um we will be talking of course today about the absolute OG of political Theory the the man himself the uh the uh uh Boogeyman of uh people all the way from the Tory party to Elon Musk uh we will be talking about Karl Marx and the theory that is based on his writings which is Marxism so um I hope I'll do a good job summarizing this and then of course uh tomorrow wait today's Thursday yes tomorrow we'll talk about critical theory both of these theoretical strands are closely linked critical theory though arguably Builds on top of Marxism so it makes sense that we first talk about Marxism before we talk about theories that are built on some of the insights that are coming from Marxism and if you want to sum up the world view of Marxism really in one simple sentence it would be that the world isn't quite right this isn't okay the world we live in but the system is also rigged against us once we've made this inside and once we want to do something about it that gets quite hard because well the system doesn't want to be changed okay it's rigged against us if you ever felt like you know this system that I currently live in that's not really working for me right like I'm not going to buy a house politics isn't going to listen to me you know things are probably going to stay the same and that means it's worse for me than it was for my parents or my grandparents then you you are familiar with this type of feeling right that the system kind of isn't really working for you and that you probably also aren't expecting that it will work for you in the future so um let's start from the observation of inequality though let's say that you are on the one side right you are this is when you search on stock photos for clueless student or confused student I think you get this guy I've been using him for years I feel like I know him at this point so imagine you on the one side of a hypothetical scenario that I'm going to spin in a second and then imagine General cool guy and also billionaire Heather Elon Musk on the other side right by the way the same Elon Musk that complained that his daughter was uh turned by people that taught communism in schools so um he probably wouldn't like my lecture today but I'm okay with that I'm sure he is also okay with uh with me teaching this today so let's say you on the one side and Elon Musk on the other side now imagine you make a decision like you make them every day dozens of times potentially right imagine you have 500 pounds in the bank that is the money that you can do something with I know no one has 500 pounds in the bank but still let's just imagine for a second okay that you can freely do with 500 pounds whatever you want and you are making a decision about one pound a purchase decision about one pound right that one pound out of the 500 pounds that you have represents about 0.2 percent of your money and that is in other words the Snickers decision okay so if you go out and you decide whether or not you buy a Snickers think of how long you normally think about these types of decisions how long does it take you to arrive at making that decision probably not terribly long so you make a decision about one pound when you have 500 pounds that means buying a Snickers now you can probably already see where this is going because if Elon Musk makes a similar decision on a similar Thursday afternoon he actually has I have to update the stat constantly like I don't know if he's at the moment worth 220 billion someone fact check me if you want to but at the time when I made these slides he had 220 billion pounds in the bank right he could do something with 220 billion so that means when he makes a Snickers decision that means he makes the decision about 440 million pounds because that also constitutes 0.2 percent of his net assets and that is the equivalent of actually not one Airbus A320 but four Airbus air 320 so you go out and you buy four Airbus planes and then you actually still have enough money left over to buy a 40 million pound house somewhere in the countryside okay so that is the equivalent um the equivalent scope of a decision made between you and Elon Musk the richest man in the world okay so it's pretty clear that this I would argue is not okay right and when you make a decision about a sneakers Elon Musk can go around and throw out planes right and you can do this every day without losing anything right it doesn't it doesn't have to care right money is meaningless to a person with this much right it doesn't it ceases to be an effect on your life right it's just a thing right but you don't have to worry about it and clearly this type of inequality I would argue as a Marxist I'm not but I have to be for today as a marxistance inequality is inacceptable okay and if you think like oh why are you using the richest man in the world you know there's plenty of other rich people and maybe you know there's always the story that rich people tend to work really hard for their for their fortunes as the Twitter account on the left points out if you started making five thousand dollars a day ever since the time that Columbus sailed to the Americas you would still not be a billionaire today okay so whatever you think a good salary is it's not enough to become a billionaire just from a salary right it's clear that your money has to come from elsewhere there has to be other sources for you to generate wealth and then the person on the right points out that this is actually not a bug but this is a feature of the system so this type of inequality maybe isn't just um happening it's also accepted that that's happening and maybe some people even think that's okay that this is happening right now um where does Marxism come from so who was the first person that now packaged this insight about this gross inequality this inequality that is unfair and morally um dubious right it's unethical to have this much inequality in the world and by the way I didn't even mention this you guys with 500 pounds in a bank buying sneakers you're actually rich compared to the majority of the world right the majority of world doesn't have 500 pounds lying around and they have to live off potentially the entire money that you spend on a sneaker is to nourish themselves or even a family right so you're not even the bottom end of the spectrum and once you open this giant pair of scissors in terms of inequality you see how dramatic this gets so inequality is where we start now Karl Marx says a Karl Marx born in a trigger so my countrymen he grew up in the early 19th century