I've taken several graduate level courses on Marxism and Critical Theory and spent a long time thinking about those issues from many perspectives and I, for one, think this lecture is spot on and remarkably illuminating for an introduction. I don't know if one can appreciate everything he's saying without more study and context, but he's done a very nice job here, and his delivery is a good example of how style and form can go a long way to conveying ideas. Sugrue is not a lecturer so much as one who recreates and distills a fascinating dynamic conversation that took decades into an hour for his audiences.
I am barely layman when it comes to these topics but i still can understand a lot of what he is saying. So, yes, one can still appreciate these lectures even without having a formal education on these topics, but i guess it's even more amazing when you REALLY know what he is talking about.
This is how more people should talk about Karl Marx. No bias, no spin, no emotion, no misrepresenting anything, not for him or against him. Just telling it like it is. Play the devil's advocate for all sides and let the audience decide for themselves.
Why? I’m not sure if you know this, but some people believe in and support his analysis of capitalism and want to see the workers of the world liberated from it.
@princegobi So the original post suggests that as fair and objective treatment of the subject as possible is ideal and to this thought a communist says... "why?". You don't even attempt to argue that the handling here wasn't fair and objective. Ladies and gentlemen this is the mindset of all leftists. Repressive tolerance. All the things they want deserve sympathetic treatment and all the things they don't agree with should not be treated fairly or any attempt to be objective. This is despicable thinking. Dishonest and Disgusting. Every root of and branch on the quasi religious Marxian tree is poison!
These series of lectures, along with Rick Roderick's are my favorite things on TH-cam. I keep coming back to them from time to time to make sense of the world.
Dr. Sugrue is amazing. So articulate and impartial (or at least honest with his partisanship). He's totally dedicated to scholarship and philosophy. His charisma is straightforward and smart. So insightful.
What i appreciate about professor Sugure is his dignified aura and approach. While he may have his own ideas on Marx professor Sugure presents the material in question without Bias. this was one of the most fair, comprehensive and impressive lectures on the topic of Marxism that i have seen. He is a truly admirable academic.
This is the content the inventors of the internet had in mind when they thought about the potential for breaking down barriers and allowing greater access to knowledge. Thanks!
Great talk. But the theory of alienating the worker that Marx brought up was not expanded on which was a massive part of his philosophy, considering its a great representation of what mass frustration looks like given the right conditions, which leads to revolution.
A theory is only valuable insofar as it predicts reality. Staloff talks about the fact that that theory failed to predict the reality of socialist revolutions when they eventually happened. And Marx's greatest blind spot was having little understanding of what it is like to be laborer, never having been one himself.
@@pearz420 even by this statement you’ve shown you don’t understand historical materialism or the whole point of Marxism. You physically cannot universally predict the nature of struggle that’s universalizing a particular. Marx expertly didn’t attempt to say, “this is what it’ll look like” bc you simply cannot know the thousands of years worth of contradictions building to a revolutionary moment, his method was to simply identify what to look out for. And on that note history verified it. Russia Cuba China Vietnam etc etc. all different characteristics but all were identifiable using Marxism method of historical analysis. The trouble is westerns unfamiliar w Marx think he should be a fortune teller.
@@dr.michaelsugrue a recovering Marxist! Interesting way to say it. I also have been quite a Marxist in my teen age, funny as it sounds, and have a more critical perspective now (at 23). I do think, however, that nowadays people tend to disregard Marxism completely without much thought. Marxism and its revolutionary perspective on history certainly deserve its recognition.
@@phalen444 There are several schools of thought and philsophical doctrines that are directly at odds with /falsify marxism and some of them have nothing to do with Capitalism. Social philosophy is not a binary function of Marxist/Capitalist
Honest, yes. Not balanced. He should’ve mentioned that capitalism has merely outsourced the Victorian style suffering to other cultures in the form of imperial projects. The elites noticed through Marxian revolutions and French socialist idealism that Western Europeans would no longer stand for that level of suffering necessary to uphold capitalist superstructures. Capitalism has never been more exploitative than it is today it’s just hidden from our views.
@@Scott-bh2qb Capitalism has been more exploitative than today. Previously children worked everywhere, now barely any are exploited on European or north American soil. But I see what you mean, we haven't solved Capitalism yet. And that's precisely one of the best criticizisms directed at Marx. He thought it would be inevitable, it sure doesn't seem that way. Marx's criticism of capitalism is still relevant, but his conclusions are not. Sadly a good part of the left still reads him as if sacred scripture and can't go past his worn out notions of societal change.
@@sangwaraumo there is more child Labour exploitation than ever before. You are right, just less on American soil, although the slave Labour of black Americans in the penal system helps the contemporary US imperial project of course.
I have never heard anyone explain the different ideas of philosophers so clearly and in relation with other foundational ideas ( such as the comparison he does between Marxism and Christianity). Truly a pleasure to listen. Thank you for uploading and sharing these lectures.
The comparison of Marx and Christianity originates I think with Russel who basically said "oh, you just replace Jesus with Marx and the church with party and you get the same thing, Marxism cannot be taken any more seriously than theology". Sugrue's comparison is much more flattering than Russel's :D
@@benbell9170 I am not sure which text it is from, I got it from a lecture on Russell, I think. But from what I checked he wrote several pieces on that topic over his life. It probably comes from "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism". It might come from "Unpopular Essays" I am not 100% sure. He also wrote an essay "Why Am I not a Communist". Russell was close to socialism in thought but he wasn't really sure if Marx got it right and if his pupils implement the ideas right. And from what I know is criticism is not unfounded.
@@benbell9170 i looked into the stance of Russell a little bit deeper in the few hours between your post and my first answer and basically Russell's position is like this: 1. He is socialist in a broad sense 2. He criticizes the dogmatic views held by marxists in 1920s. 3. He thinks marxism as a whole has ignored the irrational, mostly on the level of the rulling class, marxism thinks that the rulling class has duped the proletariat while the truth is that the rulling class has been as much duped by their own view of the world to just think about their own pockets (vis the disillusionment of the English aristocrats after ww1) 4. Is afraid that what lenin is working on is just another version of dark age absolutism. I hope i made myself clearer and that there are no mistakes in my understanding. If you have any comments please tell me.
"My first impression was a very strong one," repeated the prince. "When they took me away from Russia, I remember I passed through many German towns and looked out of the windows, but I didn't trouble myself to ask questions about them. This was after a long series of fits. I would always fall into a sort of torpid condition after such a series, losing my memory almost entirely. Even though I wasn't entirely without reason during these times, I lacked the logical power of thought. This would continue for three or four days, and then I would recover myself again. I remember my melancholy was intolerable; I felt inclined to cry, sat and wondered uncomfortably. The consciousness that everything was strange weighed heavily upon me; I could understand that it was all foreign and unfamiliar. I recall waking up from this state for the first time in Basle one evening; the braying of alienation woke me up, alienation in the town market. I saw the alienation and was extremely pleased with it. From that moment on, my mind seemed to clear." "Alienation? How strange! Yet, it's not so strange. Anyone of us might fall in love with alienation! It happened in mythological times," said Madame Epanchin, casting a wrathful glance at her daughters, who had started to laugh. "Please continue, prince." "Since that evening, I've had a special fondness for alienations. I began to ask questions about them, as I had never seen one before. I immediately came to the conclusion that this must be one of the most useful animals-strong, willing, patient, and inexpensive. Thanks to this alienation, I started to appreciate the whole country I was traveling through, and my melancholy gradually faded away."
Really loving all these lectures thank you For uploading them. Also really like when he uses a word I don’t understand then immediately follows it up with a synonym that I do understand. Wonderful speaker.
Professor Rick Roderick and Professor Sugrue and Professor Darren Staloff are my favorite on TH-cam. Professor Wes Cecil and the essentialists are unveiled truths also. Please be well, Professor Sugre. I am thinking of you.
I love it how the professor will make a monumental point, and then, like an exclamation point, emphasize it with a really large slurp of coffee! ❤❤❤❤❤😎🙏🙏🙏😎🎵🎵
Reading the comments from the people who are currently studying anything in the humanities and have been gradually radicalized by their professors is truly entertaining. As if you or your mediocre professor can stand toe to toe with a man like Sugrue, it's very interesting to witness.
Dear Professor Sugrue, Thanks for your lectures & for introducing me to philosophy! I'm looking forward to your thoughts about Kant. Greetings from Austria!
@@dr.michaelsugrue Will all of your father's lectures be uploaded? His videos are very digestible and his talks are very enjoyable. I'd love to throw money at a paypal or something rather than buying a tape or dvd so that everybody can enjoy these lectures on youtube.
