust a surgeon that operates the wrong part of the body? A driving instructor that every time he drives crashes? A pilot that has never managed to take a plane off the ground? You see where that’s going? Moreover, the man was mistaken on every single assumption he made. From his stupid theory of (surplus) value and the internal consistency of his theory (something that Von Bawerk proved even while Marx was alive!) to his Hegelian based world-theory.
@@C_R_O_M________ So here you are proposing that a political economist whose theories are wrong is not worth engaging with because of the resulting lack of trust in his erroneous theories, especially according to an economist from the end of the 19th century? And that’s why his personal behaviour has no impact on his ideas because he was already mistaken in his theories but his awful personal life also shows why he shouldn’t be trusted? Have I summarised your comments reasonably?
What classes exist and what are the sufficient conditions one must meet to belong to each of these classes? That is, what classes are there and how do we divide these classes up?
sgt7 you are not sticking to capitalism you are sticking to your needs which is provided by capitalst economy , of course not sufficient. once you loose such benefits from yur beloved system your class character come on the surface . If you are lucky enough you will experience this when you loose your job in next recession.
Kangaroo Fox I've had far worse happen to me than lose a job. This never had the effect of convincing me that socialism is a better social/economic system. I took responsibility, worked hard and I'm doing pretty well now.
Wow, I'm surprised that so many people who have never read Marx have such strong opinions about him.
False consciousness everywhere. haha.
Those who hate Marx most know the least about him and his works.
zombiesingularity True, although Marxist-Leninists don't know much more about Marx either.
BUT MUH ANTI REVISIONISM
*****
You know what is funny, Marx was the original person to use the phrase 'cult of personality' in a political sense, and the first thing that Marx did is denounce it.
Here's a quote from Marx, when that phrase was first used:
"Neither of us cares a straw of popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult [orig. Personenkultus] that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves [...] to accord me public honor, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity"
Studying business and accounting for 4 years then experiencing 22 years of labor in logistics and retail this quote converted me pretty quickly.
"In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production."
Currently 40% of food produced is thrown away. Overproduction devalues a commodity price below cost of production leading to bankruptcy and food is the most overproduced things.
Overproduction, planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity and artificial consumption... capitalism is a mountain of contradictions.
During the last 20 years, as we know, there has been a concentration of capital by the formation of trusts such as Marx in his boldest flights of imagination could never have dreamed of. Especially is this the case in the United States of America, where we get the best examples of these giant undertakings. According to the latest statistics, no less than 8,664 concerns which were formerly independent are now amalgamated in a few Trusts with a capital of 20,000 million dollars. Of these seven of the ‘greater’ industrial trusts contain 1,528 concerns formerly independent, and possess a capital of 2,663 million dollars. The six largest railway trusts are even better placed; they have a capital of 9,017 million dollars!
What are concerns?
False consciousness is everywhere. If you actually listened to all of this or read the book you would not be so ignorant about Marx's philosophy.
+Foliorum Viridium Well, I have read the New Testament IN GREEK. You could read at least about Marx in English. Marx never claimed to have all the answers or to be God. He just wanted working people to have better lives than could be had at the time, or now. I don't buy that the Jesus of the Gospels is the historical Jesus, for many many reasons. Read Bertrand Russell's book "Why I am Not A Christian" if Marx is too tough for you.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Historically, before Marx there was NO labor movement. Weekends and the 8 hour day are some things you have Marx to thank for.
+Foliorum Viridium Your premise is that Marx should be dismissed, since everybody wants working people to have better lives. Ergo, your premise is utter tosh. Those behind the predatory lending, to name just one group, didn't give a damn about working people.
+Foliorum Viridium Then why do you have a picture of Karl Marx on the cross rocking some awesome avant-garde headwear?
@@coulton-davisjazz2872 "Before Marx there was NO labor movement"... this is incredibly ignorant. I don't mean that as an insult, but as a fact. Class struggle has existed since societies have had classes. That's just reality.
People who know reality and in turn themselves are aware that Marx was a visionary who saw right through capitalism and it's inherent exploitative nature.
+Jasper Mercy Since Adam Smith, Capitalism doubled life expectancy in 150 years, gave us cell phones to communicate with people across the planet, and cars allowing us to have access to more goods than most wealthy people in history. He opposes that which has given us the most time saving devices, giving us the very leisure he sought out.
Please reconsider your position.
@@KeithKnightDontTreadonAnyone no
All large-scale political and economic systems are exploitative inasmuch as all such systems treat humans as means rather than ends in themselves. However, this is not a bug; rather it is a feature of human society.
Obviously all the replies are from those who don’t fall under the categories I mentioned initially. “The Futurist”, who hasn’t read enough history evidently. No, exploiting one another is not an intrinsic feature of humanity at all 🙄.
People who understand modern (updated) Economics tend not to believe that way. In fact, statistics indicate more knowledge in Economics, less Marxism. Maybe visionary, but still defensor of problematic beliefs whose practical application was up to 100 million deaths. Have a nice day!
It ia impressive the amount of prejudices associated with the figure of Karl Marx. He had nothing to do with the comunist systems of the XXth century. His thought was appropriated by these systems. This is what Eagleton as a real reader of Marx has tried to show and it is not new!
lol, I mean I'm a socialist but it'd be hard to say that they had "nothing" to do with marx. I mean even if you think they perverted his ideas that's still something.
Claudio Costa really he was the first expressed the idea of a holocaust of the masses to erase class and race
@n. фффвär What about PR China, North Korea, Kambodja, Cuba and on and on and on? Why cant somebody say that "Mein Kampf" had nothing to do with Nazism also? Its the same outrageous statement.
@Jim P This idea an underrated comment. You are absolutely correct. It's actually pretty scary to see how people still try to excuse or otherwise explain away the facts of a movement that is objectively responsible for significantly more deaths than the Holocaust (which they claim to abhor, ironically enough).
Marx and Engles were great fools.
Marx was more realistic then people give him credit for.
Terrible outcome.
He was a fool. He was possibly the single biggest fool of all time.
@@charlesnwarren have you read "capital"? have you read "the german ideology"?
@@hansmuller4338 I've read everything in print that Marx wrote in English. "Capital?" Sure. Twenty years in the writing, it still stands as the only book he'd published. Overwrought with nonsense, it came across as a confusing series of postulations and predictions for the future of capitalism perishing within, while communism would thrive. That was his recurring theme.
Historically, the exact reverse proved true.
Check his authoritative biography. He allowed his eleven year-old son to starve to death, while his poor wife ran begging in the streets of London for money to pay for her son's burial. His two daughters hated him, and refused to speak of him.
Marx had a maid who lived with his family, and she's an interesting figure who worked for free.
" A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism." first line of the Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels.
The Communist Manifesto has nothing of substance in it really.
