To some he was a genius that gave hope to millions. To others he was charlatan that nearly led mankind to its destruction. Everyone agreed that he was a rebel that offered a savage indictment on the harsh realities of modern industrial society; a prophet of doom to the powers that be. His work still inspires aspiration and dread to this day. It is still relevant. In a century it will remain relevant. Who was he? What did he really believe? What vision did he offer? You may think you know him but chances are you only know half the story. It's Karl Marx... this time on Savage Continent.
To some he was a genius that gave hope to millions. To others he was charlatan that nearly led mankind to its destruction. Everyone agreed that he was a rebel that offered a savage indictment on the harsh realities of modern industrial society; a prophet of doom to the powers that be. His work still inspires aspiration and dread to this day. It is still relevant. In a century it will remain relevant. Who was he? What did he really believe? What vision did he offer? You may think you know him but chances are you only know half the story. It's Karl Marx... this time on Savage Continent.
Stephen 0:00
What if someone told you there was a button and that button had an immense power. This button could take any idea.. Any belief.. Any generally accepted concept and take it apart piece by piece and demolish it. What if someone told you that you could use this button to win any argument with anybody. You would have the ability to show up anyone.. I think you'd probably be very interested in that button. He says he will show you its location but before he does he warns you that the button itself is indestructible. It can never be disconnected. If you learn of its existence you will never forget of it. It will always be there. You go ahead anyways. You have this secret weapon. Your pride soars as you win every argument with anyone you meet. But then a thing happens. You start to question your own beliefs. Why not? You have to know if they are true right?? You soon find that you cant stop pressing the button. You become depressed and start wishing you never heard of the button and talk to the man who told you in the first place. Take it away!! I used to love this thing and now it just makes me miserable. All he can say is.. “I warned you.” You always hear about addicts.. And how once you are an addict you will always be an addict… drugs.. Booze… gamblig… sex.. Even OCD.. What are they all? They are solutions. They are short cuts. Feeling depressed?? Overwhelmed?? Anxious??? Press this button. It will all go away just like that. Once you know that button is out there you can never unknow it.
Today we are going to learn a concept quite similar. As you may have guessed this episode is on Karl Marx and his philosophy. Soo.. what does that have to do with metaphorical buttons? People think of his philosophy as being purely materialistic. Sure… class struggle.. Ending private ownership of the means of production… that's part of it. But there's so much more to it than that. Marx once described his method as “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.” As we will see its reach proved to be much more all encompassing and widespread than he ever dream. It helped to demolish a world order and nearly create a new one. At one point nearly one third of the world’s population lived under states that professed to be his followers. We know how the story ends.. Or we think we do… But if you were an objective observer in the 1950’s or even 1960’s you might reasonably make the case that Soviet style communism might possibly prevail in the end.. And no. Im ruling out nuclear war here. Their economy was diversifying. Their standard of living was showing impressive gains. Khruschev wasn't totally talking out of his ass when he predicted that his civilization would overtake the west in a decade or two. Even in the 1970’s the Soviet state was viable economically…. Of course then it just stagnated. It developed a dependence on oil sales on the international market. When the price of crude collapsed during the early 80s the state fell on hard times. Of course it never helped that felt it had to compete in an increasingly manic arms race but its problems became too much. Still.. Virtually no one predicted its collapse but that is for a future episode.
In our last series, Wizards of Armageddon we saw the insane levels states would go to to guarantee their own safety in the face of weapons systems that really beggar the imagination. You think about a multi megaton weapon landing on any sort of populated area and you mind just recoils. The suddenness of it the finality. All of that destructive power inside a cylinder or cone not much bigger than a trashcan. But the Cold War wasnt just a story of technology running away with the show. There were people ready to make those choices… Choices that might potentially mean life and death for millions. Remember Che Guevarra’s quote from our last episode??
Che Guevarra in Nov 1962 did an interview with Sam Russel of the “Daily Worker” - “If the nuclear missiles had remained, we wold have fired them at the heart of the US… including New York City. The victory of Socialism is worth millions of atomic victims.”
Che would would reflect on the episode a year later; “Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer atomic immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies. When an agreement was reached by which atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice.”
Where did this all come from? Che and Fidel came from relatively comfortable upper middle class backgrounds. Che had a promising medical career and Fidel was the son of a planter. Why did they risk everything… everything. To rail against an abstract concept like capitalism?
Many people get upset when if you equate communism with religion. Essentially it is opposed to religion. Marx called religion the “opiate of the masses.” Nonetheless, this type of fervor is hard to understand outside of some sort of religious lens. Yuri Slezkine does an in depth comparison in his 2017 book “The House of Government” where he compares the primary actors in the Russian revolution to a millenarian cult working toward a utopian future. Think about that. In the same way Christians, Muslims and Jews anticipate a future in which God will reign supreme and the existence for the faithful will be an eternity of bliss and tranquility, so marxism preaches that the state will simply fall away and workers will bask in a limitless future of equality and abundance.