A very entertaining lecture! If I have any criticisms of it, they would also be criticisms directed at Marxists themselves, as most share a view of Marxism very similar to that articulated here. Firstly, I think it's important to address false consciousness. While it is true that one facet of false consciousness is a kind of "just so" story about Capitalism propagated by intellectuals, Marx also believed this false consciousness permeated the working class and the socialist movement itself. The proletariat and the socialist intelligentsia would have contained the contradictions of Capitalism within them, because there was no material "outside" of Capitalism. This is the reason Marx's writing is so rife with the contradictions alluded to at the end. If these contradictions could be adequately intellectually resolved, Marx would in fact be disproving his own conception of dialectical materialism. If the Hegelian dialectic is about the progress of Geist as consciousness, as the mind of humanity at the level of ideas, then Marx's dialectic is about resolving contradiction through concrete political practice. The utopian socialists were dubbed "idealists" because they believed they could design a socialist society through careful advanced planning of the economic particulars of their society, that socialism could be "worked out" in advance of experience and without the need to take action in the realm of politics, that Capitalism could just be dropped out of if you had the right ideas. Marx's response was "No, prior historical epochs, like the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, did not and could not plan the particulars of their new society as a blueprint. They discarded the old order and built a new one through revolution against it." That is why the dialectic is material, it is a product of the movement of people and productive forces. It might be worth pointing out that the synthetic and syncretic conception of English Empiricism, German Idealism, and French Socialism described in the beginning of the lecture is not originally Marx's, but precedes him. The French Anarchist Proudhoun famously stated that he accepted only three authorities: Adam Smith, Hegel, and the Bible. Most of Marx's criticisms, of surplus value, the labor theory of value, exploitation, and all the rest, precede him in one form or another. Marx stated he thought his only original contribution was the recognition of the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, I am surprised that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not mentioned directly in this lecture given its central importance to Marx. Since the Marxian view was that the working class represented the historical subject of Capitalism, he believed that the practical way that society would change fundamentally must necessarily be driven by the working class becoming an unmediated political force unto itself, in the same way the third estate and the bourgeois/burghers/city-dwellers did during the great early-modern revolutions in England (during the English Civil War), America, and France. It would not be enough to simply reform Capitalism because any gradual reform instituted by the Bourgeois state would still be dependent on Capitalism's social relations and profitability for econonic viability. And indeed, this criticism of gradualism in Marx seems to hold up rather well in many ways today. While the level of subsistence in the Western world is much improved, in part as a result of the welfare state, it is also true that most political and economic power is still concentrated in the hands of the Capitalist class, both within and without the state, and that the profitability of Capitalism which funds that welfare state still depends on profits from direct investment in new economies and new working classes which often enjoy conditions no better than that of 19th century England, as exhibited in countries like China, India, etc. Will it be possible for all these states to enjoy a western standard of living after a similar generational sacrifice? Perhaps, but Marx would have been skeptical based on his belief in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the absence of new productive technologies or new workers which could be incorporated into industry. In a circumstance where the whole globe became evenly developed, it would paradoxically produce few opportunities for continued Capitalist growth and its profits which form the basis of the redistributionary state. This lack of profitability would produce social crises which would destroy the material basis of Capitalism, at once recreating poverty and opportunity for profit. It is the point of view of many early 20th century Marxists that the Great Depression was an example of this, with only the negative space created by the global convulsions of WWII allowing the system to regrow. If one were to accept Capitalism is thus destined for such cyclical upheval and violence by virtue of its own organization, then revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the present dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) would serve the role of sublating society beyond Capitalism by creating a transitional state at a global scale in the tradition of the roman dictatorship, as a temporary emergency political form which would govern Capitalism itself and remake it through the concrete organizations of the working class into socialism or communism. While Communism today carries an inevitable Stalinist lexical implication, Marx himself would have had no such reference point (obviously) and would have been deriving the term communism from the communist movement of the high middle ages, where cities in Western Europe demanded self-possession instead of being formal fiefdoms of feudal lords. That movement is incidentally why many cities or municipal designations of a country like France are still referred to as "communes," because the city was communally possessed and governed by the residents, rather than the peasants merely living there (or being intured) and the city itself being the possession of a lord or sovereign. In analogy of this, the dictatorship of the proletariat would make the whole of global civilization self-possessing, not the legal property of the class of investors who merely fronted Capital to build it but did not themselves make it. Is Marxism dead and obsolete? Well, in spite of its failures in the 20th century and the crimes committed in its name by Stalinists and other totalitarians, Marxism continues to retain a strangely persistent ghostly presence in modern times. Irrespective of the fact that China, Cuba, Vietnam, and a handful of other states are still nominally Marxist (though this mostly serves as a cover for post-colonial nationalism), it is strange that, however misunderstood, Marxism remains a kind of compulsive ideology in the political Left of the western world, that Marx is still reached for in times of self-doubt in Capitalism. It also seems to be a consistent facet of Modernity that people rely on conceptions of Hegelian historical progress as axiomatic over and over again. In the absence of a critique of society as it exists in its concrete economic and political modes, people seem to believe, as Fukuyama did, that Western Liberal Capitalism is the end of history, and it is noteworthy that many of the first generation of neoconservative thinkers in the 1970s-80s were disaffected former Marxists (mostly Trotskyite). If Modernity having no teleology is itself a kind of teleology, where does that leave us? Will we live in a kind of perpetually tinkered-with eternal Capitalist Realism as Mark Fischer feared? Is Modernity exhausted? Even worse, could Modernity itself be the illusion? Are we destined to return, not as Marx thought, to the primitive communism of hunter-gatherers, but to the barbarity of serfdom, slavery, and domination? Has anything really changed? These types of fears seem to drive people to Marxism almost out of desperation to rescue the future from the present. I also wanted to make one final remark. As much as Marx might seem a kind of rationalist millenarian, make no mistake that his ideas cannot really be reconciled with religion, especially with Christianity. The Bible makes quite clear that only God can redeem and save Man, through Christ. This is repeated over and over and over again in the Old Testament (the tower of Babel), the Gospels (Christ's refusal to take a political role as an earthly king), and the Epistles (Book of Romans which emphasizes man's inability to save himself through acts of obedience to the law). All traditional religious thinkers are clear that manmade utopias are impossible, and while Marx may have criticized "utopian" socialists, make no mistake that Marx's aim is to bring Heaven down to earth. From the Christian perspective there is an almost Satanic quality to thinkers and writers like Marx, regardless of his intent, due to his aim to put Man in the place of God as the saviour of mankind. And the problem is not just with Marx, but with the overwhelming preponderance of Modern thought, even that written by profoundly religious people like Hegel. I thought that was just worthwhile to note, given the allusion to liberation theology as a kind of Catholic syncreticism with socialism. Anyway, very good lectures! I hope at least one of you out there finds this mini-essay I wrote here just a fraction as interesting as the video it's under.
I love this guy. He gets right to the point. No waist of time with drawn out introductions. I wouldn't mind, however, if he would loosen up a little with a joke or two. At least loosen the tie a bit more. Stand up comedy potential man!
32:00 small corrective on capitalism making piecemeal reforms. It was only the pressure of the working class and socialist thinking that got these reforms passed. Capital fought against these reforms at every step, the welfare state was only instituted out of fear of 'Bolshevism' following the Great Depression. You can see in the age of neo liberalism the attempt to demolish everything they can get away with regarding these reforms. The current living standard of the US in particular is the exploitation of workers, largely in Asia, with working and living conditions very reminiscent of Engels coverage of Manchester. It is further supported by the unprecedented increase of governmental, corporate, and personal debt which offsets the working classes freeze in wages since the late 70s. Our current condition is a chimera and ticking time bomb. The so called 'Marxist' regimes of the USSR and China are clearly state capitalist in nature. I agree with the criticism of Marx's teleology. I square that circle by interpreting Marx as trying to give confidence to the working class by insisting that 'nature' or 'history' is on their side. Overall a great explanation of Marx.
I think the point he makes is that these changes were consistant with the capitalist economic system. Also, capital is not the embodiment of capitalism, since when you discuss an entire system any single group within that system can’t represent it in its entirety
Great lecture but I do have some reservations with some of the points he makes: 1. The authoritarian regimes he mentions are all outgrowths of Lenin's interpretations of Marx and his dogmatic doctrine that every 20th-century socialist regime adopted (or a modification of that doctrine as with Mao in China) 2. Sugrue also, in my opinion wrongly, characterizes the later outgrowths of marxism as somehow myopic when correcting the many shortcomings of Marx and accuses them of not being fully encompassing enough of marx's full theory although he also rightly points out that Marxism has contradictions in the underlying way it's assembled which, to fix, necessitates the removal or modification of one or more of the portions that contradiction another portion if that makes any sense, which I think is a bit strange.
I think it's a quite shallow, contradictive and idealist analysis that you're making, although I still enjoyed it, thank you :) It is clear to me that you are speaking in the realm of ideas, which is understandable concerning your background and the present state of division of labor :D You seem to have alot of knowledge in the field of philosophy. This is for example visible to me when you are making comparisons between Marx's idea about ruling ideologies and Hegels idea of the Geist. Additionally, Marx did not wholly think that people are "distorted" into "false consciousness" by the ruling ideology per se, because distortion implies that there is an absolute idea, but this he refuted, which you yourself mentioned afterwards. And therein you will find the solution to the problem of freedom and necessity. It is simply an adoption of the Hegelian notion: "Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves - two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom. On the threshold of human history stands the discovery that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat: the production of fire by friction; at the close of the development so far gone through stands the discovery that heat can be transformed into mechanical motion: the steam-engine. - And, in spite of the gigantic liberating revolution in the social world which the steam-engine is carrying through, and which is not yet half completed, it is beyond all doubt that the generation of fire by friction has had an even greater effect on the liberation of mankind. For the generation of fire by friction gave man for the first time control over one of the forces of nature, and thereby separated him for ever from the animal kingdom. The steam-engine will never bring about such a mighty leap forward in human development, however important it may seem in our eyes as representing all those immense productive forces dependent on it - forces which alone make possible a state of society in which there are no longer class distinctions or anxiety over the means of subsistence for the individual, and in which for the first time there can be talk of real human freedom, of an existence in harmony with the laws of nature that have become known. But how young the whole of human history still is, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views, is evident from the simple fact that all past history can be characterised as the history of the epoch from the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion into heat up to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion." - Friedrich Engels (Anti-Duhring) Btw, Marx's historical materialism also explains how American intellectuals of the 20th and 21st century seem to always bash his theories and focus on his most undeveloped and idealistic ideas ;) But let me rhetorically ask this: Marx was actually humble concerning what the future holds as compared to other post-hegelians, can someone answer me why that was? Because he founded dialectical materialism. A term that I unfortunately never heard you mention, not even once. Dialectical materialism is first and foremost a scientific(!) means of understanding reality, not a trajectory of the future. The main contradiction of study is that between socialised production and private ownership of the means of production. Marx flipped the hegelian notion and got rid of the Geist within the Geist. Finally, in the end I think your refutations are very shallow and idealistic, speaking of "wisdom". And why are you speaking of him using others' ideas as theft? And also, building communism takes time and is a living experiment, just like everything else. I enjoyed you sharing your philosophical ideas, but your political refutations of Marxism in the end were really low and I think you're going into areas which you don't know that much about.
@@patricktan7120 Hey Patrick, don't be so harsh. We all have different faculties, some are philosophers, some are doctors and others are carpenters. And the people writing those comments you mentioned, are natural born comedians. :D
Just wanted to ask, if not even the current academia portrays Marx’s ideas rightly, who should we believe in? Did your understanding of marxism come from the academia, other philosophers who analyzed this as well? Or did it come from yourself as you read his works personally? The reason why I ask is firstly I am a skeptic when one starts argumenting things like: “This is what -put any well renowned philosopher here- REALLY meant by this or that”. So we’re always argumenting over what is the correct interpretation without truly questioning that in itself. My second reason is that marxist ideas seem to be still prevalent in the west, and yet it might be possible that they never represented “TRUE” marxist thought. Is it all a delusion then of the masses? Or can we propose that ideas evolve over time?
@@1yanyiel To your first question, read the primary sources yourself first. Otherwise, you're just relying on someone else to tell you what somebody else wrote. You talk as if the entire academia has a single take on all philosophies or ideas. Academics and philosphers tend to differ on the interpretations of the texts themselves, so you're pretty much relying on their reliability than anything else. Secondly, ideas evolve over time. Marxism has had many additions since Marx first laid down his critique of capitalism. If you want to understand an idea, start at the very beginning and then move to the latest iterations of it.
