LSP 200 - HW 3 - VID 5

So to wrap up with our discussion about liberal theory and in particular economics, we are going to cover communism and Karl Marx. So just as a sort of not disclaimer, but like a just to make sure that what you write about is accurate. Marxism or communism is one of the most easily misunderstood. theories that we cover in class. The other one is libertarianism. So usually students have a problem with either like more fiscal conservative ideas and have trouble really, I think, hearing what I'm trying to say or what our authors are trying to say. And the same is true for Marx. So it's totally okay, again, to hate communism, to hate Marx. But in my experience, not just students, but like people in America, don't really understand communism. So they have a lot of hatred for it, but don't actually know what it is actually saying. So please, when you write your reflection about this, that you really understand what I'm saying, or what Marx is saying, so that your critiques, if you want to critique communism, is accurate, is actually referring to what he believed. So the number one thing that I want to say right from the get-go is that if you write in your paper, I don't like communism, or gosh, Marx was an evil person because he wanted to destroy the concept or the right to private property, that's super wrong. That is the exact opposite of what Marx wanted, okay, or believed in. So my point is, is that you don't have to like communism. I'm not a communist, but just to understand what it is. And if you want to say something bad about it, that you actually are saying something. about what communism really is instead of some weird idea. And the reason why most of us don't understand communism is simply because America is pretty anti-communist. So we don't learn about it in schools and what we do learn through the media or even in some textbooks is not accurate information or very deep information. So just like anything that we've read or discussed in this class, if you have never read anything, Except for maybe like a quote that's taken out of context from Karl Marx. If you've never read the Communist Manifesto all the way through, or Das Kapital, which is really what you should be reading if you want to know his theory, all the way through, it means that you don't really know what communism is. Okay, so just spending five minutes online, on the Wikipedia page, or whatever, that's not real research or understanding. And that's true of anything, right? So if you just, if you only know about... republicanism through like your uncle who's a republican or through fox news or whatever that's not going to give you actually the clearest understanding of what those things are so please be humble and if you don't know that much about communism if you haven't really studied it seriously before and this is sort of the first like more than two second introduction to communism please listen carefully take good notes and try not to assume things that are not true. Right. So what do Marx believe? I think the best way to sort of introduce Marxism is to talk about all three liberal economic beliefs. So you have three major economic belief systems that are a part of liberal political theory. You have capitalism, you have socialism, and you have communism. We're not going to talk that much about socialism, not because it's not important. In fact, it's more popular than communism in the world. But because, quote-unquote, pure socialism, and pure socialism would mean that the government would control everything about economics, it would create the jobs themselves, it would manage the payment to workers itself. That's, it's never really happened, and most socialists, I've never met a socialist who's advocating. for like this abstract kind of pure socialism. And a lot of the ideas in socialism are related to communism. It's why a lot of people don't understand the distinction. And there is, and I'll try to make that clear in this video. But I just want to know and apologize in advance that socialism sort of gets short shrift in this class. And it's not because I don't like socialism. It's just there's limitations. And so I tend to like to talk about extremes in this class, and not so much about the moderate. parts because I think once you know the extremes it's easier to understand what's in the middle. But there are these three that can be distinct. Sometimes you can mix and match. distinct economic theories. So a good question to ask yourself when trying to figure out what each economic theory is all about and how it works is to use Marxist language, but not because I want to privilege Marx, but because I just think it's actually a useful way of thinking about it. So when you're thinking about economic theories, I think what we're asking is who owns the means of production? What does that mean? It means that who sort of controls it? business? Who has the most power economically? Who's controlling economics itself in any nation state? So the whole like who controls means of production, that's a very Marxist way to put it. But again, I'm not saying it as a Marxist. It's just anybody can use that language. But then, of course, Marxist preference is going to be, of course, in favor of communism. So who owns the means of production in capitalism? The answer to that is, it is the CEO or the person who owns the business itself. So if we're talking about a large corporation, it's usually not one person, right? Yes, it's the CEO, but it's like the board of directors and the shareholders if it's a public corporation or company. So if you own stock in a company, in some sense you own part of... right that company so it is just basically your boss like if you have a um if you have a regular job and you're not working for yourself and there's a boss like they own the means of production if you work for a restaurant that is privately owned um it's not like mcdonald's like a chain um it's like a local restaurant the person who owns the building who owns the restaurant itself that is the person who owns the means of production So it's just the business owners. In socialism, who owns the means of production? In real life, that's actually sort of complicated because there is, like I said, no pure socialism anywhere in the world, and there never has been. And again, I don't think most people are advocating for that anyway, but it's the state. So because capitalism in a weird way can actually coexist with socialism, and this is what you see in Europe, for instance, Where it's not like the state owns all of the corporations or companies, but what they do is that they oversee and sort of manage the economic system overall. And what that ends up translating into is that you see a lot of taxation. And that those taxes that are placed upon businesses, private or otherwise, are going to the government to create welfare programs for people. All right, so that... You have free healthcare, you can go to therapy for free, that women and men in many Scandinavian countries can get leave off if they have children, stuff like that. So that the government is taxing the companies quite a bit, and that they're regulating the business. So they have a lot of say in terms of what kinds of businesses can be started, how they should run. and then how many taxes are taken from those businesses. So it is the state that owns the means of production in socialism, but I put an asterisk beside that in real life because it's not to say that the government owns every business in a socialist country. All right, so just if you have more questions about that, please email me because it is a little confusing. In communism, who owns the means of production? This is where most Americans are very confused. They'll say the same thing as socialism. They'll say, oh, the state owns the means of production. And this is not true. So in true communism, and there's actually stages of all economic systems for Marx, and this is true in communism as well, there's stages to communism, but true third stage communism, the kind of communism Marx really envisioned as the end goal, is that it is the people. themselves, that own the means of production. And here's to me the strongest argument that I can make for communism. What is the definition of democracy? Who sort of is in control in democracy? What's the answer? The easiest answer is it is the people, right? It is the citizens themselves that own democracy, that control democracy. In all three of these liberal economic theories, in which one is it the people that are controlling it? It's communism. Communism is the only economic liberal theory where it is truly the people that own the means of production. It is not the state. Because in third stage communism... There is no state. You might be thinking, whoa, what about the USSR? What about China? You know, what about Korea, North Korea? So let's talk a little bit about the history. There has never been a truly communist state or community in the world, and this is why we're all confused. What does the USSR mean in English? It is the Soviet... Republic, it is the socialist Soviet Republic. In China, it is the socialist Republic of China. It is not the communist. So yes, when there was the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, it was a communist revolution. In the beginning, the revolt was our end goal is communism, which means a collapse of the state. It is kind of a form of anarchism, in fact. However, Marx said, that you can't just skip from either feudalism or capitalism or even, you know, capitalism and jump right into full stage communism, that you have to go into stages and like baby steps because there's too much of a shock to completely overhaul the system from a state to a non-state. So what the Bolsheviks wanted was, yes, there was going to be not a permanent state. that would create socialism first, you would dismantle what they didn't really have capitalism in Russia, it was like a feudalism really, right, they had a monarchy, they wanted to dismantle that kind of hierarchical top-down power, and the socialist state would start redistributing, you know, all the factories, and all the money, right, and all the wealth to the working class, to the peasants, or what, um, Marx uses the term proletariat, and that word will be written down if you've never heard it or you don't know how to spell it. The proletariat. So that's why, you know, you see in Russia in the past and in China right now, there is still a government, and there seems like a lot of government control over people's lives. North Korea is not, I wouldn't say it's not, it's not even socialist. It's a different kind of thing. So just so you know, like, don't call China a... communists. Now, why is that confusing? Because who's in power in China? The Communist Party. What's really interesting about China is that they are not even socialists. They are state-owned capitalists. Whoa, doesn't that seem like an oxymoron? State-owned