Okay. Greetings everybody. Good morning. I realize it was not the easiest morning to get in, so I'm glad you can be here. Um, I will uh I first want to do a little sound test. How is it today? Can you hear me? Is it better? It's better. That's great. Okay. Thanks to everybody who's been working on this.
What we're going to try to do today is answer the question, what is communism? We're going to do that from essentially the perspective of Marx's life through Lenin. What actually happens under Stalinism with the Soviet Union, we're going to hold off for now. That'll be the subject in lectures to come as we start to handle Stalinist famine and Stalinist terror. What we're going to try to do today though is understand Marxism in its intellectual setting and its imperial setting.
Now, I'm going to remind you, although you know this, that this lecture is going to be a lot easier to understand if you have already done the reading. The Communist Manifesto is frankly one of those books that everyone should have read, everyone in the world who's literate. But in particular, you should have read it if you're taking a class when it's on the reading list, right? So, if there is not a lot of reading, there is no point in like trying to find some kind of cheat sheet for this reading. Just read it. Um, you'll find that it makes everything ever so much easier and later you'll look back and say, 'Okay, like now I've read the Communist Manifesto. I know what it's all about. I can explain it to other people.'
Um, Marx in general was a terrible writer and he put a lot of effort into crystallizing his ideas in the Communist Manifesto. So, like that's as clear as it's going to possibly get. I'll try to clarify it further, but there's no point like going to AI or like looking for some kind of summary of what it's actually about because those things will be less clear than the text itself. Okay.
So, um what we're trying to handle today is the beginnings of all of this. And I want you as we go through this lecture to keep your minds open to various possibilities, right? Like I assume that you have some notion of what Marx is or what Marxism is. You have some kind of attitude towards Marxism, positive or negative. All kinds of attitudes are possible and reasonable. But as we go through this, I want you to keep your mind open about a few basic questions.
Number one, what is the relationship between Marxism and Leninism? Right? Could there be other interpretations of Marxism that are possibly correct? Number two, are there things that you could get out of Marxism that might possibly help you to understand the contemporary world even if you don't like the interpretation that Lenin and later Stalin happen to provide?
Um, number three, how does all of this fit, as I'm going through this lecture about Marx and at the very end about Lenin, how does all of this fit into the broader imperial context that we've been talking about? So Marx was a very important German thinker who was trying to understand this phenomenon that we call globalization and provide not only some analysis but some guidance for this phenomenon called globalization.
Likewise with all of the other Marxists at the same time, they were situated in a certain place as they were trying to understand globalization just as we are, right? Unavoidably, everything that happens around us has something to do with things that happen over the entire scale of the world. At the same time we are sitting in a lecture hall in Toronto, Canada and we can't avoid that perspective, right? So as we consider Marx and his view of the world and Lenin and his view of the world, we also have to keep in mind and try to understand ourselves a bit their very specific national perspective, right? That Marx is looking at the world through Germany.
And don't worry about it, nothing important has happened, it's fine. Um, Marx is looking at the world from a specific mid-19th century German point of view. Lenin is looking at the world from a very specific late 19th, early 20th century Russian point of view.
Okay. So, I realize that as we move into the topic of Marxism, I'm facing various kinds of hurdles. I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but they're probably... Don't raise your hands. You're on camera. Um, no, you can if you want. It's fine. Like, you're in Canada. It'll be okay. Um... [laughter] I'm going to stop. This is... I'm going to stop. Yeah, I'm going to stop before I go down the line of what's happening at US universities right now.
So we're facing various, you know, barriers as we try to understand what Marxism is. It's just a long time ago. The middle of the 19th century is a different intellectual world. Connected to that is that in the middle of the 19th century and the early 20th century people had a common core of intellectual references, at least in Europe, which we tend to lack. And so to try to understand Marx and Lenin, we have to understand the things which they understood.
Another barrier in trying to understand Marxism is that we know how it turned out, or at least we know how certain parts of it turned out. Right? So we know that the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991 and it didn't come to an end in some sort of glorious success. It fell apart into poverty and later into war. We don't know how China will turn out, but we have an idea of what China is. The current regime was established in 1948, 1949 on the basis of Leninist ideas of communism and we now know that it's a highly repressive capitalist state with one party, or rather one-man rule. So we know how some things turned out. We have an idea how certain things turned out and that can affect the way that we see the original ideas.
We also are in a world where broadly speaking, and again you can correct me in Q&A if you think this isn't true, but we're in a world which is broadly dismissive of ideas. We're in a world which tends to say it's not ideas, it's some other kind of larger force. It's your emotions, but it's not ideas that matter. Um, it's a world where even on the left, I think it's fair to say the first response to ideas [snorts] is to critique or dismiss or to try to find some thread to pull so the whole thing will just disappear and we can get back to how we feel right now.
Now, the idea that ideas don't matter, if you'll forgive me, like a moment of philosophy. Um, here comes some philosophy. Are you ready? The idea that ideas don't matter is itself an idea, which is just as much subject to critique as any other idea. So if you hold the view that ideas don't matter very much, you have to be prepared to defend that as an idea.
If it's just your inclination, which I think it is for much of the culture because it's easy to dismiss ideas, right? Because if you can dismiss ideas, then you can move back to inclinations or emotions or opinions or reactions or intuitions or whatever it is that you're feeling right now. Right? But I'm just going to point out that that is an idea. The idea that ideas don't matter is an idea and it may not be the best of ideas, right? Um, it may be an influential idea, but it may not be the best of ideas.
So another barrier we have in dealing with Marxism is that I think, again correct me if I'm wrong, but it's hard for us to imagine that a single idea could really transform the world. And of course this idea did transform the world. However you wish to evaluate it, had Karl Marx never grown up and written the Communist Manifesto... And he wrote these things when he was very young by the way. I mean not to put a lot of pressure on you but most of the things that we're talking about were written when he was in his 20s or 30s, right? Um, so you know, get a move on is what I'm trying to say.
So one of the barriers is that, right? It's hard for us to imagine because we'd prefer to be cynical or nihilistic or dismissive or just lazy. It's hard for us to imagine that an idea really could transform the world. And this idea clearly did, right? If Karl Marx's parents hadn't had a child, the world would be a very different place.
Another barrier that we're running up against as we try to understand Marx is the philosophical basis of it, which I'm going to spend some time trying to explain. Marx is aiming towards one total idea that will explain everything. But of course, as he tries to get to that, he's coming out of a certain tradition in the philosophy of a German philosopher called Hegel, who we're going to discuss a little bit more. But it's essentially impossible to understand Marx without Hegel.
And Hegel is operating in a way which is difficult for us in a couple of ways. I guess actually difficult. Number one, um, and I'm sorry to sound like the cranky old historian that I am, but Hegel assumes that everybody knows what world history is. So Hegel assumes that basically all of his readers know what happened in world history up to the early 19th century. Um, and Marx assumes that too. Marx assumes that we can know what history was, that in fact we more or less know what happened in the history of the world.
But the second difference is a philosophical one which I'm going to dwell on more. But it has to do with how you understand the shape of reality. Is reality something static that you observe and chronicle? Right? Like so when I'm looking out at this lecture hall, is reality the number of you, what you're wearing, you know, where you're looking right now, how old you are? Is reality a matter of an accumulation of observable facts? Is it essentially static? Right? Is reality just being and is being essentially observable and recordable from the surfaces of things?
Or is reality a kind of becoming? Right? Is reality a matter of encounters which lead to things that are implicit in the encounter but which weren't present? Right? So for example, a class, right? So like this is very simple but a class could be you're just there and I'm just here or it could be that you are listening to things and the things that you listen to encounter things that you have read or things that you've experienced leading to something new, right? So that's a very simple way of describing it but it gives you one step towards the way Hegel saw the world.
Hegel saw the world in terms of becoming rather than in terms of being. I'll dwell on this some more but it's very important for understanding Marx. Um, Marx understood the world not so much in terms of being but in terms of becoming.
Okay. So, um, another reason why it's hard for us to grasp Marx or see Marx, and this is a different kind of argument I'm about to make, is that where Marx was successful he is often invisible. So, for example, let's say that you go to Vienna on vacation or you decide to live in Vienna and you say, 'Hey, Vienna is a really nice place.' And if you buy the propaganda of Vienna, it will be, 'Well, it's the Mozart, right? It's the coffee.'
Um, so I see some of you bought the propaganda. Okay, it's like it's the Habsburgs. That's why it was so nice. It's the horse rides, right? That's why Vienna is so great. It's the Baroque. The reason why Vienna is such a nice place to live, or one of the major reasons it's such a nice place to live, is that Vienna has lots of public housing.
And the reason why the mood in Vienna cafes is nice, this is Marxist analysis by the way. So, if you didn't want to in this class or if you're like blocking it, like time to put your hands over your ears. The reason why the atmosphere in the Vienna coffee houses is so nice is because the people who work in the coffee houses don't have incredibly long commutes to get to work. And the reason they don't have incredibly long commutes to get to work is because there's public housing and low rent housing scattered all through the central districts of Vienna. Right? Okay, that was a bit of Marxist analysis. It's now over.