Marx wrote so much good analysis and critique, but the manifesto is "only" a "combat organ".
If you are looking for deeper thought the manifesto is not the way to go.
Go for "the german ideology" "critique of critical critique" or of course most prominent "capital"
hans müller ok. Thank you very much for the information. Hope you’re well.
hans müller Das Kapital is his magnum opus but the Manifesto should not be so readily disparaged - it is an excellent introduction to the Marxist critique of capitalist production, the first chapter especially. Those who are not already acquainted with the Marxists critique should start with the Manifesto and then study Das Kapital which is a much more demanding work and probably too difficult for most people to really understand without some help.
conny lake Allow me suggest starting with the Manofesto - it’s an excellent introduction to Marx’s critique of capitalism - and then try reading Capital, which is his magnum opus but also a very lengthy and demanding work. Also, check out the Marx-Engels Reader, a compendium of their writings with samples from various works.
Yeah, read the rest of it.
Someone wrote "socialism promises but Capitalism delivers," But Capitalism makes losers out of all but a few winners. Production should be according to social need, not private greed. Capitalism has a false promise built into it. You too can GET RICH!
tell that to Venezuela.
Capitalism ensures freedom.
@@charlesnwarren for a few countries? few classes? few castes? few races?
@@swamivardana9911 Yeah, tell that to a country whose economy is a 60~70% privatized "free" market
@@subashsankar8019 you have no experience of Socialist India. Right.
Very interesting, what people don't realise is that Marx saw man/woman as a creative force and the material progress that could be experience by the mechanisation of industry provided a chance for less labour and more time to explore creativity. Unfortunately, that old human flaw greed got in the way.
then you have, say, Stalin starving 50 million people...there's that...
Marx’s idea of human nature (or ‘species being’ as it is more commonly translated) was naive and simplistic. Greed, for him, was a by-product of economic systems that favoured the greedy, but it is impossible to say that this must be the case. Greed is a property of humans, not a flaw (it is only conceived of as a flaw based on theistic moralities which prescribe charity and humility). There are reasons to be careful of excessive greed, but it is the excess and not the greed itself that is the problem.
Many thinkers conceived of humans as creative, and Marx was not unique in this regard. What set him apart was his attempt to fuse Hegelian dialectic, theistic morality, Clauswitzian strategy and a generally optimistic sentiment into a historical model of social progress. Interestingly there has so far been no instances of a capitalist society transitioning into a communist one (all communist societies had been autocratic previously), and only one capitalist society has transitioned into a different form entirely: Germany in the 1930s.
Lastly, Marx was very clear about how mechanisation would lead to alienation (of the worker from the product of their labour) and it’s difficult to see how this, for him, would be in any way desirable.
@@thefuturist8864 You're spot on. Marx thrived because of the superfluous artificial hypocritic Abrahamic religions. We Hindoos are nevee impressed by Marx. Because man is innately pestered by Kaama, Krodha , Moha, Madha ...and so on and these things drive him in worldly affairs.
Lust, Vindictiveness , Pride, Obsession, Jealousy and other vices flock together and drive a man to work and love and have children.
To escape from this you have to embrace spirituality but that's another story
You obviously don't know how difficult it is to get a loan, or the fact that 70% of all new businesses fail.
Marxism is not state capitalism. Marxism is vehemently opposed to state capitalism.
So you think lack of safety regulations helps the poor? That's the idiocy of Milton Friedman.
Did you listen to anything said in this discussion?
Oscar Wilde's vision of the future = brilliant ;-) Good comprehensive speech by Eagleton.
hmm. the same Oscar Wilde who converted to Catholicism near death?
and the same oscar wilde who wrote an extremely gay book cause he was secretly gay@@glennlanham6309
Marx is making a come back. Capitalism is finished.
this is 5 years old and uhhh... nope... sure isn't ^_^
You mad?
Capitalism is the only economic system we know of that can monetise, and profit from, its own detractors. It’s more adaptable than any other system, economic or otherwise. It’s not going anywhere. In fact, this could prove incredibly useful to activist groups who are becoming increasingly aware of how to use capitalism to help achieve various ends.
That's not what philosophy is for exploiting labour and alienating the product from the labourer. Only with the bastards within catholic religion .
Great book by Terry Eagleton. Provides such an insight into the works of karl marx which I've gotten very into recently and have been a big influence on my own thinking
What a great mind this man has. Very insightful.
He was a loser and a life Ling leech ie a BUM
and you worship that? Says more about how dumb you are as opposed to how ridiculous marx was
what strikes me at quick glance is just how illogical the arguments for capitalism are vs what is offered by ones who seemingly lean towards socialist or communist theories; indeed even the ones that are for capitalism that are logical, all seem to wish for more constraints on how capitalism operates today which would lend it's self again to socialism. i'm not offering an argument here, just a observation.
You still on that train of thought?
How does one save and invest when all their income goes to living expenses?
I'll help you. Give me your budget and I'll sort it out how you can save and invest.
The poorest American is richer than the rich Indian. You can always save. Living expenses does not include Iphones and branded wear. Clothes are meant to be worn till the threads separate. You make your meals from scratch and run 5000$ cars. Booze and drugs is not a living expense nor are vacations.
@@swamivardana9911 Your first sentence is complete bullshit. Your next five sentences show you've bought into the welfare queen lie.
@@scottandrewhutchins I never talked about welfare. Presently an Indian worker will get 4.00 $ a shift of eight hours.
I make about 6,000 $ A YEAR. that makes me rich.
Do the maths.
@@swamivardana9911 Ludicrous. Purchasing power is the only measure that makes any sense for comparison.
5:04: "one of the tragedies of the twentieth century ...socialism was most necessary where it was least possible...."; 8:43: "...the only image of the future is the failure of the present...."; 9:06: '...for Marx, eating a peach is production.... 10:30:...his ideal was leisure, not labor....".
its interesting to hear how almost any notion the average educated contemporary individual would have in marx is actually an opposite to the truth. Especially the part where eagleton says marx was not necessarily in favor of violent revolution over peaceful reform. That's so incredibly contrary to what we are taught about him that i'm still doubtful about that point
Well, you know, Marx had a history. As in, the old Marx did not believe in the same things the young Marx did. The Marx of the Communist Manifesto did believe in a revolution, which was not something communist conspirators instigated, but something which would be brought forth by the evolution of capitalism itself. The old Marx, as he had seen how the Paris Commune failed, thought that the proletariat could not simply take over power and impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. He even says so in the preface to the later editions of the communist manifesto. I'm not quite sure what the old Marx thought about revolution, he seemed a bit undecided on the point.