Slezkine, Yuri The House of Government pg. 114
Marxism, like christianity is vague about what the actual dream would look like but the theme seems to be a sort of freedom.
Slezkine, Yuri The House of Government pg. 117
Thats a beautiful dream. Ah but how to get there. Lets explore the work of a man whose ideas are more hated and loved than perhaps anyone in history. Its Karl Marx…. This time on savage continent!!
Intro Music 9:29
Now a little bit of a disclaimer. That analogy of a metaphorical button? I borrowed that from a podcaster named Daryl Cooper from the Martyrmade Podcast. If you've never listened to it, I highly recommend it. He used it to describe the critique Neitzche used to dismantle the dominant ideology of his day. He is of the opinion that its one of things that drove the philosopher to madness. He does this great show where he looks at Nietzsche alongside Dostoyevsky. Good stuff.
Stephen 11:23
The 19th century saw a vast upsurge in wealth and productivity but it also brought to light inequality. Of course inequality has always existed. Let's face it. Look around. No two people are the same. We just can't be equal. Socialist theorists had been active since the French Revolution. If you ever take a course taught by a dedicated marxist you'll know what I mean, They treat that thing like the end all watershed moment in history. Historian Norman Davies links it closely to “Christian Socialism”
Davies, Norman Europe: A History pg. 835
This sense of an inherent equality of mankind is sort of an undercurrent in western thought. What the French Revolution did was strip it of its religious underpinnings. As working classes became more organized in industrialized countries they were able to form trade unions and negotiate with employers. Well you see where this is going.
Davies, Norman Europe: A History pg. 837
To Marx, the progression from capitalism to communism was just as inevitable as the natural processes at work in evolution. He famously intended devote Das Kapital part 1 to Charles Darwin. At his funeral in 1883 his intellectual partner and life long best friend Friedrich Engles was quoted to say:
“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.”
Marx loved to borrow. We tend to think that marx created his philosophy ex nihilo but that would be wrong. His goal was to combine the best of English Political Economy… Adam Smith, David Hume, John Locke and David Ricardo. German Philosophical Idealism… Predominately Georg Hegel and… of course the bedrock of his thinking was French Utopian Socialism… Compte, San Simon, the wild and wacky Charles Furier and of course Jean Jac Rousseau. If you take each one of these 3 “pillars” on their own they seem completely unlike the others but Marx finds a way to make them work together.
So let's look at English Political Economy…. Adam Smith. If you paid any attention in high school history class you will remember him as the “wealth of nations” guy if nothing else. He was known for his scathing indictment of British Mercantilism and a big time proponent of free trade… but he is also considered to be “proto Marxian” Why? First is his promulgation of the “Labor theory of Value.” This is a cornerstone of Marx’s economic thinking. Although he borrowed the idea from John Locke Smith thought that the value of any good in the marketplace came from the labor that went into making it…. Particularly the number of man hours it takes to produce a good. Are all workers the same? No. Some are more skilled than other. Marx gets around that the skilled worker had to be trained to get that way and that took time. Although its not something any economist follows today classical economists thought that all other factors aside prices would tend to follow this. Another thing that Marx grabs from Smith is the idea that society is divided into social classes based on economic self interest and that this division was caused by division of labor. You have a class who owns the means of production and you have the class who has to work for that class. What is interesting is that a lot of these thinkers were openly opposed to socialism… Especially David Ricardo.. Doesn’t matter. Marx likes their no nonsense style. They are objective and rational. Marx wants a philosophy based on reality. Thats what English Political economy was all about. Hell… Britain had the number one economy in the world at that point. Why not learn from the best eh??
So what about French Utopian Socialism?? What do these guys have that Marx wants?? For one they believe that a radical change in society is not only possible but it is necessary. These were men that formulated schemes to transform the world they lived in to one in which property would be held in common and everyone’s needs would be met. Men like Robert Owen and Charles San Simon and Charles Fourier set up model societies in which these ideas were put to the test in real life. True these experiments were total failures but the reason why they failed is that they lacked a “scientific” rational basis. They were too much heart and too little brain. Marx believes that he can supply the brain.
Stephen 19:49
Finally… German Philosophy. I like to think of this as the glue that holds all the parts together. Marx was a steadfast devotee of Georg Hegel and also a critic. Marx loved Hegel’s idea that history is constantly moving towards a defined end point. Hegel was an idealist. He believed that ideas were the driving force in history… everything else… religion, economics, politics and came about because of a “geist” or “spirit” of the age in which they came about. He postulated that an idea or “thesis” would invariably come up against a counter idea or “antithesis” and the result would be a new idea or “synthesis”.... Which would be another idea… which would come up against a competing idea.. And on and on. This was the driving force in history. Marx disagreed with Hegel though. Unlike Hegel he is a materialist. Rather than concepts movin history he believes material conditions are all that's important at the end of the day. Whatever ideas people believe in is based on the economic realities they face. He writes:
‘The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” - German Ideology 1845
Not only that but the ideas prominent in any age spring from those who live in material abundance.. Ie the ruling class. They invariably are the kings.. .the priests… the philosophers. They make the laws. They formulate what metaphysical realities society believes in. They decide whats right and wrong. And invariably, they rig the whole game to keep as much of the wealth as possible for themselves. Now remember how Hegel believes history is moving in a direction towards an end point? Well hegel sees that point as being the modern state… particularly Prussia…
Marx thinks thats a load of crap. History isn't moving towards the modern state .. no no. Its moving towards a perfect world society… one in which property is held in common and the hierarchies that have sprouted over the ages will be eliminated. That of course is world communism. He believes that modern industrial society has created such material abundance that scarcity should no longer be an issue but that the majority of humans suffer because of unequal distribution. Labor must be paid back what labor produces.
