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Commodities our world is quite literally built around them but what are they really how do they Define our lives are there any secrets contained within and what can they tell us about the course of history KL Marx one of maybe the most influential thinkers in all of history has any other philosopher influenced not just ideas and culture but movements actions revolutions and Wars the courses of entire governments countries and continents understanding Marx is key to
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understanding the political and economic Waters that we still swim in and leads to a big question do we still live in Marx's world he was reportedly a towering intellect one contemporary said imagine rouso Voltaire HB back Lessing Hine and Hegel fused into one person and you have Dr Marx another said Marx himself was the type of man who is made up of energy will and unshakable conviction his life was one of Exile secret societies intense study and poverty will'll try to unpack his most
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important ideas and some of the most common critiques because most people miss misunderstand marks or at least misunderstand what he was truly trying to say most would associate him with Communism of which he actually had very little to say what he sought to understand was capitalism Commerce markets industrialization and technological progress and the question importantly of what makes us truly human Mark absorbed and thought through through all of the trends and ideas
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around him but what was most new in his writing was that it wasn't thinkers that could change the world but action by ordinary working people to understand what that really means we're going to have to go on a journey across history from churches and Fields to factories and cities we need to understand where Marx was coming from
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Marx was a great synthesizer of the trends movements and ideas around him he was born in 1818 in Prussia modern day Germany just after the French Revolution Napoleon and the spread of new liberal ideas about freedoms and rights new Sciences industries and factories were spreading across Europe it was a time of unprecedented Dynamic change change is key to Marks and to understand change there was no better person to turn to than G Hegel Hegel had argued that all previous moments in history
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were the unfolding of ideas Concepts truth dialectically moving us propelling us forward okay I'm going to have to simplify a bit here but for Hegel this truth was an idea idea ISM images and words and Concepts that led slowly across history to a greater understanding of the world and the universe better political systems more freedom the source of all of this ultimately for Hegel was God now Hegel was still alive when Marx was young but to Young radical admirers Hegel had
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become a dull conservative reactionary figure he believed believed in progress in rights in Freedom of a kind but he also believed in order in monarchy and in religion to a younger generation these were all oppressive forces a loose group of young intellectuals called the Young hegelians emerged who were influenced by hegar but sought to go further than their old Master they were much more Republican liberal and Democratic over time they mostly got more radical tending towards revolution
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rather than reform this was a century of Reform and revolutions minor and major successful and failed from America to Germany and wider the problem was that many radicals in Europe didn't really know what to do what to replace the old aristocratic system with the French Revolution for example had in its most radical phase is failed the young hegelians started with religion they believed it was oppressive and they attempted to remove God from hegel's system two thinkers in
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particular Bruno Bower and lvic fback were the most influential critics of religion of the time Hegel had argued that that unfolding of History was the product of God revealing themselves through time that we are all products of the creation of God and slowly come to know the universe science the world better and so in a way we kind of return to God but expansively but to the young hegelians this positions ideas is kind of up there above us Transcendent unfolding down to
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us in other words we imagine a god that is the creator of us all powerful directing and guiding us but is also unreachable fback argued that when people did this they were projecting God is the sum total of the imaginative powers of our species projected onto some all powerful being instead we should recognize this for what it is our imagination religion is the dream of the spirit he said it actually disempowered Us by displacing some of our thoughts onto some Supreme unreachable being
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instead of attributing them to us as a powerful species in his book on marks political theorist Alexander kalinikos writes fback argued that Hegel had turned something that is merely the property of human beings The Faculty of thought into the ruling principle of existence existance instead of seeing human beings as part of the material world and thought merely as the way they reflect that Material World Hegel had turned both man and nature into mere reflections of the all powerful absolute
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idea in other words by attributing our ideas to something outside of the world particularly as Supernatural religious phenomena we alienated something within our our El it makes our thoughts not our own not come completely from us it falsely presents them as coming from God in the form of Commandments or origin stories or church or political authorities they thought it held us back Frederick Engles Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator wrote that fback placed materialism on the throne again he
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reminded us that ideas are the products of real physical human lives they come out of us out of our flesh Bruno Bower was even more radical he argued that by asserting that the world was the product of God's will we Justified the world as it was poverty God's will Kings and despots God's will in short religion obstructed change it Justified the world for good for bad from Bruno Bower Marx would develop his famous idea that religion was the Opium of the masses it
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says yes life is hard but that is God's intention and don't worry you'll be rewarded in the afterlife rather than instead maybe encouraging a more Progressive idea of history that sought change now here's an important part these young hegelians were still well aliens they still believed in the power of ideas they just thought you needed better ideas more rational ones more truthful ones to replace the old repressive wrong ideas another young haalan the early Anarchist Max sterer argued that bad
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ideas were Spooks bad thoughts that haunt the mind and Marx criticized this approach there were two significant early work here on the Jewish question published in 1843 and the German ideology published in 1845 it's all well and good advocating for religious freedoms and property rights and liberal ideas like freedom of speech but all of it ultimately in the end leaves the real physical material lives of Ordinary People untouched for Marx it was isn't enough because once the holy form of human
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self-alienation has been unmasked the first task of philosophy in the service of history is to unmask self-alienation in its Unholy forms the criticism of Heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of Earth the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics man many including hegu and Rus before him thought that the state could be above Society kind of natural General negotiating fairly between different
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interests neutrally but like the young hegelian critique of religion being kind of up there too supposedly neutral but actually connected Mark saw the same argument applying to the state the French and American Revolutions had made the claim that everyone was equal in freedoms before the law in speech and that this political equality emancipated people as the philosopher Le kakowski puts it in his book on Marxism purely political and therefore partial emancipation is
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valuable and important but it does not amount to human emancipation but what does emancipation really mean if some had nothing was starving had no land or means or resources were taken advantage of in other ways we need to think about what emancipation means Marx wrote that a liberal Revolution would liberate only as an individual withdrawn into himself into the confines of his private interests and private Caprices and separated from the community instead a social Revolution could offer human
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emancipation Marx thought that the Declaration of the rights of man was a big step forward but is not the final form of human emancipation he continued just as the Christians were equal in heaven but unequal on Earth so the individual members of the nation are equal in the heaven of their political world but unequal in the Earthly existence of society politics must become concrete he asks how can Liberty just mean the right to not be interfered with or the right
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to acquire as much property as possible what does that kind of liberty mean if you have nothing Marx writes none of the so-called Rights of Man therefore go beyond egoistic man beyond man as a member of civil society that is an individual withdrawn into himself into the confines of his private interests and private Caprice separated from the community in our time all the inaccessibility of Politics the endless talking in parliaments and congresses the debates and the distractions the
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dramas the sensationalist press all pull away from the very real material issues in people's lives the idea that we all have freedoms can go where we want and say what we want and vote how we want but actually when you look at it it really depends on what you have on who's on the ballot there are so many more things that matter than just formal rights and this is what Marx was starting to get at he was beginning in his own words to invert hego to bring his ideas down from
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the Heavens to the dirty gritty physical hard Earth in the German ideology Marx criticized his young hegelian contemporaries for believing that ideas can change the world on their own this was ideology it distorted thinking and concealed the real issues going on underneath kakowski writes ideology in this sense is a false consciousness or an obfuscated mental process in which men do not understand the forces that actually guide their thinking but imagine it to be wholly governed by log
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and intellectual influences again it ignores material sensory physical life for Marx Freedom progress should be understood as quote power as domination over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives ridiculing idealism ideology the idea that ideas were dominant marks quips that once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity if they were to get this notion
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out of their heads Say by avowing it to be superstitious a religious concept they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water what he's saying is that gravity is not just an idea in our heads that if we change through debate or rework in our minds that we can get rid of and then fly and walk on water gravity is very real it's material it's in the world it affects us rather than us affecting it and he's saying that there are other things human things like that
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too that people moving about eating producing doing things working affects ideas not the other way round summing up his critique of the young hegelians Marx famously wrote the philosoph ERS have only interpreted the world in various ways the point is to change [Music]
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it the romantics were another influence they had argued just a generation or so before Marx that much about Modern Life industry and politics seem to separate us from what they saw as a kind of natural wholeness Marx was a romantic in his early years like many others then and now he wrote bad romantic poetry in his 20s and he came to the romantics primarily through Hegel Hegel took the idea of unity and completeness from them that a person should be able to develop themselves fully