Um, but and you'll see why it's Marxist analysis later. The reason why there's public housing in Vienna is because Marxists governed Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s and built the public housing. Okay. So, you can see a kind of interesting irony here, which is that Vienna advertises itself all around the world for prosperous bourgeois people to come and visit as the most livable or the most beautiful or whatever the most something in the world, which arguably it is. It's a wonderful city.
But if you want to understand why it's wonderful, you have to look back into the part of its history which is undeniably Marxist, which is the 1920s and the 1930s. But I've now explained that to you, but I would wager that very few of you knew that or thought of it, right? Whether or not you've ever been to Vienna. And that's because of my larger point, which is that where Marxism has been successful, it has often become invisible, right?
So people, at least liberals or people on the right, will be aware of Marxism's failures, right? And we'll be talking about them abundantly in this class. They will be aware of the great terror or a famine in the Soviet Union or China. But where Marxism has been successful, it largely becomes invisible or it doesn't feel like Marxism anymore. Right? So if you're walking through downtown Vienna, you're not looking around saying, 'Wow, this is an example of how Marxism works.' Nobody does that, but it [snorts] probably is.
Another example is the welfare state. So if you have the welfare state, as in Canada you pretty much do, if you have the welfare state, that is definitely a result of Marxism, almost certainly a result of Marxism to some degree, right? Um, but nevertheless when people have health care or when you don't have to pay huge amounts for medicine or when you go to the hospital and like someone actually treats you, nobody says thank you Karl Marx, right?
I mean, there are no signs in the hospital that say like, if you didn't pay a huge bill to exploitative finance capitalists, thank Karl Marx, right? That doesn't exist. That doesn't exist. And yet nevertheless the history of the welfare state, as you track it back, which I'm going to do a little bit in this lecture, it leads to a few sources of origin. It leads to Christian critics of capitalism, it leads to various kinds of reform movements, but one of the places it leads back to is Marxists who decided they were going to be social democrats and try to repair capitalism from within.
So again though, my point is invisibility, right? Just as when you go to Vienna and you look up and you see the Baroque masterpieces, you don't say, 'Thank you, Karl Marx.' Also, when you go to the pharmacy in Toronto and you don't pay hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars for your medicines, which I hope you're not doing, um, you also don't say like, 'Thank you, Karl Marx.' Nobody does that.
And so the point is that, and this is, by the way, just a point about life in general, like if you're successful, nobody cares. All right? It's just like, you know, it's when you fail that people come for you. Okay? All right. Okay, [laughter] good. You're too young to know that. That's excellent. That's very good. I don't want you to know that. Forget I said it, in fact. Okay, [snorts] so that was the setup, right?
I'm trying to explain why it is that we face certain epistemic difficulties. We have certain difficulties in our point of view which make it hard for us to see Marx, to understand Marxism. So, who was Marx? Let's start with that. Karl Marx was a German philosopher. He lived from 1818 to 1883. Um, he was of Jewish origin. He wrote the sketches of his most important ideas when he was in his 20s.
Um, the revolution of 1848, which prompted the Communist Manifesto which you read, he wrote when he was 30. Um, the revolution of 1848 was a very important formative experience for him. It was, as a famous historian famously called it, the turning point where European history failed to turn. The revolutions of 1848, which were against empire and feudalism, failed to produce what Marx hoped they would produce, which was socialist revolution. Much of his subsequent career can be understood as an attempt to push that revolution forward.
However, in his personal life, the failure of the revolutions of 1848 meant that he had to move to London, um, which he did in 1849, and he lived in poverty mostly in London for the next 34 years. Um, which I'm going to stop here and make a very simple point. One thing that one needs to know about Karl Marx is that he worked incredibly hard. He wrote a huge amount.
Um, in order to write his last works, which I'm only going to brush over, which were called Capital or Das Kapital, he sat for decades in the British Library, um, which has now been absorbed as part of the British Museum. When I was a graduate student in London, you could still sit, I didn't actually do it but people I know did, um, you could sit at the carrel that Karl Marx used. It was known which one it was and you could sit in the same place.
He was a journalist between 1851 and 1862, um, writing for money for the New York Daily Tribune, and um, he was also one of the most impressive thinkers of his time. An important fact about Marx is friendship, and friendship is one of those features in history which can go a little bit overlooked, but if it weren't for Friedrich Engels there probably wouldn't have been a Karl Marx.
Friedrich Engels kept him going. Friedrich Engels exchanged ideas with him. Friedrich Engels lent him money from time to time. The two of them sometimes wrote together. They were very closely connected. Um, and also Engels, this is a point to which I'll return, Engels outlived Marx. So it was one of these awkward situations. In fact, it happens quite a lot that people who are very close to each other don't die on the same day. [snorts] Um, it often happens. I mean I dare say more often than not.
And when it happens then there's the question of the interpretation of the one person by the other. One classic formulation of this is that one spouse outlives the other spouse and then they get to interpret what the other spouse did or they choose to or they don't. That's a famous problem in intellectual history. You know, the spouse throws away the best letters, right? Um, the spouse says that the husband's plays were really about this or whatever it might be.
In the case of Engels and Marx, it wasn't the spouses, it was the friends. And it's just a basic brute fact that Engels lived for a dozen years longer than Marx. Um, Engels lived until 1895, which means that what Karl Marx did, thought and wrote was largely understood by everyone by way of Engels, because Engels was there for a dozen more years to interpret it. Engels was there to write more books after Marx was dead.
Okay. Another dimension of Marx is Marx the politician. And a way to grasp the phases of Marx the politician is to know something which you really have to know for the history of communism, which is the names and character of the three Communist Internationals. I was thinking about how you pronounce that. Is it Communist Internationals or is it Communists International? Like is it like brothers-in-law or brother-in... you know what I mean? Okay. [snorts] Um, so it's Communist Internationals.
The first Communist International was the one of Marx's lifetime and it was a very loose association of small revolutionary parties without really any kind of overarching structure or ideology. It was that ideology that Marx was always seeking to provide. After the first international, there is a second international, um, which is from 1889 until 1914. This is not directly affected by the living Marx. Marx is already dead.
The second international is the so-called golden age of Marxism. It's the period essentially between Marx and Lenin when there were some very important Marxist parties in the world, in France and Germany and Austria and the Russian Empire in particular, but none of them had seized power. So they weren't really responsible for anything, which is an interesting notion of a golden age by the way. Like it's sort of like, you know, right before you're responsible, when things are going okay, like you got some people on your side but no one's going to blame you for anything.
That's the second international. So the second international is the most interesting period and it's the period from which Lenin is going to arise. The third international is after Lenin and his comrades, the Bolsheviks, seize power in Russia. So the third international is formed after the revolution of 1917 and it's a different kind of organization because the third international, unlike the others, is completely hierarchical.
The idea of the third international is that there's one correct understanding of Marxism. It's the Leninist one and therefore the party in the Soviet Union is the mother party and all the other parties are the daughter parties and they have to follow what is now known as the line. In the first and second international, there wasn't a line. The first international was essentially a bunch of troublemakers who occasionally managed to show up in the same city for a few days before they were arrested.
The second international were parties that functioned in national political systems and which did have more or less organized congresses, um, and they gave speeches and they had debates and it was very well organized and there were debates, and I'll get to that, important debates on important subjects, but there wasn't a line, right? Like the German comrades in the second international always thought they were right, unsurprisingly, but the German comrades didn't tell everyone else what to do, right?
There was a very important newspaper in the second international called Die Zeit. Um, it was a German newspaper, it was edited by a fellow called Karl Kautsky and that's where the debates took place, right? Um, but the Die Zeit didn't try to set a line, it didn't say everyone else has to think this or they're not Marxists. Whereas after the Bolshevik revolution in the third international as designed by Lenin, there was a line and the notion was that if you didn't follow the line then you were in fact not a Marxist, you were not a communist, um, you could be purged, expelled, and so on and so forth.
Okay. So if you can keep those three internationals in mind, it will help you to understand how Marx fits into the history of Marxist politics. He was only around personally for the first stage. The next two stages, the next two internationals were without him. Okay. So, um, let's move on now to the ideas. Okay.
And in this part, if something is really unclear, I encourage you to raise your hand. I mean, if it's really unclear, okay, not just because your hand has kind of been itching, you know, since class started, but because there's something you fundamentally don't understand and you think that other people would also not understand it. Please do raise your hand. I'll try to walk you through this. It's not very difficult. In fact, it's just a little bit unusual.
We're going to move through three of his texts, one of which, the middle one, the Communist Manifesto, you've read. So the first text I want to talk about is something which was published later, um, but he wrote it in 1844. It was called the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written when he was about 25. I mean, again, no pressure, but like this helps you to see like where you are in your own development, you know, you've got three, four, five years to get ready to begin to design a world historical ideology. Okay.
Oh, no. But see, that's why it's good that you're in this class because like it's giving you perspective, right? Okay. So, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were published in 1844. Um, the key concept in these manuscripts is the concept of alienation. Okay.