capitalism. But yeah, it's too complicated for me to explain in this class. But if you want to know more, I'll give you information. Just email me. So it's very interesting in China that yes, technically, on paper, they call themselves the Communist Party. However, if you are a true fan of Chairman Mao, that is actually looked down upon in China, and they're very suspicious of you. Because there's this weird thing in China where it's like, yeah, we respect Mao, and he's our former leader and whatever. But Mao's ideas are not supported by the current Communist Party of China. And communism is actually sort of looked down upon. in China it seems it is deemed dangerous so it's very complicated if you're from China you probably know this you don't need me to tell you and white explain this to you um but a lot of people who are Chinese come up to me I've given lectures on like anarchy and stuff and they're like wow like because I've never I thought I was communist but I've never actually learned comworks I've never actually learned Maoism itself Maoism is a form of communism you Mao had slightly different ideas from Marx, just so you know. So you can like one but not the other. Like, you would like parts of Marx for sure if you're a Maoist, but you can be a communist and not be a Maoist, just so you know. The same is true of Trotsky and Lenin, that Lenin had very particular ideas about communism that are not 100% in alignment with Karl Marx, although, of course, Lenin loved Marx. And the same with Trotsky. So just so you know, there's a lot of different kinds of communisms out there and different perspectives. There's different perspectives about how to be an egalitarian or a republican or whatever. So yeah, that's why it's confusing is that the models that we have for communism are not actual models of communism. It's models of socialism. Now, if you're talking about the Communist Party of the United States of America, which does exist today, there is a move towards state, like there is a state like non-anarchic. non-third stage communism. And the reason for that is, is because this is what happened in Russia, is that Lenin sort of figured out, look, We can't get to true anarchy where the state itself collapses 100% because we have foreign enemies, because America is super hostile, was super hostile to the USSR and Germany, World War II, all this kind of stuff. There was a lot of external pressure. And the Russians were afraid that if they had no central government, that it would be harder to defend their borders, that they would be more vulnerable. So the thing about Marx is that Marx believed in a kind of universal history of economics. He believed he was a Hegelian, H-E-G-E-L, Hegel, loved Hegel, who's a philosopher, German philosopher. So he took Hegel's theory of history and applied it to communism. What does that mean? Can't get into Hegel right now. But he just thought that there was like a necessary end to history itself. That no matter what... economics you actually believed or liked communism was the necessary inevitable outcome to human society so let's say you're a capitalist you're like i hate communism marxist sort of just shrugged shoulders and be like it doesn't matter because no matter what eventually all nations all cultures would end up being communist why because he believed that communism was the only rational um And it was the only economic theory that didn't have internal problems that would lead to its own destruction. And I'll talk about this a little bit later, but he believed that capitalism had logical inconsistencies within it that would lead to the destruction of capitalism, so that you wouldn't need a revolution. That even if none of us ever revolted against capitalism or socialism, that those two ways of doing economics would fall. under their own weight because they just were not... it's like they're like faulty machines that they're going to break down sooner or later whether you like that machine or not. So that's the really interesting thing about communism. You do not have to be a communist and agree with that part of Marxist theory because there's a lot of communists that that say that's not really true. But I'll talk a little bit about the logical inconsistencies of capitalism in a second in this video if you want to know what his thoughts on that were. So... The reason why Marx thought it was possible to have true third-stage anarchic communism was because eventually the whole world would be communist, and so you wouldn't have to worry about invasion or capitalists trying to dismantle communism. But a lot of communists today, and it sort of started in Russia, realized, well, until that happens, we have to defend ourselves. There has to be some kind of state, government. that has some sort of control where they can create a standing army to protect themselves and just try to regulate society, especially when you think about size. So, and we'll talk more about this later, but anarchism, anarchy is really hard to do in a super large scale society because you have to manage a big society. Russia is really big. It's really big just physically in terms of the land mass of Russia, but there's also a lot of people. So how would you manage communism, right, without a state? That would be really hard to do. So just so you know, like, if you identify as communist right now, you might not even know about the Hegelian thing and about the anarchy thing. And so that's why communism often looks a lot like socialism. What is the main difference between socialism and communism? That has to do with class. So in a socialist society, there's usually still class distinctions. So even in Scandinavia, there are rich, middle class, and poor. But it's not, the gaps are not as big in most socialist countries. You might be thinking about England and Canada. England and Canada, they're not socialist. They're Scandinavian. There's no truly like, again, hardcore socialist society in the world. So what you're seeing with Canada and England... Great Britain in particular, is that they're like the most, they're like the lightest version. So they do have a lot of taxation, but not nearly as much as Scandinavian countries. And so you still, you, they're very similar to America in terms of economic disparity. You see a lot more poverty in Canada and Great Britain than you do in Scandinavian countries. And there's a lot of other reasons why Scandinavian countries tend to be smaller. In general, a lot of Scandinavian countries are resource rich. So economically, they're just better off because of that. And because they have a smaller population to have the support. So yeah, England and Canada. They're pretty capitalist, and they just have a little, a few more taxes than we do. But Scandinavia, they are a better representation of socialism. But again, in socialism, you can still make a profit. And the profit thing is really important for communists, because communists don't like the idea of profit itself. And that's the main distinction between most forms of socialism and communist economics, is the idea that in communism... There's not supposed to be, right, any class distinction. This is Marx's big problem, is that there is, like, the poor. In communism, there are no poor people. There are no rich people. Everybody makes more or less the same. And I'll talk more about, like, how that works and why it's not like we're forcing in communism for everybody to be the same. It's just that there are other values in communism. So in socialism, you can still have class disparity. Theoretically, the disparity would be less, that you would have fewer... It would be very hard to have a Bill Gates, if not impossible, in a socialist society. It would also be really hard, if not impossible, to be truly, like, abject poor. Why? Because there's so many welfare programs in socialism. Because there's healthcare, there's free education, vacation time, all this kind of stuff in socialism that you don't... That's not... usually guaranteed in pure capitalism. Another thing to point out is that, of course, you can mix and match these theories. So in the United States, we're not a purely capitalist state. This is why libertarians are so upset about things. And many ultra-fiscally conservative Republicans is that they want truly unfettered, unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism. And that's not what we have. Like I mentioned before, we have... welfare programs. We have taxation of businesses and of incomes. So we do not have, we have socialist ideas within the United States, even though we are, I would characterize America as a capitalist economic system, but it's not pure. And again, in Scandinavia and everywhere around the world where socialism is a factor, it is not pure socialism. And capitalism does exist in Scandinavian countries. meaning you can start your own business and you can make profit and you can have like meaningful control over your business and it doesn't mean that the state like owns everything so like the lego corporation i can't i don't is it swedish it's a scandinavian corporation like the founders of that corporation are wealthy people but they're just taxed a lot more heavily than if that uh company were in the united states so just so you can mix and match uh no Scandinavian country is truly socialist. They have capitalism within the system. So what about Marx though? Like why is Marx not interested in socialism as the end goal and not interested in certainly capitalism? It's his, it all comes down to his interpretation of John Locke. So this is another thing that people do not understand. Karl Marx loved John Locke. He loved the concept of private property. He's obsessed with it. He's just as obsessed with private property as Adam Smith was. Adam Smith being, of course, in some sense, the father of capitalism. He wrote The Wealth of Nations. That was published in 1776, which, of course, is the same date as when the Declaration of Independence was published in the United States. So. He has a lot in common with Adam Smith in this sense and with capitalists in general, which is every liberal is obsessed with John Locke to some degree. He's interpreting John Locke differently, and this is where you see those differences between communists, socialists, and capitalists. So Karl Marx believed that in a capitalist system, what you have is tyranny, that capitalism is anti-democratic, and that capitalism is predicated on the theft of private property. And the theft is being done by the, he uses a French term called the bourgeoisie, very hard to spell, it will be on your prompt. The bourgeoisie is just another word for the ownership class, the business class, the people who own the means of production. And that what he believes is that the bourgeoisie are stealing from the property, from the labor of the proletariat, the working class. How does he defend this or argue for this? Because I think for most of us, most of us are capitalists or