Hegel was of the opinion that the intellectual elites provided the ideas which propelled society. Marx thinks that its the people that actually do things that satisfy basic human needs that do the important work… The working class. They produce everything that a society needs but they only receive a small part of their real value in return. The ruling class lives off the sweat of their brows. This is what is called “surplus value.” Way back in the mists of time.. Before civilization as we know it came about people were hunter gatherers. There was no division of labor. There was no property. There was no hierarchy. What goods existed were held in common. Wealth was unknown. This was the “state of nature” that philosophers like Locke and Rousseau talked about. Then.. for some reason agricultural society came about. In the beginning perhaps everyone worked the fields but inevitably some worked and others did other things. Division of labor came about. Maybe 9 people did the field work and one guy bossed everyone around. Well give it a thousand or two years and you still have plenty of field workers but you also have soldiers, scribes, priests, kings.. In short you have all these other people that dont do the work but are kept alive only because other people make the food for them. Producers… Exploiters. Fast forward to the time of Marx and that dynamic basically remains the same. The hierarchies that all societies seem to have only enforces this split. Doers.. Loafers. Now for most of human history the amount of material wealth produced by this system was negligible. Why? The economy could only feed so many loafers. You need a lot of manpower in the fields. There was only so much “surplus value.” The slaves or serfs or peasants or workers produced as much as they could while everyone else stood around. And they had to. Hierarchical social structures would always keep them in place. Not alot of upward mobility you know? Guess what. Every society has this. But there’s something about 19th century industrial society that Marx thinks makes the situation completely different. Because of technology, labor has become extremely productive… but at the same time they have never been worked so hard or been so miserable. Labor is being exploited. Think of a Charles Dickens novel like Oliver Twist or Hard Times. Think of one of those grimy industrial smoke stack cities. Yuck. There is more surplus value than ever but labor has never been so exploited… and the hierarchical reality of Europe in his day keeps it that way. In the ancient world you have the master and the slave. In the middle ages you have lord and serf. In modern times its factory owner and worker. Nothing changes.
And the culture of each age just keeps everyone in their place. In the ancient world Aristotle would right about how some people were “natural masters” and others were “natural slaves.” Every major religion codifies the institution of slavery thus giving it a divine sanction. Well that makes sense. The people who wrote the Bible or Koran probably owned slaves themselves. God has a plan. If you were born into poverty thats what he wanted. If you are rich thats what he wanted… and thats not just Europe.. Think about the concept of reincarnation… If you are born poor than its your own fault. Obviously you screwed up in a previous life. Rich?? Well good on you. You must have been a saint. So Hegel believes that each age is dominated by a spirit or “geist” and that everything flows from that…. Marx says no.. Everything comes from the predominant “mode of production” which produces the surplus value. In the ancient world the mode of production was of course slavery. You are free or you are a slave. No ancient society questioned whether this was moral or not. In the middle ages we find the great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas writing about how God himself supported the feudal structure. The King is king because God wanted it that way. You know… “divine right of kings” Serfs have to farm the land because God wanted them to be. Woulnt you know it. God is all over this mode of production just like he was cool with slavery a few hundred years before. Its all self interest. Now in the age of wage labor what do you have?? You have the protestant work ethic. You have property rights. You have contracts. You have an elaborate social hierarchy where you have the owners the “bourgeoisie” milk of the workers the “Proletariat.” Western societies are dominated by wealthy industrialists that have cozy relationships with the states in which they reside. The whole system.. The laws, the religion, the customs are set up to keep the fat cat owners fed. He talks of how Marx thinks the time has come to break the cycle.
Marx believes in a concept called “alienation.” In the beginning humans were connected to the earth. As a materialist he believes we are part of the earth. This division of labor and the social stratification that came with it caused producers to become separated from the goods produced, from the act of producing, from other workers… from their own life essence even.
In his book “The Wealth of Nations” Adam Smith has this analogy of a pin factory where he compares these two systems where you have this old timey system where you have a number of craftsmen that sit down and they make pins. And they are exquisite pins. They will go in the wall just right but they have to make them all one by one and they do it all themselves. But at the same time they can look at that pin and say “I made that all by myself.” Maybe they can have some sort of pride in that. Well,he compares that kind of mode of production to a factory. Under the original system everyone can make a couple dozen pins but under this new system you can make 10,000 pins a day and its because of this division of labor. Well, those people in the factory are alienated from the goods they produce and this alienation makes people unhappy. People need to be connected to the earth. They need to be connected to what they do. It seems like an abstract concept but you can kind of get it right?