Dr. Sugrue, thank you so much for providing this eminence and essential knowledge for free. I am currently listening though and attempting to grasp all of your lectures. Do you believe the huge disconnect and uninformed scrambling in our political dialogues could be due to a lack of study/disregard of the great thinkers of the past in our collective consciousness?
Dad said we are living through an age of cultural vandalism manufactured in universities, the collective analogue of an autoimmune disease in the body politic. Institutions like the media and foundations join the corrupted faculties of the soft sciences in propagating an evangelical gnosticism, like Puritanism, Jacobinism, Bolshevism, which now hates the white working class in the US and Europe for not creating the global proletarian revolution when the Frankfurt School thought they should, which they regard as being indistinguishable from being Nazis. In the US, mob actions combining ultra right wing racial categories and Maoist tactics have produced a new Great Awakening, a jolt of religious hysteria propagated by a cultic pandemonium of political flagellants imposing a compulsory cultural masochism on everyone else's speech and action.
@@dr.michaelsugrue I’m not sure the primary frustration is that the white working class of the US and Europe didn’t start a global proletariat revolution. At least for many 3rd world citizens, the primary frustration is how citizens in the US and Europe are often at best apathetic or at worst supportive of what seems to be undesired interventionism done by their governments on weaker nations to the detriment of those weaker nations.
What an incisive and surreally accurate analysis. Please connect Michael with Drs James Lindsay, Stephen Hicks, and Jordan Peterson if it all possible.
Its funny how Dr. Sugrue first talks about the legitimization of a society by the intellectuals who happen to be born to that society and then he himself exemplifies this phenomenon under the guise of the critique of marxism at the end :D
Watching this right after studying up on the French Revolution and Edmund Burke is a trip. My big question is this whole "Dialectical Materialism" thing. Never had the foggiest what it is, tried to understand Hegel, still don't. Something to do with contradictions within systems. But it all seemed so extraordinarily hyper-abstract to me.
Marx turned idealist Hegel on its materials head . Evething, the universe, is matter in motion, contradiction builds up and drives motion. We are an integral part of the universe. Just happened to have evolved into organic life forms. Lenin notebooks no 38 contains a breakdown and critique of Hegel. Motion is not always gradual, there are leaps.
@@doodlebug1820 think about the formation, stages of development of a star. That's dialectical development. Gradual changes give way to rapid changes. Check out the book: The Revolutionary Philosophy of Marxism, it's a collection of writings by multiple authors, including Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
My idea of what Marx got wrong is the difference in speed in which something can either be produced itself or be differentiated into other modes of production. Looking back the last 200 years, the only historical progress that I can discern is the speed at which we relate to the world. Those who cant follow the speed are left behind -- often thinking that their labor is exploited, but not realizing what frame of reference they are using to understand the labor they are performing.
You know I had been struggling to wrap my head around Marxist philosophy for the last week and a half and the opening 2 minutes of this presentation were rather enlightening as to why that's been so difficult.
Modern historians and archeologists wouldn't agree with hierarchical structure and division of labor in the early stages of agrarian civilizations. It actually came so much later in some parts of the world it raises interesting questions.
As a Marxist myself who spends a lot of time studying this topic, I have to say that Micheal Sugrue here does a fairly unbias account of Marxism. There are a couple things that I would criticize. 1) Micheal Sugrue made it sound like that Karl Marx only believe that there were 2 classes throughout history because of his theory of alienation. This is false he only references the theory of alienation under capitalism. Alienation under capitalism is unique compared to another mode of production because the Laborer has double freedom. Not only they are free in their political life they are also free from the mode of production. Think about it this way. Under slavery, the Slaver owns the land, tools, people everything. Under Serf people can own property but they serve a lord. What is unique under capitalism is that not only that a person is free politically but they are free from the product they produce. A blacksmith in the middle age owns a forge, owns the tool that he uses, he controls every aspect of his life. However, under capitalism, the capitalist will own the capital and the labor owns nothing. So this means that a worker under the capitalist system is alienated from his surroundings even though he is politically free and this relationship creates an alienation 2) The second issue that I have there is no reference to dialectical materialism. This is the fundamental part of Marxism and without it Marxism will not make sense. Micheal Sugrue make the argument that Karl Marx could never reconcile the contradiction that he has made. In the Marxian chain of taught, it is no surprise that this kind of contradiction exists since it is fundamentally routed in our philosophy. The classic Marxian example of dialactical thinking would be how capitalism was able to create a better living condition then any other society before it but at the same time it won't elimanate poverty. Poverty is something that is deeply rooted in the system that capitalism is design to create. An employee has the desire to earn as much wealth as possible while the employer wants to pay as little as possible. THese two forces are in contraction with each other. Which is why you see capitalist trying to pay poverty wages all the time while you see the left advocating a living wage.
I think the contradiction only occurs when the left is given sufficient totalitarian power to enforce their demands and throw the whole thing off balance.
@@cyruswang9354 i actually argue is because of ML do not advocate for individuals freedom. They tend to surpress all individuals freedom for the sake of collective. I am an anarchist who is very much oppose of this line of reasoning
Yes, and Sugrue argues that Marxism enables people to enact authoritarian structures, which is true, but it is only because Marxism criticizes the status quo. ANY ideology that is radical enough will have this issue. It is not a strictly Marxian issue, but a populist one. An anarchist framework alleviates that issue by making people critical of authoritarian structures from the start.
@@convenientEstelle i absolutely agree with you. The problem is that people automatically think that if you advocate for Marxism it automatically means you are a Marxist-lennist which i fundamentally disagree with for the reason that you mentioned
37:26 Stalin was the son of a cobbler, Mao was from a moderately well off peasant family, Thomas Sankara was a military man not an intellectual, Hugo Chavez too, Same with the sandinistas all poor people, so I'm not sure that criticism really stands
@@BboyKeny yeah but at least there is some difference because are the leaders in the west poor working class people or already related to the political and business elite?
@@kalelvigil1510 I meant he wasn't a bourgeois sellout academic in the sense of someone who only writes a papers and is privileged like Noam chomsky, Sankara was a man of action that came from the people and deep intellect. A great revolutionary!
I personally believe that "necessarily having false consciousness in the benefit of class interest" is the most insightful part of the Marxist thought. This is something that seems to be ingrained in humanity and the parasitic classes will not bother to address on the very nature of their cause. Readings of common sense by Thomas Paine points to a familiar picture of desperation for equality and separation of class values.
The idea of human equality is a product of Jerusalem, not Athens. Prior to monotheism, Greco-Roman thought was utterly inegalitarian, see Aristotle's natural slaves and Cato's superannuated "retirees". There is nothing rational about human equality, it is a Christian religious dogma to which I am devoted. So was Marx, who is an updated Amos but a tad more clownish. He helps us dance around the utopian intellectual circle doing the incoherent/ahistorical two-step. Marx insightfully insists that a) all people are equal and b) all religion is a necessarily false ideological facade legitimizing exploitation, allowing us to trip and do the face plant when we learn that c) the political equality pursued from the Enlightenment to the present, including socialism, feminism, democracy and other reform movements are all, as Nietzsche said, ill disguised mutations of Christianity dressed up in scientific drag. Marx scolds us for nor being equal enough and for not being rational enough, allegedly because he is in possession of true, undistorted consciousness [which is realized through his followers' self contradiction and desk pounding and mob actions] which is prima facie at variance with intellectual history while pretending be the only lucid convergence of history and philosophy. As one of my best grad school professors, Jim Shenton, told me, "Marxism is the last great Christian heresy."
It's interesting listening to this lecture now during this kind of renaissance of Marxist thought at the failure and the end of the capitalist neoliberal project.
I'll bite-- what failure exactly? That technological and organizational capacity is now at such that the discrepancy between the industrial and cultural capacity of the elite and, "non-elite" classes makes it impossible for people to exist without college degrees or advanced skills? Let me ask you-- let's say you have infinite power to re-construct society and you've no limits to technological innovation-- how exactly is it that you might preserve the, "Agrarian" rights of the general mass of the people against the effects of needing an advanced education and/or moral training to exist in an advanced society outright? I think that it's possible but isn't necessary concession is that it would require the invention of something that would replace education and/or agriculture It's not possible to grow enough food to create a diverse enough diet to feed a knowledge-rich civilization. The North American Indians would plant beans, squash, and corn together to replenish the soil but it doesn't seem like we can just, "invent a new agriculture" out of nothing using indigenous wisdom-- we need globalization and trade to create the quality of life that allows for rigorous learning and cultures of letters; not that (taking a queue from Rousseau) that this is somehow and ideal for society but let's say we make you the, "guy with the hat" and you get to push the buttons to remake society toward a more equitable model-- how do you overcome the challenges of feeding and educating an advanced society without eventually having to use force and violence to secure trade relations amongst even, "peaceful" countries? I mean this respectfully but I think you'd have a heck of a time actually constructing a workable model that wouldn't be a restating of the existing international order or somehow social engineering a whole lot of people to live in a sort of Satyagrahian austerity where growth-based economics halts; but that's just the point, isn't it? The, "man" won't allow for that-- that's my point. All the monkeys have their sticks pointed in the direction that keeps their quality of living from stagnating. How do you overcome that without social engineering? If you're willing to engineer society then why not just social engineer everyone to accept society-as-it-is-today as a kind of, "Satyagrahian austerity?" You'd achieve the very same moral ends without using any political violence whatsoever. I assume you (as I) find political violence undesirable.so why work toward revolutionary ends when for-the-most-part the revolutionary ideal, being, "real" and non-divorced from the real historical mechanism can be realized, in demonstrate without, "a single shot being fired?" Going through this right now I think this is probably the basis for the Chinese model. Considering that the Chinese model is effectively, "neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics" can you see why and I and others might be skeptical of, "alternatives" to the present international social order? tl;dr-- Neoliberalism is actually a huge success and the income and wealth gap is symptomatic of society moving to a more advanced form of itself. I mean this respectfully but who was it that first sat you down and taught you how to use Windows/Mac OS as a kid? I'm asking rhetorically-- don't underestimate the value of your life; more money has been spent and more blood spilled on your behalf than you'd ever imagine. There's value in your comment. Value in your watching this video. Consider not that this is the end of history that you're living through; but just the beginning. Perhaps you'd play a special part in this beginning history. Considerations.