some version thereof, and that doesn't make sense. So how does profit itself get created? How do we get profit? How do you make profit? What is profit? What is the difference between profit and wage earning? All that kind of stuff. So I'm going to use a very overly simplistic, dummy version of capitalism. Please know that I know this, and I'm not trying to create a straw person out of capitalism. It's just that I have to make it simple enough for you to understand, given the time constraints, right? Because we don't have a whole 10 weeks to talk about the complexities of capitalism or communism. So let's say that you and I, like all of us, in this class that we own a table making factory and we make the kinds of tables like industrial tables that you see at DePaul those kind of ugly ones and every table that we make can be sold on the free market we're talking about capitalism right now for $75 so that is the price on the market for our tables do we get $75 out of pure profit from that sale of the individual table? No. Why not? Because every business has expenses, right? So unless you have a vertical monopoly, a vertical monopoly is when a company owns every stage of production. So it would mean that if like our table making company was a vertical monopoly, which it's not in this imagined scenario, it would mean that we would own the lumber company. that makes the wood for our tables. It would make the metal parts for the legs of the tables, you know, to own that company too. So unless you have a vertical monopoly where you own everything that it takes to make your product, you actually have to pay for those materials. So in our business, we just make or assemble the table, but we have to get lumber from another company and we have to get our metal from another company. We just assemble things basically. So we have to pay for those raw materials. Let's say out of every $75 that we can get for an individual single table in the free market, $25 goes to the raw materials, paying for the raw materials. So we have $50 left over. Is that pure profit? No, because most corporations, well, we have to pay taxes for a business, for the land and for the property. A lot of businesses have... debt or right they have loans that they have to pay off so let's say for those kinds of things we have to pay for taxes or for the loans that we got from the bank to start the business that's $75 I mean $25 sorry so we have $25 that we have to pay for the raw materials now we have another 25 that pays for our taxes our property taxes and for any kind of bank loan that we might have so we have $25 left over from that original $75 you Is the $25 pure profit for us? No, because we have to pay our workers. Usually, unless, right, when we're talking about like you, you're an entrepreneur and like there's just one person and that's you and you own your business, that's a different kind of business and that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about like businesses where there are actual workers and there's more than just one person working. So the people who own big businesses are not usually the people that are actually doing the physical labor, right? So a CEO, Jeff Bezos, is not working in the Amazon factories, right? Making the shipments. He's doing other kinds of labor, like he's managing, he's thinking of ideas of how to do his business. It's a different kind of labor and we'll get back to that. But the actual physical labor that is necessary for the business to exist in the first place. In order for our tables to get made, we have to hire people and we have to pay them a wage. Now, can we pay them all $25? Of course not, because then there wouldn't be left anything left over for us. And why would we be making, why would we own a company where we don't get any money from it? So that's the question for Marx. It's a big question mark. How much do workers deserve for their labor? This is where it gets tricky and complicated. He says that the only kind of real labor in any business is the labor of the proletariat, and that the bourgeoisie don't do any labor. All they do, really, is they simply own things. So here's another way to think of it. Like, think about this book. I own this book, all right? Simply by owning this book, am I doing any form of labor? Should I be paid any kind of money just because I own this book? Right? The answer obviously is no. I'm not doing any labor. just by owning this book. Now you might say like, oh, I can dust it or something, take care of it, but like, I shouldn't be paid for that. It's just something that I own, and it's mine, and I can choose to take care of it, or I can choose to throw it away, or let it get dusty, right? It's just my choice, and nobody needs to be involved with that, or pay me, or not pay me, right? So just by owning things, Marx does not believe that you deserve money for that. That is not labor. And this is exactly what the bourgeoisie do, according to Marx, is that they don't do any real meaningful labor themselves. They just steal what the proletariat rightfully own and deserve in order to make profit. That profit itself is a form of theft. And as long as you have profit of any kind, you will have theft. And if you believe in democracy, if you believe in private property, that's not what capitalism does. It actually violates democratic principles and the principles of private property. I know I still got that. explain more how because it might be confusing so you might say if you're a capitalist hey Karl Marx I'm not just owning things when I own a business I'm right I came up with that idea for the business I have intellectual labor when you start a business it's really scary and really difficult right because the business might fail you might go into debt you might lose all the money that you put into it because it doesn't work I think the statistics is like 40 to 50 percent of all restaurants close within the first year, you know, and people lose a lot of money. Like if that happens, that means that you, right, that you failed and that that is a huge loss for you financially. So a capitalist would say, look, it's a lot of risk and a lot of creativity and just labor to get an idea for a business started. You have to apply for loans. You have to, again, risk your money and the possible loss of that money in order to start that business. You have to do all the work to go to the government to try to get the stuff approved for your kind of business. You have to jump through all these hoops. That's time and money. And once you have the business up and running, you are still doing labor. You have to manage and oversee your company. You have to make sure everything is on the up and up. If you're the CEO, you're going to meetings and all sorts of things. isn't that labor? Mark says, yes, it is. So he's not saying that it's not labor. He's saying that if you're starting a company, of course, you should be paid back for that. Because yes, you did put in work and effort. And he does acknowledge that intellectual labor is labor. He's a philosopher, right? So he definitely understands that. But he says, once you get paid back for that labor, you don't keep getting paid once you stop doing the work. You don't get paid in perpetuity. Because theoretically, and I know Marks knows this, you could be a CEO of a company and not do work. You could actually do that. You could own, let's say that you inherit a business from your parents. And yes, on the legal papers, you're the owner of that business. But technically, you don't have to do a day of work in order to continue to own that business and to continue getting profit from it. Just the fact that that's possible for Marx is like it blows his brain. And you might say, well, why? Because if you inherit something that your parents own, that's just a gift. And Locke says that you can gain private property by being gifted. Marx says, yes, but the only reason why a business can continue giving you profits is because there's labor still going on in the part of the proletariat. So if you like, if you inherited a business from your parents, and then like you sold a business or something, That money is right, fine, you get the money. Although Marx would say that the history, the legacy of the labor of how your parents got rich was still on the backs of the proletariat. So it's complicated. But for the sake of argument, like, fine, whatever, that's a gift, and that's yours. But that's not what happens if you continue being the CEO of a company. It's that the company is still working, and the only way that it exists is through the actual physical labor of the proletariat. So... For Marx, his other thing is that managerial positions are made-up jobs. They're fake. They are not real, and they are not necessary. So when a lot of rich people say, oh, like, I manage a business, Marx is going to say, that's total BS. You're just looking and making sure that other people are doing their work. That's not actual work. It's a fake job so that you can sort of lie to people in your society and say, oh, I'm still doing work too. But he's going to say, how is managerial work worth more than physical labor? Think about it. Most of you are going to DePaul to get a degree so that you don't have to do blue-collar kinds of labor, where you are physically, right, like factory work is the most common example of that, right? We don't like doing those kinds of jobs, not only because they don't pay a good wage, but because they're tedious, they're repetitive, they don't really ask of us much intellectual labor. They're not fulfilling emotionally or intellectually. They can also be really physically demanding to the point of being dangerous, right? So many kinds of factory work is you're dealing with a lot of plastics, like the computer industry. Any kind of computer technology is incredibly polluting to humans and to our environment. People who work in factories that produce a lot of plastics have higher rates, much higher rates of cancer compared to the rest of the general population, right? If you work in coal mining. right that is a huge physical risk to you right and there's a lot of reasons why most of us don't want to be coal miners it's dangerous it's dirty and it's not a lot of fun so proletariat work in capitalism is is looked down upon in a way right and how we know that to be true not just socially like you don't get people don't respect you as much right for being a farm worker versus being in the tech industry, but also financially. Capitalist economics favors the kinds of jobs that create as much capital or wealth as possible. So working on Wall Street, for instance, the reason why you can get rich doing that is because that kind of labor produces, it actually creates more money versus if I work on a farm, I'm producing product, but I'm not producing capital. That's the difference. If I'm working at an auto factory and I'm helping to make cars, I'm making product. I'm not creating wealth. And