PragerU’s 4 Worst Lies about Marx | Red Plateaus

Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
03:05 - Part 1: Karl Marx on Why Capitalism is not Unjust
08:40 - Part 2: Karl Marx on Justice, Freedom, and Communism
15:10 - Part 3: Karl Marx on Communism
25:11 - Part 4: Karl Marx on Freedom and Democracy
40:43 - Part 5: Conclusion

Twitter @RPlateaus

Please note that the USSR was officially founded in 1922, and thus had not been officially founded in 1918, when the Russian civil war started.

[mattgilbert]

ie: Marx was not a moralist. He was an Enlightenment thinker concerned with rational inquiry, analysis, understanding, and freedom of the human subject.

[bluecobra]

lmao "we take the time to read people's work before making youtube videos about it"

[willow]

it's.. quite something that it requires a 45 minute video to explain why a 5 minute video is wrong. thanks for doing this work, though.

[TheAndrew]

you put too much labour for what you get out of these videos, i hope you're not overworking yourself, very underrated channel

[El_Rebelde_]

Haha I love the "Don't believe the whole it's never been tried argument, it has". Yes but when you criticize capitalism the classic rebuttal is "but real capitalism has never been tried!!"

[Bisquick]

Speaking of Adam Smith, I might be fooling myself here, but one thing that appears to have had at least some success in getting some reconsideration of Marx from 'conservative libertarians' (aka the most absurdly confused/intentionally misled people on earth) using classical economics to get an intellectual foot in the door, is using Adam Smith's accepted consensus as "the father of capitalism" to get them to question the economic rent extraction that he rails against pretty thoroughly in ch.11, book 1 making the obvious but apparently not so obvious point of shitting on landlords as they produce literally nothing of value, which of course is like the throughline of capitalism's justifying logic, and Adam Smith's accepted historical role of being like _the_ proponent of capitalism appears to offer that point of openness toward _actually reading_ what he said which I think/hope is the main barrier in all of this.

On this note, and I can't really prove this obviously, but I'd argue the term 'free market' within its historical context where it was used by Smith and Ricardo here seems to have originally meant a market free of economic rent extraction as opposed to the distortion of a market without regulation conservatives seemed to have twisted it into, which is pretty crazy considering that it's virtually the opposite in meaning. But uhh c'est la vie I guess.

Anyway, thank you, you're doing God's work and apparently that guy fell asleep on the job.

[redstatesaint]

People who levy the blame that Marx wanted to destroy "democracy" to get to communism often forget that most countries around the world were still enslaved, colonized, or exterminated by genocide; women and non-propertied men didn't have the right to vote; children were still being worked to death as bonded labour inside coal mines and industrial workhouses; and workers and other oppressed communities were killed brutally for demanding equal and better rights. At Jalianwalah Bagh, ordinary indians, hindus, sikhs and muslims, were shot at by the british army simply for assembling for the spring harvest festival, and the two people (Lt. Gov Dwyer and Gen. Dyer) responsible for the incident were given a ticket back to England, and faced no further consequences. For heaven's sake, America needed a war to free slaves. Was that war won by bullets or ballots?

[Bisquick]

Wow, I thought you were joking by saying PragerU has a video titled "Money in Politics: what's the problem?". Some hope for humanity was restored seeing it was pretty universally panned, with the connections to fracking capital explicitly cited in some comments. I'm surprised they allow the comments and stuff but I guess that might give up the game in a different way, and they can scapegoat such panning on 'cultural marxists' or something.

[LuckyBlackCat]

I love how you always emphasize the message of freedom in Marxism. Good work, comrade. :)

[ideologue]

Interesting thing about exploitation. Probably the most important part of the video for me. I was initially feeling like I had lost a key argument for explaining Marxism but I think I realized that yea, like you guys said, Marx never moralizes but I think we can still utilize this secondary meaning of exploitation by focusing on the asymmetrical power structures which give rise to it. Im gonna go read some more on exploitation right now. Anywany keep up the good work guys. Love your videos!

[Kathrin_yt]

'this is gonna get nerdy' hahah you weren't wrong. i think this is your best video yet!! This must have taken a longgg time! Thanks for doing all this work!