It is my understanding, and I've been reading Marx and about Marx for some time, that he didn't see revolution as something favorable, but as something inevitable. I mean if there was another way we could reach communism (for Marx the return to a natural status of living with no middle class or war or exploitation or ruling government) then of course that would be awesome. But revolution for Marx was a natural occurrence of things, it was an almost scientific law for him. And he didn't approve of what the communists were doing, that much is for sure. In the beginning he was with them, he supported them, wrote the Manifesto, but when he saw the direction it took, he was like no this isn't what I was talking about at all you guys are doing something else. It's what finally led him to declare that he himself was not a Marxist.
Mishima Concerning the revolution: Yes, that's precisely what I meant to say when I talked about the Marx of the communist manifesto, that's precisely how he formulated his point at that time. It is quite probable that he still regarded revolution as inevitable in his latter years, though I don't know whether he wrote about it... About his relationship to other communists: I really don't know about that. I know Engels mentioned in a letter that Marx said he wasn't a marxist... which I always understood in the sense of: I'm not infallible, so don't dogmatically "apply my teachings", continue to expand and refine my theoretical work instead. So, what's going to replace liberal capitalism? It looks like it'll be either authoritarian state capitalism (sort of like China) or a sort of Pinochet-meets-Bush capitalism, with little or no welfare state, class apartheid, repressive military and police control and a lot of privatization or a mixture of both. If we don't do anything, that is... seems like the good old choice of socialism or barbarism we last faced in the thirties. So, what will it mean to choose socialism? the 20th century idea of state socialism seems to be the quickest way to "capitalism with asian values". I still support the nationalization of health care, banks, energy companies, rail companies and heavy industry. But then what?
AgentHomer I think you're a little mislead. if you first look at the dictionary definitions of free market capitalism and state capitalism, and then at the facts about countries instead of looking at the ideology taught in school, the only real capitalist countries are third-world countries that got liberal capitalism imposed on them by groups like the IMF (who grant loans to states on the condition that they liberalize. oh gosh, guess which states are the suppliers and which are the recipients of these loans. also, a loan is a power relation), while western corporations can dominate developing markets (that are now liberalized for them) and benefit from economics of scale by producing subsidized goods (aka colonialism - the same principle that transformed Asia from an industrialized and technocratic society into the shithole it has been in the 20th century. Fun fact: Bangladesh in 1800 produced steamers and railroads for the British to fight Napoleon with. Europe could only impose these measures because it had a greater tradition of war and violence, not anything else). Now you get why a media war is being waged against countries like cuba and iran, because their closed markets mean they might have an actual chance at development and sovereignty. The west does not tolerate that. First world countries today are extremely state-capitalist. This is also true domestically: the vast majority of our technology and products resulting therefrom originate in and profit from state investments (one of the many examples being electronics). A corporation can officially be 'private' but they blackmail western (national or regional) governments into giving them tax exempts and sudsidies by threatening to outsource themselves, thus endangering short-term domestic employment which wouldn't last forever but would last about a presidential term. the difference is that the people of our glorious democracies don't get a vote in this, while accountability is nonexistant (because god forbid, might a corporation actually intentionally do something that would actually benefit the population masses on spaceship earth?). Of course you can think of other fun things corporations do with this politcial influence, be it in the field of media, foreign policy or education. The ''free market vs. nationalisation'' debate that education emphasizes is plain propaganda for the sake of misdirecting the public. to summarize, our education in economics does not account for the fact that corporations will stop at nothing to get their profits (because it is required of them by law), even if this means they have to destroy everything. Prosperity is sometimes an unintentional phenomenon in a free market, not an intention. all this can only be changed by revolution, because there can be no benevolent corporate manager ; he'd just get fired by the shareholders. In economics, silly things like 'progress for humanity and a sustainable human community'' are just geeky side-note externals,
AgentHomer I should definitely take the chronology of his writings into account and research the issue further, as it definitely has relevance to the issue. I know I myself have changed my opinions radically over the years (though I am in my twenties and I guess that's only expected), but I would hate for people to hold me to exactly what I believed even five years ago, as I was kind of an idiot back then (and maybe I'll be saying the same things 25 years from now). But yeah, Marxism as it was practiced by Stalin and Mao really looked nothing like what Marx would have called communism. He was pretty vague on what that would look like, but it is pretty clear it would have looked nothing like, what (I think it was Foucault who said this) ended up becoming nothing more than a kind of State Capitalism, with the replacement of one upper class for another.
As for his feelings regarding reform, it is my understanding that he did not believe it would work, like you correctly pointed out, because any change from within would simply get scooped up in its own ideology and become more of the same. And so revolution from outside could only incite real change. But of course, as I've just expressed, even this ended up being more of the same. Which has led many neo-Marxists to say stuff like "Capitalism always wins, it will always absorb everything into itself" and that kind of thing. I don't have an opinion here yet (still sorting out all the arguments in my mind and weighing them against each other) but it is just very interesting to me all the same.
I read (listened to an audio book) the communist manifesto a few days ago, the first part is sublime. Everything is true, nothing invented nor biased. You can feel the honesty and passion behind every word chosen.
The best part? I ALREADY KNEW what Marx was going to say, all he did was confirm my ideas. That to me, proves 100 % that ''Marxism'' (or communism, economic justice, call it whatever you want), is eternally true and just. No one can ever justify that somehow one person deserves more money then he knows what to do with, while millions starve.
A book is not true or just merely because it confirms your beliefs.
@@thefuturist8864 It confirms every rational thinking human's beliefs about basic economic justice, not just mine, so yes it is very true in that case.
Eagleton is a genius, and he explains the genius of Marx lucidly and wittily, both in this talk and in the book. Just as he did for the potentially arid subject of literary theory in `Literary Theory: An Introduction`.
Why are so many people in this comment thread SO opposed to democracy and personal empowerment?
I like how Eagleton had a go at Simon Cowell at 17:30. Ha ha
You made heck of an assumption. Take for example food. People would produce it because it has value, that value being they need it too survive. Profit however would not necessarily mean they'd have an extra reason to produce food. If they produced too much food the market would decrease it's profitability (inflation). This gives the producer an incentive to produce less if not minimum to maintain profit rather then use. Profit is not a one way variable.
It’s not always the case that producing more of something *necessarily* leads to its value being lowered. There are a few ways in which this can be mitigated, such as reserving certain items considered to have, or indicate, higher social status. If it’s a particular commodity rather than a general one it can be harder to produce this outcome, but not impossible (such as how supermarkets might take a quarter of a particular foodstuff and sell it as a ‘finer’ version).
Where money itself is the commodity, a modern economy allows for more currency to be added without lowering its value so long as steps are taken to reinforce the general belief that the money is, in fact, worth something.
He says Marx’s was not arguing in favour of equality but in the communist manifesto he does advocate a highly progressive form of taxation.
So interesting that the imagery of Marxs ideal system is almost the antithesis of what we have always considered communistic life to be...i.e dull,grey,austere, grim and souless
The propaganda has been FIERCE! Marx has become a boogie man for the Capitalists to draw discord among the masses. It's especially obvious in this comment section how little people actually know of Marxist thought (ie SO many ad hominems and garbled concepts)!