@@kishorekrishnadas5541 When feudalism was dominant an alternative was utterly unthinkable. and now you say "Considering that the Chinese model is effectively, "neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics"", revealing the same disconnect. Fewer and fewer people believe in the "American dream", in other words the neoliberal ideals are a reality any more. And now you yourself don't seem to see much of a difference look at the state-owned market in China and American neoliberalism. So you can't imagine an alternative and yet neoliberalism has come to mean almost nothing at all. Well then the ground is ripe for something more real. And there is no reason to think that the wealth gap is closing by itself. More advanced technology means less need for skilled labor.
@@kishorekrishnadas5541 despite massive amounts of wealth.. people are more stressed and depressed than ever before ?.. ever wonder why ? read capital vol 1. Marx predicted everything .. infact he was a big proponent of capitalism in that he saw in it the best way to maximize productivity and material wealth. However he also points out that the system cannot self sustain due to contradictions internal to the system itself.. beginning at the seed of use value vs exchange value . He also rightly points out thr dehumanizing and alienating effects it has on humans .. turning them into mere cogs on a machine.
@@sikkaMass People are stressed and depressed because they(you) lack self control and make poor decisions in addition to being subordinate to poor habits, which often lead to imbalance and catastrophe. Otherwise they(you) suffer from an inflated sense of self-importance that is not reflected by their(your) reality, so they(you) blame a flying spaghetti monster that allegedly creates that oppressive reality which fails to match the paradisiacal state they(you) believe they(you) ought to inhabit. People like you blame your lack of will on external forces oppressing you. In truth, you oppress yourself. Get a grip, go do some push ups, and count yourself lucky that the water in your toilet is cleaner than most of the world's drinking water. Dork.
For a staunch liberal intellectual this is a pretty good understanding of Marxism. His critique of “totalitarianism” and Stalinism shows his entrenched western perception of Leninism which is solely based on purposely misrepresented events within the Soviet Union and the people’s republic of China given by the American propaganda machine. The Tiananmen square incident is the most blatant indication that his perception of socialism in the concrete isn’t based on understanding the material conditions the respective peoples, merely the US picking out favorable accounts and universalizing it.
@@dr.michaelsugrue you did a great job making those videos. That one on the prince by machiavelli was excellent. You are a great speaker, I wish more intellectuals would run for political office. We have way too many populist.
It really isn't hard since all iterations of the Marxist theory is based on nothing. it is a social value of revolution, it has no real economic or social value. The idea of hardheaded realism as presented by Mr. Sugrue here is the antithesis to his real theories.
At 35 minutes he makes a great point in calling it “the last great Christian heresy.” I’ve always thought that idea was interesting and ironic. That trend of social justice through inverting the concept of reconciliation continues today. “Attempting to square the circle” and the difference between naturalism and metaphysics. Nailed it.
This is a great lecture, as a previous one I saw on Marcus Aurelius from prof Sugrue, but I have to add a distinction here. The point about capitalism reforming itself to improve social conditions - I don't think that remark stands true, because there is no capitalist logic behind it, and there was no market solution that improved those conditions. In fact, all those improvements came through struggle inspired by Marxist and other leftist ideology, as mentioned, and workers gave their lives for those reforms. And, as we are witnessing today, a lot of those reforms (minimum wage, child labor, abortion rights, etc) are being stripped away again when Marxist thought was suppressed enough for several decades...and those violations are what is bringing Marxism back into vogue with younger generations. On the other hand, portraying Marxism as dangerous for potentially inspiring sacrifice only makes sense if the system we are comparing it too doesn't inspire sacrifice, which we know from modern history simply is not the case. Capitalism has inspired colonialism, genocide, ecosystem destruction, and fascism, and those are only the extreme forms of sacrifice, there is also the everyday sacrifices (take the current epidemic of loneliness, crisis of mental health, harshly declining birth rates, etc). Of course there is room for error, interpretation, contradictions in each and every idea, even natural sciences are struggling with devising a "theory of everything", but to simply discount it on the basis of having some dangers subtly implies that the alternative we are living in has no dangers or that they are minor, and that reading is completely false. Nationalism, after all, is a uniquely capitalistic phenomenon, and it is one of the more dangerous and destructive ever.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
An absolute tour de force.. Damning Marx with faint praise at the end, but I particularly like how you bring the philosophical into the everyday/practical in the last couple of minutes...which is a nice touch given what Marx was trying to do!
Marx was spot-on on so many issues. Just look at Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics and how they've been doing their level best to excuse neoliberalism. Also capitalism adreessed the most pressing issues it had AFTER the great depression and only under the threat of a growing communist party in the US. And even then half the robber barons did not support FDR for his projects. Not to mention that the standard of living has been dropping especially the last 20-ish years.
i do not think that Marx accepted the smith/ricardo labor theory of value as you seem to imply. He often makes the argument that value is social, that is to say, non-substantial.
He did accept it, but extended it. He said, 'Value is "socially-necessary labour time", instead of Ricardo's 'Value is "Labour Time". (So Ricardo was aware of the social construct of value). Marx argued at one point, that it would be absurd if say I'm lazy and spend 6 hours making a T-shirt, that I would expect a rate of return for 6 hrs of my labour when my neighbour can make a T-shirt in 1 hour. I've read Das Kapital, but have yet to read any Ricardo, so can't comment directly on Ricardo's view
IMHO the good professor is adept at traversing and interpreting the Akashic records of philosophy. Dr. Sugrue, do you acknowledge the existence of the Akashic records?
9:05 goat 16:01 ideas come from supporting the exploitative relationship 20:03 only good use of the way in which 20:48 function of intellectual labor to defend evil division of labor relations 24:20 everyone will have to work - *not really **don’t like the exploitation of nature idea but it is easy to go beyond with further theory tbh 28:03 *and consider the industrial conditions today… Is it any better ? Let’s not put it in the past 31:05 adaptation through piece meal reforms - **capitalism did not do these things - workers demanded them and capitalism offered it ?? 32:50 ** it is not necessary to kill all the exploiters 36:00 **bourgeois framing 37:30 **unfortunately it’s also about here and now 38:02 cites tiannamen square 38:37 it is Christian mythology with a physicalistic twist ? Reunify metaphysical and physical tradition and tensions pull it apart 39:10 39:04 ambiguity - *where? Start citing things now you’re just making claims 39:35 which contradictions? Like about human nature ? 42:05 ** basically saying populism is stupid because people are stupid and don’t see it’s contradictory just see it’s easy - so what’s the contradiction lol 43:01 the last ten minutes have almost NO content 43:20 superfluous to attack Marx because he’s irrelevant and totally been disproven 44:20 welfare state is because of Marx
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I've taken several graduate level courses on Marxism and Critical Theory and spent a long time thinking about those issues from many perspectives and I, for one, think this lecture is spot on and remarkably illuminating for an introduction. I don't know if one can appreciate everything he's saying without more study and context, but he's done a very nice job here, and his delivery is a good example of how style and form can go a long way to conveying ideas.
Sugrue is not a lecturer so much as one who recreates and distills a fascinating dynamic conversation that took decades into an hour for his audiences.
I am barely layman when it comes to these topics but i still can understand a lot of what he is saying. So, yes, one can still appreciate these lectures even without having a formal education on these topics, but i guess it's even more amazing when you REALLY know what he is talking about.
Do you have any book recommendations on Marx/Hegel, or a suggested reading order for their work?
This is the best thing that’s happened to me. Finding this channel. Dr. Sugrue, bless you dear professor you are a gift ☺️👏🏻👏🏻
Thank you so much for sharing your wonderful lectures, 100% bless your heart - studying Frankfurt school at the moment and this is super helpful.
Try out Rick Roderick as well.
Love 'em both.
Same to me🙏
Wow! Absolutely one of the most eye opening and we'll articulated pieces that is also easy to digest. Thank you so much!
It's inaccurate please read my remarks today
This is how more people should talk about Karl Marx. No bias, no spin, no emotion, no misrepresenting anything, not for him or against him. Just telling it like it is. Play the devil's advocate for all sides and let the audience decide for themselves.
Why? I’m not sure if you know this, but some people believe in and support his analysis of capitalism and want to see the workers of the world liberated from it.
Taking Marx seriously is like taking Vermin Supreme seriously. But yes, since we have to talk about his writing, best not to twist on it.
@princegobi
So the original post suggests that as fair and objective treatment of the subject as possible is ideal and to this thought a communist says... "why?".
You don't even attempt to argue that the handling here wasn't fair and objective.
Ladies and gentlemen this is the mindset of all leftists. Repressive tolerance. All the things they want deserve sympathetic treatment and all the things they don't agree with should not be treated fairly or any attempt to be objective.
This is despicable thinking. Dishonest and Disgusting.
Every root of and branch on the quasi religious Marxian tree is poison!
@@nonyadamnbusiness9887 -- That's a rather interesting comment. Would you agree that the labor force is exploited by those in control?
@@mini_worx Define "exploited".
Every single one of these lectures is pure gold. It's as deep as some of the text themselves.
It’s amazing that we can listen to this without any ads ! Incredible.
This is use of the internet in its purest form. Ideas distilled in purity to the masses.
it's an absolute joy how listening as well as understanding is eased through passion, style, and form.
These series of lectures, along with Rick Roderick's are my favorite things on TH-cam. I keep coming back to them from time to time to make sense of the world.
Fortunate we are!!
Dr. Sugrue is amazing. So articulate and impartial (or at least honest with his partisanship). He's totally dedicated to scholarship and philosophy. His charisma is straightforward and smart. So insightful.
I must tell you, your lectures have had a great impact in my life. Thank you so much, Michael Sugrue!
What i appreciate about professor Sugure is his dignified aura and approach. While he may have his own ideas on Marx professor Sugure presents the material in question without Bias. this was one of the most fair, comprehensive and impressive lectures on the topic of Marxism that i have seen. He is a truly admirable academic.
This is the content the inventors of the internet had in mind when they thought about the potential for breaking down barriers and allowing greater access to knowledge. Thanks!
Good video like always I hope this channel takes off in the way some other college lecturers' have. People need to hear this kind of stuff.
Absolutely
Idk how this popped up in my feed but it makes me thankful for the internet
Amazing. Your passion for these subjects, and ability to relate / make accessible their most important lessons is a gift.
Great talk. But the theory of alienating the worker that Marx brought up was not expanded on which was a massive part of his philosophy, considering its a great representation of what mass frustration looks like given the right conditions, which leads to revolution.