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three-dimensionally in a relationship with the world around them rather than feeling disconnected from it in other words Romanticism was about a striving towards a completeness it was about being at home in the world the opposite to this was alienation feeling estranged disconnected from the world Hegel said that individuals are in a torn and shattered condition Marx had a complicated relationship with this idea when he was young he hated hego accused him of mystification and obscurantism
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but he came back to him later turned him upside down and some say as we'll get to abandoned him at least in part later on understanding alienation is crucial because it was fundamental to Marx's development and to many ideas of the time and since many critiques of the modern world so what exactly is it in his book book on alienation the philosopher Richard shaed points to several definitions according to one alienation is avoidable discontent another is that it's a feeling which accompanies any
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behavior in which the person is compelled to act self-destructively and another that alienation points to some relationship or connection that once existed that is natural desirable or good and has been lost but the word that comes up most in the early Marx's writings is estranged hinting at something that is either no longer close that once was or isn't close that should be things being disconnected separate when they should be connected integral it comes up in several ways first
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money money is a ating because it's a standing for the real social relationships that are hidden underneath it it disconnects us from them it hides them it hides the social reality it becomes what he calls an alien medium instead of people being the mediators themselves it separates us as a species money is quote men's estranged alienating and self- disposing species nature money is the alienated ability of mankind but labor is arranged and alienated too what workers do all day is
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for someone else on something for someone else what they're doing is out of their control they are estranged from it even their own bodies can become alien to them as they're Force to sell their labor to stay alive I like to think of it as a kind of zombie ified State on the factory line doing something for no good reason yourself except to afford to stay alive Mark says the object the laborer produces confronts them as something alien something independent which stands over and against
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them kakowski writes the alienation of Labor is expressed by the fact that the workers own labor as well as its products have become alien to him labor has become a commodity like any other on top of that the division of labor means workers don't even work on or understand the entire product line they divide it into small disconnected Parts Marx writes not only is the specialized work distributed among the different individuals but the individual himself is divided up and transformed into the
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automatic motor of a detailed operation thus realizing the Absurd Fable of menus Agrippa which presents man as a mere fragment of his own body capitalism he says converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity in on the Jewish question Marx writes that while humans are supposedly equal in the political realm in everyday life the worker quote degrades himself into a means and becomes the play thing of alien powers but and here's the key according to Hegel we produce project and create the
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conditions of our own alienation as a species then by recognizing that condition we aim and work to overcome it in other words that progress arises out of the discontent of alienation itself the bad becomes the good negativity alienation it's part of us we have to overcome it and it drives us forward kakowski writes the greatness of hegel's dialectic of negation consisted in Mark's view in the idea that Humanity creates Itself by a process of alienation alternating with the
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Transcendence of that alienation but remember Marx flips Hegel on his head for Hegel that process was in the realm of ideas for Marx it's material it's about the real conditions on the ground who's doing what where for who in what ways it's how alienation confronts Us in physical objects and processes like money like labor in bricks and mortar kakowski writes that the true starting point is man's active contact with nature and petani says that man is not only a
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natural sensuous being but that specific being which self- produces itself through historical labor and through the dialectic of estrangement and reappropriation that characterizes it it's a process of creating our world producing it seeing problems in it being alienated in it and then working to address it to change it to re revolutionize to move through it dialectically in his early writings Marx lent heavily on the concept of alienation some argue he abandoned it
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later on as it wasn't a rigorous enough scientific economic concept some like the French philosopher Louie aluer argued that you can divide Marx into an early stage and a later more mature one others like David Harvey disagree petani also says that while the early ideas become more precise reformulated and filled with content they're never abandoned while Kalen Nikos writes that in the early work of Marx everything is built around the contrast between human nature as it is debased distorted
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alienated and as it should be but this begs a question how can you possibly know what human nature should be surely everyone's different you can't get an ought a moral normative Claim about the world out of an is a how the world is a description of the world at the moment if you could wouldn't that be idealism positing an ideal out of the mind about what the world should look like exactly what Mark sought to critique in the young hegelians Marx's problem with alienation
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Can Be Imagined like this you say capitalism alienates us I say from what you say well from natural selves I say like Adam Smith did that capitalism is natural because human beings have a natural desire to trade and exchange and barter you say it's not natural to work in a factory all day I say it's not natural to wear clothes or shoes or farm and on and on we go this is called the naturalistic fallacy that we place an arbitrary dividing line between something natural and something
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unnatural when in fact everything in some sense comes from the earth Everything Changes everyone is different Marx tried to get around this problem with the concept of species being for Marx there isn't a magical spiritual natural human Essence that's repressed by modern society instead he imagines human society as a whole at any given time everything humans are doing arguing being and then he contrasts an individual the individual with that he wrote the essence of man is no
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abstraction inherent in each single individual in its reality it's The Ensemble of social relations our Essence as a species our species being is precisely that we can recognize ourselves as part of a species as part of a totality of our economic systems cultures politics our history and so on what he's saying is we have an idea of our species in our head that comes from the material reality of our species and then our relationship to it what's possible and so we can become estranged
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and alienated from that that a natural Society shouldn't be something cooked up by philosophers like Plato did in the Republic designed laid out engineered and planned Society is a process that's happening right now it's always happening it's always moving it's about that development the development of it and how we relate to it philosopher Lloyd Eon writes Marx particularly warns against establishing Society as an abstraction over against the individual the individual is a social being as the
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subjective experienced existence of society what you need then is to find a philosophical process that moves from alienation to a world in which everyone is in some way connected to has some control over is served by our material species being that the individual and Society are not estranged from one another but in development with each other and it's around this time that Mark starts calling himself a communist in his economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 a set
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of notes not published until 1932 and maybe the least catchy title of all time if it was a YouTube title it would be something like you won't believe these 10 secrets about wealth and wisdom anyway Marx wrote that communism was the positive Transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement and therefore as the real appropriation of the human Essence by and for man communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social I.E human being communism
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should be the achievement of a real Community under communism the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or individual family and the interest of all will according to Marx be overcome communism should be the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man the true resolution of The Strife between existence and Essence between objectification and self-confirmation between freedom and necessity between the individual and the species
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again many argue that this language of alienation and species being was largely abandoned in those later works but whether that's true or not they were indisputably the influence the driving force at the beginning and I think the most influential commentators seem to disagree that there was a break between the early and late marks anyway kakowski holds that there is no discontinuity in Marx's thought and that it was from first to last inspired by basically heelan
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philosophy social being estranged alienated individual development repressed then recognition of that reconciliation return and then emancipation
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for Marx this new focus on material conditions social relations and physical life demanded a new method to understand capitalism the old philosophy just wouldn't do he's fascinated by stuff that's not adequately captured by reflecting on ideas wood machines protests he borrows from Benjamin Franklin for example the notion that humans are a tool making species that that's what separates us from animals Engel studies the working conditions in and around his father's factories in
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Manchester where he works both are working to bring philosophy down from the [Music] heavens for a long time peasants in rural France and Germany had a traditional right to collect wood and twigs from the forest for their fires but in the 1820s as enclosures were happening and capitalism and property rights were expanding laws were passed that ended these ancient rights remember Hegel and rouso had argued that the state the government could be a neutral representation of the general will of
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everybody's interests unbiasedly but it was in these new wood theft laws that Mark saw the obvious problem with that logic the government in Banning the collecting of wood to keep warm by poor peasants were taking the side of wealthy landowners over Ordinary People in other words the state became the vehicle for the propertied class who held economic power Above All Else and against quote the poor politically and socially property L Engles later wrote I heard Mark say again and again that it
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was precisely through concerning himself with the wood theft law and with the situation of the Mosel peasants that he was shunted from Pure politics over to economic conditions and thus came to socialism it was in wood in Tools in material that the truth of alienation could be found if peasants and laborers were kicked off the land if all of the countryside was enclosed into plots to farm by the wealth y if the peasants had no tools or no Machinery or money of
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Their Own no resources what would happen they'd be forced to sell their own