Capitalism has done this… But… when we overthrow the system and abolish these dreadful hierarchical social relations history… just as Hegel predicted would end. Each human would be able to find out who they really are. There would be no more of what marx called “false consciousness.” People wouldn't say or do or even think things that go against the good of mankind because the class antagonisms that marked every heretofore epoch of human history would be a distant memory. A story you tell your kids before you tuck them in at night. All of humanity will recognize that they are one family and they have but one interest. The only reason people ever thought differently in the past was because they were conditioned by the past society to be that way. No more. No more false consciousness.
This is eschatology. This is an apocalypse… But there is no religion involved. It is entirely secular.
Stephen 34:26
Marxism at its core is a brutal critique of everything in society. It leaves no stone unturned. “The ruthless criticism of all that exists.” You hear today of critical race theory.. Marxism is critical everything theory. One of Marx’s favorite mantras that he would constantly recite was “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” Pretty badass. Name a single belief you have. Name a single value… anything. Marxism has the tools to take it down. Marxism can deconstruct anything and point out how class interest lies somewhere beneath. Just keep digging and you will find it. Don't think so?? Well then that's just your false consciousness talking my friend. You don't understand. You aren't educated. You have been brainwashed. When we eliminate exploitation, when we eliminate hierarchy.. Then we can redirect the machine that capitalism has built. A machine capable of seemingly limitless production and direct it towards the good of all. Much like Neitzche he has little time for the religion of his day and wants a new system of beliefs entirely divorced from the prevailing Christian ethic he grew up under. Although he was baptized when he was 6 when he entered his college years he loses his faith When in college he became good friends with a college processor Bruno Baur. Now Baur was a theologian but also an atheist. He wrote extensively on the new testament.. And did so fairly effectively. I've read some of his work. It stands up… but it is scabrous. Everything is questioned. You can tell this a Hegel guy through and through. He propogates the idea not only is the new testament account of Jesus unfactual but that Jesus never even existed at all. Even today thats kind of a fringe idea but in the 1840s??? Helooo!!!!!!! So apparently the two got tight. So tight that one Palm Sunday the two both found a pair of donkeys and rode them through a small town to mock the Story where Jesus goes to Jerusalem to fulfill that prophecy in Zechariah. This hostility to religion pervades his work. .
Historian Christopher Hutton writes:
“Marx states in Private Property and Communism that “communism begins from the outset….with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.” For Marx, one must start at atheism in order to truly understand and live out true communism. In doing so, one would not only be able to grasp the world and the controlling class struggle as it exists, but the irrelevance of religion.”
Nonetheless, there is this etiology that makes his system somewhat religious. It Echoes Christianity. Its big cycle really. And here is where that background element of Christianity comes in. This division of labor is only transitory. Its done its job. In the beginning humans lived in a state of primitive communism. We will go back to communism again.. Only now.. Armed with the productive capacity that capitalism has built for us we wont live some pitiful hand to mouth existence. We will live in a state of permanent abundance.. Relentless toil and strife will be gone. Its kind of like how Adam and eve sin when they eat the fruit of the tree if the knowledge of good and evil. Before they had perfect communion with God. Nature provided their every need. They fell from grace. They sinned. They discovered good and evil. That's when sickness started. That's when work started. That's when enmity started. That's when separation from God started. In the same way humans fell from grace when they discovered division of labor. When they discovered hierarchical social relations. But Marxism, like Christianity and the other religions of the western canon provides a way back. History will end. We will walk with God in the garden again. True… there will be a tribulation. Big time. Marx believed strongly that the powers that be wont go down without a fight. That fight will be a violent one. He is adamant. He says:
“The weapon of criticism cannot replace criticism by weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force.” - Contribution to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844)
“There is only one means to curtail, simplify and localize the bloody agony of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new… only one means.... The revolutionary terror.” - Victory of the Counter Revolution in Vienna Nov 1848
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. ... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.” - Communist manifesto 1848
This will be pushed along by what Marx terms the crises of capitalism. In the same way spoke of the “birth pangs” that will rock the earth before the second coming occurs.. The wars and rumors of wars, the earthquakes, famines and upheaval of all sorts so the world that the bourgeoisie have created for themselves will be rocked by economic crises that will grow in both frequency and intensity. He is convinced… and he gets this largely from John Stuart Mill that the rate of profit will fall for capitalism over time. Marx sees there being two types of capital in the economy Variable Capital and Constant Capital. Variable capital is the wages the capitalist has to pay his workers to keep them alive basically and constant capital is everything else. As time goes by the expense of constant capital will only grow. Every time one capitalist in an industry buys a new machine that makes production more efficient… say a spinning jenny to make cloth. Everyone else has to buy the same thing just to be efficient enough to stay in the game. Capitalists will be forced to cut what they pay their workers.. Many will simply go out of business. Those workers will go unemployed and the owners may be forced into the ranks of the proletariat themselves. They will no longer be able to pay for the goods being sold by those producers still in business and those producers themselves will be forced to close up show and on it goes. Everyone gets squeezed. This will be an ongoing chronic problem with the capitalist mode of production. Sooner of later workers will develop a “class consciousness” and as time goes on they will mobilize. What choice do they have??