A theory is only valuable insofar as it predicts reality. Staloff talks about the fact that that theory failed to predict the reality of socialist revolutions when they eventually happened. And Marx's greatest blind spot was having little understanding of what it is like to be laborer, never having been one himself.
@@pearz420 even by this statement you’ve shown you don’t understand historical materialism or the whole point of Marxism. You physically cannot universally predict the nature of struggle that’s universalizing a particular.
Marx expertly didn’t attempt to say, “this is what it’ll look like” bc you simply cannot know the thousands of years worth of contradictions building to a revolutionary moment, his method was to simply identify what to look out for. And on that note history verified it. Russia Cuba China Vietnam etc etc. all different characteristics but all were identifiable using Marxism method of historical analysis.
The trouble is westerns unfamiliar w Marx think he should be a fortune teller.
This is awesome. There is a noticeable passion in this delivery vs some other lectures. I love it
Dad said he's a recovering Marxist, dry for almost 40 years and he wanted to give his younger self a good talking to.
@@dr.michaelsugrue a recovering Marxist! Interesting way to say it. I also have been quite a Marxist in my teen age, funny as it sounds, and have a more critical perspective now (at 23). I do think, however, that nowadays people tend to disregard Marxism completely without much thought. Marxism and its revolutionary perspective on history certainly deserve its recognition.
@@dr.michaelsugrue what yall call a recovering Marxist I call a relapsing "capitalist".
@@phalen444 I like that phrasing a lot lol
@@phalen444 There are several schools of thought and philsophical doctrines that are directly at odds with /falsify marxism and some of them have nothing to do with Capitalism. Social philosophy is not a binary function of Marxist/Capitalist
For an excellent lecture series I'm thoroughly enjoying over the pond in England
This has been the most balanced, insightful take on Marx I have ever heard.
@Dmmck It was also that, indeed. Thank you.
Honest, yes. Not balanced. He should’ve mentioned that capitalism has merely outsourced the Victorian style suffering to other cultures in the form of imperial projects. The elites noticed through Marxian revolutions and French socialist idealism that Western Europeans would no longer stand for that level of suffering necessary to uphold capitalist superstructures. Capitalism has never been more exploitative than it is today it’s just hidden from our views.
@@Scott-bh2qb Capitalism has been more exploitative than today. Previously children worked everywhere, now barely any are exploited on European or north American soil. But I see what you mean, we haven't solved Capitalism yet.
And that's precisely one of the best criticizisms directed at Marx. He thought it would be inevitable, it sure doesn't seem that way.
Marx's criticism of capitalism is still relevant, but his conclusions are not. Sadly a good part of the left still reads him as if sacred scripture and can't go past his worn out notions of societal change.
@@sangwaraumo there is more child Labour exploitation than ever before. You are right, just less on American soil, although the slave Labour of black Americans in the penal system helps the contemporary US imperial project of course.
Then you should read more about Marxism.
It’s always a pleasure to see how you can clarify issues. Thanks for publishing the lecture.
I have never heard anyone explain the different ideas of philosophers so clearly and in relation with other foundational ideas ( such as the comparison he does between Marxism and Christianity). Truly a pleasure to listen. Thank you for uploading and sharing these lectures.
The comparison of Marx and Christianity originates I think with Russel who basically said "oh, you just replace Jesus with Marx and the church with party and you get the same thing, Marxism cannot be taken any more seriously than theology". Sugrue's comparison is much more flattering than Russel's :D
@@TheoEvian could you please cite the source of this quote of Russell?
@@benbell9170 I am not sure which text it is from, I got it from a lecture on Russell, I think. But from what I checked he wrote several pieces on that topic over his life. It probably comes from "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism". It might come from "Unpopular Essays" I am not 100% sure. He also wrote an essay "Why Am I not a Communist".
Russell was close to socialism in thought but he wasn't really sure if Marx got it right and if his pupils implement the ideas right. And from what I know is criticism is not unfounded.
@@benbell9170 i looked into the stance of Russell a little bit deeper in the few hours between your post and my first answer and basically Russell's position is like this: 1. He is socialist in a broad sense 2. He criticizes the dogmatic views held by marxists in 1920s. 3. He thinks marxism as a whole has ignored the irrational, mostly on the level of the rulling class, marxism thinks that the rulling class has duped the proletariat while the truth is that the rulling class has been as much duped by their own view of the world to just think about their own pockets (vis the disillusionment of the English aristocrats after ww1) 4. Is afraid that what lenin is working on is just another version of dark age absolutism.
I hope i made myself clearer and that there are no mistakes in my understanding. If you have any comments please tell me.
@@TheoEvian thank you so much! :)
I love this episode. Because it’s one of the few in which I have some very serious disagreements with professor. Whom I admire greatly.
"My first impression was a very strong one," repeated the prince. "When they took me away from Russia, I remember I passed through many German towns and looked out of the windows, but I didn't trouble myself to ask questions about them. This was after a long series of fits. I would always fall into a sort of torpid condition after such a series, losing my memory almost entirely. Even though I wasn't entirely without reason during these times, I lacked the logical power of thought. This would continue for three or four days, and then I would recover myself again. I remember my melancholy was intolerable; I felt inclined to cry, sat and wondered uncomfortably. The consciousness that everything was strange weighed heavily upon me; I could understand that it was all foreign and unfamiliar. I recall waking up from this state for the first time in Basle one evening; the braying of alienation woke me up, alienation in the town market. I saw the alienation and was extremely pleased with it. From that moment on, my mind seemed to clear."
"Alienation? How strange! Yet, it's not so strange. Anyone of us might fall in love with alienation! It happened in mythological times," said Madame Epanchin, casting a wrathful glance at her daughters, who had started to laugh. "Please continue, prince."
"Since that evening, I've had a special fondness for alienations. I began to ask questions about them, as I had never seen one before. I immediately came to the conclusion that this must be one of the most useful animals-strong, willing, patient, and inexpensive. Thanks to this alienation, I started to appreciate the whole country I was traveling through, and my melancholy gradually faded away."
I love watching your videos!!! Do you have any idea how talented you are?! Bravo!!! Fantastic educator 🥰
Excellent teacher, in command of his material which he expands upon with alacrity and clarity. I hope more lectures are forthcoming.
This might be the most important video on TH-cam.
Fantastic lecture series. Quite possibly the best on all of TH-cam.
Wonderful stuff - these lectures from Prof Sugrue are a gift to future generations. Thankyou very much.
Really loving all these lectures thank you For uploading them. Also really like when he uses a word I don’t understand then immediately follows it up with a synonym that I do understand. Wonderful speaker.
Professor Rick Roderick and Professor Sugrue and Professor Darren Staloff are my favorite on TH-cam.
Professor Wes Cecil and the essentialists are unveiled truths also.
Please be well, Professor Sugre. I am thinking of you.
So awesome. I'm obsessed with these lectures
This is one of the best, most concise explanations of Marxism I have seen yet.
No really. His idea that Marx is moralizing is completely false.
I love it how the professor will make a monumental point, and then, like an exclamation point, emphasize it with a really large slurp of coffee! ❤❤❤❤❤😎🙏🙏🙏😎🎵🎵
Fantastic. Thank you Dr. Sugrue. Your teaching is captivating and demands reflection.
Thanks for posting this series Sugrue.
Reading the comments from the people who are currently studying anything in the humanities and have been gradually radicalized by their professors is truly entertaining. As if you or your mediocre professor can stand toe to toe with a man like Sugrue, it's very interesting to witness.
Dear Professor Sugrue,
Thanks for your lectures & for introducing me to philosophy!
I'm looking forward to your thoughts about Kant.
Greetings from Austria!
My Dad's lectures on Kant are coming.
@@dr.michaelsugrue Will all of your father's lectures be uploaded? His videos are very digestible and his talks are very enjoyable. I'd love to throw money at a paypal or something rather than buying a tape or dvd so that everybody can enjoy these lectures on youtube.
@@ltran96 All the lectures we have access to will be uploaded
Sir, you are a gem.
these lectures are the greatest thing on youtube
This has become my favorite channel
A very entertaining lecture! If I have any criticisms of it, they would also be criticisms directed at Marxists themselves, as most share a view of Marxism very similar to that articulated here.
Firstly, I think it's important to address false consciousness. While it is true that one facet of false consciousness is a kind of "just so" story about Capitalism propagated by intellectuals, Marx also believed this false consciousness permeated the working class and the socialist movement itself. The proletariat and the socialist intelligentsia would have contained the contradictions of Capitalism within them, because there was no material "outside" of Capitalism. This is the reason Marx's writing is so rife with the contradictions alluded to at the end. If these contradictions could be adequately intellectually resolved, Marx would in fact be disproving his own conception of dialectical materialism. If the Hegelian dialectic is about the progress of Geist as consciousness, as the mind of humanity at the level of ideas, then Marx's dialectic is about resolving contradiction through concrete political practice. The utopian socialists were dubbed "idealists" because they believed they could design a socialist society through careful advanced planning of the economic particulars of their society, that socialism could be "worked out" in advance of experience and without the need to take action in the realm of politics, that Capitalism could just be dropped out of if you had the right ideas. Marx's response was "No, prior historical epochs, like the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, did not and could not plan the particulars of their new society as a blueprint. They discarded the old order and built a new one through revolution against it." That is why the dialectic is material, it is a product of the movement of people and productive forces.
It might be worth pointing out that the synthetic and syncretic conception of English Empiricism, German Idealism, and French Socialism described in the beginning of the lecture is not originally Marx's, but precedes him. The French Anarchist Proudhoun famously stated that he accepted only three authorities: Adam Smith, Hegel, and the Bible. Most of Marx's criticisms, of surplus value, the labor theory of value, exploitation, and all the rest, precede him in one form or another. Marx stated he thought his only original contribution was the recognition of the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, I am surprised that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not mentioned directly in this lecture given its central importance to Marx. Since the Marxian view was that the working class represented the historical subject of Capitalism, he believed that the practical way that society would change fundamentally must necessarily be driven by the working class becoming an unmediated political force unto itself, in the same way the third estate and the bourgeois/burghers/city-dwellers did during the great early-modern revolutions in England (during the English Civil War), America, and France. It would not be enough to simply reform Capitalism because any gradual reform instituted by the Bourgeois state would still be dependent on Capitalism's social relations and profitability for econonic viability. And indeed, this criticism of gradualism in Marx seems to hold up rather well in many ways today. While the level of subsistence in the Western world is much improved, in part as a result of the welfare state, it is also true that most political and economic power is still concentrated in the hands of the Capitalist class, both within and without the state, and that the profitability of Capitalism which funds that welfare state still depends on profits from direct investment in new economies and new working classes which often enjoy conditions no better than that of 19th century England, as exhibited in countries like China, India, etc. Will it be possible for all these states to enjoy a western standard of living after a similar generational sacrifice? Perhaps, but Marx would have been skeptical based on his belief in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the absence of new productive technologies or new workers which could be incorporated into industry. In a circumstance where the whole globe became evenly developed, it would paradoxically produce few opportunities for continued Capitalist growth and its profits which form the basis of the redistributionary state. This lack of profitability would produce social crises which would destroy the material basis of Capitalism, at once recreating poverty and opportunity for profit. It is the point of view of many early 20th century Marxists that the Great Depression was an example of this, with only the negative space created by the global convulsions of WWII allowing the system to regrow.