this is very important. And this is why proletariat work is not respected in capitalism. Because it's not helping to increase overall wealth in the economy. This is why teachers are not well respected in capitalism because we do not create wealth. You could argue like, yes, you're creating brilliant minds to then... help society, but that's too... capitalism is very short-term thinking, so no, it doesn't work. I'm not creating capital, and that's why I don't get paid a lot compared to other kinds of jobs. So for Marx, again, the managerial positions, the CEOs, the board of directors, they are not doing real work. An example of this, because I know that sounds... that's... you might be very skeptical of that. There is a really interesting documentary called The Take, and it's an Argentinian... documentary and I think it was made by, I don't know, she was the producer or she just worked on it. But it was made with Naomi Klein, K-L-E-I-N. And she's very famous. She's, she writes, she's a left winger. And she's written a lot of books. Her latest book was, no, she's written a book after that. The last book I read of hers is the book This Changes Everything, which is about climate change. So she's super famous. And she helped to make this documentary. I think her husband actually made it. And it's about, there's a law in Argentina, there's similar laws in Venezuela and other countries as well in South America, that if you own a business, principally like factories, and you go out of business, so you're like the factory is shut down and you're not using it. The business is not operating. After seven years of that land and that factory being inoperable, the government can take over that land against your will. your private property, and open it back up to the workers that used to work there. So this has happened many times in Argentina. And in the particular case of the take, the documentary, it was a factory that made men's button-down shirts. And the employees were women. And so the factory was given to the women. And so the women started owning the factory. And that's a very communist thing. So communist business are... called co-operatives or co-ops. We actually have co-ops right here in America, right here today. So even though we don't live in a communist country, we can have versions of communist labor. It's really interesting. We have co-ops right here in Chicago. I think one of the most famous national co-operatives is REI. They sell like ski gear and like cold weather stuff. You might be a member. of that co-op and in fact as a shopper you can actually buy stock like you can become a member of the co-op. own part of REI. We'll go into it, but you can look online. I can give you more resources about how cooperatives work. But in a nutshell, cooperatives are owned communally by everybody who works. And everybody has an equal share. So there's no hierarchy in communism. There are no bosses and then the proletariat. Everybody is equal in communism. Why would this be fair? Because It is the people that are democratically making decisions about who gets what. So it is not the case, actually, that you have to pay everybody exactly the same in a cooperative. It usually happens that way, but not always. Because if democratically, I know that, okay, Bob is doing a lot more work than I am, or he's just doing a job that's harder than mine, then we can agree that Bob gets paid a little bit more. It's never going to be to the point where he's rich and everybody else isn't, but he might get paid a little bit more. So the point of a cooperative is that no decision is made just by a chosen few. Everybody works together. It is democratic. If you think that co-ops are not democratic because everybody gets paid the same, you have to realize how is that decision being made? By the people. So it's not tyranny. How could it be tyranny if everybody is working together and agreeing upon how the wages are set? So please understand that because a lot of people are like, oh, but that's not... fair or democratic, it's the most democratic. Because in capitalism, like if you work at McDonald's, you don't get to decide what your wage is. You have no input on that. It's people above you that get to decide how much you're worth. And how is that democratic? That's weird. So riddle me that, says Karl Marx. If you're like a capitalist, you're like, oh my god, it's not democratic. Be a word, please. Whenever you have a hierarchy, you don't really have democracy. According to common works and a lot of democratic theorists. So cooperative gain, everybody, all the women in this factory in Argentina, they all own equally the factory. And so they all make decisions. So not only are they being paid the same or a similar wage, everybody gets a say in how the business is run, which is really important, equally important to what you're getting paid. And what they say, these women are to our standards. uneducated, so they don't usually have more than like a grade school education. Many of them are illiterate. They cannot read. They didn't go to business school, and yet they were able to manage the business better because what happened was when they were working under the people who owned it in the first place, under capitalism, it went out of business because the bourgeoisie mismanaged their money. They took out too much money in terms of profits, and they weren't able to support the business. And so the women, there's a quote, I'm paraphrasing because it's been a while since I've seen this documentary, but they said, we used to think that it took experts to run a business, that it was really hard and that you needed to be educated in a special way. But what we realized when we were given back this factory was it's actually really easy to make a business work because all you have to do is pay yourself a fair wage, enough that you can live on it and live well. but not so much that it actually makes the business collapse. And all you have to do is basically balance your books. And I always thought that was a really funny thing. And that's what Marx would say, that there's no... What Kablos often will say is, you need expertise. You need specialized people with degrees in business in order to know how to make a business. And Marx is like, you don't. It's not that hard. You will learn on the job. You don't need that at all. And so business is actually really easy to do. Anybody can do it. You don't need a special education. And that kind of expertise knowledge is really just like a, it's like a Ponzi scheme that just tries to legitimize people having power over others for no really good democratic reason. So that's his argument. And again, I just want to say this again. I know we already said it, but it's something that people don't really understand. In communism, it is a democratic system of economics, even if you disagree with it. Why? Because Everybody who's involved in that system is making a choice, including, weirdly, the consumers. So in America right now, the most popular or common forms of cooperatives are, apart from like, you can actually have housing co-ops, but apart from that, because that's not a business, apart from that, it's grocery stores. And so you might even have gone to a cooperative here in... in Chicago, maybe even belong to a co-op. And the cool thing is that even if you don't work there, if you shop there, you can... you can become an owner and you pay like yearly dues and you can go to like meetings and have your input so in cooperatives they'll often ask the consumers what do you want us to stock what are the things that you feel like need to be changed about how we run the store so it's sort of very communal it's like the community comes together and like is deciding what kinds of businesses they need because in capitalism often if they create like perceived needs like oh you need this product But you don't really need that product. They just want to sell something that you don't really need to use so they can make a profit. They don't really care about you or understand the needs of your community or your neighborhood. They just want to foist something on you. And this is why a lot of communities want to reject Walmart or Amazon because they think it'll take over or destroy small businesses and things like that that actually will harm that local economy in favor of this national or international. economy that has no bearing on on the people who live in that physical place but communism does the opposite it's always small scale you're not going to have these big corporations that are international or even national they're always going to be smaller um because that's the only way to do it democratically where everybody has a say right you can't really have a corporation that's 10 000 strong and to have democracy because it's really hard to like there's no meeting room that can seat 10,000 people, right, where everybody can be heard. So it's necessarily smaller scale, it's local, where the needs of that particular neighborhood or community are being reflected in the kinds of businesses that you see presented there. And usually, like, the people hired are going to be local. So it's very much grassroots kind of thing. So again, to the idea like, okay, well, I started the business, I should get paid, Marx agrees, you should get paid back for that. But you cannot make profit off of other people. And yet, the problem with profit is that there's no other way to make a profit but to steal from the proletariat. So let me break that down a little bit more. How do they actually steal from the labor of the proletariat or the property of the proletariat? Let's go back to John Locke. How do you gain property other from gifts or inheritance or you find something that is not previously owned? Like there's a tree in nature, nobody owns it, and you claim ownership. You do it through your labor, right? For Marx, you mix your labor. So think about the apple idea that I talked about way back at the beginning of the class. When you mix your labor by plucking an apple from a tree, and that tree is not previously owned by anybody else, that apple becomes your property. It becomes a part of your body metaphysically. So when you are part of the working class, the proletariat, you are mixing your labor with, in our case, our tables, or if you're working in an autumn. mobile factory, you're mixing your labor with the car that you're making. If you are a farm worker, you're mixing your labor with the land and the food that you are harvesting. And because of that, because you're mixing your labor with those objects, those objects become a part of your body. You have created the objects. So you might say, well, but the business, like, they bought the raw materials to make that table. And that's true, but... The table itself, the thing that you're actually selling, it has not been created until you have the pull to make the table. And so it's not to say that the business owners don't have