Marx’s theory has 5 parts. And its not like these things necessarily have to happen in order but these 5 things will happen as part of the crisis.
Now keep in mind these things don't have to happen in a specific order… well 5 does.
But the wheat will be separated from the chaff. The sheep from the goats. The difference with Marx is that in the end humanity wont reconnect with God in heaven. We will connect with nature… before we lost our innocence. This is why despite its overt atheism I've even heard marxism described as the “last great christian heresy.’
Stephen 46:39
But this new heaven and new earth will be brought about through coercion… there are no two ways about it. The goal is communism. There will be no money, no property, perfect harmony for all mankind. First however Socialism..
Marx has a 10 point plan that he lays out in the Commuist Manifesto. A lot of this even a modern conservative would be cool with.. Others… .not so much
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.”
That's some pretty strong stuff. And although it went out of print for nearly 20 years after the revolutions of 1848 were suppressed it turned a lot of heads at the time and continues to do so to this day
So Marx gets chased all over Europe for his ideas. He has to flee Germany, then France, then Belgium. In the end its only England that allows him to live and work there permanently. This is the England of the industrial revolution at its worst. He sees the iconic filth, the horrible hours, the child labor. He meets people who really do “have nothing to lose but their chains.” Read “The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester and you will see what I mean. He documents how people have been forced from their villages. Rich landlords have appropriated common lands for themselves. They have literally had the rugs yanked from beneath them and now they are completely destitute. Malnourished. Only occasional help from some well meaning charity. 19th century England is the product of capitalism's primitive accumulation. The rest of the world will go this way sooner or later and it won't be pretty. This is where he will write the Grundrisse and Das Kapital. These aren't the passionate polemics of his early years. They are his attempt to grapple with what capitalism is. How it got here.. Where its headed. He spends literally every day in the basement of the British Library for decades. At one point he learns Russian on his own because he's down some rabbit hole and he is interested in some russian writers have to say about rent. When I think about him… constantly reading and writing all day every day Im reminded of what Henry Duke of Glauster said to Edward Gibbon
"Another damned, thick, square, book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?"
Although in the case of Marx it would be the cleaning lady saying this at the end of the day and not the brother of the king of England at a royal engagement.
He pushes for political reform. Workers of the World Unite. He will help foundthe first international working ments association in london 1864. He will write continuously until his death in 1883. He has to learn englisn btw.. But by the 1850’s he writes well enough to land an op ed piece with the new york times.
It doesnt happen fast. Its a slow burn. But at the end of the day its not hard to understand why people would flock to this banner. I mean think about it. They were campaigning for a 10 or even a 12 hour working day!! Some sort of social safety net. Children under the age of 10 not havig to work in a place where they might easily lose a finger. Look around you. Look at the comfort you live in. This is a world those people built. They laid the foundations. We sit in the house watching netflix debating white privilege and gender spectrums.
Marx is interesting again because he loves and hates these British economists like adam smith. There is this concept of surplus value. For them its profit. To him its theft. Their views are ideologically distorted. They are alienated. They think they see the reality of the world but marx know they do not. They cant see what he sees because they they have been blinded by their own class interests. He’s the rational one. He can see over the horizon and armed with his work he allows us to see though the veil of maya that has shrouded the eyes of humanity for as far back as anyone knows. This is philosophy in action. Marxism has been called the “Philosophy of Praxis.”
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach
Of course as Hegel’s famous phrase goes.. “The owl of minerva only flies at dusk.”
Translation… things are only obvious after the fact.
Stephen 57:10
Marx underestimated the ability of Capitalism to adjust. If only as an emergency measure. Inspired by people like Edmund burke capitalism will limit child labor, the labor of women then egregious safety conditions…As time goes on its like capitalism seems to give where it has to. Takes away the worst complaints. Marx in time will be diffused… but he cant see it coming. He never saw it coming. He never lived to see its fruition. The corpus of work he left called for revolution. It continues to call for revolution. 300 years from now it will call for revolution. This can be dangerous. Marx has this idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat… this violent uprising in which all existing power relations will be overthrown… but he is very cagey about just what it will look like. Thus self proclaimed marxists have interpreted it in many different ways… usually with gruesome results. The end result… the “Communist” society would “fall away” has never materialized. The state itself would only grow more and more powerful. This is something that many revolutionaries saw coming in Marx’s own time though. His one time ally and eventual bitter enemy the great anarchist Mikhail Bakunin would write:
“Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and
brutality.”