Great stuff!
If you're a communist int the 21st century.
@@charlesnwarren marx is still relevant👍🏻
For last time , he wasnt right , he was left
Ay lmao
What I love most about Marx is his writing?
Incredible mastery of the language, literary genius.
We in the present stand on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Marx. We know nothing of the depth of his thought and writings.
He championed capitalism as he saw it a stepping stone to communist society, whether it is a necessary step is the drama of human history?
I was also impressed to learn and had verified that the earliest document that is socialist in nature was the Celtic Book of Laws 15th century.
People like you and I have the benefit of access to the real documents digitized in virtual libraries of the major libraries in the world through the Internet is how i find stuff to study and learn.
I read (listened to an audio book) the communist manifesto a few days ago, the first part is sublime. Everything is true, nothing invented nor biased. You can feel the honesty and passion behind every word chosen.
The best part? I ALREADY KNEW what Marx was going to say, all he did was confirm my ideas. That to me, proves 100 % that ''Marxism'' (or communism, economic justice, call it whatever you want), is eternally true and just. No one can ever justify that somehow one person deserves more money then he knows what to do with, while millions starve.
Revolutionary Greetings Metal Coasters, a good read.
I wanted to ask you by the way, about a question that crossed my mind. What would happen even if capitalism is abolished and the means of production are not private, what would happen to the independent workers? For example a garbage man that works for no company but rather for himself, would he still be poor since people will seek the cheapest work out there because there is a lot of ''potential'' garbage men? And same goes for a doctor that works for himself, people will have no choice to pay what he asks (a higher price), since there is not so many doctors. Would we simply remain in a system where your income is based on how replaceable you are? And if so, what would be the solution then?
I would suggest reading Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, written in 1846 Edited by C.J. Arthur. Your questions are close to the questions this book addresses as part of the development of the criticism of capitalism. Dissolving the class nature of production abolishes both capital and wage-labor in production. Production is no longer divided along class distinctions with workers on the one side as hired and managers on the other side as capital. If wages as the main form of income for workers is abolished their independence as a 'free worker' is also abolished, along with its opposite, capital is abolished. What is left? Production and 330 million people, they all work for themselves and families and for society as a whole? How much time does an individual work? This answer varies with the state of science and technology. Some societies could have a 40 hour work week for individuals because productivity is low. Some per capita a 20 hour work week because productivity is high. Labor is no longer the measure of value, people are not used as the specific means by which one can become super rich. Labor is labor, useful labor, and anyone who can perform it is regarded indispensable. Industries do not produce according to demand they produce according to need. A doctor's compensation for his/her labor is the health of their patient not the social status of their income. Many, many doctors would leave the US as individuals unable to adjust to a loss of a life luxury consumption.
Worse yet, the super rich individuals who have no useful skills of their own, as people who do not work, that is, would launch with their capital a counter-revolt to defeat a socialist society unable and unwilling to adjust to a life of luxury abstinence. But go read the GI, its a great read for more of its implications. Be well.
DXR interesting, thanks for the reply!
I just arrived from Jordan Peterson's channel where Marx is being described as someone flirting with satanism and here I hear that Marxism is about love... Mad world 😂
Respectfully, Peterson is a charlatan.
Oh dear me not Jordan Peterson. I'm so Sorry you went through that ordeal. The man talks so much nonsense.
@@lobotobot154My sir, you're far too kind.
@@AcceptfactsNreality haha. I think the man has some good ideas from time to time. But I've been a bit disappointed with him because he uses some dirty rhetorical tactics to win the arguments when he interviews people. Also, it seems he uses his podcast interviews only to sell his own thoughts and he's not really interested in the ideas of the people he invites. It's frustrating.
@@rodrigoffdsilva did you see JBP's 'debate' with Zizek? JBP admitted that he's only ever read PART of the Communist Manifesto. That was fairly recent so you know how shallow his understanding of the theory, despite his extensive, word-salad rhetoric.
fascinating, thank you
a shame that we didnt get the discussion that went on after
So "Marx Was Right" was he?
Well, everyone is bound to be "right" about a few things once in a while.
But when you supposedly create theories about economics and you get something so basic as the theory of value so absolutely wrong that it's laughable, then there's not much to account for you being "right" overall in your general conclusions.
Marx was so fundamentally wrong about the value of goods, the potential for abundance, and just basic human nature that he's merely a relic of history.
Commercial banks create money and decide who gets it. It's not the poor with business ideas and no capital.
Marx loved Mozart (step over the millions of dead bodies via socialism and communism) and was on the side of the worker (forget the Gulags & killing fields) but was right about capitalism (despite the fact poor people in Capitalist nations are the wealthiest people in the world).
You can't logically equivocate Marxism to any regime that called themselves Socialists. Even if places like the SU and PRC were Socialistic, and they weren't, (as the revolution failed in an industrialized country like Germany, unindustrialized countries had to Industrialize themselves, and elected to do so through a system known as State Capitalism, whereby the state owns and controls Capital like a private firm would with wage labor, workplace hierarchy etc...), then you still can't say that they're the same. Material conditions are radically different in different places and different times. Political oppression was a result of the Russian and Chinese situations, not some magical property of Socialism.
+Keith Knight
you can't hold marx responsible for these things! he didn't advocate for the gulag or sovjet-style communism, nor do they follow logically from his views. (they may in practice, but that's empirical data marx didn't have.)
you should not dehumanize the guy.
and no, i'm not a marxist.
The same old tired rhetoric... *"Those countries just didn't do it right! But trust us, when WE do it, it'll be perfect!"* Marxism fails to recognize human nature, because the moment any marxist did, they would have to abandon marxism as untenable. And so, like all utopian ideologies, they simply pretend that human nature is not in fact what human nature undeniably is, and that all of the character traits inherent to human beings which illustrate why their ideology could never work, are merely 'a product of the current system'. But as soon as we switch over to our glorious system, these traits will magically vanish.
RileyKaiSeeker Firstly, human nature isn't static, or unchanging. It's dependent on external conditions, look at any epoch of history or even radically differing contemporary societies. Secondly, Communism isn't predicated on some childish notion of "altruism". It is just as applicable to greed as Capitalism. For many reasons (that this argument isn't about, but that I'd be happy to go into more detail about in the future), Communism would bring up standards of living, making it more rational even when operating on the presumption that people are soley motivated by greed.
Marx strongly opposed and developed his philosophy in opposition to Utopian arguments for Socialism and Communism, namely those of "Utopian Socialists". That's why Marxists and many post Marx Anarchists are referred to as "Scientific Socialists", as opposed to "Utopian Socialists". "Scientific Socialists" because they use scientific analysis to arrive at conclusions about the material world we specifically DON'T use emotion in Marxian analysis, that's the point of Marxian analysis.