[chayabat-tzvi]

I'm currently reading and reviewing Kengor's latest book, The Devil and Karl Marx, and it is horrid by every definition of the word. His thesis is that Marx was a disturbed and "vile" person who brought dark forces into his life and ended up theorizing the blueprints to a death cult. As a communist Jewish witch, I don't deny that there are certainly esoteric elements found in Marxism, but Kengor's understanding of Marx is downright awful and he offers zero real examination. It's obvious his goal is to pander to his audience of Reagan conservatives and Christian rightists (he is a born-again Roman Catholic, and the book is mostly about alleged communist infiltration of the Church). I suspect his other books read like this as well.

[josedavidgarcesceballos]

It is hard in the eye to see anything from Prager

[luthwyhn]

@26:40 you accidentally say the Paris Commune happen in 1971

[jacobvg]

This is a bit late but thought I'd give a few thoughts.

First, kudos for exposing Prageru's lack of knowledge about Marx, this was really one of their more cringe takes. That said, I think I agree and disagree with this video's thesis. Although there is a sense in which Marx did not think capitalism was unjust (you're right about his refutation of Lasalle's moralism about fairness & equality), this is also not the whole story. Against the view that Marx thought capitalism was not unjust (which is known as the Tucker-Wood thesis), there are also many instances where Marx clearly does resort to moral arguments, using language like 'theft' and 'plunder'. An interesting example is where he writes in the Grundrisse that alienation (i.e. the separation of labour from the conditions of its realisation) is "improper" (ungehörig), but when he reproduces this passage in the Critique of Political Economy, he replaces "improper" with "an injustice" (ein Unrecht).

This contradiction in Marx is resolved when you see that he's offering a hierarchical, multi-perspective analysis of justice. So on one hand (as emphasised by the Tucker-Wood thesis), Marx is giving an account (sometimes ironically) of how the capitalist wage-relation is viewed as just according to prevailing capitalist norms. But on the other hand, he is offering a socialist critique of capitalist exploitation and of the norms which hold it to be just. However, even this does not capture the richness of Marx's thought, because he also has an overarching meta-critique of the very notion of justice, whereby he adopts a communist standpoint and criticises both capitalist exploitation AND the socialist critique that it is unjust. Ultimately, for Marx, moralistic talk of justice is still the sign of a class society - once true emancipation is achieved under communism, there will be no need for bourgeois notions of justice.

This is why you can find Marxist thinkers expressing Marx's critique of justice itself from a higher-critical standpoint. The Soviet legal thinker Evgeny Pashukanis, for example, wrote that the withering away of bourgeois law, will, under socialist conditions, mean the withering away of law altogether. Pashukanis may have had some dubious theories about the state, and was ultimately killed by Stalin, but he was still remaining entirely faithful to Marx.

This paradox in Marx's thought is discussed in much more detail in a great book by Steven Lukes, which I highly recommend. I should also say I'm not a Marxist, and I happen to think Marx is wrong on a lot of the stuff above, but though I disagree with him I just can't stand to see those like Prageru misrepresent him so badly, and I'm grateful to see more unintelligent anti-Marxists get challenged. So this is just food for thought for anyone who cares.

[LibertarianLeninistRants]

I don't really understand how somebody would be able to make up so many lies about their political opponents. At the point where you write something like that down, doesn't your consciousness think something like "ok but first I have to check if Marx really meant it in that way"? Maybe not everyone is such a perfectionist like me, but doesn't everyone wants their work to be devoid of stupid mistakes like that? I don't want my work to be associated with the label of "got the basic facts wrong". That would be so embarrassing. Yet the Right does that all the time and doesn't seem to care.
I really don't get it.

[RealDemimondaine]

Great video. Learned what I had forgotten about Marx. Thanks!

[surajchaudhary]

Comrade this is wonderful, keep up the great work!

[Artyom]

Good video, just a small error I noticed: 32:45
There was no USSR until 1922. The civil war started at the end of 1918.

[janquel]

superb video, cannot wait for your next one! also, which books by Filtzer and Cohen did you cite?