Indeed, the Anarchists would be the primary rivals to Marx and his followers. They thought that Marx was a statist and despite wanting the same world where all property would be held in common they felt that using any despotic means to get that point would lead right down a slippery slope into totalitarianism where an all powerful state would prove to be just as bad as the capitalist class was now. Certainly if Bakunin were to come to life today he would go around saying “See. I told you so!!”
What would it look like once Capitalism is overthrown? Marx doesn't really seem to know how labor would function. In the German Ideology we get that famous vision of hunting in the morning and philosophizing in the evening but other sources he proposes strict centralization coercion and does so increasingly with time. He writes in the Grundrisse “If you rob money of its social power you must give that power to persons to exercise over other persons.” He compares the “economy of gold” to that of the “sword.” He thinks that while harsh the economy of the sword is more rational and even humane. The planners would take over everything. Engles once proposed that factories should have signs over the entrance saying “Abandon all autonomy you who enter here.” to limit this authoritarian aspect Marx would postulate that perhaps since division of Labor has been the cause of so much of this dreadful alienation maybe workers could rotate jobs… like the same guy that works on he assembly line might find himself in the back office the next and so on… he says that change in activity is important to our “animal spirits.” How on earth would that be more efficient? But then you cant have everyone doing the same mindless thing everyday. That cuts against your basic philosophy. And its not like these readings are decades apart. No. they are just a couple years apart.
There are contradictions in Marxist thought that cannot be reconciled. You have an earthy naturalism but also a teleological mysticism. It seeks to incorporate everything but at the end of the day it is reductive. There are so many interpretations of his work that no two self proclaimed Marxist states have seen it in the same way. How else can you read “liberation theology” into Marx but also a strict atheistic materialism? He wants pure reason but he also wants positivistic determinism. If you were to drop the overtly atheistic marx into a South American seminary in the 1960s what would he think of his doctrine of Scientific Socialism being coopted by a nationalistic Christian populism? Its almost a total contradiction in terms.
The Labor Theory of Value which lies at the very core of his economic model was widespread at the time of the classical economists but even by Marx’s day it was being abandoned by the thinkers of his day. Today its little more than a quaint oddity. Even the most dyed in the wool Marxist will mention it only in passing before moving on to a more fruitful topic like labor exploitation or something.
His life itself if also problematic. If Marx was ever destitute it wasnt because of his proliterian roots. He was a notorious spendthrift that seemed to have a hole in his pockets. Even in college he was spending between 2 and 3 times the income of an average German family of the period. Believe it or not he actually lost money in the stock market. I was a bit surprised about that one.
Apparently he and Engles were fairly avid speculators in the equity markets. He once wrote to an uncle
“I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating … in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year … and are forced up to quite an unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400. …
“… now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It’s a type of operation that makes demands on one’s time, [but] it’s worthwhile running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money.”
He was born into money he married into money and his connections kept him well fed for most of his life. As a young man in the 1840’s he worked for radical newspapers that were run actually be wealthy industrialists that wanted to undermine the old school conservatie elites. A close analysis of his earnings would have him making 200k a year in todays’ dollars. Even during his years in exile he lived on a stipend of 250 pounds a year. This was at a time when the average worker made just 35 pounds a year. He was in the top 2% of British earners. You have a brief stretch were his friend Engles isnt sending enough money that he actually went to employment agency at applied for a job as a telegrapher but was turned down due to his handwriting. In 1864 a supporter named Wilhelm Wolf died and left him with 1,000 pounds… Thats like 20 to 30 years income for an average worker. Kind of makes you wonder if he was really serious about that “eliminating inheritance” part of the Communist Manifesto. This was no Diogenes. Nonetheless several years we have him writing to Engels for money because pawn brokers were about about to take his stuff. Then his wife’s mother dies and he’s in the money again. He spent the last 20 or so years living in a fashionable neighborhood in London. His wife was known to throw large parties which were attended by some of the most connected members of London Society. This should not be considered odd. If one looks at societal groups have been most influenced by marxism youll notice that its the well connected intellectual class and students that fill the ranks… rarely the stereotypical urban proletariat. In states where an overtly Marxist regime has come to power typically it has been with the help of the peasantry rather than the urban laborer. Marx would be truly puzzled by this given his views of the “ideocy of rural life.” Would Marx ever wish to give his good bourgeois life if the revolution came? Would anyone in his circle want that?
After Das Kapital he spends the last 15 years of his life and he publishes 2 short articles. Engles writes him constantly to publish more but he refuses. He just sits in the British Library... He learns danish and russian. He gets into chemistry.. He says he’s working on the definition of classes.,, but who knows. Ive heard he decided the Labor Theory of Value was indefensible and just prevaricated to the end when he died in 1883. He just seems tired of it all. In one letter tp Engels he writes “Very shortly im going to be done with this economic shisse!” What do you make of that?? I dont know.
Marx also was a racist. Now keep in mind that the 19th century was pretty much prime time for racism.. In Europe especially. Marx is not a multicultural person and he has some views about Jews andAfricans that would make your hair stand on end if you heard them today.