Now, having gone through, you know, um, a bunch of English language literature from the 1950s forwards, um, and, you know, being young, you probably think you have an intuitive sense of what alienation is. Yes? No? Are you all alienated? No? Okay, that's good. Yes? No? Okay, good. All right. That's interesting.
It would have been kind of troubling if I'd said, 'Are you all alienated?' and then like everyone nodded their heads because like not only would that be discouraging but it would also be a little bit paradoxical, right? Because if everybody's alienated, is it still alienation, right? Because like if you're all alienated together in one big lecture hall, is that still alienation? Okay, anyway, so you'll understand. I mean, so what alienation basically means is this.
There are factual things about yourself, right? You exist contingently in the world. So contingent means the things as they happen to be, right? So you happen to have a certain name, you happen to be a certain age, you happen to be a certain shape, right? You happen to come from a certain place, you happen to have certain parents, you happen to be enrolled in a certain university, um, or not as the case might be. Um, but you have a contingent existence which can be defined in terms of these historical facts.
But these historical facts are a little bit troubling. Most of them weren't controlled by you, either in their particulars or even in their generals, right? So you may have in some sense chosen to go to this university, but you didn't choose that this university existed. You didn't choose that universities exist. You didn't choose that at this time of life you go to university. All these things were sort of there before you, right?
You're one gender rather than another or another, but you didn't choose what genders exist. You know, like maybe you chose what gender you decided you were going to be, but still it was kind of a limited menu. You may have chosen what you put on this morning, right? But not among a huge, you know, infinite range of options. At the end of the day, you know, the things that are you are troubling because I'm just explaining alienation, okay? For those of you who are not alienated, for those of you who are, you already get it.
But the things that are you are of a troubling character because you didn't choose them. And even if in some sense you chose them, you were choosing them in a world that you didn't choose. So there's something troubling about a world which is contingent, which it seems like things just happen to be the way that they are.
But maybe there's another reality, right? Maybe deep inside there is a real you. Maybe there's a non-contingent version of you. Maybe there's a version of you that goes beyond how you're wearing your hair or what clothes you put on or what your body shape happens to be or even what gender you happen to be. Right? Um, maybe there is a real you. Do you ever have that? Okay. Don't, but like, do you ever have the feeling that you exist? Okay. It would be good if you did. Yeah. I love that. Thank you for raising your hand. That's good. That's good. Okay. Two people raised their hand. That's awesome.
In the year 2026, you know, as we lose the war against the digital creatures, two humans existing in the huge lecture hall is great. I'll take it. Um, so but that feeling that you really exist, right? Not just like your attributes and the things that happen to you. Um, but that you really exist, that there really is a you, that there's something about you which is, you know, ineffable, irreducible, real with a capital R. Okay.
So, but that sense that you're really there is probably in some kind of tension with your bodily experience, with your relationships, with the larger facts of the world around you, right? That's alienation, the sense. And so what Marx is in some sense about, and we'll get to this, is how you overcome alienation. How all of these apparently senseless facts around us can be brought into sense, not just analytically, but so that they make sense for us, so that we feel that we are in the world not bumping up against everything, but in the world, that there's a larger sense and that we are part of this larger sense.
Okay, so this problem of alienation can be addressed in various ways and Marx has a very specific way of addressing it. I'm going to take this opportunity to try to explain now the relationship between Marx and Hegel because Marx doesn't exist without Hegel and the way that Hegel tries to handle this problem of alienation.
So here's what Hegel says and it's interesting and it's powerful. Um, what Hegel says is that yes, we have this sense that we exist, that there's a spirit inside of us, that we exist in some way which is not just material, physical, accidental. Uh, but that feeling that we have is only part of some larger thing which is a world spirit.
And when we look back at history, what we find, says Hegel, is not just a series of accidental events, but a kind of strange, painful, conflictual progress which is happening. So if you're in the middle of a battlefield, which I hope you won't be, if you're in the middle of a battlefield and you look around, everything could be senseless. But what Hegel says is that this battle is part of a war and this war was part of a clash and as a result of this clash in some way human history is moving forward. Right?
So Hegel famously or infamously compares history to slaughter. It happens but all of the killing has some kind of a meaning. Um, and the meaning is that humanity is moving forwards. It's moving forwards to understanding itself and this is where the history of the world comes in. So Hegel goes through the whole history of the world and discusses phases of the history of the world from the Mesopotamians forward and the notion is that there's progress, not natural friendly gradual progress, but progress by way of conflict.
And as a result of these conflicts what he calls the world spirit is working itself out and we are, not we as individuals, but the sense of what humanity is, is gradually emerging over time. Okay, now that may seem like a weird alien idea. If it does, I mean, maybe a bunch of you are German Hegelians, but if it seems like a weird alien idea, it's because you have another notion of how the world works, right?
Like you may have the notion that nothing ever changes or you may have the notion that things change gradually, right? Or you may have the notion that there is no such thing as a human essence or whatever. What Hegel has is a solution to a problem. Hegel says, 'Yes, it doesn't make sense, but it will make sense. It's all working itself out. We're moving in the direction of a kind of total self-understanding. We're getting there, but the price is conflict.' Okay.
Now, the key term in understanding Hegel is the term dialectic. Um, dialectic in the Hegelian understanding means that when two things clash, something emerges which wasn't there before but which was somehow implicit in the elements of the things that clash. So this is what I was trying to say before about history being a matter of becoming rather than history being a matter of being.
Um, it's not just that history is made up of a bunch of things that just exist. It's not like classical physics. So it's not like pool, right? So one version of history is that nothing ever happens. Okay, it's just a pool table and the balls are there and nothing ever happens. Okay, that's not a very attractive view of history. I mean, or depending on your mood, right? Like sometimes you had a busy day and you just want to stare at that pool table, you know, like, look at that pool table. Look how peacefully the balls are arranged. Nothing's happening. This is very relaxing. Okay, that's one view of history.
Another view of history is that you take that pool cue and you hit the pool balls and they bounce in a completely predictable way, right? They're just physical objects. They are obeying physical laws. And so everything is predictable. Everything is an object. All right? Now what Hegel would say is something like this. When you strike that ball, it's not just that these individual balls are moving around in a way which is predictable classical mechanics. It's that they are...
Going from one shape to another shape, right? And so then as the person playing — by the way, this is the first time that Hegel has ever been explained in terms of pool in the history of the world, I believe, right? You can go like Google it and correct me. But so then, so what Hegel would say is it's not just that these individual balls have been muled around. It's that now look, one shape has become a different shape.
Okay. And this, the second shape was in some way enabled by the first shape, but it's not the same thing as the first shape, right? And in the second shape, you look at the second shape and you see things that are there and they were always implicitly there. They were always possible, right? In that original pyramid or triangle, all this possibility was already there. It hadn't happened yet. And when you look at this possibility, it's not just random. It's what tells you where you can make your shot, right? So, a new quality has emerged which was implicit, but you couldn't see it. But now that you struck the pool balls, you can see it. You can see, okay, now I can make this shot or I can make that shot. So, there's a quality there which wasn't there before. Okay. Was that helpful at all? That no? Moderately? A little bit? Sort of? Okay. Um, one person really — I want, I want to be recorded that one person really loved that explanation.
Okay, so it's partly — so what Hegel is saying is that the transformation, right, the clash between me and those balls, it wasn't just like one state and another state. The clash revealed something which was always present but now was there, and now we act, right? So now we move on to the next stage and everything is different, and we act, and then it happens again. Okay, so all of history is like that. It's not just a meaningless succession of one thing after another. Clashes which lead to new possibilities and new levels of awareness which weren't there before. So when I look at that pool table and I see the balls scattered around, I can now see where I can put them into the holes, right? That wasn't there. I can see what shot I'm going to make and so on and so forth. Okay. So Hegel is thinking dialectically.
Um, and all right, I guess I now have to explain the difference between Marx and Hegel. So I'm going to explain this at greater length, but what Marx says is that Hegel's right about one big thing, wrong about another big thing. What Marx says is that Hegel is right about becoming and not being. Hegel is right about the dialectic. Hegel is right about the clash. Hegel is right to say that history is a matter of clashes in which things emerge which weren't present before and are in some sense at a higher level. Okay. But where Hegel's wrong, says Marx, is in the idea of a world spirit. The history doesn't move forward because there is some kind of general abstract world spirit in which we all blindly partially partake. History moves forward, says Marx, not for that reason, but because of changes in the way that we survive. So for Marx, what the interaction which is most important is the interaction of us with what he calls nature. Okay. So let's now try to explain what Marx means by this.
So Marx, to take the famous phrase, is that Marx turns Hegel on his head. That Marx accepts that there's a dialectical relationship, but the relationship doesn't start with a big idea. There is no big idea in that sense. The relationship starts with humans and the way they interact with their immediate environment. Okay. So here we get an idea of what Marx thinks the unalienated person would be like. The unalienated — so a person is complete not on their own. A person is complete because of the interaction with nature. So what Marx thinks is that we live not as separated individuals, we live as entities in a permanent interaction with a natural world around us.