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labor here was a key and classic distinction and those that had nothing that the exclusive ownership of the tools the machines the means of production was one of the keys to prosperity to flourishing and to overcoming alienation again this is what's special about humans as a species we make tools that the projection of an idea onto a material object that helps us survive better and better is key to our historical development he wrote the animal is immediately one with its life
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activity it does not distinguish it self from it it is its life activity man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his Consciousness we till sew fence build we enslave with chains we engineer we innovate these are the things our lives are quite literally built around they make up our materiality our material existence they help us or at least some of us to overcome our limitations our fleshy limitations and they have a dynamic changing shifting history he
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writes men have history because they must produce their life and because they must produce it more over in a certain way this is determined by their physical organization their Consciousness is determined in just the same way this is the basis of Marx's materialism that it's our material physical sensory social productive lives that matter this may seem accepted or obvious at least in a large part today but when economics as a field was very new all of this was
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very novel most would have argued and did at the time that it was leadership or intelligence or great thinkers that determined the course of history and people's lives Napoleon a great military strategist Plato the great philosopher religion the teachings of divine scriptures and Prophets Marx was arguing to the contrary the economy mattered most it determines everything else he wrote men developing their material production and their material intercourse alter along
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with this their actual World also their thinking and the products of their thinking it is not Consciousness that determines life but life that determines Consciousness this led him to the nent field of economics and his Brilliance would be to combine economics with philosophy the newspaper he had edited in Germany had been shut down he'd moved to Paris but been kicked out and now he was in Exile in Britain he spent months in the British Library pouring over economists like Adam Smith and David
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Ricardo and recording whatever he could find filling notebook after notebook he borrowed several Concepts that we'll come back to but he was immediately critical too from his hegelianism marks believed that everything was connected that no man was an island Adam Smith trying to understand the logic of the new commercially driven societies developing across Europe and America Started From The Assumption of natural individual self-interest that it's not from the benevolence of the
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butcher the Brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner he wrote but from their regard to their own interest in other words selfishness could create value Marx hated this he wrote production by an isolated individual outside Society is as much an absurdity as is the development of language with without human beings living together and talking to each other he called people like Smith Robin son ards that they assumed each person was like a Robinson cruso on his own little island being
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productive without any influence from wider Society kenos writes Marx criticized the political economists because they tended to treat society as a collection of isolated individuals lacking any real relation to one another so that quote the limbs of the social system are dislocated another Trend which immediately dissatisfied marks was their tendency to naturalize commercial society as Timeless Smith for example thought humans had a natural tendency to truck trade and barter and that the
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market was the natural result of that again drawing on Hegel Mark saw this as absurd history clearly changed across time capitalism emerged from somewhere he wrote economists have a singular method of procedure there are only two kinds of Institutions for them artificial and natural the institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions those of the Bourgeois Z are natural institutions they failed to see how there was nothing natural about them human societies changed over time and
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human life was embedded in that societal context he wrote the sensuous world around him is not a thing given directly from all eternity remaining ever the same but the product of industry and of the state of society and indeed a product in the sense that it is a historical product the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one so this was how Marx proceeded economics plus hegu this idea of development change of
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progress was the fashion of the day in 1859 for example Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species his theory of evolution Marx later wrote Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology I.E the formation of the organs of plants and animals which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life does not the history of the productive organs of man in society of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society
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deserve equal attention the key was to try to understand how capitalism unfolded as a system it wasn't that The Lion and the deer or the worker and the capitalist were just in competition with each other separate from each other but that they were part of the same totality the same system and that that system had to develop and change in a connected way dialectically he was comparing biological organs to economic organs he was comparing flesh and plants to machines and Industry he summed up his
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method like this my dialectical method is in its foundations not only different from the hegelian but exactly opposite to it for hegu the process of thinking which he even transforms into an independent subject under the name of the idea is the creator of the real world and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea with me the reverse is true the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man and translated into forms of [Music]
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thought there's a final influence that we haven't talked about much yet the utopian socialists these were a Vari group of movements and thinkers that emerged out of the Enlightenment ideal of progress reason and rights that you could could in short plan and design a society in which the needs of everyone could be fairly met the first was Francois no Babu and his conspiracy of equals B and his followers planned a coup during the French Revolution his conspiracy of equals plan to implement
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absolute equality in France with their Manifesto reading we aspire to live and die equal the way we were born we want real equality or death this is what we need and we'll have this real equality at whatever cost spoiler alert Buu's conspiracy didn't end well for him after the French Revolution came two figures Omri desant Simone and Charles fuer S Simone distrusted democracy and the mob but was an Enlightenment figure who believed that Society could be organized in
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everyone's interests by men of science that the State could technocratic plan Society from the top down he was an elitist figures in today's terms Charles fuer on the other hand argued that rational communes could be organized around Universal principles of psychology that were based on different personality types who could each perform different jobs Fier was an eccentric and influential character who thought that the ideal commune would have exactly 1620 people
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people over in England and then America Robert Owen argued that our characters were influenced by our environment and so there should be a focus on education reform and cooperatives it was in Owen's Cooperative magazine in 1827 that the term socialist was likely used for the first time finally during the 1848 revolutions Louis Blanc argued for a dictatorship of the proletarian without which he thought the forces of reaction foreign aristocratic monarchical Etc would simply retake
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power he wrote that the provisional government should regard themselves as dictators appointed by a revolution which had become inevitable and which was under no obligation to seek the sanction of universal suffrage until after having accomplished all the good which the moment required what made of these utopian that you could conceptualize idealistically a rational planned commune or Society a Utopia and build it like an engineer designing and building a building this utopianism is
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what Marx rejected but he still had one foot in this tradition in 1836 a group of German Exiles in Paris then London formed a communist League of the just Marx joined them and they changed their name to the Communist league in 1847 Marx and Engles worked out per Manifesto in 1848 and at almost exactly the same time by complete coincidence a revolution broke out in Paris which then spread across Europe these revolutions differed from place to place but communism was
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also just beginning to be taken a bit more seriously in 1848 Marx and a fellow Prussian named angles wrote a small book which was to have a large effect on world history the Communist Manifesto began with these now famous lines a spectre is haunting Europe the Spectre of Communism all the powers of Old Europe have entered into a holy Alliance to exercise this Spectre Pope and Zar metan and guizo French radicals and German police spies it continued the history of all hitherto existing Society
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is the history of class struggles Freeman and slave Patrician and plean Lord and surf Guild Master and journeyman in a word oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another carried on an uninterrupted Now hidden now open fight a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes the manifesto is short the best introduction to Marks you can find pretty easy to read written to
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be popular and contains most of Marx's most important early ideas ending with those famous lines workers of the World Unite you have nothing to lose but your chains it was in this early period that Marx discovered the next big piece of his puzzle the Bourgeois and the ruling classes could never be philosopher king or leaders in Plato or Hegel sense because no one stands above and separate from the system like God looking down pulling the strings the rulers are part
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of the system they benefit from it and so change necessarily has to come from elsewhere the proletariat workers who must sell their alienated estranged labor who understand money as alien Nation who work materially physically at the ground level they are the forces of change petani writes the proletariat is the class that lives through the most complete negation and which therefore becomes itself the subject able to deny all existing relations this is why the
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cool of the manifesto and the Communist League slogan was working men of all countries unite it was through this that Marx argued that the material conditions produce ideas but then ideas can then influence and change material life reality Marx wrote the weapon of criticism cannot of course replace criticism by weapons material Force must be overthrown by material Force but Theory also becomes a material Force as soon as it has gripped the masses for Marks this wasn't a moral argument it
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was a historical economic dialectical one a scientific one matter of forces one class was getting richer the other immiserated reactionary aristocratic monarchical despotic governments were holding on to power across Europe and using increasingly suppressive tactics the continent was becoming a pressure cooker once again and Marx believed that real Revolution ution would come you wrote Revolution Is Possible only in the periods when both these factors the modern productive forces and the
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Bourgeois forms of production come into collision with each other a new Revolution Is Possible only in consequence of a new crisis it is however just as certain as this crisis the manifesto bought all of these early themes we've looked at together however while it was initially printed thank thousands of times it fell Into Obscurity for over 20 years before becoming more influential in the 1870s and in those 20 years crisis and slumps would come and go and Marx kept
