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Who Was Karl Marx? And Why Is Everyone Still Talking About Him?

YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3imIf8NAcWQ
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MLA Full: "Who Was Karl Marx? And Why Is Everyone Still Talking About Him?" YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 19 December 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3imIf8NAcWQ.
MLA Inline: (CrashCourse, 2024)
APA Full: CrashCourse. (2024, December 19). Who Was Karl Marx? And Why Is Everyone Still Talking About Him? [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3imIf8NAcWQ
APA Inline: (CrashCourse, 2024)
Chicago Full: CrashCourse, "Who Was Karl Marx? And Why Is Everyone Still Talking About Him?", December 19, 2024, YouTube, 13:18,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3imIf8NAcWQ.
To some, Marxism is the solution to all capitalism’s problems. To others, it’s a major threat to democracy. But what did Karl Marx really say about capitalism and communism, and how can that help shape our discussions today?

Crash Course Political Theory #6

Introduction: "The Specter of Communism" 00:00
Who Was Marx 0:37
The Problem of Capitalism 4:17
The Mondragon Corporation 6:22
The Proletariat Revolution 8:04
Critiquing Marx 10:04
Review & Credits 11:41

Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u5zJCbVA0xCurLbQwWzcxXEdlqXAPpAyYVS1quwKIis/edit?usp=sharing
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 (00:00) to (02:00)


You may have noticed people talking about Marxism lately.

(Marsha Blackburn): ...the unchecked spread of Marxist influence...

(Tommy Tuberville): ...as our nation has been taken over by the Marxists...

(Louie Gohmert): ...the demands of the anarchists and Marxists rampaging across America...

(Marsha Blackburn): ...will threaten our very survival.

Okay, whoa. Should I be alarmed? The Marxists are threatening my survival? It seems like our elected officials are pretty worked up about this. But what does Marxism actually mean? Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson, and this is Crash Course: Political Theory.

(music)

"A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of communism." That's literally the opening line to "The Communist Manifesto." You can't deny it's a total banger.

Ever since Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels wrote this line in the late 1840s, people have agonized about the supposed evils of communism. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy infamously made his political career rooting out alleged communists, coming for everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Lucille Ball, and we're still haunted by that ghost today. 

A 2024 bill would require high schools in New Hampshire to teach anti-communism. And in Florida, Republican lawmakers are trying to mandate anti-communist education from kindergarten up. But are Marx's ideas really such a threat to freedom?

Before I can answer that question, I have to back up into some very philosophical territory. I'm gonna need...a lot more coffee.

(music)

Okay. Bear with me while I attempt to explain a concept that's a tough one even for

 (02:00) to (04:00)


philosophy grad students: dialectical materialism. I know. Even the name sounds scary. But we are in this together. Let's do it.

So Karl Marx was a fan of German philosopher G.W.F Hegel, who had this theory about how ideas evolve. Basically, he thought that any general way you think about the world--any philosophy, model, or theory--isn't one solid idea, but rather the result of a bunch of contradictory perspectives in conflict with each other. And as people try to reconcile their opposing viewpoints, they create new ideas--an ongoing process he called the "dialectic." Think "dia" like "dialogue," "lectic" like "lecture". Two conflicting ideas talking and eventually synthesizing into new ones.

Still with me? Okay. Now, in Hegel's view, if you want to understand why the world is the way it is, you have to look to the realm of ideas--a perspective called idealism. But Marx turned Hegel on his head. He said, if you want to understand why the world is the way it is, you have to look not at ideas, but at the physical world--the material conditions of the world, especially the economic ones. This is called materialism.

So, want to understand why religion is the way it is? You need to understand wages. Wanna understand why a society has the moral values it does? You need to look at the market. In other words, in Marx's view, material economic systems are the root of everything. Not just how goods are exchanged, but who controls what gets made, who actually makes the things, the conditions they're under, and so on.

As he put it: "every class struggle is a political struggle." And when we put these two big ideas together--the dialectic and materialism-- we get a view called dialectical materialism. I know, great name.

This is Marx's real bread and butter. It's the view that, once we understand the world

 (04:00) to (06:00)


in terms of its material, economic realities, we can better understand how history works, how things change over time. And, much like what would happen if you gave a roomful of hungry grad students a single sandwich, conflict is inevitable.

So, most of what Marx talked about were problems with capitalism, and in contemporary American society, many people associate critiques of capitalism with communism, which explains why a lot of people today think of Marx as the spokesperson for communism. Well, that and the fact that he co-authored a pamphlet called "The Communist Manifesto," which, if you don't want to be associated with communism, is just bad branding. But hindsight is 20-20.

In reality, Marx didn't actually write very much about what a communist government might look like, but he did have a lot to say about the problems with capitalism, including these three hot takes:

First, Marx believed that humans are productive by nature, an idea called homo faber. "Homo," human; "faber," fabricate. People make stuff; it's what we do. But not just for creativity's sake. We control our environment through the use of tools, and, according to Marx, we get our sense of self partly from seeing the impact of our work on the world. If that's true, then making stuff and not seeing the impact is going to really screw people up.