and if you know anything about the 19th century you know it was very turbulent it was an age of not only industry of Revolution but also actual political revolutions and political upheaval he was radicalized in these so for example the Revolutions of 1848 was a wave of revolutions that was sweeping through Europe and he got caught up in that so for anyone that was politically radicalized against the authorities it wasn't a good idea to stay in Germany at the time so he saw the signs and he left for Paris where he more or less met angels for the angles here at the bottom at a cafe and the sources tell us that Karl Marx was more of a heavy depressed Drinker and Freddie Engels was a Teutonic happy drinker so in other words they struck some kind of relationship and of course it is through the writings of both Marx and Engels at the same time that we now have this theory that we call Marxism but more accurately we should probably call this Marxism annualism um for a whole 20 years he wrote his magnum opus which was Das Capital critique the politician economy or the capital A A critique of political economy and that was basically his his big idea about how this whole economy political economy and world history and everything was supposed to work that was such a big idea that they needed several volumes and he had the good idea of dying before more than the first couple of volumes were published so it also means that for the English has collaborator actually finished this series of books that described this whole Theory himself had an interesting background maybe one you were you aren't expecting from a Marxist he was also born in Germany and his family was quite rich and they had a bunch of textile factories in England um and when he went there for an internship more or less with the idea of maybe taking over the family Factory he saw how poorly the workers were treated there and how little they uh garnered an income and how generally bad the living conditions were and That Shook him so much that he published a book in 1845 called La guitar in England the situation of the working class in England and that was basically just a description about like shit's really bad there people um and that made him not only go away from taking over the family textile Factory but also dedicate the rest of his life to think about these types of inequalities together with Marx and he's also the editor of the second and third chapter uh second and third volumes of Das Capital so this kind of meeting of the minds right these two thinkers that both were deeply uh interested and affected by also inequality and trying to come up with a big theory that explained how we got here but also how we didn't get out of this situation of inequality so Marxism to put it relatively simply is is a theory that analyzes historical patterns and these historical patterns are about mostly the material and economic development of societies so Marxism is at its core maybe almost more an economic theory than just a political Theory or I mean you can call it a political theory of political economy right that's probably the accurate description but rather than just stop and say well this is how the world currently Works Marx went a step further and he defined that there should be an emancipatory goal of this kind of theorizing you can't just say well the world is really screwed up and then leave it there basically and go home and collect the royalties from your book no you have to actually say wow can that be changed and what are Pathways to changing this right can this be changed can this world be made less unequal and less unfair so a normative critique of capitalism capitalism at the time he considered to be the dominant form in which societies were economically organized and the dominant form in which products were produced and he says well capitalism is the problem right currently the world works on the capitalism and this is bad because capitalism as a system is fundamentally built on exploitation you cannot have capitalism without exploitation of the working class there is no gentle capitalism there's no nice capitalism there's no nice capitalists the system itself is set up so that people are exploited that's how it works and anyone that supports capitalism accepts this basically and the people that are exploited are the working class all of us maybe and the people that are doing the exploiting are the bourgeoisie so you could also call them the upper class the elites the capitalists maybe the political class whatever you want to call it right and the aim of Marxism is of course to transcend this current state of how societies are organized it is to say well capitalism that's not good enough that's not the best that you've ever come up with we need to find something Beyond capitalism and that is what a communist society would be which is a society in which things are produced without exploitation largely because the workers themselves own the means of production imagine you yourself owning the factory you work at that's nice so like a Cooperative model of production basically and that would eventually not only mean that private property would go away but also that class would disappear as a feature so people no longer belong to separate classes but we were all be in a classless society and eventually we wouldn't even need a state anymore because the state after all is a corrective right the state corrects things that aren't going right in society but in a communist Society that's no longer the case and with the elimination of private property also many of the problems we see in society today go away so Marxism says here's historical patterns we've gone through a couple of different stages of how societies evolve now we're in capitalism and capitalism is bad because it's built on exploitation so that means we have to reach something Beyond it and that is a communist Society now what does he mean when he says capitalism is fundamentally built on exploitation this is going to be extremely simplified so don't imagine that I'm going to give you the entirety of like Capital One Two Three on this little schematic but imagine all of us were workers right we sell our labor essentially we sell the time and the effort that we spend to make things right and Imagine by the way this is an economy that's this is a 19th century economy he's describing right you don't make money by going to a call center or like working as an influencer or something you you make money by going to a factory and investing