any rights to that at all. What's really happening in this kind of industrial labor is that that final product is shared by many people. Because usually in factories, you're not making, it's not artisanal, right? Where it's a craftsperson who is making a table all by themselves. Usually The workers are, right, I'm in charge of putting the right leg on, right? I'm in charge of putting the wheels on the car that we're selling. So it's not that any one member of the company owns the final product. They own a part of it. But what's happening is that they're not getting their fair share because the people on top are not mixing their labor with it as much or at all. And that's the problem, right? So if I'm not getting... what I rightfully own, the true cost of my labor, you are stealing from me. You are stealing my private property away from me. And this is how, according to Marx, capitalism is violating the sacred right of private property. In other ways, the reason why a lot of industrialized labor, and this is really hard for Marx because Marx is of two minds. He actually really likes cities. He likes technological advancements. He thinks there's there are a lot of positives to industrialization because he was writing around the time of industrialization in Europe. And so he thinks it's a lot of positive, but he also thinks that it's negative because the kind of labor that we have, like factory labor, is alienating. And so this is the other key part of his theory. Not only does capitalism steal from the private property of the proletariat, but it steals like their souls. So it's very interesting. So for Marx, humans actually love to work. They love to labor. This goes against our kind of prejudices against communism. Because a lot of people will say, look, if there's no way to make a profit, if everybody's getting paid more or less the same amount as anybody else, regardless of what kind of job you're doing, people will become lazy. Because why should I become a doctor and spend all that time and energy to learn this thing that's really hard to do, when I could get paid about the same and be a bus driver? Which takes some skill, but not as much, right? So... The capitalist fears of a communist state is everybody would be kind of stupid. Nobody would push themselves to be innovators. No one would push themselves to become doctors or lawyers or professors because there's no financial incentive to do that extra work. Here is Marx's response to that. And it's very similar to some of the things that we talked about with Rawls. He says that anything... that is inherently worth doing, you will do without money. And in fact, you want people to do things not because they want them to get rich, but because they actually like doing it. Here's an example. If you have to have heart surgery, do you want a doctor that loves and has a passion for heart surgery, that is also knowledgeable and very good at it, but really like, oh, they just want to help people, right? And they're actively doing research every year to keep up on all the latest surgery techniques and ideas. because of their passion, or do you want to go to a heart surgeon who's just in it for the money? There's going to be a disparity, perhaps, in the quality of care that you get. Do you want a professor that just is in it for the money, or really cares about what they're doing, is constantly trying to improve and expand their knowledge? They really care about the students because their heart is in it. Marx says that we are not inherently lazy. He just really disagrees with capitalism. that you do not need to beat people over the head and force people to work. Meaningful labor. And Marx's problem with capitalism is that most of the jobs that we have are not meaningful and they're not actually necessary for society. Think about it, right? We have lots of products in capitalism and this on the surface looks positive, right? That we have a tremendous amount of consumer choice in capitalism. A lot of products to choose from. Think about just like the makeup industry and like just the infinity amount of different companies that you can choose from if you want to have a red lipstick there are thousands of choices that you can make and kablis will say this is a good thing but mark should say do people need makeup like what about the sexism inherent in the creation of the cosmetic industry um do you need a thousand choices no right that anything that people would truly want and truly need in a society will create it out of their own volition without money as an incentive. Because if I truly feel like I need makeup, I need that red lipstick, I will find a way to make it myself or to create a company or I will, there will be enough of a demand in my community such that someone's going to to produce it for me. So anything that you need and truly want, you will have in communism and you have at a great reasonable price. Because the great thing about communism for Marx is that goods are very cheap. that there is no like luxury good. There would be nothing that we produce in communism that you couldn't afford. Everybody can afford everything that is produced in communism. And so you might think, well, then that means like luxuries, like yachts would never be created. That's not true. Anybody who loves yachting and really thinks like yachts are really important, they will be made and they will be made at a cheap price and affordable to people. The reason why that would be possible in a communist society. is because not everybody loves yachts. This is the great thing that most luxuries, right, they're about preferences, and not everybody has the same preference. So you don't need a yacht for every single person, which would be hard to create for every single person, because you'd have to have a lot of jobs for that. But the people who would want it would help to create it. And within communism, also, you don't always have to have a job. Like, you can make things for free, right? Like, I could teach you for free. You don't need to pay me to teach you, in fact, in reality, right? If you quit DePaul and still wanted to learn philosophy from me, I would teach you for free. That's always the funny thing about education, is that you don't need to pay for it. So because I love to do the work that I do, I love to teach dance, I often regularly offer things, you know, teaching my teaching for free. That's why I teach at a prison for free. You know, I teach at community programs for free. because it's so important to me inherently. I don't need to be paid for it. And you can even make things for other people. And you do this all the time. All of you are communists in your everyday lives. You've just never thought about it. When your parents take care of you, right? When you're a baby, do they get paid for that? No, it actually costs money to bring you into this world. Why do they do it? Because they love you. And they're not asking you by the time you turn 18, okay, here is all the expenses that you incurred from our caring for you. Now you have to pay all this back, right? When you love or care about someone, you do things for free. And so communism is actually something that we do all the time. When we're good friends to each other, when we help our friends move and we don't get paid for it, that's unpaid labor, right? You do labor all the time in your life for absolutely no money because those things are inherently worth doing and you care about the people to whom you're giving those products to or that labor to. That's what Marx would say, that anything that you would want in society would exist just naturally because if people wanted it, it would be there. It's just a natural consequence. And that you don't need money as an incentive to work hard because meaningful labor is its own reward. And again, he believes that laziness only occurs because of capitalism. So why are you lazy if you have a job that you don't really love? Why don't you work that hard? Why are you like checking your email, checking Instagram when you should be working? It's not because you're inherently lazy. It's because you don't own the means of production. That job is alienating you. It's literally for Marx, it's alienating your body from you. That you're working for the man. You're working for someone else's profit. Someone else is getting rich off of your back. So of course you don't care. Of course you're not going to be super passionate about working more. then you need to to get your your wage because you're being exploited says Marx. Capitalist labor is necessarily exploitative labor. We are all prostitutes in capitalism according to Marx. Why? We are literally selling our bodies. We are selling our labor in a locking sense to the man. The man owns our bodies in a sense. Takes from our bodies without our true and full consent because most of us right the reason why you you work at McDonald's is not because you love McDonald's. It's because you feel like you have to or else The only other option is poverty and death. Starvation. Why do people around the world work for cents on the hour in factories? It's not because they love factory work. It's because they have no other option. How is that democracy, says Marx. That's not democracy. In a true democracy, people would only do labor that they truly wanted and felt was necessary. Period. If anybody in a democratic society is doing work that they do not love, that they are not being filled by emotionally, intellectually, physically, that is exploitation, that is slavery. Period. Just end of story. How is communism not a form, I mean capitalism, not a form of slavery? Because it forces those that don't have a lot of other options, people who live in poverty, to do really shitty work that is dangerous to them. that is unfulfilling, that is boring, that is mind-numbing, that's taking their time. Time is your life. If you're spending most of your time working at a job that you hate to make profit for someone else, how is that democratic? And yet the vast majority of people on the planet and even in America are doing jobs they don't want to do. You are going to DePaul, most of you, not because you want to learn at DePaul. It's because you think that if you don't, you will not get the job that you want. And if you don't have the job that you want, you will not have the life that you want. How is that democratic? You should only be doing things, including education, because you're fulfilled by it emotionally and intellectually and all other ways. And so what communism offers, according to Marx, is the purest form of democracy, not just in terms of like financially, but way more than that. Like finances don't even matter to Marx. He's giving you a kind of labor that is inherently fulfilling and an opportunity. to do the work that you are suited to and that you love doing. I'm just going to stop right here because we're out of hour and I'll make another quick short video to wrap up on marks so hold on.