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thinking a Revolution was right around the corner but capitalism Railways factories steamships and colonialism kept on expanding trade unions began organizing for the first time having previously been banned in many countries and socialists and anarchists formed the international working men's association in 1864 shortened now to the first International and so as he waited for revolution Mark sat down to write his magnum opus an analysis of the entire system
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at this point Marx is juggling some of the most modern ideas that he's found around him he knows he wants to grind his work materially but he needs a concrete place to start because for Marks capitalism is dynamic dialectical in motion he knows it's transformative for this reason it's important I think to remember that capital A critique of political economy or Das capital or simply Capital published in 1867 is not meant as a universal truth but a snapshot of the European
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capitalism of the period and the societal laws that marks thinks emerge from it it's a hugely ambitious diverse book full of references to literature economics and philosophical ideas the politics and culture of the period furthermore it's only the first of three volumes the second and third being left in notes at the time of Marx's death and compiled by angles and on top of that there were meant to be six volumes originally looking at things like land the state and the World Market so it's
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impossible to do justice even most of Marx's detractors don't deny that capital is a masterpiece agree with its conclusions or not reading it and understanding it is indispensable for understanding our modern world the themes are varied but the most important are these the question of what we value and why what gives things their monetary value say and how we value that usefulness then labor and work what motivates them what's at the root of them then capital and wealth and how
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they function and circulate and then the forces the movements the contradictions that arise from the relationships between all of these the simplest way to understand what Mark is saying is this that capital is an impersonal Force like gravity or meteorology or mathematics it has a life of its own which is why Marx believed that what he was doing was science it wasn't speculative in the sense of philosophers thinking up ideas in Dusty studies capital is f of references to
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statistics and Factory routines it's rich and dense in descriptions of how Craftsmen use different instruments and pamphlets and parliamentary debates and all of this was very rare for the time in this sense it's a very modern history drawing on lots of evidence of 19th century capitalism Marx was a man of the Enlightenment maybe one of the last great Enlightenment system Builders inspired by people like Newton and the idea that there are recognizable scientific forces Laws of Motion at play
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in both the natural world and in human
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societies the key for Marks was to search around to peel away to zoom in to interrogate like astronomers and scientists do to find the kernel the hidden Truth at the core of history [Music]
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itself so where does marks begin with something that's all around us that's at the core of capitalism and all of our lives that we cannot do without and may contain some Secrets the commodity what is it then this mysterious thing that we call a commodity it's not obvious from the surface of them they're also different after all there's almost nothing that unites them that they have in common a bus ticket so different from an iPhone a movie on DVD so different from a
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carefully crafted table but Marx wants to find a concept a definition of sorts that unites them all the most obvious that he realized first is that despite all their differences one being a food and another being a toy they all have a use to someone they all have a use value so that's one side of a commodity but they also have a price an exchange value and that is something they all have in common what Marx finds immediately interesting is that neither of these are
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in the commodity they can't be found anywhere by simp simply examining it by taking it apart they're not inherent in it so these values must come from somewhere else he writes we may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish it remains impossible to grasp as a thing possessing value okay so everything has these price tags on so that's where the price comes from but where does that come from maybe just from use value usefulness how useful we find each commodity but everyone finds different
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things useful diamond rings aren't that useful but they're certainly expensive water is very useful but is very cheap I might hate Picasso and not find his art useful to me useful to my aesthetic pleasure but I definitely wouldn't turn down someone giving me a free Picasso painting because I know it's worth something else its value isn't just defined by its use value to me so what is the mysterious exchange value based on marks points out that if I offer my
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three apples for your three onions there must be some Metric some common idea that we're basing our appraisal of what each is worth on why is it that all Commodities are comparable if they have nothing else in common there must be something otherwise we wouldn't be able to compare them on the same plane by the same metric we need a kind of ruler a measuring tape to understand what's going on here the simple answer is that the price tag or the exchange value is the cost of
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producing the item a phone costs more than an apple because it's more difficult to make it takes more infrastructure more machines more attention more Supply chains if I sell you a cake for example I add up the cost of all the ingredients to me and add a little bit more for my labor too but we get into an infinite regress what determines the cost of flour the cost of the machines at the phone factory the cost of wood Mark says that at the base what all Commodities have in
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common is that their products of Labor Commodities he says can Jed quantities of homogeneous human labor and by homogeneous he means this is the value this is the homogeneous unit that unites the heterogenity and all the differences of such a wide range of Commodities he says Commodities have values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance human labor what he means is yes my cake is based on the cost of flour sugar bowls Etc but at every stage in their
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production human labor produced each part of it the flour the sugar the bowls the electricity even the factory walls say at the phone factory were built by someone and they had to travel to the factory when they would build it and they had to eat and so on and so on the sugar cane had to be farmed and so exchange value is the totality of all of that put together the total value of the long line of production that came before the commodity what Marx has immediately
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reached is the social value hidden behind the price tag he says the object has a phantom likee objectivity in his incredible and influential guide to D Capal David writes value is a social relation and you cannot actually see touch or feel social relations directly yet they have an objective presence what he means is they objectively existed the process objectively happened we can bring this back to Marx's idea about species being the value is something social not
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individual otherwise how would you ever get to something called a fair price a correct price something to judge what your offer say is made on when you reject the price of something you often say something like I could have made it for less than that what you're doing here is invoking a labor theory of value it's a kind of hidden pattern that connects me to the rest of society like Hegel before him it isn't the thing in its particularity in its singleness the commodity that particular
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toy say that has an essential truth within it but the relationships between things that really
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matter why does this matter value is a difficult idea to grasp but it's at the heart of almost everything what we value is what we want more of what we're less likely to give away does for example how we value food differ from how we value friendship or democracy does value differ across different political and economic systems if we can get to the bottom of how and why we value things we can use that as a basis for good arguments good philosophy and good economics Marx came across the labor
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theory of value when he was reading the classic iCal economists the Scottish Economist Adam Smith had first used the idea to describe how wealth came from production and Industry rather than land but he also said it came from capitalist investment and rent to then the British Economist David Ricardo went further arguing all value comes directly from the amount of Labor time needed to produce a good Ricardo though in interested in making sure land and industry was productive rather than
1:02:00
wasted didn't take the next logical step in asking why if labor creates value why did capitalists get rich and laborers stay poor this was left to Marx okay so for Marx the more effort the longer the more difficult it is to produce something the more work and labor it takes the more value it has but there's a problem here I might be very slow at making this box of cereal I might be bad at it and a competitor might do it better quicker and easier despite this they will likely sell it at
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a higher price so despite my labor time being higher the outcome of my shoddy work is worth less surely this contradicts the labor theory of value for Marks remember value is a social phenomenon things might have different use values I might find this useful but you might find it useless but when we're thinking about what it's worth to society to everyone on average what price we can get for it what's going on behind the scenes of that calculation value he says is socially
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necessary labor time which is he writes the labor time required to produce any use value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of Labor prevalent in that Society petani puts it like this why socially necessary because empirically it can happen that a slow or incapable producer takes more time than a skilled and quick one to make the same object say a chair it would make no sense to say that an inefficiently produced chair
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is worth more and thus Marx makes value equal to the average labor time which is needed to produce a given good when we come together to judge value socially we're not interested in how long it took the individual manufacturer say like we're walking along a line of Market stores who are all selling the same product we're comparing them in the Agri good we're comparing them and judging them next to each other we're averaging everything out and appraising it Marx
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writes the sum total of the labor of all these private individuals form the aggregate labor of society since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labor the specific social characteristics of their private labors appear only within this exchange that value is socially necessary labor time forces producers into a single system each has to compare with one another compete in the market keep up with the latest Innovations if I take too long to
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make an inferior product to you and it's not going to sell I'll be undercut by you or the person on the market St next to me this is precisely Marx's method that dialectical reversal the Turning of Hegel on his head he's gone and looked at the world materially are the work products physical goods and factories and from that empirical study in the library taken lots of diverse hetrogeneous ideas and exchanges and identified one single homogeneous abstract concept the labor theory of
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value he writes concrete labor time becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite abstract ract human labor and remember labor itself has a value if I employ 10 workers I need to pay them enough to feed them shelter them make sure they have enough energy to work then that amount paid to them has to at least be in the price or the value of the end product it has to be transferred their labor the energy goes directly into the product so the value of Labor is the