actual physical labor and making something okay that's how things are produced so we say a lot of Labor and of course also our skills because not all labor is just stupid sort of manual labor some labor is quite skilled but anyway we have to sell our labor to make a living who do we selling this labor to though well we're selling it to the capitalist effectively because while in the olden days um imagine a medieval town right the Smith had everything and owned everything that he needed to make the things he had to right to make a horseshoe for example you have your own Forge and you have your your um your hammers your tools you make that and you sell that good but in the modern world that's no longer the case right the modern world the economy of the modern world including the 19th century world has gotten so complex that normally an individual worker can't really produce a very complex good you can't go out there and like artisanally make a car or something I mean I make this joke always but like I'm sure there's some hipsters in Brooklyn that are like making cars and it takes like 11 years to make one or something and it's amazing but no one can wait for it but for most of the products of the modern world you are aware that it's not one person making it one at a time right it's you're going to a factory because you even infrastructure around it but you as a worker don't own that infrastructure the infrastructure is owned by someone called a capitalist and the infrastructure sort of the work environment that you have your tools all the other things that's together called the means of production and in a sense because you have to sell your labor to the capitalist to earn money to buy food and things you are kind of also owned by the capitalist in a sense right so the capitalist not only owns the means of production I.E the factory but he also kind of owns you because otherwise where would you get money from now what is the exploitation coming though now imagine that who generates the value of a good okay if you just start with the raw materials a raw material a bunch of aluminum and steel and whatever doesn't make a car the the thing the person that actually instills those things with a value is the worker so you instill value in a thing by working on it you put things together you forge things you like move things from one from A to B you skillfully put things together like you are the one that generates the value of the good and that means that you generate a surplus what does that mean it means that if the raw materials of a car are worth a thousand pounds I know that's not what they're worth but still if the raw materials of a car are worth a thousand pounds of course the fact the car factory doesn't sell that car for a thousand pounds to someone to some private individual right they will sell it for twenty thousand pounds and that means that the car through your labor those materials have become 19 000 pounds worth more okay that's the Surplus that you generate and now you can say well great okay the worker generates the Surplus so surely the worker should get that Surplus because otherwise what if you invested your time for what have you worked for if you don't get that Surplus but it says Marx the Surplus actually in a capitalist system goes to the capitalist it doesn't go to the worker right when you make one car you don't get the additional the full price of the car as your wage you get a fixed wage and oftentimes that wage is in no way related to the value of the object right you make relatively little while the object can be worth a lot and that Surplus up top that is being taken away by the capitalist it's not given back to you you made the car 19 000 pounds worth more but you're not getting 19 000 pounds in salary you're only getting say four thousand pounds and then where does the rest of the money go to well it goes to the capitalist the person owning the means of production so because you generate all the value the capitalist isn't standing there like at the assembly line making the car right he's sitting up top you know looking out over his Factory and lets you do the jobs lets you do the work so because you that does the work that makes the object worth more doesn't actually get that added value as a salary that means it's inherently exploitative and of course the capitalist has to skim some off the top the capitalist has to take away the Surplus because the capitalist doesn't work a factory by itself doesn't generate anything it reads it's just a hunk of metal that's sitting there they need to get a salary they need to get money too so they need to take it away from you the capitalists can only make money if they take it away from you as the worker they cannot pay you fairly because if they pay you fairly they would pay you as much as the good is worth afterwards but if they did that there was there would be zero left for them and that is why capitalism is inherently an exploitative system okay you can't have capitalists you can't have people not working um without starving basically without them exploiting you that's the core idea of how Marx D is the capitalist system okay now the problem with this is that you don't have to be terribly smart to understand this if you are a worker in a car factory you understand that you know when you assemble a thousand cars a month or you partake in that you're not getting the value of a thousand cars a month in salary right it's pretty easy to see that that you're not getting paid as much as you could be paid and so that means that Mark says well to stabilize this relationship to stabilize the relationship of exploitation you need institutions you need a structure around it that does its own job to stabilize the system and basically keep you quiet in a sense so when marxists think about the state they very rarely see the state as a solution to anything because in a system that is built on inequality the institutions of the state legitimize that inequality they basically tell you like this is how the system is set up there's plenty of ways for you to protest for example there's plenty of ways for you to get your to make your voice heard right you can join Union or you can like vote for labor or whatever right there's so many ways that you can address if you think this world is inequal but of course Marxist say that's all because the state's institutions have no interest in helping you out of your current situation they have no interest in helping the working class they have been set up to stabilize