theories that we cover in class. The other one is libertarianism. So usually students have a problem with either like more fiscal conservative ideas and have trouble really, I think, hearing what I'm trying to say or what our authors are trying to say.

And the same is true for Marx. So it's totally okay, again, to hate communism, to hate Marx. But in my experience, not just students, but like people in America, don't really understand communism. So they have a lot of hatred for it, but don't actually know what it is actually saying. So please, when you write your reflection about this, that you really understand what I'm saying, or what Marx is saying, so that your critiques, if you want to critique communism, is accurate, is actually referring to what he believed.

So the number one thing that I want to say right from the get-go is that if you write in your paper, I don't like communism, or gosh, Marx was an evil person because he wanted to destroy the concept or the right to private property, that's super wrong. That is the exact opposite of what Marx wanted, okay, or believed in. So my point is, is that you don't have to like communism.

I'm not a communist, but just to understand what it is. And if you want to say something bad about it, that you actually are saying something. about what communism really is instead of some weird idea.

And the reason why most of us don't understand communism is simply because America is pretty anti-communist. So we don't learn about it in schools and what we do learn through the media or even in some textbooks is not accurate information or very deep information. So just like anything that we've read or discussed in this class, if you have never read anything, Except for maybe like a quote that's taken out of context from Karl Marx. If you've never read the Communist Manifesto all the way through, or Das Kapital, which is really what you should be reading if you want to know his theory, all the way through, it means that you don't really know what communism is. Okay, so just spending five minutes online, on the Wikipedia page, or whatever, that's not real research or understanding.

And that's true of anything, right? So if you just, if you only know about... republicanism through like your uncle who's a republican or through fox news or whatever that's not going to give you actually the clearest understanding of what those things are so please be humble and if you don't know that much about communism if you haven't really studied it seriously before and this is sort of the first like more than two second introduction to communism please listen carefully take good notes and try not to assume things that are not true. Right.

So what do Marx believe? I think the best way to sort of introduce Marxism is to talk about all three liberal economic beliefs. So you have three major economic belief systems that are a part of liberal political theory. You have capitalism, you have socialism, and you have communism.

We're not going to talk that much about socialism, not because it's not important. In fact, it's more popular than communism in the world. But because, quote-unquote, pure socialism, and pure socialism would mean that the government would control everything about economics, it would create the jobs themselves, it would manage the payment to workers itself.

That's, it's never really happened, and most socialists, I've never met a socialist who's advocating. for like this abstract kind of pure socialism. And a lot of the ideas in socialism are related to communism. It's why a lot of people don't understand the distinction. And there is, and I'll try to make that clear in this video.

But I just want to know and apologize in advance that socialism sort of gets short shrift in this class. And it's not because I don't like socialism. It's just there's limitations. And so I tend to like to talk about extremes in this class, and not so much about the moderate. parts because I think once you know the extremes it's easier to understand what's in the middle.

But there are these three that can be distinct. Sometimes you can mix and match. distinct economic theories. So a good question to ask yourself when trying to figure out what each economic theory is all about and how it works is to use Marxist language, but not because I want to privilege Marx, but because I just think it's actually a useful way of thinking about it. So when you're thinking about economic theories, I think what we're asking is who owns the means of production?

What does that mean? It means that who sort of controls it? business? Who has the most power economically? Who's controlling economics itself in any nation state?

So the whole like who controls means of production, that's a very Marxist way to put it. But again, I'm not saying it as a Marxist. It's just anybody can use that language.

But then, of course, Marxist preference is going to be, of course, in favor of communism. So who owns the means of production in capitalism? The answer to that is, it is the CEO or the person who owns the business itself. So if we're talking about a large corporation, it's usually not one person, right? Yes, it's the CEO, but it's like the board of directors and the shareholders if it's a public corporation or company.

So if you own stock in a company, in some sense you own part of... right that company so it is just basically your boss like if you have a um if you have a regular job and you're not working for yourself and there's a boss like they own the means of production if you work for a restaurant that is privately owned um it's not like mcdonald's like a chain um it's like a local restaurant the person who owns the building who owns the restaurant itself that is the person who owns the means of production So it's just the business owners. In socialism, who owns the means of production?

In real life, that's actually sort of complicated because there is, like I said, no pure socialism anywhere in the world, and there never has been. And again, I don't think most people are advocating for that anyway, but it's the state. So because capitalism in a weird way can actually coexist with socialism, and this is what you see in Europe, for instance, Where it's not like the state owns all of the corporations or companies, but what they do is that they oversee and sort of manage the economic system overall. And what that ends up translating into is that you see a lot of taxation. And that those taxes that are placed upon businesses, private or otherwise, are going to the government to create welfare programs for people.

All right, so that... You have free healthcare, you can go to therapy for free, that women and men in many Scandinavian countries can get leave off if they have children, stuff like that. So that the government is taxing the companies quite a bit, and that they're regulating the business.

So they have a lot of say in terms of what kinds of businesses can be started, how they should run. and then how many taxes are taken from those businesses. So it is the state that owns the means of production in socialism, but I put an asterisk beside that in real life because it's not to say that the government owns every business in a socialist country. All right, so just if you have more questions about that, please email me because it is a little confusing. In communism, who owns the means of production?

This is where most Americans are very confused. They'll say the same thing as socialism. They'll say, oh, the state owns the means of production. And this is not true. So in true communism, and there's actually stages of all economic systems for Marx, and this is true in communism as well, there's stages to communism, but true third stage communism, the kind of communism Marx really envisioned as the end goal, is that it is the people.

themselves, that own the means of production. And here's to me the strongest argument that I can make for communism. What is the definition of democracy?