And what's different from — the way that we're different from aardvarks, aside from having less cool names and being not nearly as cute and generally appealing, the way we're different from aardvarks is that we transform the world around us. Okay, I mean, unfair to aardvarks. They also transform the world around us. But you see what I mean? We are more advanced tool users. We're not the only ones. Ravens use tools. I know, I know. Octopi, I get it. I know all the exceptions. I'm just giving you Marx's view. Marx was unfamiliar with the intelligence of octopi. We're gonna give him a pass on that one. So what's special about Marx — what's special about humans is that we interact with nature and we transform it. And when we transform nature, we become ourselves. That's the way that it's supposed to work.
So if we are in solitary confinement or, you know, if we're in a cubicle all day staring at a screen or whatever, we're not ourselves. We're alienated. But when we are able to transform the world around us in a meaningful way — meaningful in the sense that it allows us to survive, that's good, but also meaningful in the sense that we are understanding what we are doing. We're not just behaving instinctually. We're not just putting our faces in a trough. We understand what we are doing when, for example, we plant a crop, or we understand what we're doing when we make a plow. We understand what we're doing when we create a tool or when we use a tool. We're extending ourselves into the physical world and the physical world is returning the favor by adapting to what we do to it. And it's in that interaction that we become ourselves.
So we're not isolated individual beings. We're beings who are connected to nature and to one another by way of what we do. Okay. So an unalienated individual is an individual who is working with nature. Work is what makes us who we are, says Marx. Okay. How could this possibly go wrong? What goes wrong with this? Well, what goes wrong with this, says Marx, is the division of labor. So when I or maybe my family or maybe my clan is self-sufficient, right? Maybe we're pastoralists. We have a herd of goats. Maybe we farm, right? But we're in the world, we're self-sufficient. We know how to do everything which is relevant for us. We have that knowledge. We're able to survive that way and it all makes sense to us.
But let's imagine that you could take a step in another direction and you could be a farmer, right? And you could specialize in farming and you could farm and you could make much more than you actually need. And meanwhile, you could be a pastoralist and you could just raise the goats, and meanwhile I could build myself an incredible temple and explain to you why both of you need to pay a lot of taxes to me. Wouldn't that be great? Okay. Now, the real Marxists in the audience are saying, 'But Professor Snyder, you're describing the relationship between yourself and the students as it in fact is.' Okay. All right. Which maybe would be a little bit unfair, all of you true Marxists out there. All right. So, but so what could go wrong is a division of labor. We can under certain conditions produce a lot more, but at the price of specializing.
Okay. And for Marx this is a problem because Marx says the farmer who is then producing much more than he needs so that someone else can take it is now just — he's doing something which isn't for himself. He's now alienated from his labor, right? He's doing something which isn't directly sensible for him. Likewise the pastoralist who has more goats than she really needs and doesn't do the other things, she's specialized, is now alienated from her labor because her labor is going towards something which is much more abstract, toward the survival of a city-state, for example. So the division of labor separates us from ourselves. The next step where things can really go wrong is private property.
So for Marx, if you're born into a world where there's already private property — and I'll give you a hint, you all were right — if you're born into a world where there's already private property, it's essentially impossible to have an unalienated interaction with nature because you don't have nature around you. There's already this social fact that things belong to people already. That's just the way it is. You can't do anything about it except have a revolution, right? We'll get to that. But you can't do anything about that. You can't just say, 'I'm going to plant a tree' or 'I'm going to take this apple' or 'I'm going to plow a furrow here.' You can't do it because somebody else already owns all of this stuff, right? So private property — private property under the system that Marx calls capitalism is very alienating.
So then we get to the way Marx sees history. So what Marx says is that — and this is an interesting view of history, right? And it's been very influential and it's certainly not entirely wrong. His view of history is that history happens because the means of production change. The means of production may sound like a complicated technical term, but it's not. The means of production are just the tools we have at hand in order to survive or to produce what Marx would call a surplus. So when we would use the term technology probably, when technology changes then everything else changes, right? When technology changes then social life and political life and cultural life also change. So the meaningful turning points in history are the inventions.
So when you have, you know, when you have the plow and the stirrup, then you're capable of some kind of advanced agriculture or pastoralism. You can produce a surplus. You can get to feudalism — Marx calls it feudalism — where some people own the land and control the labor of other people and they produce a surplus. Or once you have the use of hydrocarbons, once you have the steamship, once you have the railway and the factory, then you can get to something which Marx calls capitalism, where a relatively small number of people can own the means of production and exploit the labor of other people. So Marx's point — and I'm making it more simple, you know, than in fact it would be — but Marx's point is that as technology advances, as the means of production change, then everything else changes. And I think it's pretty easy to see the power of this point. It's not the only thing that happens in history, but this is obviously a very significant thing that happens in history.
So for example, before everything was digital, politics and society were different than they are now, right? Like for you, a lot of things might seem like completely natural, which 50 years ago would have been unknown, bizarre, verging on unthinkable. But what changed was the means of production, right? And when the means of production changed, then everything else changed and started to look natural. So what Marx says is that, you know, these things that seem natural are in fact historical, and they're historical in a very specific sense — they have to do with changes in technology or in the means of production.
But says Marx — and now we're getting to the Communist Manifesto — there's something special about capitalism. Capitalism is a stage in history which is unsustainable. It's unsustainable at a couple of levels. The first is that it leads to workers who are thoroughly spiritually alienated because what they're doing is so wildly unconnected from their own selves. Right? So the example in Marx's day would be something like you are in a factory and you're carrying out one tiny little part in the production of something. The thing that you're — you're not even making a whole thing. You're just making a part of it. Marx found this outrageous. You're just making a part of it. You're not making the whole thing. You're not selling it. It's not for you. You don't need it. You're not even making it. You're just making a part and then it gets sold. But you don't even get the money from when it's sold. You just get a little tiny bit of that money, which is your wage.
For — I mean, this might seem normal to you, but like that's because we're all in capitalism. For Marx, this was an outrageous situation. I mean, we have reached further stages of this kind of alienation, right? So like you're sitting in a — you're not even in a cubicle anymore, okay? But let's imagine you're sitting in a cubicle and like you're staring at a screen and like you're answering some query which isn't even from another person, like it's from somebody else's AI. And then, you know, the levels that you have to get through before it makes any sense to you, it just increase and increase and increase. So Marx says this is untenable. Humans won't stand for it.
Or what Marx actually says is when the level of alienation becomes sufficiently great, you then realize who you are. Okay, that might not be true. It could be that when the level of alienation is sufficiently great, you just become, you know, a digitally programmed fascist. I'm not sure Marx was right about this, but this was Marx's point or his hope, his analysis was that when alienation reaches a grotesque level, you then recognize your place in history, right? The levels of falsification or complication become so many that it strikes you, like the grotesqueness, the absurdity strikes you and you realize this isn't who I am. This can't go on. Okay, that's one thing that happens.
The other thing that happens, says Marx, is that as capitalism proceeds the workers are ever more economically exploited. So exploitation is not the same thing as alienation, right? I mean, presumably you could be paid well for a job — I don't know why I said presumably — you can be paid well for a job that completely destroys your soul, right? That's possible. Or you could be paid badly for a job which you find immensely enriching and true to yourself. So alienation is one thing and Marx used the term immiseration or exploitation is a different thing. Marx said that capitalism was leading to both. So that workers were simultaneously economically exploited, you know, in the sort of standard sense, like we're not going to take this anymore, we're being exploited, but they're also being alienated to a degree.
And this is what makes workers special, says Marx. They're so alienated that they actually attain objectivity, because their situation is so absurd, they have a kind of moment of insight where they see things the way they actually are. And both of these things, says Marx, are going to bring us towards revolution. Okay, which leads us to the Communist Manifesto. Now, when you read the Communist Manifesto, I hope it was striking to you how positive Marx's description of capitalism was. Okay, like if you were reading the Communist Manifesto expecting just a long, you know, a long description of the misery of factories, I mean, that's another book. That's The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels. But if you're expecting like a long diatribe about how bad capitalism is, that's not the Communist Manifesto.
The Communist Manifesto actually has a very interestingly ambivalent idea about capitalism, which is that capitalism is a kind of useful disaster, that it's historically necessary. And this is important because it brings us back to this notion of the dialectic. So if you have, like let's say you have a theory of history which a lot of people in the English-speaking world did and some still do, which says things get gradually better. Okay. So like each generation is better educated than the one before. I'm just pausing for like the awkward laughter. Okay, got it. Good. Okay. Each generation is better educated than the one before. Each decade, each household is a bit wealthier. We all become a bit more reasonable. Right? So that's one view of how things get better. It's gradual and it has to do with our reason and with our ability to just slowly exploit the world better and better.
That's not what Marx says. What Marx says is that capitalism is extraordinarily destructive and at the same time it offers this sort of — not just once in a lifetime, but once in all of history — opportunity. Capitalism destroys your soul. Capitalism leads you to a place where you understand how alienated you are. Capitalism creates a very large working class which is immiserated, exploited, poor. It does all those bad things. But those things are also good because without those things we don't build the big factories and without those things we don't create this industry which is enough to provide for everybody.