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cost of maintaining cing that labor if all of the food and the getting to work and the rent costs £100 say and then it produces 100 of these tiny toy bottles of milk then all other things being equal these are worth1 each Marx writes if the workers could live on air it would not be possible to buy them at any price the constant tendency of capital is to force the C cost of Labor back towards this absolute zero it's only through the fact that laborers need things that their labor
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power costs a certain amount that makes the value of that pass through into a
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[Music] commodity once we have a universal measure that unites all Commodities the amount of Labor and embodied within them the socially necessary labor time then that unit that appraisal that number can be represented or symbolized by something else [Music]
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money next just like in hego as one shape develops into another the idea that an object can have an exchange value based on how much labor went into it can develop logically into the idea of money to represent that value importantly what we have here is movement dynamism development Marx writes the money form is merely the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all other Commodities in other words it's social value abstracted it's
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all of that socially necessary labor in its reality and its physicality and its movement and its doing stuff made into an abstract number an abstract value represented then by a unit money but money does something else too it measures value but it also provides a kind of lubricant that enables exchanges to happen easier money is both a measure of value and a means of circulation however just like there's a contradiction between use value and exchange value between what an object's
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usefulness is to you and how much it's worth on the market there's also a contradiction within money itself it being a measure of value is different to it being a means of circulation because money can be saved up hoarded hidden and stashed I could take it all and there be no means of circulation left whatsoever Harvey writes what happens to the circulation of Commodities in general if everybody suddenly decides to hold on to money the buying of Commodities would cease and circulation would stop
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resulting in a generalized crisis sure you can hoard grain or bread or milk but money is obviously different it last longer it's more efficient you can do more with it everyone wants it and yeah it doesn't spoil as much it's here for Marks that capitalism really starts to take off people want money not just to pay for the necessities of life but want it for its own sake modern society Marx writes greets gold as its Holy Grail as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of
1:10:19
life here we have accumulation the root of some being able to lend money to others to command interest rates to get richer we have what Marx calls primitive accumulation the building up of capital itself large amounts of disposable money petani says the same attitude which appeared manic in the hoard becomes Ironclad rationality in the capitalist the capitalist incarnates an insatiable desire for gain Marx uses a formula it used to be that a commodity would be exchanged for money to buy another
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commodity sell an Apple to buy a chair c for commodity to M for money into C again for a new commodity cmcc but under capitalism that starts to reverse money can be used to buy Commodities to sell for a profit more money instead of CMC commodity money commodity we get MC c m money commodity money instead of a new commodity being the goal selling the Apple to get yourself a chair say money itself becomes the goal but Marx points out the Curious fact that if you're swapping a
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number of apples for a chairay they can both be worth exactly the same and you can still get what you want from the deal the apple or the chair he says where equality exists there is not gain but if if you're using money to buy Commodities to make a profit where does the extra money come from at the end in that second m in the MCM why would you do the exchange if some gain wasn't going to come from it if CMC cup for money to buy food is zero sum each are worth the same you're just
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getting a different product a different commodity that you need why is MCM positive sum why is it that the goal of the last m is more than the first M where does that extra come from Mark says that under capitalism for the first time this appears as if a mystery he writes capital is money capital is Commodities by virtue of being value it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself it brings forth living Offspring or at least lays golden eggs now remember all value must come from
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labor people putting work into things but when we start really using money value becomes mysterious as if taken over by money as if money has magical powers and is the source of value itself rather than being meaningless pieces of paper or chunks of metal Marx calls this commodity fetishism he says there's a magic of money the conceals what's going on underneath that conceals the very human work underneath he calls it a riddle to be solved and with Marx there's always
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something going on under the surface of concrete things he's always moving from particular stuff to broader Universal social phenomenon Commodities he says are sensuous things which at the same time are super sensible social he writes the mysterious character of the commodity form consists simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labor as objective characteristics of the products of Labor themselves as the socionatural properties of these things
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under capitalism you can buy a fancy new shirt but the objective conditions of production can be very hidden sweat shops unethical business practices the devastation of the environment are all happening elsewhere under the surface and money can hide it Commodities can appear on the shelves as if by Magic petani puts it like this fetishism would be that attitude According to which Commodities are endowed with value as if it belonged to them by Nature rather than because of
1:14:49
the specific modality of their production Commodities and money are hieroglyphs to be decoded and understood their curtains to be drawn back and peered through there's always something real something material something physical something understandable behind them but we too easily forget this Marx writes it is however precisely this finished form of the world of Commodities the money form which conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between
1:15:21
the individual workers by making those relations appear as relations between material objects instead of revealing them plainly so what's going on behind the surface how does the capitalist lay a golden egg why does the last M of the MCM magically contain more money than the first [Music] M to uncover the secret to peel back the layers to dispel the illusion of commodity fetishism we have to go somewhere that philosophy doesn't ordinarily tread Mark says we have to go
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into the hidden Abode of production on Whose threshold there hangs the notice no admittance except on business we have to go through the factory doors let's visit a typical Factory it's only here that the riddle of profit can be sold how value can be miraculous L created from nowhere emerging like that golden egg after all value can only be made from people doing work laboring in factories people work together at machines to make many of the products that help us live better and
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easier if someone has a horde a stash a wind full of money what can they do with it to increase it how can they increase that last m in the m CM cycle the capitalist searches around for a commodity that can expand in value and they find it most obviously in people themselves if I'm putting together a new product out of wood and nails and wires whatever it is I need labor to help me do it too in this sense labor power is a commodity like any other I can go to the
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market and buy my wood and I can go to the market and under capitalism hire labor the products made in a factory take a great deal of planning preparation and work on the part of many people Marx writes the possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market the capacity for labor in other words labor power to purchase or rent labor power the laborer must must be free to sell it they must be freed from servitude as peasants or slaves for example they must then have nothing and
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need something need a means of subsistence on the one hand there are those that have access to Estates with vegetable patches and Fields and forests and woods and then on the other hand after feudalism and slavery is abolished there are those that are forced from the land prohibited from collecting wood or using common land to grow food or graze animals Marx writes nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or Commodities and on the other hand men
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possessing nothing but their labor power this relation has no basis in Natural History nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history it is clearly the result of a past historical development what Adam Smith described as that natural tendency to truck trade and barter isn't natural but is historical it developed it changed and so it cannot be natural now here is the core of Marx's argument it is that labor power is a commodity like any
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other the laborer wandering searching looking for work needs a certain level of sustenance of food shelter of welfare that itself has to be provided Ed at least in part by the labor power of other laborers so the value or cost of Labor power is the value or cost of producing all of the energy that energizes and sustains that labor power in the laborer meaning labor power is comparable to any other commodity it has a value and that value like every other commodity is to
1:19:54
determined by the labor theory of value how much labor food production building shelter collecting water and so on goes into sustaining and energizing the worker doing the work let's save the talk can't we agree that capitalism is an economic system a system for the production and distribution of things we need and want I won't agree to that not so the capitalist has capital and they can spend that money on raw materials supplies and they can buy labor power they can combine it all together and
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marks assumes that all of this is purchased at the correct price that the value of everything is determined by how much labor went into making it if it costs me $5 to get the energy and the sleep and the shelter to hammer the nails for one hour that's how much the labor power is worth $5 per hour that labor power is combined or mixed with the wood and the nails and then the capitalist sells on but again he sells on for a profit it has to sell for more than the combined value of the labor
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power and the materials the second MCM must be greater where is this extra this Surplus coming from if the labor theory of value is correct it can only come from labor so here's the key Marx argues there's a gap between what it costs to sustain the labor over say a day and what the capitalist gets out of the laborer in labor power over the course of that day and this has to be where Surplus value comes from so in the first part of the day as an example the laborer is working in
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return for wages that cover the cost of sustaining them or what Marx calls reproducing the labor and in the second part of the day the labor is also covering the cost of sustaining the capitalists needs their food and sustenance and shelter but it's here Marx argues that the capitalist can suck more value out of the worker than their being compensated for that they can extract Surplus value and make a profit he writes wherever a part of society possesses the Monopoly of the