First Name Last Name Human beings, just like the other 3 great apes, are hierarchical, they are competitive, they seek social status to stand out of the crowd and they need to be incentivized. These character traits, observable in virtually every mammalian species which live in social groups, have been evolving in us for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years and, yes, are unchanging and static.
I appreciated the Simon Cowell reference 😂
He makes only justice to the true humanist thinker who was Marx.
Bravo Terry Eagleton! you clarify many ideas about Marx thoughts on capitalism; reforms and revolutions; proletarians; environment aspect of economy and Marxist theory . I think you have well explained the essence of Marxism; better than, may be the best economist in the world: in any case you attract my attention, to read your book for this summer holiday, when Capitalism will face its final challenge phase in its historical trends
It's hard to believe but actually quite funny that there are still people in the world who still take Marx seriously.
its hard to believe that he is still not taken seriously
People still profess to believe in astrology, either because they are simple minded or because a money making scam they are running is dependent on it. Despite Marxism being utter nonsense, scams based on this ideology are still extremely lucrative. If astrology and astrologers are still with us, even though this system of belief was superseded by astronomy hundreds of years ago, why would you expect Marxism to disappear overnight?
***** irony of posting commments? ?????
tom thomas nutter? read Capital not adam smith son
DrCruel PLease, i can clearly tell that you read sht about marx. Please read Capital
1.) perhaps you could be more specific, as my understanding of that debate is that its still undecided even among capitalists.
2.) I don't see how this is an issue nor how it contradicts his theories. Marx was well aware of how the progress in society was dramatically effecting the scales of production. Cheap goods is by no means a counter to his theory. Perhaps you should be more specific.
Socialism/Communism promises, Capitalism delivers... need I say more
Liam Sena
correct
delivers to who? your (presumably) privileged middle class ass? does it deliver to the millions of working class people worldwide that slave away and die to make all of materials you love in capitalism? does it deliver to the entire continents that have been colonized and imperialized in the name of capital?
fuck off with your "capitalism delivers" bullshit
commie ... i lived in your fantasy world not on paper but in real life and it sucks .. it promises the sky but delivers only oppressiom and poverty.. spit your bulshit propaganda to someone who cant think ... i was one of the slaves you are talking about and was able to better my life dispite shills like you without stealing from others, all trough voluntary contracts and exchange. so go troll somewhere where no critical thinking is required they will believe you
TheMraptor Mind informing exactly which supposed "communist state" you came from?
riiiiiiiiight .... they were not true sociaist/communists ... spare me this non-argument... don't get offended but really please come up with some more original argument.. this is getting tiresome.
The resource is SCARCE by default/nature and the best system yet known to man is private property, voluntary contacts and the free market to manage this scarcity.
Any top-down approach be it Socialism or Fascism is prone to bring only misery and poverty. You don't have to be rocket scientist to figure that.
Let me really simplify it..
No private property no incentive to better yourself => no division of labor => no trade => no price. No price no way to do economic calculation. No calculation, No way to manage natural scarcity.
This in short is called the Calculation problem (look it up on in Internet) was posed to Socialists ~100 years ago ... not a satisfactory answer yet. That is 100 years, hellooo !!!
Then there is even more hard Knowledge problem which discredit all the current schemes of Social Democracy, Crony capitalism and such...
Socialism is logically impossible if you simply apply basic economics principles, not to mention all the incentive problems (who will take the trash) ... etc.
Then you have all the 20th century disastrous experiments ... I'm still wondering how ppl bend their minds to believe in this suicidal ideology.
That is the reason I said what I said : Socialism looks good on paper but all experiments of making it work killed millions of ppl in the mean time the partially-free-market took billions of ppl out of poverty in last 50y including me.
So I stand by what I said :
Socialism promises, Capitalism delivers.
yes it is abit catchy, but I like it ;)
although eagleton failed in south africa he should be given credit
I don't think he's quite right on how listening to Mozart is productive labour. Marx writes "Productive labour, therefore, is labour which - in the system of capitalist production - produces surplus value for its employer or which converts the objective conditions of labour into capital, and their owners into capitalists, hence, labour which produces its own product as capital" - though he does also write that every act of consumption is an act of production, stimulating future supply.
He was not right he was defiantly left
Hey-O 😂
Terry Eagleton is a fine literary essayist, no doubt about it, making his best in convincing the audience no less than himself how cool Marx's marxism´really was. However is obvious he lacks any training in economics whatsoever. That’s why he takes for granted that an overarching holistic approach in dealing with economic processes is the best thing in town. It is a clumsy way to do it. A botanist does not need a whole grandiose conception of life in conducting her trade, nor an engineer on how the cosmos works. Holism is metaphysical quasi theological assumption, a child in this case of the first half XIX century German monumental philosophy. In economics you do not understand macro processes if you lack an understanding of microeconomics ones, not the other way round. The holistic approach has, besides, empirical consequences: to discard off hand the value of piecemeal cumulative changes in improving a society. A thing that Marx, notwithstanding what Eagleton says, regarded at best as a mere tactical value in pursuing the transformation of a society in its totality if not dismissed as palliatives when not considered outright illusory, being this more often than not how Marx considered both civil and political liberties and their institutions. When a political agenda is drawn from such an holistic view consequences are unavoidable: a violent maximalist disruption and distortion of all layers of human interaction, so no corner of social life is left untouched with a cascade of unintended effects. The historical totalitarian consequences of Marxism in the XX century were not merely bad luck or something to blame on what was implemented in backward countries with an authoritarian political culture: it was embedded as well on how the theory approaches social reality.
These attempts to save Marxism from its real historical consequences are self-contradictory in a theory that idolizes historical verdict. To sever the connection between theory and its empirical consequences is to fall back to an endless cycle of speculative reinterpretations on what Marx meant and intended: same thing with horoscopes if things didn’t work out as enunciated. Reinterpretation on the face of facts is typical of pseudoscience as Karl Popper Pointed out. Pseudo sciences are unfalsifiable because it is like playing poker with a gambler that has an infinite number of cards under his sleeve; each one a new reinterpretation so never to lose.
Eagleton also needs to be persuasive in Marxist terms on why Marxist ideas had such a huge impact despite its materialist tenets. To concede that ideas are present in the very texture of historical facts demands a non-Marxist approach. In other words, Marxist theory has problems in explaining its own success in terms of influence and stubborn endurance till now. Marxism phenomena and why is so seductive amongst intellectuals attests to its incompleteness. And finally, Marxism is also a self-contradictory theory in the extend it aims to draw the trajectory of the future of social change in one hand and in the other insisting that the state of the art of science and technology (“the development of the productive forces” using its terminology) is at the core of this trajectory. One thing cancels the other because unless the social theorist could foretell the future of inventions and their consequences even before they are either discovered or invented you cannot say anything on the possible future affairs of the world. Scientific-Technological change makes the future more uncertain, not less. Marxism cannot have both ways (a vision of the future compatible with an affirmation on what drives it). That’s the central paradox of Marxist historicism or the so-called Popper-Taleb paradox.