Who sort of is in control in democracy? What's the answer? The easiest answer is it is the people, right? It is the citizens themselves that own democracy, that control democracy. In all three of these liberal economic theories, in which one is it the people that are controlling it?

It's communism. Communism is the only economic liberal theory where it is truly the people that own the means of production. It is not the state.

Because in third stage communism... There is no state. You might be thinking, whoa, what about the USSR? What about China?

You know, what about Korea, North Korea? So let's talk a little bit about the history. There has never been a truly communist state or community in the world, and this is why we're all confused. What does the USSR mean in English?

It is the Soviet... Republic, it is the socialist Soviet Republic. In China, it is the socialist Republic of China. It is not the communist.

So yes, when there was the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, it was a communist revolution. In the beginning, the revolt was our end goal is communism, which means a collapse of the state. It is kind of a form of anarchism, in fact.

However, Marx said, that you can't just skip from either feudalism or capitalism or even, you know, capitalism and jump right into full stage communism, that you have to go into stages and like baby steps because there's too much of a shock to completely overhaul the system from a state to a non-state. So what the Bolsheviks wanted was, yes, there was going to be not a permanent state. that would create socialism first, you would dismantle what they didn't really have capitalism in Russia, it was like a feudalism really, right, they had a monarchy, they wanted to dismantle that kind of hierarchical top-down power, and the socialist state would start redistributing, you know, all the factories, and all the money, right, and all the wealth to the working class, to the peasants, or what, um, Marx uses the term proletariat, and that word will be written down if you've never heard it or you don't know how to spell it. The proletariat. So that's why, you know, you see in Russia in the past and in China right now, there is still a government, and there seems like a lot of government control over people's lives.

North Korea is not, I wouldn't say it's not, it's not even socialist. It's a different kind of thing. So just so you know, like, don't call China a... communists.

Now, why is that confusing? Because who's in power in China? The Communist Party.

What's really interesting about China is that they are not even socialists. They are state-owned capitalists. Whoa, doesn't that seem like an oxymoron? State-owned capitalism.

But yeah, it's too complicated for me to explain in this class. But if you want to know more, I'll give you information. Just email me.

So it's very interesting in China that yes, technically, on paper, they call themselves the Communist Party. However, if you are a true fan of Chairman Mao, that is actually looked down upon in China, and they're very suspicious of you. Because there's this weird thing in China where it's like, yeah, we respect Mao, and he's our former leader and whatever. But Mao's ideas are not supported by the current Communist Party of China. And communism is actually sort of looked down upon.

in China it seems it is deemed dangerous so it's very complicated if you're from China you probably know this you don't need me to tell you and white explain this to you um but a lot of people who are Chinese come up to me I've given lectures on like anarchy and stuff and they're like wow like because I've never I thought I was communist but I've never actually learned comworks I've never actually learned Maoism itself Maoism is a form of communism you Mao had slightly different ideas from Marx, just so you know. So you can like one but not the other. Like, you would like parts of Marx for sure if you're a Maoist, but you can be a communist and not be a Maoist, just so you know.

The same is true of Trotsky and Lenin, that Lenin had very particular ideas about communism that are not 100% in alignment with Karl Marx, although, of course, Lenin loved Marx. And the same with Trotsky. So just so you know, there's a lot of different kinds of communisms out there and different perspectives. There's different perspectives about how to be an egalitarian or a republican or whatever.

So yeah, that's why it's confusing is that the models that we have for communism are not actual models of communism. It's models of socialism. Now, if you're talking about the Communist Party of the United States of America, which does exist today, there is a move towards state, like there is a state like non-anarchic.

non-third stage communism. And the reason for that is, is because this is what happened in Russia, is that Lenin sort of figured out, look, We can't get to true anarchy where the state itself collapses 100% because we have foreign enemies, because America is super hostile, was super hostile to the USSR and Germany, World War II, all this kind of stuff. There was a lot of external pressure. And the Russians were afraid that if they had no central government, that it would be harder to defend their borders, that they would be more vulnerable.

So the thing about Marx is that Marx believed in a kind of universal history of economics. He believed he was a Hegelian, H-E-G-E-L, Hegel, loved Hegel, who's a philosopher, German philosopher. So he took Hegel's theory of history and applied it to communism.

What does that mean? Can't get into Hegel right now. But he just thought that there was like a necessary end to history itself. That no matter what... economics you actually believed or liked communism was the necessary inevitable outcome to human society so let's say you're a capitalist you're like i hate communism marxist sort of just shrugged shoulders and be like it doesn't matter because no matter what eventually all nations all cultures would end up being communist why because he believed that communism was the only rational um And it was the only economic theory that didn't have internal problems that would lead to its own destruction.

And I'll talk about this a little bit later, but he believed that capitalism had logical inconsistencies within it that would lead to the destruction of capitalism, so that you wouldn't need a revolution. That even if none of us ever revolted against capitalism or socialism, that those two ways of doing economics would fall. under their own weight because they just were not...

it's like they're like faulty machines that they're going to break down sooner or later whether you like that machine or not. So that's the really interesting thing about communism. You do not have to be a communist and agree with that part of Marxist theory because there's a lot of communists that that say that's not really true.

But I'll talk a little bit about the logical inconsistencies of capitalism in a second in this video if you want to know what his thoughts on that were. So... The reason why Marx thought it was possible to have true third-stage anarchic communism was because eventually the whole world would be communist, and so you wouldn't have to worry about invasion or capitalists trying to dismantle communism. But a lot of communists today, and it sort of started in Russia, realized, well, until that happens, we have to defend ourselves.

There has to be some kind of state, government. that has some sort of control where they can create a standing army to protect themselves and just try to regulate society, especially when you think about size. So, and we'll talk more about this later, but anarchism, anarchy is really hard to do in a super large scale society because you have to manage a big society.

Russia is really big. It's really big just physically in terms of the land mass of Russia, but there's also a lot of people. So how would you manage communism, right, without a state?

That would be really hard to do. So just so you know, like, if you identify as communist right now, you might not even know about the Hegelian thing and about the anarchy thing. And so that's why communism often looks a lot like socialism.

What is the main difference between socialism and communism? That has to do with class. So in a socialist society, there's usually still class distinctions. So even in Scandinavia, there are rich, middle class, and poor. But it's not, the gaps are not as big in most socialist countries.

You might be thinking about England and Canada. England and Canada, they're not socialist. They're Scandinavian. There's no truly like, again, hardcore socialist society in the world. So what you're seeing with Canada and England...

Great Britain in particular, is that they're like the most, they're like the lightest version. So they do have a lot of taxation, but not nearly as much as Scandinavian countries. And so you still, you, they're very similar to America in terms of economic disparity.

You see a lot more poverty in Canada and Great Britain than you do in Scandinavian countries. And there's a lot of other reasons why Scandinavian countries tend to be smaller. In general, a lot of Scandinavian countries are resource rich. So economically, they're just better off because of that. And because they have a smaller population to have the support.

So yeah, England and Canada. They're pretty capitalist, and they just have a little, a few more taxes than we do. But Scandinavia, they are a better representation of socialism.

But again, in socialism, you can still make a profit. And the profit thing is really important for communists, because communists don't like the idea of profit itself. And that's the main distinction between most forms of socialism and communist economics, is the idea that in communism... There's not supposed to be, right, any class distinction. This is Marx's big problem, is that there is, like, the poor.