this exploitative relationship okay so the state is nothing more than expression of the modes of production the modes of production are unequal one uh you have a party that is a capitalist you have a party that's the working class and the state is set up to mirror this so the state is always a product of class struggle so this is the product of this so the state as we see today is the product of the capitalists subjugating the working class you see this very nicely Illustrated you often see this when capitalism is talked about there's a there's an illustration for the early 20th century I think from 1913 or something that illustrates this Marxist view of how a state works right the working class is all the way at the bottom they are the downtrodden they are the ones that do all the work we work for all and we feed all they say at the bottom and then everyone that's sitting on top of this is just exploiting them in a variety of ways right the bourgeoisie on top we eat for you as if of course the working class needs help uh with that on top of that is the military that shoots at you the religion and the clergy that lies to you and fools you and all the way at the top uh the monarchs and the politicians that rule you and of course at the very top you have the idea of capitalism itself right that's the idea of this is how marxists see the state the state's not your helper the state's not your friend the state's not going to fix your problems because it's built on perpetuating a capitalist system now um Mark citizen is often described as being based in two different things in historical materialism and in dialectical materialism so you will read this in many bits of literature and so I just wanted to uh by the way did I just lose my mind no I did um and uh I just wanted to clarify these two things because they often appear so historical materialism basically means that the that history is based on uh you can have a reading of history that is based on the distribution of materials okay so who has a lot and who doesn't have a lot that oftentimes tells you a lot about the situations at a given time you can of course analyze other things but fundamentally deep down when you have a good grasp of who the Haves and the have-nots are how the material capabilities are distributed then you normally also understand what's going on and who's exploiting whom and who's on top and who's at the bottom and the idea of course is that you can only ever overcome a specific configuration of this through class struggle this is going to be violent this is not going to be easy this is not going to be nice because the capitalists have no interest in simply letting the working class rise they want to keep the working class down so historical materialism means you look at the material conditions of the time largely to understand a specific areas of history and dialectical materialism basically means that things are always context dependent okay so we produce history in our actions but history also produces us that's the dialectical thing right it's like a conversation basically sometimes um shown by this thing on the right here that you might have seen in other contexts where we say there is a base in any society this is kind of how material things are distributed right so how production is is organized and how the means of production are organized then you have a superstructure on top of that um that is everything that's not directly related to production so things like media religion Politics the the non-tangible stuff if you will right and the idea of dialectical materialism is that these two things are kind of mutually constituted in a sense right we are a product of our current times and then we sort of make the next times in a sense we might be limited by the base right we can't just decide whatever we're just going to make a new Society basically we're Limited in a sense but we can still act and then whoever comes next is a product of that time and will try to change their their the following time for them so that's dialectical materialism but um a Marxist would certainly say that the stuff at the bottom is arguably more important or often neglected in favor of just looking at the stuff at the top a Marxist would be disgusted with us even calling this political science how can you call it political science if you just start with taking the political science the political system as a given right why are you not looking at the underlying systems of production and inequalities and things right why why do you you're starting too high you can't understand politics if you don't understand the base underneath it is what a Marxist would say so it's it's the idea that the world around us matters the material world around us matters and we can't pretend that it doesn't now um I've already told you of course about what Marx things about capitalism he thinks generally it's a bad idea it's a bad idea for a variety of reasons um and he thinks that modern history so this is the history roughly speaking maybe from say the industry of evolution probably a little bit before that right but we didn't really have large a large-scale proletariat A large-scale working class before that because production was still a fairly small scale and he says well modern history was shaped by capitalism but this isn't a story it isn't a feel-good story this isn't the story where things get better over time this is actually a tragedy the idea the fact that we live in a capitalist Society because we have not only exploitation but also alienation alienation is a really important um thing in a really important Concept in Marx's thinking I'm not going to talk about that all that much but suffice it to say if you've ever seen that Charlie Chaplin movie modern times we probably haven't because you're not 100 years old but anyway it's this it's a movie where he works on a conveyor belt in a factory and he basically does this all day long until he can't do anything but this and he like walks around and just just moves his arms in the same fashion that is because as a worker in an industrial uh Society you are don't you no longer have anything to do with the product you just do like you put like the same button on the car like 500 times a day and then you go home and then you come back and you put the next button on the car like what is your relationship to the thing you're making right so you get alienated from your own products you also get alienated from other workers because I'm a button man why would I talk to a