Stephen 1:11:42
Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844 contains the following:
“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”
He would write this in an NY tribune article in January 1856
“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.
“… the real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loanmongering mysteries by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade in securities… Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment, there is ever one of these little Jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. The smartest highwayman in the Abruzzi is not better posted up about the locale of the hard cash in a traveler’s valise or pocket than those Jews about any loose capital in the hands of a trader… The language spoken smells strongly of Babel, and the perfume which otherwise pervades the place is by no means of a choice kind.”
Marx argues that, “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”
Larry Ray explains, “Marx’s position is essentially an assimilationist one in which there is no room within emancipated humanity for Jews as a separate ethnic or cultural identity.”
Historian Dennis Fischman in his book Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx writes, “Jews, Marx seems to be saying, can only become free when, as Jews, they no longer exist.”
“Marx seems fairly to bristle with anti-Jewish sentiments.” Even the anti-Zionist Joel Kovel, whose political views I normally have no time for, has said:
By anti-Semitism I mean the denial of the right of the Jew to autonomous existence, i.e., to freely determine his/her own being as Jew. Anti-Semitism therefore entails an attitude of hostility to the Jew as Jew. This is an act of violence, addressed to an essential property of humanity: the assertion of an identity, which may be understood as a socially shared structuring of subjectivity. To attack the free assumption of identity is to undermine the social foundation of the self. Judged by these criteria, OJQ [On the Jewish Question] is without any question an anti-Semitic tract – significantly, only in its second part, “Die Fähigkeit.” No attempt to read these pages as a play on words can conceal the hostility which infuses them, and is precisely directed against the identity of the Jew.
When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: "Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history." Then he asked, "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?"
Of course…. His writing is is replete with the n word.
In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx's son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had "one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood." In an April 1887 letter to Paul's wife, Engels wrote, "Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."
He would frequently refer to his son in law as a gorilla or even “nigrilla”
His personal life was kind of a mess. Although he would remain with his wife Jenny Von Westphalen until her death in 1881, like a lot of men of the period he was not faithful. At one point she goes to Brussels to beg for money. Although she was only away for a month Marx uses the time to have an affair with Helene Demuth the family housekeeper. Who wasnt even paid btw.. Anyways. Wouldnt you know it oopsie!!!!! she gets pregnant and the wife is coming home soon. This is where is where Engels steps in. He tells Jenny that he was the one to have the affair with Helene and that the child is his. Nonetheless, when the boy is born he gets shipped off to a foster home in London’s East End. He would never know who his father was. The father side of the birth certificate was left blank. Neither Marx nor Engels ever supported Freddie. He would die in poverty in 1929.
He really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. He rarely bathed… I mean even for the time you are probably looking at a monthly phenomenon. He believed it was a bourgeois practice and avoided it as a matter of principle
A Prussian policeman investigating Marx in London in 1850 reported on his room: “Everything dirty and covered with dust, so that to sit down becomes a hazardous business.”
Marx was plagued with festering boils and broken cysts that many people say may have contributed to regular eye infections that slowed his writing close to the end of his life. In an 1883 letter to his pal, Frederich Engels, Marx wrote that “the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles to their dying day.”
He was constantly fighting with his friends. He angered one fellow socialist so much that there was a murder plot against him in 1850. Believe it or not the guy who wanted to do it August Willich ended up challenging Marx to a duel. Marx refused. He ended up emigrating to the United States where he became a Brigadier General in the Union Army.
Unsurprisingly, Marx didnt have many friends by the time he died in 1883. True he was well respected. In his later years he was referred to as the “Great old Man” in the International Workingmen’s Association but people didn’t like being too close. His funeral was attended by 13 people. Believe it or not one of them was the maid Helene. His memorial was a small stone slab. 71 years later his body would be disintrred and moved. The monument you see today in high gate cemetery wasnt installed until 1956.
Stephen 1:22:30
Marx was not a bad father. There are numerous stories of him doting on his daughters… Still of 7 children only two would survive him. Many have blamed the squalor that the family lived in as the culprit. Its possible. His surviving daughters were both talented women and I believe one had a biographical movie done on her in 2020. Unfortunately, they both suffered tragic fates.
Laura Marx had worked closely with her father, editing his work which could be a tough job since his handwriting was illegible to pretty much everyone and his mind was desultory on good days. After his death she took up the Socialist cause.. So much so that she is considered to be the “mother of feminist socialism.” She helped establish the international workers day (May Day) as an official holiday, founded the Gas Workers and Laborer’s Union and the Independent Labor Party. She even translated Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bouvary into English 20 years after its publication in French. But unfortunately she fell for the wrong man and it proved fatal.
According to a 2020 article for the BBC’ History Extra magazine: “Committed to free love, she experienced the profound difficulties of free-spiritedness in a conventional society. ln her late twenties she fell in love with Edward Aveling, a socialist educator and would-be agitator who shared her passion for radical culture and joined in her political work. But Edward never matched Eleanor’s intellectual spark and political stature. Increasingly jealous, he took advantage of her in manifold ways.