Summing up If Marxism failed in a such embarrassing scale as no other modern political philosophy never has and if it did with tragic consequences to this day is because the grandiose theory always has been the wrong, awkward tool in addressing human affairs in a way attainable to both social practices and social change; and approach with serious blind spots in understanding the true nature of power and also what makes a given economy deliver or not. But above all there is no historical innocence anymore. We know better now once Marxism has been tested by History and cannot remain in such a denial.
I guess you are right ! Thanks.
Getting the right word is luck for me.
I think he's referring to social darwinism. The term ascribed to people who advocate competative social system, these people often over-estimate how meritocratic our current system is and I believe the reference to George Bush was intended to refute the idea that it is meritocratic.
Capitalism is a named coined by Karl Marx, over 200 years ago, to describe the, horrific by today's standards, factories and sweatshops of the day.
Marx made a living from these folks, donated to him by factory owner/friend Freddy Engels, yet Marx coined the word capitalism to describe those workplace/market dynamics, but took the money.
Marx, from a very wealthy family, didn't ever practice law, his PhD. Instead, as a violent thug, he was banned from Europe and lived in London, all his life.
Marx was sure that the working poor would rise up and make a revolution, because he didn't know that these folk were happy to have work and had come from far worse and starvation conditions, on the farm.
His predictive 1848 Communist Manifesto with its 12 points, failed to come near to reality.
Most of Marx's economic ideas were plagiarised from great economic pioneers Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Marx sincerely thought he had the answer to the world's problems, but his handling of his only employee, the maid, whom he made pregnant, says it all.
A person’s ideas are not proved correct or incorrect by their behaviour.
Austerity is simply punishing the poor for the crimes of the rich and cannot be supported by any ethical person.
I knew it wouldn't take long !! At around 5min.30secs he says that Marx recognises the poverty and deprivation capitalism has caused.
That is absolutely nonsense, its only through capitalism that we now live in a world with the least amount of global poverty human history has ever known.
The wealth that capitalism has brought has given us a world where life expectancy has risen from around 38yrs of age in 1800 to around 80yrs of age now .
Marx spent most of his life in London poncing off his mate Freidrich Engels who himself lived off his inherited wealth .
As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and just like socialism it has never worked and will never work.
As Margerat Thatcher once said
" socialism is great until you run out of other peoples money "
While it’s certainly true that we live in a world where capitalism is the dominant economic system and where absolute poverty has been lowered, it doesn’t follow that the former is the cause of the latter, and it *definitely* doesn’t follow that the latter could only have been caused by the former.
Well , there is a lot of missunderstandings in your arguments. Profit is not value and value is social abstraction - not money. Marx talks about profit also , but it would be a great missunderstanding to link this to value in any other way then the fact that value is the fundation of profit. Profit will always float and also over time establish itself on a level regardless of its origin. It will seem like profit live its own life and has been created in the prices.
One of the most fundamental question neglected in any suave speech on Marx is how actually money is generated _ a topic with which Simmel deals more profusely in The phiosophy of money . The point is also think about what happens within college and universities where teaching posts are few and most students resort to some kind of 'sexual labour' to make money . Its truth which academia can never address and be comfortable with . All great literatry or marxist theory boils down to basics . Bodies trade for money, money trades for wares and people are much like in the position of commodities . Do professors benefit from this ? :)
Did this guy just say that Marx was reformist?
has anyone ever made the comparison between Muhammad and Marx? two guys who had grand visions of paradise on earth if only people would listen to him. their followers praise the ideology and elevate the man as a prophet chosen by god or history to change the world for the better.
People love trifles like football, video games, Music, movies, etc., and these kinds of things should be marketed in the most libertarian way possible with the minimum taxation and state restrictions; now housing, basic food, medicine and education BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS.
To say that every human being has the right to life, without giving the BASIC RESOURCES FOR SURVIVAL as a universal right is pure demagoguery.
Or are you in favor of life or you are in favour of capitalism, impossible to be both.
@Bernardo Grando commie
That's good in general, however think about what has to happen for those values to balance in the market. The market isn't like a pendulum. It's more like two pendulums tied with a rubber string trying to keep each out in equilibrium but never quite succeeding yet getting close at times. However without government influence on the stability of the system, the market will go from periods of profit to periods of extreme failure. At least the current system minimizes the boom and bust.
I'd just like to mention to you this book I've written. As always...says it all. The bougeiousie feasts itself on it"s own regurgitated verbiage...
I’ll bet you believe you took the red pill.
I don’t understand why those who are listening and present are laughing , is this lecture on Marxism is stand up comedy , or they think they know better and have condescending attitudes towards common people
Well that's interesting. Because that will also mean less money to buy the cheaper goods with. Thus where is the increased standard of living to come from? Not to mention that all commodities have different amounts of labor in them. They wouldn't all scale equally with a lowering of wages which further adds to the problem.
Capitalism is totally shameful. I have a B.A. in English and communication, an M.A. in film and media, a 3.48 GPA, and I live in a homeless shelter because I am medically limited to a desk job. I have written a novel, three stage plays, five screenplays, and various shorter works, and I have been blogging about my homeless experience and been an activist with Occupy and Picture the Homeless. I have $58,000 in student loan debt. We need to implement Marxism ASAP.
Revolution now!
Wait … we need Marxism because *your* life plan didn’t work out?
Capitalists don't have to make consumers happy, they have to increase their profits. These do not necessarily overlap: for instance, marketing forms roughly 9% of the GDP, creating misinformed consumers. Under roughly free market principles (ignoring Catallaxy and encomia to Somalia) there is a left skew away from a Pareto distribution as compared to the right skew the economist actually ignored in his data - lowering purchase power for the poorest.
I was reading before I entered preschool and pegged as a genius when I entered kindergarten. The last wave of standardized tests I took (10th grade) put me in the 98th percentile for cognitive skills, 97 percent and above in all language arts areas, 86 percent in mathematical concepts, and 74% in math computation. My SAT scores were 620 verbal and 490 math. No intelligent person would claim that I should be a field laborer.
That’s only because an intelligent person, aware of the is/ought gap, would not argue that you ‘should’ be anything in particular. Do you feel like you *deserve* to be something other than a field labourer?
@@thefuturist8864 Yes, and I'm also in no physical condition to be a field laborer.
If it's a worthless degree, show me all the people with these degrees that ended up in homeless shelters.
3 Weeks later and not a single challenge??
no creeping Communism or anything...at least, unlike most academics, you are open about it...