lever man right um so there's a there's a feeling that in a capitalist Society you are alienated for many things around you that's again a symptom of the world not being quite right and communism of course would be a disalienation it would bring back that relationship between you and the product right in a communist society and I've already said right capitalism must exploited where its workers it can't work any other way and eventually this unresolved tension this system of quotation will lead to one class rising up against the other So eventually there will be a Revolution by the working classes we can't take this any longer we overthrow the capitalists and the bourgeoisie right and now Marx was thinking very hard about when that would happen and where that would happen yes what just now so there we go yay let's overthrow the system of exploitation uh thank you for that for the info I've never had that happen live in a lecture so that's fantastic um so let's think then for the next 20 minutes about yeah maybe what we can do about the inherent system exploitation because of course what would a Marxist do after having received this news a Marcus would go hmm right a Marxist would call Mayor this doesn't matter because the next person coming into Power will just perpetuate the same system right yeah we might not like this trust or she might be incompetent or whatever we think about her right but do we think that the next story is going to change things for the better for us do we think the next Labor prime minister is suddenly going to make this into a fair and equal Society no right a Marxist would be deeply depressed about this news because if anything it just shows the general dysfunction of the political system okay Marxism is a great spoil sport Theory okay you can make anything at the not cool news when you hear it but thank you for that um now you might be you might have waited because we only have 20 minutes to go where the hell does the IR Theory come in I've told you many things about like people going to factories and building cars and blah blah where does the IR side come in well the IRS side comes in whenever we extend the idea of capitalism to the global level effectively and I have this on the next slide too but we need to remember that Marx didn't want to create an IR Theory he's not a mere Sharma he's not a Cohen he didn't set out to describe how the world Works he described to this he is set out to describe how the political economy of a state worked or of states on the domestic level so um marxists would say well capitalism relates to IR in a variety of different ways right we can first say if the global system generally is capitalist then the world would be inherently unequal so it's unequal because it's capitalist this is also by Design same way that the nation states institutions are designed to prop up the capitalist system same way the international institutions will also prop up a capitalist International System um the system will not fix itself just like on the state level it's pointless to expect that the next person in power will change anything because they just work for the capitalists they're bought out or they have a personal interest in not doing that and because we live in a country in which the chancellor of the executor once was an actual billionaire you might see why this might have some merits this idea um and conflicts of course if we think that predicting conflicts is one of the core jobs of ir Theory then we could say well conflicts will arise where actors rebel against this globally unequal system and largely we will probably see these conflicts to arise along class lines so the same classes in several countries might rise up for example and start a revolution which then might lead in the domino effect to the falling of more States so conflict will arise from economic conditions right will not be really driven by strategic concerns or other things but from economic conditions and equality but as I said Marx didn't set out to create an IR Theory so we actually have to look at people after Marx to come up with proper things that we might consider IR Theory I mean he acknowledged that there was an international Dimension but he didn't think it mattered very much he didn't say very much about colonialism or imperialism that wasn't his main focus so Marxist Scholars look at all the things we tend to look at in IR International cooperation International institutions conflicts and in all of these they will look for relationships of power and domination and exploitation so the way that the system is set up if it is capitalist it will be a system of domination and exploitation inherently so what we want to figure out as we explain the International System is where these relationships are who's on top and who's at the bottom and do we think there's any chance of this changing anytime soon so basically by taking everything we've said about the domestic level things are being produced right there's different classes working on different sides of the equation there's capitalists on top and there's class conflict there's a struggle we just take all of that and and raise it to the international level and hey Presto we have an IR Theory right we just don't no longer talk about the working class of Germany or the working class of England we talk about the global working class for example and the global capitalists so that's how you get to an IR Theory so that also means that for Marxist Scholars the International System isn't actually characterized by Anarchy you know from the previous lectures on this course that anarchy is a key Concept in many other IR theories for example uh liberal institutionalism is built on Anarchy realism of course famously is built on the concept of Anarchy so the idea of the world being structured in a certain way and that that certain way is unchangeable marxists don't think that they think that the world has undergone a couple of different stages of evolution we just now happen to be in a capitalist system but there's nothing inevitable about it this could change this has already changed so why wouldn't this change in the future so the capital of the system of production is actually what what characterizes the world and what can explain to us why certain things are happening in certain places and so class structure not the nation state is our key unit of analysis so States C is to be these like Central actors here and we should rather look at basically the global capitalists versus the global working