So capitalism — and this is again, this is very important to understand Marx, right? Marx isn't just saying that capitalism was bad. You know, who said that capitalism was bad in the 19th century? The conservatives said capitalism was bad because it was destroying the natural hierarchies of life. It was ruining their farms. It was bringing down the old ways of doing things. If you want a critique of capitalism that's sort of one-sided, go read Thomas Carlyle or read a conservative. The conservative said capitalism was bad. Marx said capitalism is good because it's bad and it's bad because it's good. It had to be bad in order to be good. Which is a different way of thinking about history, right?
Like if you're in a nice Anglo-Saxon, you know, view, gradualist liberal view of the world, you don't want things to have to be bad in order to be good. You don't want there to have to be a terrible disaster in order to come out the other side with something better. Marx says there has to be a terrible disaster, that there's just no other way. Again, he may be right or wrong, but this is his view. So his view is that capitalism is bad and it had to be bad. If it weren't bad, it would never have created these factories. Okay? And so again, when I say factories to you, like you're largely looking back, right? I mean, for you factories are things that are closing down or have closed down, I guess. But remember Marx is writing in 1848. So like he's essentially looking forward. He's correctly anticipating the way that capitalism is going to look. And I think it's forgivable that he couldn't imagine anything more impressive and spectacular than huge factories. Right?
So what Marx says is that capitalism creates the factories and then the workers seize them. That's the idea. The workers wouldn't — like there was no other way to get to the factories. But now that we've got the factories, we're going to take the factories and that's going to be socialism. Okay. Relatedly, capitalism had to conquer the world. And this is a way where Marx and Engels connect. So there were these beautiful or terribly beautiful passages in the Communist Manifesto when Marx describes capitalism as this sort of destructive wave spreading around the entire world.
And again, he actually sounds a bit like a conservative here because he says the world is full of all kinds of interestingly different practices, different cultures, different hierarchies of value, customs, and so on. And these things may be all very nice, but it doesn't really matter because capitalism is going to wipe them all out. It's going to wipe the screen completely flat. It's going to create a tabula rasa. So, and this is sad. It may be regrettable, but it's just what's going to happen. And the result of it though, says Marx, is good because as a result of this there's going to be one big world economic system which paves the way for one big world revolution.
So the things which are bad are also good and the things which are good are also bad. And this is what makes Marx different from everyone else. Right? So if you were a liberal capitalist, what you would likely have said is it's too bad — I'm caricaturing a bit — but it's too bad that you are alienated and poor, but this is the price of progress. Okay, you may be familiar with this argument because it is still made all the time, right? It's too bad that you're poor and your soul is being destroyed, but this is the price of progress. All in all, things are getting better. Okay, that's a liberal view.
A conservative view would be something like this is really terrible. It's too bad. Things used to be better. Okay, Marx is saying something else. Marx is saying, 'Yes, your souls are being destroyed and you're very poor.' And all of these interesting cultural hierarchies are being flattened out. But the result of all of this horror is going to be the possibility for something not just gradually better, but dramatically better on the other side. So, he's not a conservative, obviously. He accepts that cultures are being homogenized and wiped out, but there's a purpose to it. He's not a liberal because he's not saying things are all in all getting better. He's not saying that, right?
Like that's even today, right? Like that's the default liberal mode to say, well, you know, you're poor and you're poor and you're poor and you committed suicide. But if you take an average, right, take an average and look at a curve. It's all — look, I've got a graph and you can see there's a line going up, right? So like the fact that you committed suicide and the fact that you're addicted to drugs — and I didn't point to any particular, I was pointing right down the middle of the aisle, wasn't pointing to anybody — but like the fact that you're a drug addict and the fact that like you committed suicide, it all averages out. It all averages out because there are also some people who are happy, right? So that's — I mean, I'm making fun a little bit, but like that's the basic liberal way of looking at it.
What Marx says is no, I acknowledge that terrible things are happening, but there's a purpose to it. Okay. So I mean, and there are problems with that approach too and we're going to get to them. I'm just trying to show how like the liberal, the Marxist, and the conservative way of looking at capitalist transformation all have something to do with each other. And in some way, what Marx is doing is that he's saying, 'Yeah, you know, liberals, you're right about the factories. They're great, but they're great because we're going to take them. And conservatives, you're right about capitalism homogenizing and destroying and flattening everything out.'
But that's fine because what's going to happen when we take the factories is that it's going to return our souls. It's going to return our souls to us. It's going to end alienation. Okay? And that's the dramatic claim that Marx is making. Right? It's not just that we take the factories because we want the factories. It's that when we take the factories, we end private property and we end the division of labor and we return to our proper state. So the revolution is not about you have more stuff and I want your stuff. The revolution is about nobody having any stuff, everybody having everything. And the result of that being that we return to the kinds of creatures that we actually are. Okay? Now there again, I'm not saying that Marx had it right. I'm just trying to be clear, or that something like that is possible. What I'm saying is that that is Marx's view. And I want you to see how it's different from other related views. Okay.
So that gets us through essentially the Communist Manifesto and I think that's probably enough for what we need here. Okay. I want to move on now to — Oh, okay. One more. What? Sorry. Yeah.
Yeah, something like that. So the question is in communism — so let's just talk about Marxism for now. So in Marxism, there are pros and there are cons, right? But from a Marxist — so if there are pros and cons, let's say, you know, you're deciding you're going to go out on a date. I'm going to do this because I'm going to trust that in Canada I'm not going to get fired. Okay. So, like there are pros and there are cons, right? Like, okay, like you know, she's got a nice car. You know, she's — I don't know, my mother likes her. On the other hand, she recites poetry all the time, I can't stand it, and she doesn't like the same football team I do. Okay. So, like that's pros and cons, right? Like, so that's a kind of liberal way of looking at the world. Like there are just various kind of factors and we're going to weigh them up.
What Marx would say is that there's a pattern, right? There's an underlying pattern and it all makes sense somehow, right? So, it's not just like we're adding up the pros and adding up the cons. It's that there's a historical trajectory which is moving us in a certain way and it has to move us through all of the cons in order to get to all of the pros. Something like that. And the pros are all bound up together, right? So, and that's an important point actually because like in a normal — I mean, and this is what — so I mean, I haven't gone to this part of the lecture yet and it's really not even till the next lecture, but this gives a suggestion about what's both attractive and lethally attractive in the idea of Marxism because he does say that at the end it's going to be all pros.
I mean, his view is that there aren't just particular good things, that all of the good things actually go together and that the end of history, once we've taken all the factories, all the individual good things will come together into one good thing. Which is maybe attractive, but it's also a slightly dangerous thought and I'm going to get to that later on. Okay, I just want to say one more thing about how this ends. So Marx has this idea that when we remove — so we own the factories now. Okay. So we've gotten rid of private property, we've gotten rid of the division of labor, we have the factories. So then the notion would be that for Marx then we have now gained control over the consequences of our actions. We no longer feel the gap between what we're doing and what we're trying to do. Right.
And like if you want a very stupid example of what that means, like imagine a Hollywood movie where the plot is like in the beginning everything's kind of chaotic and you don't know what you're doing, but there's a moment in the end where suddenly like the hero takes control and the hero's intentions become reality. You know what I'm talking about? Like you're piloting — what's it called? An X-wing, and there's a Death Star, and like up until that point everything's been very — okay, this is the plot of Star Wars. Like has anybody seen Star Wars? Okay. Yay. Okay. So like up to that point things are very confusing, right? Like you've lost your parents and you're very young and you're kind of rebellious and Han Solo's kind of annoying and like you're attracted to Leia but maybe she's your sister, you know? Like up to that point everything's kind of out of your control.
But then suddenly everything falls into place, right? You're where you need to be and there's no gap between your intentions and the consequences, right? That's the end of alienation. Like everything — the things that you want to do, they happen. The things that you believe are right are real. Like alienation comes to an end. Okay? The Death Star explodes. But you see what I mean? Like that feeling that a Hollywood movie is trying to guide you towards is a sort of capitalist simulacrum of what the end of alienation would be like if there were such a thing. Okay.
So, but what Marx is saying is that when we take over the factories, it's going to be like that. He's saying there will no longer be government in the traditional sense. There will just be the administration of things. And here is where an obvious objection begins. And I'm going to mention it because it's a historical objection. And I'm going to bring into the picture another figure, a very interesting figure who you might want to learn more about at some point. His name was Mikhail Bakunin. B-A-K-U-N-I-N. Bakunin. So Bakunin was Russian. Marx was German. Bakunin hated Germany almost as much as Marx hated Russia.
And Marx, by the way, really did not like Russia. He assumed that Russia was a feudal country that was going to collapse and should be broken up into many national parts, which is one of the reasons why it's ironic that the revolution began in Russia. But Bakunin tended to see Marx as a German thinker and he saw a basic weakness in Marx which he saw as a German weakness. So Bakunin was, as I said, he was what was called at the time an anarchist. And his view of the world was something like this: that look, no one system can capture everything. Even an attractive, erudite system such as the Marxian system, it can't possibly capture everything about human life.