I reckon anything attached to Marx should be held to the same scrutiny assigned to oh, let's say Christianity. A smattering of Christian guilt and the whole colossus is demolished. How much more so is Marx culpable.
"How is it that as we speak that those in Greece are rummaging through garbage cans"
Probably because they thought that good can come from through compulsion. The same reason in the age of religious dominance most lived in abject poverty. The use of force helps one group; those who control the force.
All societies that don't interfere with interest rates are Capitalist societies, from hunter gatherer societies up to the present day, and in the present day we are witness to the economic sabotage central banks cause with policies that promote ludicrously low interest rates, thereby retarding capital formation that would be used for new business ventures.
The deleterious effects of low interest rates are apparent to those who rely on interest payment dividends from a Certificate of Deposit to supplement a major proportion of every day living expenses. As the interest rate declines on longer maturing CDs to abysmally low levels, many are forced out of CDs because the dividend of the longer maturing CD is no longer covering the living expenses it once did, and consumers need the principal now. Others transfer to shorter maturity CDs, just in case the principal is needed. This results in less capital available for business projects that require relatively longer time periods to begin to pay back loans.
To illustrate the difference between productivity increases that net (new) capital formation accomplishes and consumption-based investments (old investments that are currently selling consumption goods), let's take a look at two hunter gatherer tribes that live near to each other, then we'll take a look at what happens when a central bank intervenes by artificially lowering interest rates...
Tribe A saved more by looking for food less, placing that saved time into creating a net that would increase the catch of fish. We can say that Tribe A has a greater productive edge than does Tribe B, whose members are still using sharpened sticks to catch fish--very laborious and relatively unproductive.
Now Tribe A decides, due to its higher productivity/wealth, it can afford to save more time, adding this saved time to the saved time it used for making fishing nets, and build a boat that will allow their nets to catch even more fish. Being busy building boats, Tribe A teaches Tribe B to build the nets--a less productive venture than the new boat-building venture is.
Now imagine that a central bank enters the picture, and instructs Tribe B to construct less productive (less needed) tables and chairs instead of the critically needed and more productive fishing nets. Well, not only has Tribe B wasted precious time, it's now starving along with Tribe A. A table and chairs are consumption-based wasteful goods, while a fishing net and boat are a critical investment in the future greater abundance in food.
Is the picture clearer now? You see, in the modern economy the money we save is the "saved time" that Tribe A used to construct nets/boats, but since interest is being intentionally kept low by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, there can be no new capital formation (money that's used for new long-term productive investments) in Western economies (nor Japan) for new productive ventures, because the lure for such new investments--the higher rate of return that higher, market-based, interest rates offer--is non-existent.
As such then we see that Capitalism exited during the hunter-gatherer era, and witness the negative effect on that era's economic development should a central bank come into existence that lowered our hunter-gatherers' interest rates by artificially lowering the amount of "saved time" used for new productive enterprises.
When Marx deduced the Law of Value he forgot that Laws must explain phenomena for all eras, not just the narrowly defined age that Marx believed is the Capitalist era. The Law of Value doesn't only exist in Marx's arbitrarily defined Capitalist era, but for all eras of human existence.
For more on this subject, read my articles "The Poverty of Karl Marx's Dialectical Materialism"
sites.google.com/site/deanjackson60/the-poverty-of-karl-marx-s-dialectical-materialism
...and...
"Capitalism Needs Higher, Market Based, Interest Rates; Mercantilism Needs Government Sanctioned Low Interest Rates"
sites.google.com/site/deanjackson60/capitalism-needs-higher-market-based-interest-rates-mercantilism-needs-government-sanctioned-low-interest-rates
Then for the explanation why the West's central banks are sabotaging their respective economies with capital formation retarding low interest rates policies, read my article, "The Marxist Co-Option Of History And The Use Of The Scissors Strategy To Manipulate History Towards The Goal Of Marxist Liberation"
sites.google.com/site/deanjackson60/the-marxist-co-option-of-history-and-the-use-of-the-scissors-strategy-to-manipulate-history-towards-the-goal-of-marxist-liberation
Karl Marx was LEFT😒
Marx made his mark and left.
He is right
Understanding MARX makes mankind becoming humans.
(Could a native speaker translate this please into proper English? - or did I have luck in formulating this ? :-)
No that wasn't my point at all. My point was that your 'profit' has negative as well as positive characteristics. As for technology yes that's how that work. Capitalism works. However it's flaws continue to undermine progress. What's profitable is not necessarily good. Tell me this. How far can technology progress until it's benefits undermine capitalism (ie robotics)?
Easily done,simply stop the poor from breeding. The fewer mouths the bigger the meal.
Not quite.
I'm not expecting to be "persuasive" in 2 sentences.
But I AM mentioning 2 specific areas in which Marx "sucks."
(1) his "labor" theory of value; and
(2) his failure to anticipate the potential for producing cheap abundance that is available to "the masses" on a scale that couldn't be imagined in the 1800's.
If you'd care to defend this ridiculous "labor" theory of value,
ww w. marxist. com/marx-marxist-labour-theory-value. htm
I'd be interested in seeing what you have to say.
No, Karl Marx was left.
There's no such thing as a darwinist. If you mean people who accept the theory of evolution, they are called bioligists. And that subject has nothing at all to do with Bush. You need to ask a politician.
Why marx is wrong on the death of philosophy, the very fact that we are discussing his philosophy on that is a philosophy, so in reality she killed Karl Marx she has had influence and still has influence in the the world if you use scolastic philosophers and other religious philosophers such as Confucius as refrences. lady philosophy is still alive because of the idea of continental philosophy, lady philosophy was not happy when self righteous Karl called her a dead woman.
When Marx talked about the death of philosophy (which isn't an important thesis in his work and he didn't really sustain it), he really meant German speculative idealism, the philosophy of the young hegelians and so on.
i want to see question period!!!
I imagine he/she meant 'become'.
@15:40 I take issue with "business ethics is an oxymoron". That is only true for people who are so opposed (or unsuccessful themselves) to successful business owners that they don't even stop to analyze whether their success is legitimate and non-coercive. I have heard Marxists argue in the past that "all workers are exploited". I' m not sure if that statement is correct or not, but for me, that is like saying all carnivores are murderers. Marx was not anti-capitalist, but terry obviously is.
It’s a misunderstanding of the meaning of ‘ethics’. In everyday language people assume that ‘ethical’ means morally good. Leaving aside their assumption that they somehow know what moral good is, they don’t understand that ‘ethics’ refers to an idea of how a life should be lived, such that ‘business ethics’ is nothing more than a set of guidelines on how to do business.