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means of production the worker free or unfree must add to the labor time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of Labor time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production so he argues that humans are just Capital like everything else material muscle machinery can be bought and sold and hired and their energy put to use but that humans are a special type of capital variable Capital humans are fleshy musly
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malleable moldable and Innovative things that are highly variable in the ways they can perform so the capitalist can push a human to work harder faster differently so as to squeeze more energy out of them unlike nails or buildings humans have more variability machines on the other hand spinning wheels hammers lathes Factory equipment buildings metals and raw materials are constant capital in contrast to variable Capital humans machines and buildings and static
1:23:49
stuff they all move spin weave hammer and screw at a pretty constant steady in flexible rate because machines have made all kinds of new things that people need and made so many of them that the price can be brought down where everybody can buy those things say their value is the amount it costs to produce them and they can pass that value into the end product the nails contribute to the total value of the table for example but stuff like this cannot magically create value out
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of thin air the value they transmit is constant a new value must come from somewhere else and it's human labor that's variable it can change in speed efficacy length strength and dexterity machines don't vary don't go on strike don't get sick they can't be shouted at or disciplined or threatened they are predictable but if you can get more work out of a worker or workers then you can get more value into that final product you can extract more Surplus value labor
1:25:07
variable Capital can be organized in different ways they can be made more productive by dividing them up and getting them to perform smaller more repetitive tasks working out ways to improve efficiency their lunch breaks can be shortened or you could even provide meals if you think think that will give them more energy and make them more productive the point here is that it's variable Harvey writes Surplus value arises because workers labor beyond the number of hours it takes to
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reproduce the value equivalent of their labor power how many extra hours do they work that depends on the length of the working day as we'll come back to Mark Ben's many pages in capital describing the English workingclass struggles to shorten the length of the Working Day in the 19th century the capitalist class in factories here in the Midlands of England did everything they could to lengthen them to employ women and children in dirty and unsafe factories
1:26:08
to cut costs and to get the most out of Labor that they possibly could Marx calls all of this small thefts of the workers time and the petty pilfering of minutes or the snatching of minutes if a single capitalist gets more end product more table say from their workers in one working day for the same amount of wages they can either sell them cheaper than their competitors or for the same amount and keep more profit but the logic of capitalism of competition is such that if you don't
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your competitor will this is fundamental to Marx he's not so dogmatic as to argue that this happens all of the time everywhere or that capitalists are purposefully cruel and evil only that there's a logic a motivation a force that compels Capital to operate in this way or else someone else will do it elsewhere and make a cheaper product he writes the influence of individual capitals on one another has the effect precisely that they must conduct themselves as capital tool in other
1:27:25
words capital is a total system that has a logic of its own independent of individual capitalists there is downward pressure on wages and pressure to increase productivity not to get rich but just to keep up Marx writes the minimum wage is the center towards which the current rates of wages gravitate there might be some cultural expectations about the minimum wage say about safe working conditions there might be regulations and oversight and nosy journalists here and there that
1:28:04
push wages up slightly and advocate for improved safety or more holiday time but ultimately there is a force putting downward pressure on wages if the capitalist pays the labor more than all of his or her competitors out of the kindness of their heart then the end product costs more and they end up going out of business if they shorten the working day while their competitor lengthens it and becomes more productive and so makes a cheaper product they go out of business this is why individual
1:28:39
capitals turn into a single homogeneous capol and cap to becomes an inhuman force it has a magical effect on all of those under its spell forcing them into the logic of capital list production D capital is full of literary references from Shakespeare to romantic influences they pop up everywhere he writes things like Capital has a voracious appetite a werewolflike hunger for Surplus labor and the vampire will not let go while there remains a single muscle sinu or
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drop of blood to be exploited and that capital is dead labor which vampire like lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it sucks he's calling machines dead labor because their value comes from the living labor that was transferred into them when they were made D capital is a book of flows of energy transfer of how value moves dynamically through the world dialectically how the workers's labor power is alienated taken from from them and how as we'll see that flow of
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energy and value keeps moving inexorably from the worker class into the capitalist
1:30:08
class okay we'll return to that relationship between labor and capital because that is the Crux of it that is the hegelian contradiction one pulls on the other creating Discord but we need to supplement it with a few more basic concepts remember Marx is trying to be scientific he looks around and sees what happens a lot then builds from that observation that empirical work from the ground up into broader Concepts specifically looking at 19th century capitalism two main Concepts he
1:30:49
identifies are the forces of production and the relations of production the forces of production are the material the buildings tools technology instruments and factories of Any Given Society the relations of production are the social relationships that underpin the division of ownership and division of labor in any given Society the classes the relationships between them who owns and who doesn't how a society is organized combined these make up a mode of production in in the German
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ideology Marx wrote a certain mode of production or industrial stage is always combined with a certain mode of cooperation or social stage and this mode of cooperation is itself a productive Force importantly Marx points out how these modes of production have changed across history there was primitive communism where tribes and primitive societies held resources is broadly in common there was slavery where one class is held in bondage to labor and another is free to trade them there was a feudal
1:32:02
mode where peasants are tied to the land and produce their own means of subsistence but are obliged to provide for their lord in return for hypothetical protection and access to the Lord's land then there's the Bourgeois mode capitalism a change throughout history each Marx writes is replaced by a new one corresponding to the more developed productive forces and hence to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals as contradictions appear within each mode
1:32:36
one mode is replaced by another in a hegan way this is why Marx is a materialist not an idealist when you look at the development of societies across history it's not the ideas of individuals that matter matter so much to the majority but the type of economic system the mode of production that has the biggest influence on how they and we live our lives and classes peasants Lords slaves proletariat Kings the Bourgeois are at the root of this kikos writes classes arise when the
1:33:19
direct producers have been separated from the means of production which have become the Monopoly of a minority but what about ideas they are everywhere surely they have their place Marx calls all of this the economic base but argues there's a super structure over the top so the base is the economic relations and the forces of production slaves tools farming computers surfs the forces and the class divisions and the super structure arises from that in the form of norms political assumptions laws
1:34:01
even culture and art and so on Marx writes the sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society the real foundation on which Rises a legal and political super structure and to which correspond definite forms of social Consciousness this mode of production of material life conditions the the social political and intellectual life process in general it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but on the contrary their social being that
1:34:36
determines their Consciousness now the super structure aims to justify the economic structure wages being kept low well we have to be productive or else China will beat us capitalism is harmful read Rand I had no choice but to shoplift the baby food I understand that but property is property have you not read your John Lock young lady Marx writes the ideas of the ruling class are in every Epoch the ruling ideas I.E the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same
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time its ruling intellectual Force the class which is the means of production at its disposal consequently also controls the means of mental production so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations grasped as ideas and one of the biggest super structural myths Mark says is that the Bourgeois have the power to tell tales
1:35:50
about their Thrift their Ingenuity their creative genius and that value comes from their prowess their endless revolutionizing of Technology their
1:36:10
inventiveness like money like Commodities we often see machines as magical things we fetishize them we think that they can do things create things produce things out of thin air we forget that they conceal social relationships and processes and physical Lives real things that have happened to people and that people have done underneath the
1:36:41
surface one compelling advantage that Marx's theory of History has is that it explains technological development it explains why the Industrial Revolution seemed to take off at the same time as capitalism other theories like Innovations being the result of Genius individuals struggle to explain the wider historical trends of technological progress in Marx instead technological development is fundamental to his theory and to how history moves we've seen that one way for the
1:37:15
capsules to extract Surplus value is to try to lengthen the Working Day to improve the efficiency of Labor by dividing workers up to perform smaller tasks or to increase the intensity of work through discipline in short in finding ways of making labor more productive by getting more out of them in the same amount of time but there's another way of increasing productivity and that's with technology all of the spinning wheels and water frames and engines of the
1:37:50
Industrial Revolution were making labor more efficient you could make more clothes for example in the same amount of time employing fewer workers now importantly the machines still need labor they're all built by people they need attending need loading need maintenance need correcting if something goes wrong and so on but they're all what Marx calls labor saving devices they make work more productive and so more Surplus value can be extracted from the same amount of work work Marx writes
1:38:25
Machinery is intended to cheapen Commodities and by shortening the part of the working day in which the Worker Works for himself and to lengthen the other part the part he gives the capitalist for nothing the machine is a means of producing Surplus value through technological innovation we get more or better end product out of less labor power less labor power me means lower wages have to be paid competitors can then be undercut and more profit can flow to the Innovative
1:39:02
capitalist relative to the others in that particular industry Mark says the individual value of these articles is n below their social value in other words they have cost less labor time than the great bulk of the same article produced under the average social conditions now though something interesting happens the competitors either have to copy keep up innovate themselves or go out of business when the competitors adopt the new Machinery the new innovation the
1:39:39