The nature of people is that we don't have just one nature. We're many different kinds of things at once. The most generous impulse to give us back to ourselves must fail because there is no one thing which is ourselves. And the attempt to give us back to ourselves will inevitably involve a huge amount of political labor and coercion. And you simply can't get around that. So Bakunin in particular says that if you're going to take — and it's a very simple point, you've probably already observed it, but remember this is a debate which is happening in the 1850s and onward — but Bakunin says, look, okay Marx, there are factories, okay, Marx, capital is bad, Bakunin agreed with that, but that moment when we take all the factories, says Bakunin, we're still going to be us.
We're still going to be us. Taking the factories is not going to return us to ourselves. It's not going to make everything different. You're going to have an issue there with the factories, which is who's really going to run them, who's going to do what job. The same problems that you had before are going to reproduce themselves. And at the end of the day, someone's going to decide who's doing what job at the factory. And from that principle forward, you're going to end up creating, Bakunin says to Marx, you're going to end up creating an incredibly repressive state because you, Marx, haven't even thought about the question of how this is all going to be run. You're just saying that when private property is over, we're going to return to ourselves and we'll be different kinds of creatures.
We'll go back before the fall of man, there'll be no original sin. We'll just be complete — we'll be different kinds of creatures. Bakunin says that's not the kind of creature we are. We can't be corrected like that. We're beautiful and interesting and unpredictable. There's no one way to correct us. You can give us the factories, we'll still be us. And if you give us the factories without thinking about the consequences of that kind of transfer, you're just going to end up in the same situation you were in before.
That was a very telling critique that Bakunin made and it turned out to — when you look at the history of the Soviet Union — largely correct. But I mention it because this is now in historical context. It's now looking back. Bakunin was looking forward when he said all these things, right? He was saying this is what will happen. And I mention this partly because in the First International the main dispute was between anarchists and Marxists. And one of the main arguments that the anarchists made was that this Marxism, which seems to be all about getting past capitalism, is suspiciously like a different version of capitalism. Right?
Just like the capitalists are talking about how economics drives everything, these Marxists are also saying economics drives everything. And just like the capitalists have big structures, these Marxists — they say they're going to do away with those structures, but we think they're secretly planning to create more big structures. Right? So this conversation in which both sides had points was going on in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. Okay. So the —
The next stage that I want to make clear is the stage where Marx is dead, and that's a stage which continues, you know, until he returns. But the...
We've been going on for a while. You needed a break. All right. So, so there's there's the stage I talked about before, which is Marx is no longer alive, but Engels is. And and this stage has a very specific effect on the way that Marxism is is interpreted by Lenin and for for many other people thereafter. And it has to do with science.
Okay. So for Marx, science — Wissenschaft is a German word. The Germans have these these remarkable compound words. So Wissenschaft just means the making of knowledge, right? So it's it's a very general term. Um, when Marx thought about science or Wissenschaft, he would have been thinking about everything. He wouldn't have been making the distinction between what we would call the hard sciences like physics, um, chemistry, maybe biology, and everything else. For Marx, it was essentially all equal. So Marx studied economics, he studied history. Um, he studied everything. Um, and he he would have he believed that what he did was Wissenschaft in the sense of the word where science meant everything.
I'm saying this because something happened in the years after Marx's death, or was beginning to happen when Marx was was was older, which was a revolution in the notion of how we think about science. And it it's something which continues to this day. So if I say physics, you probably think, well, that — I mean, you don't have to, you know, fess up, but physics probably sounds like more of a science to you than anthropology.
Okay, good. That's fine. But you know, you know, because the anthropologists can just say, well, we can do an anthropology of physics, you know, um, and the and the and the and the uh um and the the physicists say, well, we can we can predict, you know, the physical movements of anthropologists. But but if if I say like physics is a physics is a hard science, like hard is positive, right? It sounds like more of a science than say psychology, let alone literary criticism. Like you probably don't even think of literary criticism as a science, um, or or even history. Like history is not a science. It's just some like vague thing.
So this this new creation of hierarchy happens in the last quarter of the 19th century, and it's a result first of all. Um, the first stage is the biology stage, and it has to do with Darwin. So without going into all the details, um, Darwin's theory of evolution was an impressive breakthrough because it it it it's it was both a matter of empirical of of empirically verifiable observation and a general theory which seemed to capture a great deal about how the history of the world had actually unfolded. So the impression that was made by Darwin was enormous, and the result in particular of his theory of evolution was that people then sought to apply evolutionary principles to all aspects of of life, including human life.
And by the way, again, you will probably notice this is still going on. So the notion that competition is inherently good — you may have heard that, right? Um, I'm just checking now. I'm doing like a Canada like thing because like in America, like competition inherently good is like, yes, of course it is. Like breakfast, it's the most important meal of the day. Um, like the [snorts] but like maybe up here you're, yeah, it's a good thing. It's fine. It's good. It's cool. Okay. But the notion that competition always brings out the best thing.
These sorts of ideas come from Darwin. Um, and these kinds of Darwinian ideas are used to justify a certain kind of capitalism because if evolution is just competition in the environment and it leads to — and this is not what Darwin actually says — but if if evolution is just kind of competition in the environment and then better species emerge, again Darwin doesn't say they're better, but if you understand Darwin in this way, then it becomes an argument for unrestricted capitalism because we should just like have at it because the best thing will automatically happen.
Okay. So this this this idea of evolution flattens out Marxism. It flattens it out. Marx always was concerned with the essential moral problem of alienation. He was fundamentally concerned with how human beings could become themselves. Again, the way that he goes about it, I think, has has has problems. Um, but there's no doubt that this was his fundamental concern.
After Marx, when Engels is engaging in ever more quote unquote scientific writing, the the tendency is to say conflict isn't good because conflict allows us to return to ourselves. Conflict is just good because the stronger survives, which is a very different kind of claim. So it it moves in the direction — so so so Marxism moves in the direction after Marx and with the help of Engels of being evolutionist in the sense of thinking, well, the proletariat is going to win because the proletariat is stronger.
It's going — this is this is like a struggle of species for habitat, and the proletariat is just getting bigger and stronger. Therefore it's going to win. Okay. So there are two issues with that. The first I already mentioned is that that removes the moral issue completely. Now again, Marx may have misunderstood the moral issue, but it certainly was important for him. If you say the struggle between the capitalist and the working class is just like is is a is is just about who's stronger, you're removing the moral question completely, right? Why does it matter then who wins?
The second thing though that emerges is a kind of notion of inevitability. So Marx says, and again he may be wrong. Okay, he may be wrong, but what Marx says is that workers, as they become more alienated, they understand their position in the world, and as they understand, they begin to see what they have to do. That's not like — so so in this view, our consciousness, our awareness of our own situation, has something to do with what happens. If you're just thinking about evolution, there's no there's no need for consciousness. It's just sort of inevitable, right? So the the world is just such that capitalism is breeding a bigger working class.
And in this light, Marxism just becomes a kind of predictive theory of what's going to happen. And if Marxism is just a predictive theory of what's going to happen, then the moral question doesn't matter, but also the consciousness question doesn't really matter, right? If it's just going to happen, then we don't even really have to think about it. It's just it's just going to — this is just the way things are going to work. And that is a very powerful idea too, the notion that history is on your side. That's a very powerful idea. Uh, but it then raises questions about what the whole point of doing anything is, right?
So if if things are just going to sort themselves out inevitably, then why do I have to think about it? Why do I have to read the works of Marx? Why do I have to go to the trouble of forming a political party? Why do I have to do anything? It's just going to happen. So you can see there's there's an issue with this, right? And and again, that's not that's not an issue which is foreign to the political problems of today, where over and over again people make arguments that things are inevitable or there are larger forces, and then you can say, okay, if they're inevitable, then why do I have to do anything?
So, so when Marx takes this evolutionary turn — sorry, when Marxism takes this evolutionary turn, it's it it sets it sets up a kind of problem, and that problem is realized or it's instantiated in the practices of the German Social Democratic Party. The Ger — in the Second International, which is now the time we're talking about, after Marx, before Lenin, during the Second International, the German Social Democratic Party is the most important left-center party, the most important Marxist party. The history of the German Social Democratic Party is absolutely crucial in the entire history of the left, um, because grosso modo, the German Social Democratic Party — I'm being very general now, okay — but it's always bigger and it always loses. So if you're on the left, oh, it's always bigger, it always has the best ideas, and it always loses.
Okay. I'm overstating the case a little bit, but the German Social Democratic Party, um, is is is the — it's like it's it's the example. It's the key example for looking back at the late 19th century, the first part of the 20th century, and asking how did it all go wrong? Okay. Why did fascism come to power? How did that happen? So I'm just I'm just noting this because I'm — we're at the beginning of the history of the German Social Democratic Party, and it's relevant to the thing you heard about in the next lecture and that we'll be returning to, which is the rise of Nazism. So this thing which I'm about to talk about, like a certain Marxist style of politics, may be relevant for the rise of fascism.