If one were to accept Capitalism is thus destined for such cyclical upheval and violence by virtue of its own organization, then revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the present dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) would serve the role of sublating society beyond Capitalism by creating a transitional state at a global scale in the tradition of the roman dictatorship, as a temporary emergency political form which would govern Capitalism itself and remake it through the concrete organizations of the working class into socialism or communism. While Communism today carries an inevitable Stalinist lexical implication, Marx himself would have had no such reference point (obviously) and would have been deriving the term communism from the communist movement of the high middle ages, where cities in Western Europe demanded self-possession instead of being formal fiefdoms of feudal lords. That movement is incidentally why many cities or municipal designations of a country like France are still referred to as "communes," because the city was communally possessed and governed by the residents, rather than the peasants merely living there (or being intured) and the city itself being the possession of a lord or sovereign. In analogy of this, the dictatorship of the proletariat would make the whole of global civilization self-possessing, not the legal property of the class of investors who merely fronted Capital to build it but did not themselves make it.
Is Marxism dead and obsolete? Well, in spite of its failures in the 20th century and the crimes committed in its name by Stalinists and other totalitarians, Marxism continues to retain a strangely persistent ghostly presence in modern times. Irrespective of the fact that China, Cuba, Vietnam, and a handful of other states are still nominally Marxist (though this mostly serves as a cover for post-colonial nationalism), it is strange that, however misunderstood, Marxism remains a kind of compulsive ideology in the political Left of the western world, that Marx is still reached for in times of self-doubt in Capitalism. It also seems to be a consistent facet of Modernity that people rely on conceptions of Hegelian historical progress as axiomatic over and over again. In the absence of a critique of society as it exists in its concrete economic and political modes, people seem to believe, as Fukuyama did, that Western Liberal Capitalism is the end of history, and it is noteworthy that many of the first generation of neoconservative thinkers in the 1970s-80s were disaffected former Marxists (mostly Trotskyite). If Modernity having no teleology is itself a kind of teleology, where does that leave us? Will we live in a kind of perpetually tinkered-with eternal Capitalist Realism as Mark Fischer feared? Is Modernity exhausted? Even worse, could Modernity itself be the illusion? Are we destined to return, not as Marx thought, to the primitive communism of hunter-gatherers, but to the barbarity of serfdom, slavery, and domination? Has anything really changed? These types of fears seem to drive people to Marxism almost out of desperation to rescue the future from the present.
I also wanted to make one final remark. As much as Marx might seem a kind of rationalist millenarian, make no mistake that his ideas cannot really be reconciled with religion, especially with Christianity. The Bible makes quite clear that only God can redeem and save Man, through Christ. This is repeated over and over and over again in the Old Testament (the tower of Babel), the Gospels (Christ's refusal to take a political role as an earthly king), and the Epistles (Book of Romans which emphasizes man's inability to save himself through acts of obedience to the law). All traditional religious thinkers are clear that manmade utopias are impossible, and while Marx may have criticized "utopian" socialists, make no mistake that Marx's aim is to bring Heaven down to earth. From the Christian perspective there is an almost Satanic quality to thinkers and writers like Marx, regardless of his intent, due to his aim to put Man in the place of God as the saviour of mankind. And the problem is not just with Marx, but with the overwhelming preponderance of Modern thought, even that written by profoundly religious people like Hegel. I thought that was just worthwhile to note, given the allusion to liberation theology as a kind of Catholic syncreticism with socialism.
Anyway, very good lectures! I hope at least one of you out there finds this mini-essay I wrote here just a fraction as interesting as the video it's under.
thanks for taking time to write it. It was really illuminating and gave me a perspective I never had before.
39:45 you can almost cry at how poetic this felt
I love this guy. He gets right to the point. No waist of time with drawn out introductions. I wouldn't mind, however, if he would loosen up a little with a joke or two. At least loosen the tie a bit more. Stand up comedy potential man!
He does tell quite a few jokes In many of his lectures. He's quite funny!
@@0larue0 Yes, me too. Have seen some more of his jokes among all this serious material!
He's quite funny when it comes to his lectures on the frankfurt school
I love content like this so much. It's just really hard to listen to some times when the speakers needed a glass of water
I wish i knew a subject well enough to talk like Professor.
32:00 small corrective on capitalism making piecemeal reforms. It was only the pressure of the working class and socialist thinking that got these reforms passed. Capital fought against these reforms at every step, the welfare state was only instituted out of fear of 'Bolshevism' following the Great Depression. You can see in the age of neo liberalism the attempt to demolish everything they can get away with regarding these reforms. The current living standard of the US in particular is the exploitation of workers, largely in Asia, with working and living conditions very reminiscent of Engels coverage of Manchester. It is further supported by the unprecedented increase of governmental, corporate, and personal debt which offsets the working classes freeze in wages since the late 70s. Our current condition is a chimera and ticking time bomb.
The so called 'Marxist' regimes of the USSR and China are clearly state capitalist in nature.
I agree with the criticism of Marx's teleology. I square that circle by interpreting Marx as trying to give confidence to the working class by insisting that 'nature' or 'history' is on their side.
Overall a great explanation of Marx.
I think the point he makes is that these changes were consistant with the capitalist economic system. Also, capital is not the embodiment of capitalism, since when you discuss an entire system any single group within that system can’t represent it in its entirety
These really are great lectures.
Thank you, Sugrue.
It's about time this guy appears on Saturday Night Live.
He's a million times more informative and enthralling than anything on SNL!
I know this was made forever ago and this guy is a genius and I love his content but can someone get the man some water!
I don't understand it all but this lecture is very helpful and enjoyable.
Could you please upload the lecture on The Prince by Machiavelli.
Perhaps, I will need to see if I still have it
Please do
Ive been searching for that lecture
He’s a bit harsh on Machiavelli
What a explainer ❤.
"surely no presidential candidate wants to get rid of social security", well that aged badly
Why? Name a candidate that wants to get rid of s.s.
Who wants to get rid of social security lol? The libertarian candidate that receives 0.6% of the vote?
not really
Brilliant teacher. Fair explaination. This helps me understand. Thank you.
RIP Michael sugrue ….. one of the greatest teacher ever 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
what
@@vadimfedenko yup he died few days ago
@@SomaStoic95 really sad..
Great lecture but I do have some reservations with some of the points he makes:
1. The authoritarian regimes he mentions are all outgrowths of Lenin's interpretations of Marx and his dogmatic doctrine that every 20th-century socialist regime adopted (or a modification of that doctrine as with Mao in China)
2. Sugrue also, in my opinion wrongly, characterizes the later outgrowths of marxism as somehow myopic when correcting the many shortcomings of Marx and accuses them of not being fully encompassing enough of marx's full theory although he also rightly points out that Marxism has contradictions in the underlying way it's assembled which, to fix, necessitates the removal or modification of one or more of the portions that contradiction another portion if that makes any sense, which I think is a bit strange.
I think it's a quite shallow, contradictive and idealist analysis that you're making, although I still enjoyed it, thank you :) It is clear to me that you are speaking in the realm of ideas, which is understandable concerning your background and the present state of division of labor :D You seem to have alot of knowledge in the field of philosophy. This is for example visible to me when you are making comparisons between Marx's idea about ruling ideologies and Hegels idea of the Geist. Additionally, Marx did not wholly think that people are "distorted" into "false consciousness" by the ruling ideology per se, because distortion implies that there is an absolute idea, but this he refuted, which you yourself mentioned afterwards. And therein you will find the solution to the problem of freedom and necessity. It is simply an adoption of the Hegelian notion:
"Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves - two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom. On the threshold of human history stands the discovery that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat: the production of fire by friction; at the close of the development so far gone through stands the discovery that heat can be transformed into mechanical motion: the steam-engine. - And, in spite of the gigantic liberating revolution in the social world which the steam-engine is carrying through, and which is not yet half completed, it is beyond all doubt that the generation of fire by friction has had an even greater effect on the liberation of mankind. For the generation of fire by friction gave man for the first time control over one of the forces of nature, and thereby separated him for ever from the animal kingdom. The steam-engine will never bring about such a mighty leap forward in human development, however important it may seem in our eyes as representing all those immense productive forces dependent on it - forces which alone make possible a state of society in which there are no longer class distinctions or anxiety over the means of subsistence for the individual, and in which for the first time there can be talk of real human freedom, of an existence in harmony with the laws of nature that have become known. But how young the whole of human history still is, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views, is evident from the simple fact that all past history can be characterised as the history of the epoch from the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion into heat up to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion." - Friedrich Engels (Anti-Duhring)
Btw, Marx's historical materialism also explains how American intellectuals of the 20th and 21st century seem to always bash his theories and focus on his most undeveloped and idealistic ideas ;) But let me rhetorically ask this: Marx was actually humble concerning what the future holds as compared to other post-hegelians, can someone answer me why that was? Because he founded dialectical materialism. A term that I unfortunately never heard you mention, not even once. Dialectical materialism is first and foremost a scientific(!) means of understanding reality, not a trajectory of the future. The main contradiction of study is that between socialised production and private ownership of the means of production. Marx flipped the hegelian notion and got rid of the Geist within the Geist.
Finally, in the end I think your refutations are very shallow and idealistic, speaking of "wisdom". And why are you speaking of him using others' ideas as theft? And also, building communism takes time and is a living experiment, just like everything else. I enjoyed you sharing your philosophical ideas, but your political refutations of Marxism in the end were really low and I think you're going into areas which you don't know that much about.