In 1897 Edward Aveling suddenly abandoned Eleanor, removing much of the furniture in their shared home while she was away at a meeting. A few months later he was back at ‘The Den’ – as Eleanor called her much-loved Sydenham home. His old kidney disease had returned, complicated by abdominal abscess and pneumonia. Eleanor agreed to see him through surgery and nurse him. In January 1898 she told intimate friends and family that Aveling’s doctors now believed his condition to be terminal and that she would nurse him lovingly to the end. Eleanor paid for his surgery and supported him through his recuperation at home.
On 31 March 1898 Eleanor Marx was found lifeless in her home in Sydenham, a victim of poisoning by prussic acid – chillingly, the same method by which Madame Bovary met her death [in Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel]. In the days preceding her sudden, mysterious death Eleanor discovered that Aveling had secretly married one of his former students the previous year in June 1897 and set her up in an apartment – on Eleanor’s money.”
Although the death was ruled a suicide. Apparently Edward was supposed to commit suicide as well but he backed out. Later on it was discovered that he was going to blackmail her about her father’s illegitimate child and there still are questions.
Marx’s final surviving daughter died in 1911. She and her husband Paul Lafargue had a sad life. All 3 of their children died infancy. Although they were committed socialists.. They translated Marx’s work into spanish and they are credited with spreading his cause into France and Spain they decided they couldn’t go on any longer. They basically lives off money that Fredrick Engels left when he died in 1895 but eventually that sum was running out. They left his note:
“Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyze my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.
For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid.
I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause to which I have been devoted for forty-five years will triumph.
Long live Communism! Long Live the international socialism!”
Both Vladmir Lenin and his wife Nadezda delivered eulogies at the funeral. Lenin closed with chilling line:
"If one cannot work for the Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the Lafargues.
Yet its not fair to totally write Karl Marx off. He is one of the great theorists of all time. You can make the case that his ideas have been incorporated into our political mainstream. True… they have been watered down but the Democratic Socialism that became a mainstay in modern welfare states especially in Europe are his doing. Who knows? If he had lived long enough maybe he would have toned down his calls for revolution. Maybe he would have gone along with the “Revisionism” that Edward Bernstien introduced in the 1890s. Maybe this “criticism” from the left was good for everyone. You might even say that the outcome has been downright Hegelian. Perhaps Marx was the antithesis to the dominant Laissez faire political economy thesis of his day. The synthesis is a world in which every state has some sort of social safety net. Every government attempts to include the voice of the common man in public policy. Only the most hardcore liberterian among us would want to go back to the European political economy of the 19th century. Only the most dyed in the wool revolutionary would want the government to be violently overthrown a la Russian Revolution. We are all somewhere in between. We have a system that works.. Not always as well as we might hope but it functions nonetheless. For all his bluster, montany and occasional incoherence maybe we owe a debt to old Karl after all.
Moreover the Critical theory (and you know what im talking about) that is prominent across academia can be linked directly to Marx. Love it or hate it all you need to do is google. You will find Frankfurt School and past that are Marx and Engels. In 1923 a German professor named Karl Grunberg opens the First marxist research institute in Germany. For about 10 years they stick to pretty run of the mill economic thought. Das Kapital type stuff. Then something interesting happens. A whole raft of Marx’s writing from the 1840’s gets published that really get to the heart of Marx’s interpretation of Hegelian thought. A notion develops that perhaps Marx’s methodology could be used to interpret psychology, language, culture, gender.. You name it. They want to get to the bottom of the dilemma that a lot of Marxists are troubled with… Why do workers seem to be supportive of a system which oppresses them?? Then the Nazis take over Germany. The school relocates to Geneva then finally New York. So what was that about? This whole fascism thing?? Why did people follow that?? The school develops a reputation for outside the box thinking. They take Marx’s “ruthless criticism of everything that exists” to its logical conclusion. They are taking his ideas of “false consciousness” and “alienation” and applying them to why people watch the TV shows they do or why they pick out the clothes they wear.. Some considered themselves “neo marxist” while others rejected the term. They resonated that the capitalist ideological views had infiltrated mass culture and reinforced a sort of dominant ideology to the point where most people had simply been brainwashed.
Traditional and Critical Theory (1937), Horkheimer said:
The facts, which our senses present to us, are socially performed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived, and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception.[17]
Now I don't want to go down this rabbit hole because as you know this gets way political and a lot of people have opinions about this…. But I do want to make clear that this is essentially an adaptation of hegelian/marxist theory. I dont think anyone would seriously question that. That doesn't mean that its essentially bad or subversive. Its just another way in which the work of this fascinating controversial bearded man are still relevant for this day.
They force us to question. They make us deconstruct. There is certainly a place for that in the world we live in. They show us the button.
Next time on Savage Continent… Lets put a historical context to this man. The world of the 19th century was one in which an old world was slowly dying and a new was emerging. There were revolutions. There was chaos. There was freedom and there was brutal repression. See you then!
Outro Music 1:40:39