Hot take number two: Under a capitalist system, workers make stuff to get money, and that's all they get. The person who owns the factory gets all the extra value created by that work, what we would call the profit. And when the worker is doing all this life-affirming labor just to make more profit for the dude at the top, she feels estranged, not only from the things she makes, but even from the work, from herself, and even from her fellow homo fabers. This is what Marx called alienation.

And finally, there's the cash workers get for their labor.

 (06:00) to (08:00)


It's not much. In a capitalist system, Marx said, workers compete with each other to accept the lowest pay. Meanwhile, capitalists compete with each other to pay the least while producing the most. If a worker demands a higher wage, they'll be out of a job. The whole system, Marx thought, was built on exploitation.

All this alienation and exploitation leaves me wondering: Has anybody ever tried to do it differently? Turns out, yeah. Let's head to the tape.

Mondragon, the world's largest existing worker-owned cooperative, emerged in 1956 when a Spanish priest named Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta was assigned to an impoverished town in the Basque region of northern Spain. He started a technical school and helped workers get their engineering degrees, and then the workers started leaving the factory to launch their own cooperatively-owned companies.

In a worker-owned co-op, there's no capitalists at the top scraping off the profit for themselves. The business is owned by the workers, and, when a profit is made, the workers share it. The co-ops grew and grew and grew into the Mondragon Corporation, a group of over 90 cooperatives, including a grocery chain, a consulting firm, and a bike manufacturer.

At Mondragon, all the worker-owners vote on big decisions like strategy and salaries. The highest-paid executive makes, at most, six times the salary of its lowest paid worker. That might sound like a lot, but to put it in a perspective, American CEOs are paid, on average, 344 times as much as typical workers. You sure that's not a typo? Nope? Okay.

Still, Mondragon exists within a broader capitalist system, which means they have to compete with non-worker-owned competitors, so they do things like outsource production

 (08:00) to (10:00)


to factories in cheaper markets whose workers don't own the means of production.

Okay, so Mondragon isn't perfect, but it offers an alternative to some of the problems Marx had with capitalism, because, crucially, Marx didn't think that a bunch of exploited, unfulfilled workers would just put up with it forever. And here's where Marx's view of dialectical materialism and his thinking about capitalism come together.

See, as I mentioned, at its core, dialectical materialism is a perspective on how history works. To Marx, he was explaining something inevitable, a cause and effect, like a science experiment. And if the material reality that people were living under was capitalism--if that was the cause--Marx thought there was only one possible effect: the proletarian revolution.

These alienated, unhappy workers--the proletariat--would attack the means of production. They'd take down the actual factories. Here's how Marx thought it would go down:

First, workers would organize once they recognized their power. They'd form trade unions to combine efforts. There would be walkouts, strikes, picket lines.

And finally, the united workers would become a political party and seize the means of production. Capitalists would no longer own the factories or exploit the workers. Workers would collectively control it all.

And here's the thing: Marx believed this was absolutely inevitable--almost like the laws of physics, but instead like the laws of history--because he believed capitalism was inherently unsustainable. Its internal contradictions would lead to a dialectical shift where it would eventually bring about its own demise. But he didn't say when this would happen, which is a source of contention among Marxists.

Hey, guys, where are you going? Wait, is it happening right now?

 (10:00) to (12:00)


False alarm. Anyway, turn on the news today, and you're likely to hear people still talking about Marx centuries later, and often in a pretty negative way. But other people think he did at least get some things right.

I mean, it seems to me that a lot of Marx's predictions about capitalism have come true. For instance, he predicted there would be increasingly rampant income inequality, and look at this. In 2023, the bottom 50% of earners in the US held less than 3% of all household wealth, while the top 10%--they held over 60%.

But can we really boil down all struggle to class struggle? What about racism, sexism, or homophobia? Would giving power to the working class really solve all of those problems?

These questions have led some critics to believe that Marx is way overhyped. They argue that class isn't the most important thing to consider; race and gender are. And then there are the folks who lie somewhere in the middle, who may consider themselves Marxists but don't think he had all the pieces in place.

Many contemporary Marxist perspectives recognize that class does matter, but that other aspects of identity impact people's lives in overlapping and complex ways. Intersectionality considers how race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and other social identities affect each other. There's more on intersectionality in Crash Course: Sociology. The point is Marx didn't consider different kinds of discrimination and identity perspectives in his theories, but modern Marxists can and often do.

And what about Marx's concept of alienation? Is that really a capitalist problem, or simply a human one? Some claim that we can ease our alienation through socialist practices like worker co-ops. That way, we can get the benefits without chopping capitalism to bits. But, as we saw with Mondragon,

 (12:00) to (13:18)


there are limitations there, too. We also don't know how much more alienation we'll have to experience before the proletarian revolution happens, unless... wait, guys, it's happening again? No.

Anyway, the thing about Marx is we're still talking about him. No matter what we think about his theories and ideas, you can't deny they had an impact. This old German philosopher's name is still in the mouths of right-wing pundits and socialist activists alike, thrown around as a political buzzword to ruffle feathers.

But, by understanding what Marx really had to say and where his ideas came from, we can have a more productive conversation about what is and isn't working in our current system, how class and other aspects of identity affect our lives, and what we can expect for the future.

Next time, we'll ask if anarchism is really the dystopian nightmare it's been made out to be. See you then.

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