first capitalist can no longer undercut them and they compete for the best price again bringing the profits back down to where they were originally so the first mover capitalist has the advantage when they innovate but this doesn't last long they're up against the clock and so the search for a new innovation new technology new labor saving devices continues Marx writes the extra Surplus value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized and then
1:40:12
the difference between the individual value of the cheap and commodity and its social value vanishes we can see the dialectical influence at play here the particular actions of one lead to a generalized Universal process that draws all in which again returns to affect the particular individual which returns to the generalized Universal and so on he continues Capital therefore has an imminent drive and a constant tendency towards increasing the productivity of
1:40:48
Labor in order to cheapen Commodities and by cheapening commodities to cheapen the worker himself again this shows how Capital becomes an inhuman alien vampire likee force it compels people to act in a certain way to search out labor saving methods to improve technology to innovate to compete to try to underpay to discipline and it compels others to follow or copy or keep up or or go bankrupt if you don't search for productivity for efficiency your competitor will capitalism becomes a
1:41:32
race against the clock it's all about incentives and pressures and forces within the total system which is why Marx believed what he was doing was a science in the same way Newton studied gravity Laws of Attraction forces that act on people pushing them to act in certain ways even after the machine is paid for there's an incentive to use it as much as possible unless it wears out rusts away gets replaced by better machines imagine the complexity and Ingenuity of
1:42:10
getting a water frame running or a steam engine working properly in a factory in the 19th century once it's working 24/7 the reflexive impulse to find workers to man it as much as possible to get as much from the machine as possible before it breaks or something must have been compulsively huge men and jobs do this people at machines people in offices and people in the shops and mines and Mills of this country men and jobs are the essential basis of our modern America Marx writes
1:42:50
competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the imminent laws of capitalist production as external and coercive laws it compels him to keep extending his Capital so as to preserve it and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation but notice a new stage of development as they compete to keep up we have larger bigger more technologically advanced companies as technology improves any industry requires more Capital more initial outlay to even get started the barriers
1:43:29
to entry get higher some can't keep up can't copy machines can't innovate and either go Bust or get bought out and incorporated into the more successful bigger businesses and importantly fewer workers are needed to produce the same amount of products as they get replaced Slowly by more and more machinery you know LEL I can tell you what's wrong with the country today it's the Machine Age everywhere you look it's machines machines machines that's the trouble the
1:44:02
machines have got all the jarms and kenos puts it like this concentration takes place when cap tools grow in size through the accumulation of surplus value centralization on the other hand involves the absorption of smaller by bigger capitals the process of competition itself encourages this Trend because the more efficient firms are able to undercut their Rivals and then to take them over but economic recessions speed up the process by enabling the surviving capitals to buy
1:44:35
up the means of production cheap I think Marx answers a fundamental question about modernity here why does technology which should save us all time it's labor saving devices not make our lives easier not make our lives better why are we all not fishing and playing guitar and camping while machines do our bidding only marks provides a compelling structural answer to this there's something here that gives a lot of people indigestion of a different kind and I'll tell you what it is it's a
1:45:14
mechanical Gadget that can make more Donuts in 10 minutes than mother could make him 10 days well well the old Sinker has gone mechanical say that machine are honey Isn't it well it certainly does everything because machines owned by a few extract productivity from the rest and the motivation to increase productivity is the desire to sell more and sell cheaper so while capitalism makes some things cheaper workers and that's a lot of us are also Commodities subject to the same
1:45:51
forces the same same pressure on wages on time on hours on improving productivity it becomes a vicious circle why everywhere you look some machines doing the work that ought to be done by men everything's machine machine machine the things get out of control you write simply that the machine is a means for producing Surplus value he Compares it to the old traditional way of handycrafts pointing to how the the old worker like a woodworker say would make use of a tool while in the new Factory
1:46:30
the machine makes use of him machines quote Dominate and soak up living labor power technology then is a double-edged sword it can improve our lives but Spurs competition leads to concentration increases barriers of Entry makes it harder for startups to compete and can put more and more out of work where capitalism starts in small scale artism workshops it ends in highly Advanced labor trampling inhuman Surplus value extracting Global technological conglomerates capitalism preise on
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whatever it can find sucking Surplus into bigger and bigger piles larger and larger factories seeking out new markets anything that can be commodified I will be in short all that is solid melts into
1:47:33
air we too often think of history as causal or linear that one thing causes the next thing like a row of dominoes falling over dialectical thinking takes a different approach instead of a linear AIS calculator microchip computer smartphone VR AI say or slave peasant proletariat Bourgeois Etc we have a dialectical one where at any given moment in time in the axis there's a mutual relationship between elements and that when there is in congruence or incompatibility or friction between them
1:48:16
transformation is forced it's what Hegel called sublation in other words it's not simp linear progress along one axis but multiple axes interacting with each other mutually that forces change between them we've seen how the interests of the proletariat and the Bourgeois are at odds how they contradict one another one wants higher wages the other wants lower one wants to get home the other wants higher productivity in the Granda an unpublished manuscript and note of his
1:48:53
economic thinking Marx wrote the growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hither to existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions crises spasms the technology owned by the Bourgeois is at odds with the wages of the worker machines put people out of work and create a reserve labor force the instrument of Labor strikes down the worker Mark rights even if it's transitional and more work is found
1:49:26
eventually there is a period at least of unemployment a period of Crisis for displaced workers not only does this happen because of Technology but this can be good for the capitalist if there's a reserve labor force then it makes it harder for workers to negotiate for higher wages because there's always someone over there willing to work for less just to work capitalists get more and more value out of fewer and fewer workers workers are displaced and squeezed neither Bourgeois can keep
1:50:00
revolutionizing building different machines finding new markets so new jobs might be created it's not the case that absolute poverty for the proletariat is inevitable although it's certainly possible what will happen is that as the Bourgeois acquire more and more Capital more and more machines and technology and as many are put out of work then the proletariat will be relatively am Miser compared with the bouri petani puts it like this Marx can this conclude by
1:50:35
claiming that the Absolute General law of capitalist accumulation is to constantly produce in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent an excess of workers a reserve Army whose poverty increases as the power of wealth grows these conclusions are of course Very Bleak appropriately so because Marx aims to show among other things how capitalism is socially unsustainable this relative am miseration means there's more concentration into larger monopolies on one hand and more
1:51:10
fragmentation and Discord on the other each are incompatible Engles wrote productive forces are concentrated in the hands of a few Bourgeois whilst the great mass of the people people are more and more becoming proletarians and their condition more wretched and unendurable in the same measure in which the riches of the Bourgeois increase on top of this map the unpredictability of capitalism its booms and busts over production leading to crises gluts Market instabilities contradictions further
1:51:44
bankruptcies and buyouts mass unemployment and you have an explosive situation all of this is the apex of the argu m in capital a tendency towards catastrophe a key concept here is that the overall rate of profit Falls if value and therefore profit comes from labor and there is increasingly less labor fewer people doing the same amount of work because there's more and more machines technology infrastructure and so on what marks calls the organic composition of capital the rate of
1:52:21
surplus value being extracted can only decrease over time doing business gets harder being a proletariat gets harder still again a contradiction an irony that by improving productivity and investing more and more the capitalist class are sewing the seeds of their own destruction Marx writes what the Bourgeois therefore produces above all is its own grav diggers its fool and the Victory of the pr arot are equally inevitable what we have is a pressure cooker on a societal scale let's just
1:53:00
recap and look at the ingredients thrown into this explosive pot first division of labor workers are fragmented into performing meaningless single repetitive tasks it alienates and dehumanizes them then the downward pressure on wages and relative impoverishment between the proletariat and the bourgeois Reserve labor army with no work at all booms and busts over production layoffs takeovers recessions then bigger more monstrous companies that are impossible to compete
1:53:34
with concentration and monopolies centralization and then the tendency of the rate of profit to fall all of this pulls on two polls on the one accumulate accumulate Mark says on the other though is something that emerges out of the chaos a class Consciousness meaning a privileged position a unique conscious State arising out of the material conditions of all of this a perspective a Consciousness that understands their place in history simply the proletariat Harvey puts it like this
1:54:14
this is typical marks there are countervailing Tendencies at work concentration on the one hand subdivision and fragment ation on the other where is the balance between them who knows the balance between concentration and decentralization is almost certainly subject to Perpetual flux the capitalist will Outsource subcontract lay off divide and conquer if the proletariat doesn't join together all of this will mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man degrade him to
1:54:47
the level of an appendage of a machine destroy any remnant of attraction in his work and turn it into a hated toil they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities they distort the conditions under which he works and subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness they transform his lifetime into working time and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital the only option for the proletariat is to join together
1:55:21
and fight Engles wrote that for the protection against the serpent of their agonies the workers have to put their heads together they have to cooperate they have to join in Union it's not inevitable but these forces the incentives all push workers into uniting they will have the numbers after all to overthrow the current system there are long-standing debates about whether Marx was a determined whether he believes in inevitability of IM miseration of revolution of human
1:55:58
history itself that we're all just puppets on a grander stage I think he walks a fine line but later on he largely tries to avoid writing in these deterministic terms as Harvey says there's not much causal language in capital just incentives and pressures and dialectical relationships that create these interesting pressure cookers but mapon culture Pol politics personal beliefs and many other things and it creates a rich but complex picture of History he says famously that
1:56:31
men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered given and transmitted from the past but none of this is a universal inevitable schema that we all live under there's just too much dynamism too much change too many variables and contingency Marx himself even complained of those who tried to turn quote my historical sketch of the Genesis of capitalism in Western Europe