class and a lot of the more um worked out theories of Marxism at the international level do this exact kind of thing now um the first thing of course that we need to mention is it's no I mean this is really a nothing that needs to be debated right that we've created a transnational capitalist class nowadays again uh General cool guy and billionaire however billions have Elon Musk on the right hand side um so we know that the past sort of hundred years have created a global Elite an ultra Elite socio-economic Class people that are basically for whom money plays no longer a role uh I recently saw that there was a court filing that was released of Elon musk's um uh DMS when he was acquiring Twitter because you know of course there's a court case going on and if you like find those online right Elon Musk DMS Twitter or something and you will see that there's billionaires texting Elon Musk and they're throwing out billion amounts like it's absolutely nothing one guy texts him like Hey can I get in on Twitter and elon's like sure I mean how much and he's like I don't know like five or six bill or so right no big deal and so this is how these people operate right so this is completely separate from the rest of the world here um so Global Production and financial systems integrate more and more of humanity there's really no way for you even if you build your tiny house in Canada or something I know we're all watching these YouTube videos uh the tiny houses with the little gardens out back okay yeah cool but you're not really getting away from this capitalist Financial system that rules the world nowadays and because wealth of course as we all intuitively understand buys you access and buys you political power you can pal around with all kinds of people in politics if you just have enough money that also means that you in this Elite Class tend to be insulated from wider societal challenges and that erodes further the rights of workers and the ability of workers to rise up against the system because you now suddenly have Glo people globally that are suppressing you they're not even in your same country so how in the world are you going to rise up against these I think personally the media should cover this a little bit more and not do things like GQ does where they're like hey at this billionaires meeting here's the fashion trends okay and that's not really how we should analyze the world of course right there's much more interesting things to say about the billionaire summer camp and you can Google this it's a real thing uh about the billionaire summer camp than this now um three people really quickly that developed some semblance of an IR Theory you have Lenin at first who took the basics of Marxism and built a work on it that was called imperialism the highest Sage of capitalism so he thought about what does capitalism do outside of the borders of its own country he thought that capitalism was inherently expansive so it was trying to expand and it was trying to export its brand of capitalism into new areas because it wanted the resources they wanted the cheap labor and eventually just wanted to take over these other countries so he thought that imperialism was a logical extension of capitalism countries going out there and building Empires was a capitalist logic and eventually he thought this would develop into a two-tiered structure where you have a developed core so some countries where all the wealth goes all the wealth has siphoned off towards this core and you have a periphery that is much less developed and where people are just generally poor and they're selling their labor for barely enough to subsist and you also thought that imperialism was a key source of World War One if you look of course he wrote it in 1917 so World War one was just three years old and not over yet and he was thinking about causes of this and he thought imperialism was one of them um two other thinkers refined this idea a little bit on the left you have Rosa Luxembourg a German who thought about a number of things to do with Marxism she came up with something called under consumptionist Theory where she pointed out what she felt was a flaw in capitalism in that if you don't pay your workers that much if you as a capitalist siphon off all the money then who buys your products basically your workers can't afford them so is it just other capitalists and you just end up trading Lamborghinis back and forth right that's not how I can how an economy could work um she also thought a lot about imperialism and the dependency of capitalist States on pre-capitalist States so capitalist states needed exploitable pre-capitalist States elsewhere to keep themselves going there was a hard limit on how much you can explode your own working class so the recipe for capitalism is you just go elsewhere where people are even poorer and you can exploit them even better um unfortunately she was killed by a militia in the turbulent times of the past first world war time in Berlin and thrown unceremoniously into the spread there's a nice memorial there if you ever go to Berlin find it and pay your respects you have Leon Trotsky on the other side that thought a lot about the uh developmental aspect of capitalist system so how do cap how does capitalism develop especially in countries that um aren't all that developed right and he pointed out that it was weird that you had at the same time countries that had a very advanced form of capitalism but then also were countries that didn't like that were very like underdeveloped in a capitalist sense and he was he was puzzled by this and that's the theory of uneven and combined development that there could be an uneven level of um capitalism around the world and you also introduced the term of the permanent revolution and the international Revolution into our dictionary he was eventually killed in Mexico by an assassin with an ice pick through his ear throughout history it hasn't been a good idea to be a Marxist thinker so maybe there is something to that theory after all it seems to worry certain people um now Valor Stein is one of the famous modern thinkers of Marxism and he developed something that is actually not called a Marxist I mean he didn't call it a Marxist theory necessarily he just called it the world systems theory and again his job was as a good Marxist scholar to understand how the international political economy worked and what um impacts that might have on global politics so he started with the idea that there is a low development of of