This is extremely superficial, I was disappointed. Pace Eagleton, Marx is utterly utopian in that he posits an inevitable future communism that he claims will be possible due to a future economic superabundance; but he does not explain how superabundance will be produced or how that alleged future society will work and what its economics will be. He does't have a theory of socialism or communism that goes beyond a vague wishful optimism. The idea of superabundance is utopian, and as is the idea that there will be a "world revolution" brought about by "objective laws of history," as well as the idea that you can have an efficient communist economics under which the workers own the means of production.
Folder of Time ƒ
10:15 focusing on the means (of production) to expedite its development & get on with more art (the for-its-own-sake epitome of production)
10:34, 10:41 background economics, foreground skillful coping
11:17 self realization only through population realization 11:29
11:46 a kind of political love - what are the necessary institutions for that to happen?
13:50 an abiding suspicion of the abstract
Marx was right all people should be poorly equal and live in gulags and work for state as slave
He didn’t say anything of the sort. It’s like if I thought Jesus said the richer I am the more god loves me, it just ain’t true no matter what prosperity doctrine Hillsong pastors quoted.
Marx should have gone to Art School
Bunk.
Of course it doesn't, but it does.
Capitalism has always functioned this way. Corporate fascism is only the natural extreme of capitalism, which seeks to subordinate the working masses to the will of a tiny ruling class for profit.
so he wasn't left?
He got it right. material reality should be the focus
I know for a fact that Marx read Roussea's Social Contract and his other one about "The Origins of inequality among men".
Marx would also know, that in ch 9 of the Social Contract Rousseau clearly declares that those who have previously agreed with it, but who now disagree..should be given the death penalty! That was the ideology behind Robispierre's mass murder of Priests and supposed Aristocrats but ended up being his closest allies and friends... until they tweaked to the "Next it will be me" idea and disposed of him.
Unfortunately for mankind....the problem is not..NOT 'the system'..... our problem with inequality and injustice is ourselves.. our greed, our lust, our passion for power and control.. you know..like a Male lion! "Biff Punch Scratch Bite" ... I WANT THOSE FEMALES..then you kill the offspring of the lionesses.. impregnate them and continue through life expanding your gene pool...and if you do not believe in a Created world, no matter how much you will deny it...'that' is where you are philosophically and politically left...and perhaps I should say "Left"....
The Political Left is like a Mormon or Jehovah's witness..they really DO believe they have the absolute truth.... THE truth... but.. the Left is left languishing in the quicksand of wishful thinking and fantasy by reality.
You see... all you deluded atheists, marxists, socialists, anarchists... by your view it's all about 'genes' whether you admit it or not. You see.. the science is clear...even if your oxytocin and vassopressin challenged minds are not.
wow....this is the biggest pile of B.S. I've heard since reading Marx. Yeah, he wasn't an egalitarian, he was an elitist--this guys literally says this as if it's a good thing. This is the most ignorant thing I've heard in a long time
Sorry. I don't believe you've actually read, Marx. Marx's entire premise is based on the dissolution of CLASS and the fairer distribution of political power and engagement. I'd love to see the evidence for your claim!
Then please head over to Venezuela as an average person and live there. Since 1988 Venezuela has plummeted very low. Secondly Marx butchered Hegel. Thirdly Marx made mistakes on Capitalism. Fourth suggest to check Ayn Rand on Capitalism. Lastly Capi like the word Capo means boss but also head in Latin, as a human being you have sovereignty as Boss/Head of finances rather than someone coming into your life and deciding now they own your wealth. If you still enjoy communism please place your ban details for all of us to use. Sharing means caring for the wolves in sheep clothes.
To advocate capitalism is to assume responsibility for the outcomes of your life. "Externalities" are mere excuses for all those that want to avoid such responsibility.
Many hard working citizens have gone from rugs to riches by tackling their inner problems namely the subsequent misery from attributing everything to external factors is a major hurdle in the course of psychological maturing of the individual.
Communists are predominantly lazy, irresponsible human beings (young individuals tend to be so) that were led by an equally lazy irresponsible human being by the name of Karl Marx.
Just looking into his life is enough to distill that he's no good. Especially when it comes to moral advocations and the "common good" (who knows what is "common good" anyway? How do one defines the term?).
For crying out loud the man lost 4 of 7 of his children from neglect, fathered a son with his maid (who he never paid as a worker) and never recognised it, never paid his dues from receiving goods and services that sustained him, never returned borrowed money (at some point he was forced by his loaners to sell the beds in his house to pay them back - at the time he was receiving a substantial yearly amount - yet he was incapable to manage his economics, a failure in every aspect).
I give it to him he was quite photogenic just like the butcher Che Guevara - one could say "their only real success in life".
Michael Jackson was a kiddie fiddler which is why his music is awful and rubbish - that’s essentially the argument you’re making. Personally, I like MJs music but have issue with his personal morality *and* I have the ability to distinguish and hold both positions in mind at the same time.
@@davespanksalot8413 Not really! Marx was a journalist that wanted to be seen as an economist but couldn’t even manage his home economics (which led to the ultimate demise of many of his kids).
@@C_R_O_M________ So according to what you’re saying because he wasn’t good with money and was awful to his family his analysis of the contemporaneous sociopolitical economic structures are invalid?
@@davespanksalot8413 I don’t know! Would you trust a surgeon that operates the wrong part of the body? A driving instructor that every time he drives crashes? A pilot that has never managed to take a plane off the ground? You see where that’s going? Moreover, the man was mistaken on every single assumption he made. From his stupid theory of (surplus) value and the internal consistency of his theory (something that Von Bawerk proved even while Marx was alive!) to his Hegelian based world-theory.
@@C_R_O_M________ So here you are proposing that a political economist whose theories are wrong is not worth engaging with because of the resulting lack of trust in his erroneous theories, especially according to an economist from the end of the 19th century? And that’s why his personal behaviour has no impact on his ideas because he was already mistaken in his theories but his awful personal life also shows why he shouldn’t be trusted? Have I summarised your comments reasonably?
it was last exist before bridge, now i wonder end is going to be ww3 or global warming? 🤔🤔
Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Venezuela etc etc all destroyed by his ideas 😰
😂🤣😅
Riiiiigght... I can only assume where you get your information. Good luck moving beyond your biases!
thank you
No..marx never admired capitalism
To dopiero winno być testowane na szczurach,
Still, even as a "worker", I'll stick with capitalism. Thanks.
working against your own class , pathetic
What classes exist and what are the sufficient conditions one must meet to belong to each of these classes? That is, what classes are there and how do we divide these classes up?
like to lick boot?
sgt7 you are not sticking to capitalism you are sticking to your needs which is provided by capitalst economy , of course not sufficient. once you loose such benefits from yur beloved system your class character come on the surface . If you are lucky enough you will experience this when you loose your job in next recession.
Kangaroo Fox I've had far worse happen to me than lose a job. This never had the effect of convincing me that socialism is a better social/economic system. I took responsibility, worked hard and I'm doing pretty well now.
Marx was angsty child
is he in a dorm room?