1:57:05
into a historical philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated To Tread whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself true to dialectical form Mark says circumstances create people in in the same degree as people create circumstances however the circumstances the pressures the forces are all pushing the proletariat to overthrow the current state of affairs replace it with something [Music]
1:57:45
new Marx famously didn't say much about what he thought a communist society would look like he was only emphatic that the proletaria needed to organize and overthrow the current system and do it themselves he believed that this would require Revolution but that it might be peaceful in places however much of the rest he left scant details of his thoughts and there was a particular reason for this as we've seen he believed the proletariat had a particularly unique point of view that
1:58:20
no one else no other group in Society had capitalists are compelled to act in the ways we've seen by the imperatives of the market politicians are compelled to act by the power of big Capital but the proletariat in factories can experience all of this feel their own am miseration feel their alienation and understand what negates them understand industry science and technology and importantly because of their proximity to one another the capacity to organize and change
1:58:57
things because of this Marx believed that it should be left to the proletariat to establish the best course of action he was in a sense a rationalist he believed that a better Society could be organized rationally to the benefit of all instead of few but he didn't believe that a rational Society could be planned in advance like the utop socialists did this is another expression of his dialectical thinking he didn't believe in dogmatic rigid static systems in Universal sets of
1:59:33
ideas in ideology Engles for example criticized those who did otherwise and tried to quote reduce the Marxist theory of development to a rigid Orthodoxy which workers are not to reach as a result of their class Consciousness but which like an article of faith is to be forced down their throat at once and without development the proletariat had to develop on their own in The Communist Manifesto Marx wrote Communists should not set up any sectarian principles of
2:00:04
Their Own by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement because they have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole and Engles rate that the masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can have the opportunity only when they have a movement of Their Own no matter in what form so long as it is their movement in which they are driven further by their mistakes and learn to profit by them however they did leave some Clues
2:00:37
as to what they thought a communist Society could look like Mark stated simply that we call communism the real movement which abolishes the present stage of things first they famously argued for a dictatorship of the proletariat the proletariat would need to establish a class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary Transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally dictatorship obviously has a connotation today that it didn't have at the time their reading of Revolution was
2:01:11
dependent on the French Revolution which was attacked by reactionary forces both domestic and foreign by the church the aristocracy Civil War and the monarchies of Europe Europe the Bourgeois also held political power so any immediate popular Democratic vote would and had in many places often just bring the old regime back into Power which is why they believed in a limited emergency dictatorship not of one person but by the proletariat as a class looking at how revolutions and
2:01:44
Democratic procedures were repressed across Europe Marx believed that a bloody Revolution was very likely but he did equivocate and change his mind on this he said in a speech for example that there are countries such as America England and Holland where the working people may achieve their goal by peaceful means okay but what would happen once the revolution is secured there are a few Clues but it should be remembered that these are comments here and there the overarching image is of
2:02:16
the proletariat working it out depending on their particular experience of the system from where they are Marx pointed to the short-lived Paris commune which existed for a couple of months in 1871 when Parisian workers took control of Paris during the Franco Prussian War it was quickly defeated importantly Marx wrote the commune was formed of the municipal councilors chosen by universal suffrage and the various Wards of the time responsible and revocable at Short
2:02:49
terms he continued like the rest of public servants magistrates and judges were to be elected responsible and revocable wage labor and capital should be abolished Marx knew it would be difficult because Society was in every respect economically morally and intellectually still stamped with the birthmarks of the old Society from whose womb it emerges because of this he believed communism would develop in stages at first he said accordingly the individ ual producer receives back from
2:03:23
society after the deductions have been made exactly what he gives to it he receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such amount of Labor and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of Labor petani identifies the first step throughout the writings like this landed Estates to be expropriated inheritance rights abolished strongly progressive taxation instituted credit and transport nationalized public
2:03:57
factories built and equal liability to work for all members of society imposed together with education of all children in National institutions at the expense of the nation so at first there would be a mix of Social Democratic reforms equalizing of Labor and reward for work and the planning of industry in the interest of all C Nikos writes the decisions about how much Social labor would depend not on the blind workings of competition but on a collective and
2:04:29
Democratic assessment by the associated producers in the light of the needs of society but after a while a higher stage of Communism should be developed which marks puts like this in a higher phase of communist Society after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor and therewi also the antithesis between mental and physical labor has vanished after Labor has become not only a means of life but life's Prime want after the productive forces have also increased with
2:05:02
allaround development of the individual and all the Springs of Cooperative wealth flow more abundantly only then can the narrow Horizon of Bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and Society inscribe on its banners from each according to his ability to each according to his need needs he thinks at this point that most people will want to work instead of being compelled to or incentivized to by monetary reward say that's each according to his ability and that each will only take what he needs
2:05:37
from the common stock and that's to each according to his needs the states would then wither away Engles wrote as soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in sub ejection as soon as class rule in the individual struggle for existence based upon our present Anarchy and production with the collisions and excesses arising from these are removed nothing more remains to be repressed and a special repressive force a state is no longer necessary finally it's important
2:06:10
to note that Marx never wanted to promote absolute equality over individuality he believed that having access to resources and contributing to how they were produced would mean individuals could flourish and their true creative individuality [Music] reached he called it an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all in engle's words it's a Humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of Freedom after the first International
2:06:48
collapsed in 1876 marks with Drew from political life spending his time on further volumes of capital which he would never finish but would be published from his notes by Engles in 1883 his daughter died Marx then caught a cold and himself died quietly in his sleep Engles wrote mankind is shorter by a head and that the greatest head of our time summing up analyzing or critiquing Marx's body of work is a huge task that's beyond the scope of this already too long video his influence on the
2:07:27
world I think is Testament to the breth of his Insight whether you agree or disagree with it much I think is due to the meticulous way he analyzed the relationship between labor capital and technology in Das Capital as a lot of the other insights before on things like alienation Revolution and socialism were much more common and we're likely to continue to be so without him so what you think of Marx should depend on appraising those big ideas in capital and if anything the
2:08:03
jury is still out I'll publish a more comprehensive appraisal on the second Channel soon but for now I'll Point towards some of the most common points of contention some of the most common criticisms first the labor theory of value is probably criticized the most NE classical economists emphasize the subjective nature of value to put it simply and there's a famous transformation problem in marks in the literature the problem of transforming labor value into actual numbers for
2:08:36
profits and prices which should be possible if the labor theory of value is correct but it doesn't seem to be all of this means that the labor theory of value is wrong at worst and limitting at best however even with the criticisms it's undeniable that labor is at the core of production and so how much labor goes into making something is at least one big part of the answer to value that on its own makes Marx's insights very valuable Harvey writes for example I
2:09:13
have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs it's not that at all it's a historical social product the problem therefore for a Socialist Communist revolutionary Anarchist or whatever is to find an alternative value form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image falling rate of profit has also repeatedly been criticized this
2:09:47
is a key marker of whether capitalism can sustain itself over time and Marx's contention was that because more technology would extract profit from fewer workers the rate of profit would fall and capitalism would Veer from crisis to crisis the debate over this rages on as of course does capitalism and Marx wouldn't be surprised capitalism's ability to transform is as we've seen one of its most distinctive features yet despite the dynamism I think Marx would still recognize it
2:10:22
today which goes a long way to showing the enduring influence and insight of his work inequality crisis banking crashes squeezed wages the speed of technological change automation Global corporations alienation we're still very much in Marx's world there's also the debate over actually existing socialism the failures of centrally commanded economies the USSR and State capitalism yet many who follow Marx today would argue that these weren't socialist in the true Marxist
2:10:58
sense Marxism Kalen Nikos writes was socialism from below it foresaw the working class liberating itself through its own activity and remaking Society in its own image socialism in the Eastern block however was based on the denial of the self-activity of the workers and the denial of popular democracy there are also criticisms about how little Mark said about the practicalities of Communism how societies could function without money or without a state apparatus at all so
2:11:33
Marx's relevance is difficult to escape from and if you drop the idea that you have to be a Marxist or an anti-marxist a capitalist or a socialist it's undeniable that his work contains still relevant insights and still useful analyses of still still very present forces he would want his readers to read and critique he would want not to inspire followers but change in other words he was emphatically not a dogmatist he would want to inspire a different fluid active creative type of
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thought and importantly action towards the end of his life he said all I know is that I am no Marxist God saved me from my friends I'll end with a quote from a letter of Marx's called for a ruthless criticism of everything that exists he wrote in it we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle here is the truth kneel down before it we develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles we do not say to the world cease your struggles they foolish we
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will give you the true slogan of struggle we merely show the world what it is really fighting for and Consciousness is something that it has to acquire even if it does not want
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2:13:35
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