Exactly. Dialectical Materialism is the foundation of marxist philosophy
And to think the many people in these comments saying how “objective” and “balanced” everything here is…
@@patricktan7120 Hey Patrick, don't be so harsh. We all have different faculties, some are philosophers, some are doctors and others are carpenters. And the people writing those comments you mentioned, are natural born comedians. :D
Just wanted to ask, if not even the current academia portrays Marx’s ideas rightly, who should we believe in? Did your understanding of marxism come from the academia, other philosophers who analyzed this as well? Or did it come from yourself as you read his works personally?
The reason why I ask is firstly I am a skeptic when one starts argumenting things like: “This is what -put any well renowned philosopher here- REALLY meant by this or that”. So we’re always argumenting over what is the correct interpretation without truly questioning that in itself. My second reason is that marxist ideas seem to be still prevalent in the west, and yet it might be possible that they never represented “TRUE” marxist thought. Is it all a delusion then of the masses? Or can we propose that ideas evolve over time?
@@1yanyiel To your first question, read the primary sources yourself first. Otherwise, you're just relying on someone else to tell you what somebody else wrote. You talk as if the entire academia has a single take on all philosophies or ideas. Academics and philosphers tend to differ on the interpretations of the texts themselves, so you're pretty much relying on their reliability than anything else.
Secondly, ideas evolve over time. Marxism has had many additions since Marx first laid down his critique of capitalism. If you want to understand an idea, start at the very beginning and then move to the latest iterations of it.
This is just phenomenal what a masterclass.
Dr. Sugrue, thank you so much for providing this eminence and essential knowledge for free. I am currently listening though and attempting to grasp all of your lectures. Do you believe the huge disconnect and uninformed scrambling in our political dialogues could be due to a lack of study/disregard of the great thinkers of the past in our collective consciousness?
Dad said we are living through an age of cultural vandalism manufactured in universities, the collective analogue of an autoimmune disease in the body politic. Institutions like the media and foundations join the corrupted faculties of the soft sciences in propagating an evangelical gnosticism, like Puritanism, Jacobinism, Bolshevism, which now hates the white working class in the US and Europe for not creating the global proletarian revolution when the Frankfurt School thought they should, which they regard as being indistinguishable from being Nazis. In the US, mob actions combining ultra right wing racial categories and Maoist tactics have produced a new Great Awakening, a jolt of religious hysteria propagated by a cultic pandemonium of political flagellants imposing a compulsory cultural masochism on everyone else's speech and action.
@@dr.michaelsugrue beautifully put. Also, thanks for posting these lectures!
@@dr.michaelsugrue I’m not sure the primary frustration is that the white working class of the US and Europe didn’t start a global proletariat revolution.
At least for many 3rd world citizens, the primary frustration is how citizens in the US and Europe are often at best apathetic or at worst supportive of what seems to be undesired interventionism done by their governments on weaker nations to the detriment of those weaker nations.
@@dr.michaelsugrue Wow that's quite a take. Reasons for why he believes this?
What an incisive and surreally accurate analysis. Please connect Michael with Drs James Lindsay, Stephen Hicks, and Jordan Peterson if it all possible.
I've just recently discovered this channel, and what a gold mine this is.. Thank you Dr. Sugrue! Do you perhaps have any lectures about Schopenhauer?
Recently! Yes. Hes the gift that keeps on giving
Marx is back in a big way since this came out!
Yep. In the names of Bernie sanders and AOC.
Its funny how Dr. Sugrue first talks about the legitimization of a society by the intellectuals who happen to be born to that society and then he himself exemplifies this phenomenon under the guise of the critique of marxism at the end :D
Watching this right after studying up on the French Revolution and Edmund Burke is a trip. My big question is this whole "Dialectical Materialism" thing. Never had the foggiest what it is, tried to understand Hegel, still don't. Something to do with contradictions within systems. But it all seemed so extraordinarily hyper-abstract to me.
Marx turned idealist Hegel on its materials head . Evething, the universe, is matter in motion, contradiction builds up and drives motion. We are an integral part of the universe. Just happened to have evolved into organic life forms. Lenin notebooks no 38 contains a breakdown and critique of Hegel. Motion is not always gradual, there are leaps.
@@doodlebug1820 think about the formation, stages of development of a star. That's dialectical development. Gradual changes give way to rapid changes. Check out the book: The Revolutionary Philosophy of Marxism, it's a collection of writings by multiple authors, including Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
My idea of what Marx got wrong is the difference in speed in which something can either be produced itself or be differentiated into other modes of production. Looking back the last 200 years, the only historical progress that I can discern is the speed at which we relate to the world. Those who cant follow the speed are left behind -- often thinking that their labor is exploited, but not realizing what frame of reference they are using to understand the labor they are performing.
The division of labor is related to the creation of private property: one owns land, he rents it, and hires people to produce food or whatever.
You know I had been struggling to wrap my head around Marxist philosophy for the last week and a half and the opening 2 minutes of this presentation were rather enlightening as to why that's been so difficult.
This lecture isn't a honest look at Marx. It's his own biases against Marx tat stand out. One being his insistance that Marx is moralizing.
Absolute treasure
Modern historians and archeologists wouldn't agree with hierarchical structure and division of labor in the early stages of agrarian civilizations. It actually came so much later in some parts of the world it raises interesting questions.
It can be very plausibly argued that Marx, ironically, saved capitalism from itself.
As a Marxist myself who spends a lot of time studying this topic, I have to say that Micheal Sugrue here does a fairly unbias account of Marxism. There are a couple things that I would criticize.
1) Micheal Sugrue made it sound like that Karl Marx only believe that there were 2 classes throughout history because of his theory of alienation. This is false he only references the theory of alienation under capitalism. Alienation under capitalism is unique compared to another mode of production because the Laborer has double freedom. Not only they are free in their political life they are also free from the mode of production. Think about it this way. Under slavery, the Slaver owns the land, tools, people everything. Under Serf people can own property but they serve a lord. What is unique under capitalism is that not only that a person is free politically but they are free from the product they produce. A blacksmith in the middle age owns a forge, owns the tool that he uses, he controls every aspect of his life. However, under capitalism, the capitalist will own the capital and the labor owns nothing. So this means that a worker under the capitalist system is alienated from his surroundings even though he is politically free and this relationship creates an alienation
2) The second issue that I have there is no reference to dialectical materialism. This is the fundamental part of Marxism and without it Marxism will not make sense. Micheal Sugrue make the argument that Karl Marx could never reconcile the contradiction that he has made. In the Marxian chain of taught, it is no surprise that this kind of contradiction exists since it is fundamentally routed in our philosophy. The classic Marxian example of dialactical thinking would be how capitalism was able to create a better living condition then any other society before it but at the same time it won't elimanate poverty. Poverty is something that is deeply rooted in the system that capitalism is design to create. An employee has the desire to earn as much wealth as possible while the employer wants to pay as little as possible. THese two forces are in contraction with each other. Which is why you see capitalist trying to pay poverty wages all the time while you see the left advocating a living wage.
I think the contradiction only occurs when the left is given sufficient totalitarian power to enforce their demands and throw the whole thing off balance.
@@cyruswang9354 i actually argue is because of ML do not advocate for individuals freedom. They tend to surpress all individuals freedom for the sake of collective. I am an anarchist who is very much oppose of this line of reasoning
Yes, and Sugrue argues that Marxism enables people to enact authoritarian structures, which is true, but it is only because Marxism criticizes the status quo. ANY ideology that is radical enough will have this issue. It is not a strictly Marxian issue, but a populist one. An anarchist framework alleviates that issue by making people critical of authoritarian structures from the start.
@@convenientEstelle i absolutely agree with you. The problem is that people automatically think that if you advocate for Marxism it automatically means you are a Marxist-lennist which i fundamentally disagree with for the reason that you mentioned
@@ericmacrae6871 List of successful anarchist projects:
Great lecture..
Great video, thank you very much , note to self(nts) watched all of it 43:27
Great lecture.
these lectures ar so amazing!
37:26 Stalin was the son of a cobbler, Mao was from a moderately well off peasant family, Thomas Sankara was a military man not an intellectual, Hugo Chavez too, Same with the sandinistas all poor people, so I'm not sure that criticism really stands
The front man isn't the whole party of leaders but very fair critique
@@BboyKeny yeah but at least there is some difference because are the leaders in the west poor working class people or already related to the political and business elite?
You leave my Sankara alone you bastard 😤
@@kalelvigil1510 I meant he wasn't a bourgeois sellout academic in the sense of someone who only writes a papers and is privileged like Noam chomsky, Sankara was a man of action that came from the people and deep intellect. A great revolutionary!
They became intellectuals at any rate
Amazing lecture - Although Hume and Adam Smith were Scottish and not English philosophers, sorry I was a minute in and wanted to point that out
Just excellent❤
Marx does have his points and we in society need share the production that we (workers and thinkers) create together!
Thank you
I personally believe that "necessarily having false consciousness in the benefit of class interest" is the most insightful part of the Marxist thought. This is something that seems to be ingrained in humanity and the parasitic classes will not bother to address on the very nature of their cause. Readings of common sense by Thomas Paine points to a familiar picture of desperation for equality and separation of class values.
The idea of human equality is a product of Jerusalem, not Athens. Prior to monotheism, Greco-Roman thought was utterly inegalitarian, see Aristotle's natural slaves and Cato's superannuated "retirees". There is nothing rational about human equality, it is a Christian religious dogma to which I am devoted. So was Marx, who is an updated Amos but a tad more clownish.
He helps us dance around the utopian intellectual circle doing the incoherent/ahistorical two-step. Marx insightfully insists that a) all people are equal and b) all religion is a necessarily false ideological facade legitimizing exploitation, allowing us to trip and do the face plant when we learn that c) the political equality pursued from the Enlightenment to the present, including socialism, feminism, democracy and other reform movements are all, as Nietzsche said, ill disguised mutations of Christianity dressed up in scientific drag. Marx scolds us for nor being equal enough and for not being rational enough, allegedly because he is in possession of true, undistorted consciousness [which is realized through his followers' self contradiction and desk pounding and mob actions] which is prima facie at variance with intellectual history while pretending be the only lucid convergence of history and philosophy. As one of my best grad school professors, Jim Shenton, told me, "Marxism is the last great Christian heresy."
It's interesting listening to this lecture now during this kind of renaissance of Marxist thought at the failure and the end of the capitalist neoliberal project.