states in the world but that development isn't just a stage on the path of progress they're not going to naturally evolve into better and more prosperous societies no they will not only there are not only peripheral now but they will stay peripheral because the more advanced states have no interest in them developing this is what this looks like um imagine you have countries in the core these are highly developed countries these are normally democracies they have a big welfare state so they pay their citizens quite well they're highly industrialized and pay their workers High wages so countries like Germany or the UK and then you have the periphery on the other hand these are the poorest countries in the world right countries like The Gambia or Venezuela that tend to be non-democracies that can't afford even having a welfare state and where wages are often under the subsistence level so we're basically actively starving even though you give away all your labor and these are barely industrialized problem now is though that if these two halves of the world would directly communicate and trade with each other that would be pretty difficult right it would kind of mean the core makes these high value products but they can't really sell them directly to the periphery because people there are too poor in the same way if you have the periphery directly interacting with the core then you suddenly see that it's the absolute cheapest labor in the world that then has to make things for the richest people in the world so Valentine says that's not really how it works if it was just these two halves the system would be too unequal too unfair and would collapse eventually so what then keeps the system going because clearly the countries of the periphery we don't think that they don't exist right this is definitely there and they're definitely poor well valerstein says there's an important bit in the world that is called the semi-periphery and these are countries that are for example China India or Brazil right South Africa you could put in there and these tend to be sort of hybrid regimes rather democratized to a point but they're not perfect obviously they have welfare states but those might be quite weak they generally have low wages but not the lowest wages and they have a medium level of industrialization and so the way that the world system is set up now is it's actually the periphery that treats that trades its raw materials and its cheapest place labor to the semi-periphery who then make things with it and sell this on to the core while the core sells High profit Goods back to the semi-periphery and the semi-periphery sells you know intermediate Goods or cheap Goods back to the periphery so this is not a system of just two halves of World The Haves and the have-nots but it's the haves the kind of Haves and the have-nots and that is what he says keeps this system stable right the existence of a semi-periphery stabilizes this International economic system um this is just an attempt there there I I was desperately trying to find a good map that colors the world into these three kind of uh separate parts but the last publication the last good and well-sided Publications over to it from over 20 years ago so I try to color those in a little bit more I would argue that the countries in blue here are constitute the core so the the centralized the the most highly capitalized societies you have the countries in red which are the periphery which tend to be exploited of course in this International System and then you have this semi periphery that is fairly developed but not entirely and that themselves exploit the poorest only to then be exploited by the richest okay so basically the semi-periphery is both exploited and exploiter towards the others and that's what keeps this weird system in balance so in other words where Marx saw a conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie this is I think also a I think that's in the data reading for today uh this little graph then valerstein here sees a three-tiered wedding cake basically with the periphery at the bottom the core at the top but in the middle there's kind of a buffer right that makes it so that the people in the core don't really have to worry all that much about what's going on in the periphery because there's always a buffer in between now um I've been asked obviously to say a couple of words about what Marxism would say about the war in Ukraine because I think the war in Ukraine the current conflict in Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine is one of the things that is that several lectures in the course pick up is that correct yes have I or have I prepared the completely wrong because that's okay good um now marxists are having a bit of a hard time and to do some research because I'm not a diet in the will Marxist I went out on the internet and I saw like what were people saying on Marxist Forums on in Marx's journals and so on so how were they debating the war in Ukraine and it turns out it's pretty complicated they don't agree on a lot I mean if you ever hung around with Marxist you know that's like the base State of Affairs right um like no one ever agrees if you put three marxists in a room you get four opinions obviously um but the war in in Ukraine is especially complicated so marxists would say if we want to understand this conflict better let's go back to the two Core Concepts that we discussed that might structure the international world and that on the one hand is capitalism on the other hand that's imperialism right so what role does capitalism play in this conflict and what role does imperialism play in this conflict now we should say that all the participants so here our life is made a little bit easier or maybe not all the participants in this conflict are functionally capitalist so all the NATO countries of course the West broadly supporting Ukraine obviously those are all capitalist countries Ukraine itself is also set up in a capitalist way and Russia is also at least de facto a capitalist Society even though of course it is a capitalist Society where this capitalism is especially extreme because it's distorted by an elite on the top that takes up really most of the profits and almost nothing appears at the at the bottom right we all know about the oligarchs for example in Russia that are able to siphon off immense amounts of wealth in a very short time uh by exploiting the other people in the system so sometimes this has also been called oligarchy capitalism or