Okay, let me let me try to make this clear. The Social Democratic Party in Germany was, um, first of all very popular. Starting in the 1890s, they went — they won elections by ever more impressive margins. Very encouraging. However, parliament didn't matter because in the unified Germany that was formed in 1871, um, power was held by the emperor and his ministers, who didn't even bother to talk to the people who were in parliament. It was essentially an an empty exercise, but it was fun to win elections. It made you feel important. It definitely made you feel like history was on your side. And if history was on your side, things were eventually going to turn out okay, weren't they? And so that's the way that the German Social Democrats thought.
They thought like, is today the right day for the revolution? No, today is not the right day because tomorrow we're going to have even more party members, and in the next election we're going to win by even more. So why would we have the election today? Mañana, let's have the election tomorrow, right? And and and then meanwhile, like the German Social Democratic Party creates an alternative civil society for itself. So they have their own like, you know, they have their own volleyball leagues and badminton leagues and chess, and they have their own newspapers. They create, you know, what we would call a bubble. They create a huge, you know, a growing culture which is their culture. Summer camps for kids, you know, Saturday schools, all this stuff. Not just a party, but a whole way of life.
So you can then live your whole life within the German Social Democratic Party. You can be a socialist. And then again, the question is, when's the revolution? Well, I mean, it's not today because today I've got volleyball, and it's not tomorrow because tomorrow I've got chess, and it's not the day after that because I got to get my kid to Saturday school, right? So like you got this whole life, and it's a socialist life, but nowhere on the calendar is that day when the revolution actually happens.
Okay. So this — so and and you see how this is informed by Marxism in a general way, right? In a general way, Marxism says we're moving forward. You know, there are stages of history, but we're moving forward. And so if we're moving forward, why do anything? And Engels says it's just inevitable, right? It's a kind of matter of scientific certainty. Okay? If it's scientific certainty, we're just going to kind of, you know, we'll play our roles, but the the work is actually being done by history here and not and not so much by us. And to gather yourself up for revolution is a difficult thing.
Okay. So it's in this environment, very relevantly, that, um, that Lenin emerges, because Lenin is reacting to all of this. Because remember, the German Social Democrats are are they're they're the most — they're the most important party. They're the largest party. They're the ones who win elections. Um, they are the heirs of Marx. They're the best theorists. They have the most important newspaper. Everything kind of orbits around around them. Um, and in the 1890s, they are essentially having the debate that I'm talking about.
The the the position that I'm making fun of a little bit, um, is the position of someone called, uh, Karl Kautsky. K-a-u-t-s-k-y, who he's he's he's essentially a student of Engels. Um, he talks about science all the time. He reduces Marxism to a kind of extremely scientistic evolutionary business in which everything is predictable by way of — by by way of — um, by way of scientific, uh, explanations. And then, you know, and and and there's a kind of perversity about the theorizing itself, where like the theory of Marxism becomes one more thing like volleyball. I don't know why I'm making fun of volleyball. Volleyball is a great sport. I don't mean to be making fun of volleyball, but like the theorizing itself becomes sort of one more activity that you're doing to pass the time.
So that's Kautsky. Kautsky is the one who he like he sits and he's the editor of Die Neue Zeit and he says, no, everything is okay, right? Everything's going well. Theory and practice are eventually going to — there's going to be revolution, but I can't I can't say when, you know, but there's going to be one. And then, um, there was a new position in the early 1890s which was led by someone called Eduard Bernstein. B-e-r-n-s-t-e-i-n. And what Bernstein said was essentially, come on, comrades, let's just drop the pretenses here. Um, what's really going on is, uh, things are getting better. The workers are not ever poorer. The workers are doing gradually better. Um, there's never going to be a revolution. Look at us. Are we going to — no, we're not going to do it. There's not. Just look at yourselves, people. Basically, he says, are we revolutionaries? No, we're not really.
He wasn't this brutal because he was German. It was 1892. But the idea was like, look at ourselves. Are we really — are we the people who — no, we're not going to carry out a revolution. What are we really going to do? What we're really going to do is we're going to we're going to work hard for two things: to turn Germany into a proper democracy, and within that democracy to have what we would call a welfare state. And so Bernstein essentially invented social democracy. The idea was that we we accept that there's not going to be a big revolutionary moment. We are going to work really hard though to turn our our our political system into a democracy. And then within that democracy, we're going to work really hard to have a shorter work week, child care, maternity leave, health care, all these things. That was Bernstein.
Okay. So Lenin — so now you have to imagine Lenin, um, who's who's coming to this, who's who who is growing up in the 1890s, and he's looking at this dominant German debate, and he's looking at it from a very specific point of view, which is the Russian one. Okay. So if you're in Russia, the perspective is very different. You do not look out and you say, I've got volleyball tomorrow and badminton the day after that, and my kid has Saturday school. You say, my brother was hanged. My friends are in Siberia. There's no free — this is Lenin's life. My brother was hanged. My friends are in Siberia. There is no overground political life. There are no legal political parties. All of political life is in conspiracy. That's where you start.
Okay? And so here I'm making a — I'm making the point again about the importance of the national perspectives. Marxism is an internationalist doctrine. But to understand why the Marxists thought what they thought, you do have to see their national perspectives. So if you're a German, the the the position of the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, is possible. It's completely understandable, honestly. Um, but if you're if you're Russian and you're a Marxist, you can't see the world this way. At least not after a while.
I mean, to be sure — I mean, to be fair, some Marx — some some Russians did. They were called legal Marxists, and they took the interesting view that Marx is right and Russia hasn't gotten to capitalism yet. So we should just publish articles in law reviews. Um, and eventually capitalism will come, and then there will be a capitalist revolution, and then after that, like our children and grandchildren will write — they'll be lawyers like us, and so they'll also publish in law reviews, and then there will eventually be a socialist revolution, which is an interesting view, right? Like it's coherent. Um, they were called the legal Marxists, and they were the targets of a lot of Lenin's abuse.
Lenin says, all right, um, the — if you're going to — if if you're going to have — and if you're going to have any kind of chance at a revolution, you have to start from a different premise. Um, and the the premise is, how do you get there from here?
Bernstein had said famously, and it's an interesting thought. Bernstein, the revisionist, the founder of revisionist, um, revisionism. It was — revisionism was meant as a criticism, by the way, that Bernstein was called a revisionist. And if you hear a Marxist call another Marxist a revisionist, it usually means like that's a right-wing deviationist. Like that's someone who is accommodating the status quo. It's not meant to be a nice thing. Um, but the — so Bernstein was called a revisionist. And and and his view — he he was when he summarized it in one sentence, it was, for me, the end is nothing, the means are everything, which is an interesting formula, right? Because it suggests that the the goals that are right in front of our eyes, you know, a little bit more democracy, um, a little bit more freedom for labor unions, a little bit higher wages — those are those things are what matter, right? The revolution at the end doesn't matter. What matters is the things that are actually attainable. It also suggests that the way you do things matters.
The means are everything, the end is nothing. So the means include how you go about things, how you treat other people, that sort of thing. Lenin reversed that formula. Essentially, what Lenin said was, look, Marx is offering the end of history. Marx is offering something dramatic. Marx is offering, um, this thing of infinite value, and therefore all things that lead us in that direction are desirable, right? So the the end is everything, and the means are nothing. The mean — the means are whatever we need them to be.
And that kind of radical view, of course, is more coherent in a Russian context because in a Russian context, you're not going to get more democratic representation. You're not going to get more freedom for labor unions. They don't exist. You're not going to get more freedom of speech. There are no free journals. You're publishing underground. Um, it's a very different political setup. And from that political setup, you can — it makes more sense to say, okay, we're going to have to have some kind of dramatic break.
The other thing that Marx says — sorry, that Lenin says about Marxism is that Marxism is, um, is a doctrine not of contemplation. It's it's a doctrine of action. Um, Marxism is about doing things right now. Um, Marxism is about changing the world. And this is this is his — and this is the title of his maybe his most famous article, which is What Is To Be Done, in in 1902. What is to be — what is to be done? And here he lays out his arguments, um, in in essentially three parts. And and the the the first part of this is to say we can't actually trust the working class.
So Bernstein has — Bernstein has basically said, look, the workers are doing a little bit better. We know what the workers want. They want higher salaries. We can help them get that. You form labor unions, we can help them organize. It's all possible, right? Lenin says, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't matter what the workers think. The workers don't know their own interests. How could the workers possibly understand Marxism? They don't. They don't. They don't get it. They can always be bought off with kielbasa.
No, this is what Lenin says about the workers, right? You can just buy them off. They will never achieve the kind of consciousness Marx is talking about. It won't happen. Um, so and so you — it's not Marxism, says Lenin, to just stare at the butt of the Russian proletariat. Um, he talked like that. That's not the only way he talked, but he did talk like that. So you can't just admire them from behind. You have to be ahead of them. You have to be ahead of them telling what they're supposed to be doing.
So his his — what Marx — what what Lenin says is that there is no there is no authentic working-class consciousness among the workers. Now that may seem like that may seem counterintuitive, but Lenin did have a point, which is that, um, Marx's whole thing, which we described earlier, about how as the workers become more alienated, they come to understand the world better — that may be questionable, right? Like it's a it's a nice thought. It's a romantic thought, but it just may not be true that the more alienated you are from the world, the better you understand it. Or that you reach a certain point of extreme alienation where suddenly the scales fall from your eyes and you see everything. I think it's reasonable to say that that's not true.