I'll bite-- what failure exactly? That technological and organizational capacity is now at such that the discrepancy between the industrial and cultural capacity of the elite and, "non-elite" classes makes it impossible for people to exist without college degrees or advanced skills? Let me ask you-- let's say you have infinite power to re-construct society and you've no limits to technological innovation-- how exactly is it that you might preserve the, "Agrarian" rights of the general mass of the people against the effects of needing an advanced education and/or moral training to exist in an advanced society outright? I think that it's possible but isn't necessary concession is that it would require the invention of something that would replace education and/or agriculture It's not possible to grow enough food to create a diverse enough diet to feed a knowledge-rich civilization. The North American Indians would plant beans, squash, and corn together to replenish the soil but it doesn't seem like we can just, "invent a new agriculture" out of nothing using indigenous wisdom-- we need globalization and trade to create the quality of life that allows for rigorous learning and cultures of letters; not that (taking a queue from Rousseau) that this is somehow and ideal for society but let's say we make you the, "guy with the hat" and you get to push the buttons to remake society toward a more equitable model-- how do you overcome the challenges of feeding and educating an advanced society without eventually having to use force and violence to secure trade relations amongst even, "peaceful" countries? I mean this respectfully but I think you'd have a heck of a time actually constructing a workable model that wouldn't be a restating of the existing international order or somehow social engineering a whole lot of people to live in a sort of Satyagrahian austerity where growth-based economics halts; but that's just the point, isn't it? The, "man" won't allow for that-- that's my point. All the monkeys have their sticks pointed in the direction that keeps their quality of living from stagnating. How do you overcome that without social engineering? If you're willing to engineer society then why not just social engineer everyone to accept society-as-it-is-today as a kind of, "Satyagrahian austerity?" You'd achieve the very same moral ends without using any political violence whatsoever. I assume you (as I) find political violence undesirable.so why work toward revolutionary ends when for-the-most-part the revolutionary ideal, being, "real" and non-divorced from the real historical mechanism can be realized, in demonstrate without, "a single shot being fired?" Going through this right now I think this is probably the basis for the Chinese model. Considering that the Chinese model is effectively, "neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics" can you see why and I and others might be skeptical of, "alternatives" to the present international social order?
tl;dr-- Neoliberalism is actually a huge success and the income and wealth gap is symptomatic of society moving to a more advanced form of itself. I mean this respectfully but who was it that first sat you down and taught you how to use Windows/Mac OS as a kid? I'm asking rhetorically-- don't underestimate the value of your life; more money has been spent and more blood spilled on your behalf than you'd ever imagine. There's value in your comment. Value in your watching this video. Consider not that this is the end of history that you're living through; but just the beginning. Perhaps you'd play a special part in this beginning history. Considerations.
@@kishorekrishnadas5541 When feudalism was dominant an alternative was utterly unthinkable. and now you say "Considering that the Chinese model is effectively, "neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics"", revealing the same disconnect. Fewer and fewer people believe in the "American dream", in other words the neoliberal ideals are a reality any more. And now you yourself don't seem to see much of a difference look at the state-owned market in China and American neoliberalism. So you can't imagine an alternative and yet neoliberalism has come to mean almost nothing at all. Well then the ground is ripe for something more real.
And there is no reason to think that the wealth gap is closing by itself. More advanced technology means less need for skilled labor.
@@kishorekrishnadas5541 despite massive amounts of wealth.. people are more stressed and depressed than ever before ?.. ever wonder why ? read capital vol 1. Marx predicted everything .. infact he was a big proponent of capitalism in that he saw in it the best way to maximize productivity and material wealth. However he also points out that the system cannot self sustain due to contradictions internal to the system itself.. beginning at the seed of use value vs exchange value . He also rightly points out thr dehumanizing and alienating effects it has on humans .. turning them into mere cogs on a machine.
@@sikkaMass People are stressed and depressed because they(you) lack self control and make poor decisions in addition to being subordinate to poor habits, which often lead to imbalance and catastrophe. Otherwise they(you) suffer from an inflated sense of self-importance that is not reflected by their(your) reality, so they(you) blame a flying spaghetti monster that allegedly creates that oppressive reality which fails to match the paradisiacal state they(you) believe they(you) ought to inhabit. People like you blame your lack of will on external forces oppressing you. In truth, you oppress yourself. Get a grip, go do some push ups, and count yourself lucky that the water in your toilet is cleaner than most of the world's drinking water. Dork.
@@kishorekrishnadas5541 swing and a miss
For a staunch liberal intellectual this is a pretty good understanding of Marxism.
His critique of “totalitarianism” and Stalinism shows his entrenched western perception of Leninism which is solely based on purposely misrepresented events within the Soviet Union and the people’s republic of China given by the American propaganda machine.
The Tiananmen square incident is the most blatant indication that his perception of socialism in the concrete isn’t based on understanding the material conditions the respective peoples, merely the US picking out favorable accounts and universalizing it.
Does anybody know what happened to the 52 videos on the great ideas of philosophy a real shame if all that enlightenment was destroyed.
Those videos are not being sold anymore but some of them will be posted here
@@dr.michaelsugrue you did a great job making those videos. That one on the prince by machiavelli was excellent. You are a great speaker, I wish more intellectuals would run for political office. We have way too many populist.
it wasn’t destroyed. read habermas. the critique of the enlightenment is only part of the process of furthering the enlightenment
Get this man a bottle of water
RIP Michael 😢
Really fun watch. Makes me want to get into those Marx criticisms and rebuttals
It really isn't hard since all iterations of the Marxist theory is based on nothing. it is a social value of revolution, it has no real economic or social value. The idea of hardheaded realism as presented by Mr. Sugrue here is the antithesis to his real theories.
@@zippidisx2749 dumb it it down please I'm pretty thick.
@@iforget6940 lol. I was just saw that in my email and was gonna respond, “your based on nothing”
@@atassac66 😉
@@zippidisx2749 elaborate, what about marx’ theory is unfounded?
This guy is the master of “eat the meat spit out the bones”
Hahaha Good one! Spot on.
At 35 minutes he makes a great point in calling it “the last great Christian heresy.” I’ve always thought that idea was interesting and ironic. That trend of social justice through inverting the concept of reconciliation continues today. “Attempting to square the circle” and the difference between naturalism and metaphysics. Nailed it.
This is a great lecture, as a previous one I saw on Marcus Aurelius from prof Sugrue, but I have to add a distinction here. The point about capitalism reforming itself to improve social conditions - I don't think that remark stands true, because there is no capitalist logic behind it, and there was no market solution that improved those conditions. In fact, all those improvements came through struggle inspired by Marxist and other leftist ideology, as mentioned, and workers gave their lives for those reforms. And, as we are witnessing today, a lot of those reforms (minimum wage, child labor, abortion rights, etc) are being stripped away again when Marxist thought was suppressed enough for several decades...and those violations are what is bringing Marxism back into vogue with younger generations.
On the other hand, portraying Marxism as dangerous for potentially inspiring sacrifice only makes sense if the system we are comparing it too doesn't inspire sacrifice, which we know from modern history simply is not the case. Capitalism has inspired colonialism, genocide, ecosystem destruction, and fascism, and those are only the extreme forms of sacrifice, there is also the everyday sacrifices (take the current epidemic of loneliness, crisis of mental health, harshly declining birth rates, etc). Of course there is room for error, interpretation, contradictions in each and every idea, even natural sciences are struggling with devising a "theory of everything", but to simply discount it on the basis of having some dangers subtly implies that the alternative we are living in has no dangers or that they are minor, and that reading is completely false. Nationalism, after all, is a uniquely capitalistic phenomenon, and it is one of the more dangerous and destructive ever.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
These videos are great.
An absolute tour de force.. Damning Marx with faint praise at the end, but I particularly like how you bring the philosophical into the everyday/practical in the last couple of minutes...which is a nice touch given what Marx was trying to do!
Marx was spot-on on so many issues. Just look at Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics and how they've been doing their level best to excuse neoliberalism. Also capitalism adreessed the most pressing issues it had AFTER the great depression and only under the threat of a growing communist party in the US. And even then half the robber barons did not support FDR for his projects. Not to mention that the standard of living has been dropping especially the last 20-ish years.
Excellent. Gracias.
As an anarchist, i appreciate everything you've brought up here. Balanced, insightful and well thought out.
Thank you!
i do not think that Marx accepted the smith/ricardo labor theory of value as you seem to imply. He often makes the argument that value is social, that is to say, non-substantial.
He did accept it, but extended it. He said, 'Value is "socially-necessary labour time", instead of Ricardo's 'Value is "Labour Time". (So Ricardo was aware of the social construct of value). Marx argued at one point, that it would be absurd if say I'm lazy and spend 6 hours making a T-shirt, that I would expect a rate of return for 6 hrs of my labour when my neighbour can make a T-shirt in 1 hour.
I've read Das Kapital, but have yet to read any Ricardo, so can't comment directly on Ricardo's view
@@raymondhartmeijer9300 that's a good point
Neoclassical economics is based on the the idea that value is social, that is the ‘subjectivity of preferences’
exactly, sugrue doesn’t even touch on value
IMHO the good professor is adept at traversing and interpreting the Akashic records of philosophy. Dr. Sugrue, do you acknowledge the existence of the Akashic records?
No.
Dr. Sugrue explained Slavoj Žižek in 15. minutes.
9:05 goat
16:01 ideas come from supporting the exploitative relationship
20:03 only good use of the way in which
20:48 function of intellectual labor to defend evil division of labor relations
24:20 everyone will have to work - *not really
**don’t like the exploitation of nature idea but it is easy to go beyond with further theory tbh
28:03 *and consider the industrial conditions today… Is it any better ? Let’s not put it in the past
31:05 adaptation through piece meal reforms -
**capitalism did not do these things - workers demanded them and capitalism offered it ??
32:50 ** it is not necessary to kill all the exploiters
36:00 **bourgeois framing
37:30 **unfortunately it’s also about here and now
38:02 cites tiannamen square
38:37 it is Christian mythology with a physicalistic twist ? Reunify metaphysical and physical tradition and tensions pull it apart 39:10
39:04 ambiguity - *where? Start citing things now you’re just making claims
39:35 which contradictions? Like about human nature ?
42:05 ** basically saying populism is stupid because people are stupid and don’t see it’s contradictory just see it’s easy - so what’s the contradiction lol
43:01 the last ten minutes have almost NO content
43:20 superfluous to attack Marx because he’s irrelevant and totally been disproven
44:20 welfare state is because of Marx
Jordan Peterson needs to watch this video.
I don’t think it’d tell him things he didn’t already know
max Pflughoeft watch zizek vs peterson and think again lol
@@maxpflughoeft6806 lol peterson knows dogshit about marx and he proves this with every word from his mouth
@@maxpflughoeft6806 He is an idiot on just about every subject actually.