political capitalism uh because of course the interesting bit here is that the people running the country themselves aren't necessarily capitalists or at least they are not painting themselves as capitalists they are primarily political actors even though they're unspeakably rich of course so um if we want to look at why Russia is doing this why Russia is invading Ukraine then we should see whether or not we can say that Russian aggression is the product of the interests of the Russian ruling class and here already it gets a little bit weird right because we all have seen that oligarchs have actually been hit quite hard in the aftermath of this conflict right they have many sanctions placed upon them many people have had their big Yachts taken away from them awesome um but it certainly doesn't seem like the ruling class of Russia is any richer now than they were before they started the conflict and that's probably because they thought that the conflict was a lot would be a lot shorter of course famously Russia seemed to believe that they could take over Ukraine in a matter of days by just taking Kiev and decapitating the regime basically there and then the conflict would be over and of course if it was just the short conflict yes we could easily paint this as an easy way for Russia to exploit further resources right and to have more people to draw from to to gain all the wealth that Ukraine has and all these other things so um if the goal was a quick defeat an annexation of Ukraine eventually then yes we can probably paint this as a way in which the ruling class in Russia wanted to Simply accumulate more wealth for themselves now if we look at imperialism then at the other side of the coin we can probably pretty safely say that Russia is an imperialist power so Russia has made has made no secret at all in the past at least decade or so of its plans to eventually kind of draw its neighbors ever closer maybe even with the goal of eventually you know reconstituting some sort of a Soviet Union right they've tried this certainly with Belarus and with a number of other neighboring countries too and they've so far resisted to various degrees Ukraine was the most vocal resistor basically of these plans so we can certainly say that Ukraine is a war of Conquest right it's not I mean let's not believe the the the the tales of the Russian side that they were removing Nazis and other things right I mean I think we all know what we have to think about these claims now if we look at the other side of the conflict Ukraine and its supporters we can certainly say that Ukraine doesn't seem to have imperialist motifs right if Ukraine wasn't trying to expand its borders into Russia but we can certainly say that the West isn't entirely standing there with a bright white shirt with no spots on it right the Western Powers at least seen from Russia are also clearly imperialist they are trying to expand their sphere of influence they wanted to push NATO all the way up to the Russian border and once you have Ukraine in NATO then it's really over because Ukraine is like 5 000 miles of just wide open field and if anyone ever wanted to attack Russia you could just roll your tanks right in there there's nothing in the way it's over basically right Russia can't protect itself at least this is the Russian perspective so from the Russian side this is also an imperialist move by NATO to um come in here and take over Ukraine if you will so at least some marxists have now painted this conflict as effectively an inter-imperialist War so two imperialist hours Russia on the one side and then NATO on the other side clashing here and trying to figure out who has the better claim problem that Marxism has I think in this particular conflict here is that nationalism plays a really large role on both sides right Russia tends to portray the conflict as a liberation of Russian people a liberation of ethnic Russians in Ukraine or the protection of ethnic Russians and that's something that doesn't really work all that well with Marxism because marxists don't really see like a Nations and ethnicities as an important structuring factor of society they think it should be mostly be along class lines right so the working class in Russia should feel solidarity with the working class in Ukraine and they should both work against the capitalist classes in both countries the fact that suddenly the Russians are like beating their nationalist fists and then on the other side the ukrainians are also asserting their nationalists their nationalist Narrative of the conflict right and that gives Marxism quite a lot of trouble so um the fact that this isn't happening that there for example isn't a widespread Uprising in Russia in the by the working class against this imperialist conflict that's a problem for marxists so I think we can say uh Marxist would see capitalist imperialism as the war's main driver right they would see Russia as being driven by imperialist motifs and by the desire to enrich further its capitalist class and although both the combatants are capitalist States and although Ukraine is arguably backed by powers that marxists would see as imperialist it's only Russia that's attempting an imperialist expansion right so it's only Russia that's trying to take away Ukraine's sovereignty and nationhood it's not the other way around so that also makes it clear who the aggressor here is and who's also in the wrong from Marx's perspective but as I said already these narratives of nationalism obfuscate these Dynamics sometimes and make it hard for marxists to make that point strongly and marks this online at least are struggling a lot about what to feel because of course for a long for the longest time they were probably much more supporters of Russia in any given International issue than they were with the Western powers and of course we can also say that regardless of what happens in this conflict whether Russia wins the Ukraine Winston ends in the stalemate or whatever the working class is still going to get shafted okay even if even if Ukraine wins this war decisively liberates its people kicks all the Russians out it's still a capitalist system and people are still going to be exploited so if anything marxists would demand an end to all imperialism Russia out of Ukraine but also NATO out of everything right that would probably be how a Marxist would approach this all right thanks very much for coming along with me on the ride tomorrow we'll do critical theory and I'll see you then at 10 A.M bright and early