So what Lenin said was that Marx is right, but you can't expect the workers to see how Marx is right. I, Lenin, understand how Marx is right, but the workers don't. And therefore I, Lenin, am going to explain to the workers what their interests are and and what they and what they should be — what they should be doing. Um, so he says though at most the workers have, um, a kind of spontaneous consciousness of their own desires and needs, but that they will never develop social democratic or or they will never develop Marxist consciousness on their own.
So so how do you do this then? Well, second part, you have to have a party, and a party of a certain kind. The party has to be made up of dedicated revolutionaries. It has to be made up of people who are ready to devote themselves to teaching the workers what the workers need to do. And this party has to be willing to be radical, and it has to be willing to be underground all the time, because that's the only way to have any sort of political existence in Russia. Um, again, you you can't have a legal political party. It's not possible. You can't do overground politics. It's illegal. You'll be hanged. You'll be sent to Siberia. So you have to organize underground.
And the fact that you're underground and you're constantly being pursued by the police does have a certain effect on the way that you operate, right? It means that you tend to think of your group not just as as as conspiratorial because it has to be. You tend to think of politics as being about a small us and a big them because it has to be. You tend to you tend to treat questions of trust, um, and belonging as very very important. And all this has echoes in the later history — later history of communism and how and how party membership is understood.
Um, Lenin then — Lenin then makes a a third entirely understandable innovation, which is that he says since the since the goal is everything and the means are nothing, anybody can be our ally at any time. Um, so Marx had a very clear set of stages. First you have feudalism. The feudalists, that is the nobles, the big landowners, they're overthrown by the capitalists. That's called a bourgeois revolution. Um, then once the capitalists take over, they u — they um they they they install private property. They spread private property everywhere. Um, they create an immiserated proletariat, an alienated proletariat. And, uh, at that stage, the proletariat overthrows everything and take — and take the factories.
And as we discussed before, this means that the capitalists are — they're both good and bad at the same time. Like they they're terrible and they they make your life miserable, but they create the conditions for your triumph at the same time. The capitalists weren't available in Russia. There were very few capitalists in Russia. It was a country of nomads and peasants basically. And so what — so there's no possibility for a capitalist revolution in Russia because there aren't any capitalists. This is what Marx said, by the way. Um, there's not going to be a revolution in Russia in the foreseeable future because there's no industry, there are no capitalists.
What Lenin says, well, we can just skip that whole stage. Um, we can make the revolution with other allies, and those allies can be the peasants, or those allies can be national minorities. Okay, so that's the idea that, you know, the the the end is everything. Um, we have to act immediately, but we have to act on the basis of our own ideas, uh, as the leaders of a revolutionary party which will choose its allies, um, as it sees fit in the politics of a given moment.
Okay. So this brings us to where we need to go, which is the revolutionary moment in Russia, which is 1905 to 1917. There was a final aspect of Lenin's thought which prepared him particularly well for the revolutionary moment of 1905 to 1917, and that was the international aspect. Marx — and I hope you you have seen this, thanks Marx — and I hope you'll have seen this from the Communist Manifesto, was thinking at a global level. Lenin did the same thing, and as Lenin did with many aspects of Marx, he he pulled Marxist — Marx's own thought to its logical conclusion in a way which is uncomfortable but which may not be at all contradictory.
So Lenin says, well, capitalism is a global system. Let's assume that it's a global system. Uh, if it's a global system, what follows from that is that the revolution can start anywhere, right? If capitalism is all over the world, it's not really about German capitalism or English capitalism. It's not especially important to have a revolution in Germany or England. That's what Marx and Engels thought, right? Um, their world was Germany and England. They thought these are the two most industrialized countries. The revolution will most likely be in England, second most likely in Germany.
Lenin says, okay, but let's be consistent. If Marxism is about a global capitalist system, then the revolution could start anywhere. It doesn't have to be in Birmingham, right? It doesn't have to be in Silesia. It can be anywhere. It can be anywhere. It doesn't matter where it starts because by its nature, it's global. Okay? And that's a — once you have that thought, then the next thought is, if it can be anywhere, then why not where I am right now?
Um, the the the only thing that matters in in in a Marxist analysis, says Lenin, is the outcome. So we will reveal where the capitalist system is weakest by combating it everywhere. So everybody should combat the capitalist system everywhere. And I'm going to combat it right here where I am right now. And if I defeat it, that means that it was ready to be defeated. And if it turns out that I made a revolution, that means that I was acting in accordance with history. And as soon as I make a revolution, then that's the beginning of the world revolution. It has to be.
Okay. So that is an incredibly clever set of arguments, and it does in fact have practical application because when we get to the moment of 1905 to 1917, Lenin is able to say the weaknesses that we see in Russia are part of a weakness in the global capitalist system. So we should push in Russia. The first revolution in Russia is the revolution of 1905, which is which um which uh is useful because it reminds us of this overall global imperial context. The revolution of 1905 takes place when the Russian Empire loses a war to Japan, which is the first time that a quote unquote European, uh, power was defeated by a quote unquote non-European power.
Um, but that that created a situation in Russia in which the revolutionaries started to get serious about when they would actually make their move and under what under what conditions. Um, it led to something called the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Um, Bolshevik just means we have more guys than you, and Menshevik means we have less guys than you. So guess who chose the names? The Bolsheviks chose the names. the the the the Bolsheviks — um, the the Bolshevik-Menshevik split takes place after this revolution, and it's the Bolsheviks who take the most radical view of of these Leninist ideas that I'm that I'm providing you.
Um, but it's the it's the First World War which provides the test of Lenin's of Lenin's approach because in the First World War, um, we have a global conflict, and it really is a global conflict. Like in this sense, Lenin is not wrong. As we talked about before, the First World War is a world war because the big European powers are are imperial powers, and they're fighting the war territorially in Europe, but they're fighting it with the wealth that they've accumulated around the world. Um, they're fighting it with the technology which they had previously used to, uh, subordinate other peoples around the world, and they are to a large extent fighting it with soldiers that they gather from around the world.
If you look at color photographs of the First World War, it's a strikingly different picture of the humans actually fighting the war than you might have expected. So, um, so Lenin's right. It is a global conflict. And so Lenin says this global conflict must be the end stage of capitalism. It must be revealing the the contradictions of capitalism. And since it's a global conflict, anywhere we choose to make a revolution will be justified. It doesn't matter. It could be anywhere. It could be Chicago. It doesn't matter. Um, you know, so the only way to — and the only way to find out is to test.
And so, um, the the Bolsheviks, um, when when the Russian Empire is fading in the in the Great War in 1917, and when the Russian monarchy has been overthrown, and when the new government of Russia, um, a fledgling constitutional regime, makes the decision to stay in the war, which was probably a mistake, the Bolsheviks make their move, which they later call, um, the Great October Revolution. It's actually essentially a coup in a couple of days in November.
Um, and the the the logic that Lenin provides for making the move is that if it works, it must be right. Right? Um, if it turns out the right way, that means that history is on our side, and the whatever argument we make is acceptable. So Lenin's — the arguments that Lenin makes at the time are end the war, which is very popular, right? Um, the argument that Lenin makes at the time is freedom for the nations, very popular, has nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism, and it won't be fulfilled, but it's a way to create allies.
The argument that Lenin makes at the time is peasants get to keep the land that they've taken. Okay, if you're a peasant and you've just taken some land, there is nothing that you want to hear more than that. Again, that has nothing to do with Marxism. Marxism is not about peasants getting to keep their land. Um, but it's a very popular set of politics. So Lenin and his comrades are able to make this revolution politically in a in a technically incredibly efficient way.
Um, and they end up in a situation, and now we're going to end this and pick up again next time, they they end — that they end in a situation where a couple of things have happened. The first thing is that incredibly they succeed. Um, they establish a new state, but they do so in the face of a couple of really huge contradictions, which we'll be exploring when we get to the lecture on terror and famine. And they are these. Number one, if you make a revolution choosing whatever allies you wish, disregarding what Marxism says, you will then have to do something about those allies.
So the Leninist state is founded on the premise that we are friends with the national minorities and we're friends with the peasants because that was convenient for making the revolution, and Lenin says whatever is convenient is good. Whatever works works. But the the peasants and the national minorities don't have any place in a Marxist view of the way that the state should be running. And that's the second problem, the state itself.
Lenin says it's fine to make a revolution here in Russia, even though Marx said not to, because if the if if it's all a world system, a revolution in Russia is going to be just the the the spark which ignites the powder keg, and there'll be a revolution around the entire world. But then that didn't happen. Then that didn't happen. And which meant that they ended up having to build, um, what would later be called socialism in one country. They would have to — they would have to be building a state in a situation which they didn't foresee at all. Um, a state which would be holding up against a hostile world.
Okay. And that's where we'll start next time. That was a long lecture. Um, you did a great job knowing when it was a joke. That was great. I appreciated that. Um, I thank you for your attention. I think we did a lot of good work this time around, and I'll look forward to seeing you in a week. Good luck in the sections.
