https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AeKQGE6SLtg
Marx also assumes that you can think about history as a binary class struggle with clear divisions between, say, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And that’s actually a problem, because it’s not so easy to make a firm division between who’s exploiter and who’s exploitee, let’s say. Because it’s not obvious, like in the case of small shareholders, let’s say, whether or not they happen to be part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor. This actually turned out to be a big problem in the Russian Revolution. And by big problem, I mean tremendously big problem. Because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple identities, and that’s a fairly easy thing to do. And you could usually find some axis along which they were part of the oppressor class. It might have been a consequence of their education, or it might have been a consequence of their wealth that they strived to accumulate during their life. Or it might have been a consequence of the fact that they had parents or grandparents who were educated or rich, or that they were a member of the priesthood, or that they were socialists. Or anyways, the listing of how it was possible for you to be bourgeois instead of proletariat grew immensely. And that was one of the reasons that the Red Terror claimed all the victims that it claimed. And so that was a huge problem. It was probably most exemplified by the demolition of the kulaks, who were basically peasants, peasant farmers, although effective ones in the Soviet Union, who had managed to raise themselves out of serfdom over a period of about 40 years, and to gather some degree of material security about them. And about 1.8 million of them were exiled. About 400,000 were killed. And the net consequence of that removal of their private property because of their bourgeois status was arguably the death of 6 million Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s. And so the binary class struggle idea, that was a bad idea. That was a very, very bad idea. It’s also bad in this way, and this is a real sleight of hand that Marx pulls off, is you have a binary class division, proletariat and bourgeoisie, and you have an implicit idea that all of the good is on the side of the proletariat, and all of the evil is on the side of the bourgeoisie. And that’s classic group identity thinking, you know. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like identity politics, is because once you divide people into groups and pit them against one another, it’s very easy to assume that all the evil in the world can be attributed to one group, the hypothetical oppressors, and all the good to the other. And that… Well, and that’s naive beyond comprehension, because it’s absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone’s moral worth with their economic standing. So, and that actually turned out to be a real problem as well, because… Marx also came up with this idea, which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell, of the… that’s a technical term, crazy idea, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And that’s the next idea that I really stumbled across. It was like, okay, so what’s the problem? Well, the problem is the capitalists own everything. They own all the means of production, and they’re oppressing everyone, and that would be all the workers. And there’s going to be a race to the bottom of wages for the workers as the capitalists strive to extract more and more value from the people. They want to extract more value from the labor of the proletariat by competing with other capitalists to drive wages downward, which, by the way, didn’t happen, partly because wage earners can become scarce, and that actually drives the market value upward. But the fact that you assume a priori that all the evil can be attributed to the capitalists, and all the good, the bourgeoisie, and all the good could be attributed to the proletariat meant that you could hypothesize that a dictatorship of the proletariat could come about. And that was the first stage in the communist revolution. And remember, this is a call for revolution, and not just revolution, but bloody violent revolution, and the overthrow of all… overthrowing of all existent social structures. Anyways, the problem with that, you see, is that because all the evil isn’t divided so easily up into oppressor and oppressed, that when you do establish a dictator of the proletariat, to the degree that you can do that, which you actually can’t because it’s technically impossible and an absurd thing to consider to begin with, not least because of the problem of centralization, which is the problem of the proletariat, and you have to hypothesize that you can take away all the property of the capitalists, you can replace the capitalist class with a minority of pro-proletariats, how they’re going to be chosen isn’t exactly clear in the communist manifesto, that none of the people who are from the proletariat class are going to be corrupted by that sudden access to power because they’re… they’re not going to be able to do anything about it. So then you have the good people who are running the world, and you also have them centralized so that they can make decisions that are insanely complicated to make, in fact impossibly complicated to make, and so that’s a failure conceptually on both dimensions because, first of all, all the proletariat aren’t going to be good, and when you put people in the same position as the evil capitalists, especially if you believe that social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character, which the Marxists certainly believe, then why wouldn’t you assume that the proletariat would immediately become as or more corrupt than the capitalists, which is, of course, I would say exactly what happened every time this experiment was run. And then… The next problem is, well, what is the problem with the proletariat? The next problem is, well, what makes you think that you can take some system as complicated as, like capitalist free market society, and centralize that and put decision-making power in the hands of a few people, the mechanisms by… without specifying the mechanisms by which you’re going to choose them, like what makes you think they’re going to have the wisdom or the ability to do what the capitalists were doing, unless you assume, as Marx did, that all of the evil was with the capitalists and all the good was with the proletariats, and that nothing that capitalists did constituted valid labor, which is another thing that Marx assumed, which is palpably absurd, because people who are… like maybe if you’re a dissolute aristocrat from 1830 or earlier, and you run a feudal estate, and all you do is spend your time gambling and chasing prostitutes, well, then your labor value is zero, but if you’re running a business, and it’s a successful business, first of all, you’re a bloody fool to exploit your workers, because even if you’re greedy as sin, because you’re not going to extract the maximum amount of labor out of them by doing that, and the notion that you’re adding no productive value as a manager, rather than a capitalist, it’s absolutely absurd. All it does is indicate that you either know nothing whatsoever about how an actual business works, or you refuse to know anything about how an actual business works. So that’s… That’s also a big problem. You