Marx Part 1: Labour & Class Conflict | Philosophy Tube

Philosophy and economics! Part 1 of my series on Karl Marx. We talk about capitalism, exploitation, labour, and the working class.

Twitter: @PhilosophyTube

Recommended Reading:
Karl Marx, Das Kapital
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital
Alexander Anievas, How The West Came to Rule

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[tantalus]

So you're saying... I could get the Das Kapital audiobook for free?

Truly, this is the only ethical form of consumption under capitalism.

[pmcgee]

Holding a block of wood and increasing its value by burning forests seems on par for capitalism.

[will]

I've been trying to understand Marx for years. But only until finding this video did it become so clear!
Best explanation of Marx ever.

[davidharris]

This channel makes me so happy and optimistic. Open discussion of views and ideas. Giving people the tools and knowledge to think critically about the world, and draw their own conclusions. Sometimes the comment section scares me, with the amount of zealots for both sides these arguments produce. People who forgot how to reason years ago when they bought a dogma. The smart ones still out weigh the fools though. Ollie fans are the best.

[Zretgul_timerunner]

Also remember to teach your kids that you always need to seize the means of productions.

[emperorxenu]

\o/ Been excited for this. Marx is my shit. No war but class war.

[joeshugabowski]

He was smart dude, now we have monopolies in every industry and they are far more powerful than our governments.

There is not much difference between feudalism and capitalism

[YCLA]

I studied science all my life and always felt that something was lacking. Some connection. I’ve just finished my MS thesis on microbiology of oral contamination, so I thought I was quite clever. I’m trying very hard to understand this philosophy thing, and I feel that I come here in order to feel stupid 🤣 and it’s somehow very much liberating! I’ve watched all the videos that are available now in 2021 and I’ll be damned if Abby is not the best thing that happened to me in a long, long time. All my respect to you, miss ♥️

[ledi]

As somebody not familiar with philosophy, I spent hours today reading about Marx and his theories for a project and struggled to understand a lot of it. This video was the clearest explanation of some of these ideas I've seen yet. Thanks!

[chadpauley]

You've come so far in 4 years =] Very inspiring and I love your content 😁💜💙

[finnianday]

Listening to this while at my shitty factory job lmao

[mattbonaccio]

After Marx you should do the Anarchist philosophers: Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin. :)

[BadMouseProductions]

Reading The Communist Manifesto as we speak, its a good and slender read, well worth a buy :)

[Hecatonicosachoron]

A clarification on the concepts behind class conflict is called for:
Ownership of the means of production and Labour are two roles that even a single person can occupy. In many cases business owners will also work for their business: so their work is applied to increase the value of said business and the businesses activity - however it is only by virtue of their capacity as owners that they can extract surplus value (from all workers).
So the rewards of ownership, as opposed to the fruits of one's work, distinguish the economic classes in this framework.
The situation is analogous to the critique of early classical economists against rent-seeking behaviour. So surplus value can be interpreted as rent that the owners charge in order to grant access to the means of production - a rent that workers pay through surplus labour.

[autocosm]

"Every time one of you signs up, I get a tiny bit of money." Does the sponsor controlling the means of production get a greater profit than the laborer?

[ViveLRoi]

With as deep a dive as you've done here for Marxism, and with your other series on Liberal Capitalism, I'd love to see a deep, multi-part, analytical dive into Feudalism.

[diddymelone]

hey Abi, I dont know if you can stomach watching your own videos; I know I wouldnt :P but as a long time fan I want to say how much I appreciate that you left us your earlier work.
its all great stuff :-)

[TheCookieFlavaJAR]

Great video. I have always wanted to learn about Marx since I studied the Cold War at GCSE and he likes to pop-up on the corners of my A2 courses.

[SpoopySquid]

Thank you for this! Am studying Marxism and the history of Communism right now and this was very helpful

[humble_roots]

3:38 "Might be ways around it" LoL it's so easy to tear apart! The first obvious answer to the so called "great contradiction":

*Why aren't the most lucrative goods/services necessarily the most labor-intensive to produce?*
Because our market makes little effort to determine the *prices* (what the market uses to represent value) of goods and services proportional to their true value in labor hours and specialized skills.

The fact that *prices* aren't necessarily determined by labor in our capitalist system doesn't mean that labor isn't the true source of *value*, on the contrary, it simply proves that Marx was also right about *price* and *value* being two distinct things that don't always match.

If you can put a lot of labor into something and have a hard time selling it (or put a little labor into something and sell it easily), what that tells you is that the *price* of your good or service is not necessarily attached to the labor involved in producing it, at least in your local market (you might have better luck selling it somewhere else) but you know from your experience in making it how valuable it is because if someone wanted exactly what you can produce, you know exactly what kind of labor it would involve and have a good idea of how exhausting, time-consuming, frustrating, etc. it could be.

Maximum profit in our system is produced by extracting the maximum amount of labor from workers while paying them the lowest possible wage. Even if the prices of the goods/services did sometimes theoretically sync up with their true value in labor, you would still have the problem of lopsided distribution where the actual laborers do not see hardly any of that value.

Consider:
--> Things like price-gouging and competitive price hikes couldn't happen if our economy actually made an effort to set prices to their value determined by labor.
--> Labor vouchers that never expire (in the same sense traditional currency doesn't expire) and are void upon use (in the sense that they are spent once and do NOT continue to circulate unlike traditional currency) would prevent gambling with the currency that's supposed to be tied to the value of the goods and services built by the laborer who receives the voucher.