In communism, there are no poor people. There are no rich people. Everybody makes more or less the same. And I'll talk more about, like, how that works and why it's not like we're forcing in communism for everybody to be the same.

It's just that there are other values in communism. So in socialism, you can still have class disparity. Theoretically, the disparity would be less, that you would have fewer...

It would be very hard to have a Bill Gates, if not impossible, in a socialist society. It would also be really hard, if not impossible, to be truly, like, abject poor. Why?

Because there's so many welfare programs in socialism. Because there's healthcare, there's free education, vacation time, all this kind of stuff in socialism that you don't... That's not...

usually guaranteed in pure capitalism. Another thing to point out is that, of course, you can mix and match these theories. So in the United States, we're not a purely capitalist state.

This is why libertarians are so upset about things. And many ultra-fiscally conservative Republicans is that they want truly unfettered, unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism. And that's not what we have.

Like I mentioned before, we have... welfare programs. We have taxation of businesses and of incomes. So we do not have, we have socialist ideas within the United States, even though we are, I would characterize America as a capitalist economic system, but it's not pure.

And again, in Scandinavia and everywhere around the world where socialism is a factor, it is not pure socialism. And capitalism does exist in Scandinavian countries. meaning you can start your own business and you can make profit and you can have like meaningful control over your business and it doesn't mean that the state like owns everything so like the lego corporation i can't i don't is it swedish it's a scandinavian corporation like the founders of that corporation are wealthy people but they're just taxed a lot more heavily than if that uh company were in the united states so just so you can mix and match uh no Scandinavian country is truly socialist. They have capitalism within the system.

So what about Marx though? Like why is Marx not interested in socialism as the end goal and not interested in certainly capitalism? It's his, it all comes down to his interpretation of John Locke.

So this is another thing that people do not understand. Karl Marx loved John Locke. He loved the concept of private property. He's obsessed with it.

He's just as obsessed with private property as Adam Smith was. Adam Smith being, of course, in some sense, the father of capitalism. He wrote The Wealth of Nations.

That was published in 1776, which, of course, is the same date as when the Declaration of Independence was published in the United States. So. He has a lot in common with Adam Smith in this sense and with capitalists in general, which is every liberal is obsessed with John Locke to some degree. He's interpreting John Locke differently, and this is where you see those differences between communists, socialists, and capitalists. So Karl Marx believed that in a capitalist system, what you have is tyranny, that capitalism is anti-democratic, and that capitalism is predicated on the theft of private property.

And the theft is being done by the, he uses a French term called the bourgeoisie, very hard to spell, it will be on your prompt. The bourgeoisie is just another word for the ownership class, the business class, the people who own the means of production. And that what he believes is that the bourgeoisie are stealing from the property, from the labor of the proletariat, the working class.

How does he defend this or argue for this? Because I think for most of us, most of us are capitalists or some version thereof, and that doesn't make sense. So how does profit itself get created?

How do we get profit? How do you make profit? What is profit? What is the difference between profit and wage earning?

All that kind of stuff. So I'm going to use a very overly simplistic, dummy version of capitalism. Please know that I know this, and I'm not trying to create a straw person out of capitalism. It's just that I have to make it simple enough for you to understand, given the time constraints, right? Because we don't have a whole 10 weeks to talk about the complexities of capitalism or communism.

So let's say that you and I, like all of us, in this class that we own a table making factory and we make the kinds of tables like industrial tables that you see at DePaul those kind of ugly ones and every table that we make can be sold on the free market we're talking about capitalism right now for $75 so that is the price on the market for our tables do we get $75 out of pure profit from that sale of the individual table? No. Why not? Because every business has expenses, right? So unless you have a vertical monopoly, a vertical monopoly is when a company owns every stage of production.

So it would mean that if like our table making company was a vertical monopoly, which it's not in this imagined scenario, it would mean that we would own the lumber company. that makes the wood for our tables. It would make the metal parts for the legs of the tables, you know, to own that company too.

So unless you have a vertical monopoly where you own everything that it takes to make your product, you actually have to pay for those materials. So in our business, we just make or assemble the table, but we have to get lumber from another company and we have to get our metal from another company. We just assemble things basically. So we have to pay for those raw materials. Let's say out of every $75 that we can get for an individual single table in the free market, $25 goes to the raw materials, paying for the raw materials.

So we have $50 left over. Is that pure profit? No, because most corporations, well, we have to pay taxes for a business, for the land and for the property.

A lot of businesses have... debt or right they have loans that they have to pay off so let's say for those kinds of things we have to pay for taxes or for the loans that we got from the bank to start the business that's $75 I mean $25 sorry so we have $25 that we have to pay for the raw materials now we have another 25 that pays for our taxes our property taxes and for any kind of bank loan that we might have so we have $25 left over from that original $75 you Is the $25 pure profit for us? No, because we have to pay our workers. Usually, unless, right, when we're talking about like you, you're an entrepreneur and like there's just one person and that's you and you own your business, that's a different kind of business and that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about like businesses where there are actual workers and there's more than just one person working. So the people who own big businesses are not usually the people that are actually doing the physical labor, right? So a CEO, Jeff Bezos, is not working in the Amazon factories, right?

Making the shipments. He's doing other kinds of labor, like he's managing, he's thinking of ideas of how to do his business. It's a different kind of labor and we'll get back to that. But the actual physical labor that is necessary for the business to exist in the first place.

In order for our tables to get made, we have to hire people and we have to pay them a wage. Now, can we pay them all $25? Of course not, because then there wouldn't be left anything left over for us.

And why would we be making, why would we own a company where we don't get any money from it? So that's the question for Marx. It's a big question mark.

How much do workers deserve for their labor? This is where it gets tricky and complicated. He says that the only kind of real labor in any business is the labor of the proletariat, and that the bourgeoisie don't do any labor.

All they do, really, is they simply own things. So here's another way to think of it. Like, think about this book. I own this book, all right?

Simply by owning this book, am I doing any form of labor? Should I be paid any kind of money just because I own this book? Right? The answer obviously is no.

I'm not doing any labor. just by owning this book. Now you might say like, oh, I can dust it or something, take care of it, but like, I shouldn't be paid for that.

It's just something that I own, and it's mine, and I can choose to take care of it, or I can choose to throw it away, or let it get dusty, right? It's just my choice, and nobody needs to be involved with that, or pay me, or not pay me, right? So just by owning things, Marx does not believe that you deserve money for that. That is not labor. And this is exactly what the bourgeoisie do, according to Marx, is that they don't do any real meaningful labor themselves.

They just steal what the proletariat rightfully own and deserve in order to make profit. That profit itself is a form of theft. And as long as you have profit of any kind, you will have theft.

And if you believe in democracy, if you believe in private property, that's not what capitalism does. It actually violates democratic principles and the principles of private property. I know I still got that. explain more how because it might be confusing so you might say if you're a capitalist hey Karl Marx I'm not just owning things when I own a business I'm right I came up with that idea for the business I have intellectual labor when you start a business it's really scary and really difficult right because the business might fail you might go into debt you might lose all the money that you put into it because it doesn't work I think the statistics is like 40 to 50 percent of all restaurants close within the first year, you know, and people lose a lot of money.

Like if that happens, that means that you, right, that you failed and that that is a huge loss for you financially. So a capitalist would say, look, it's a lot of risk and a lot of creativity and just labor to get an idea for a business started. You have to apply for loans. You have to, again, risk your money and the possible loss of that money in order to start that business.

You have to do all the work to go to the government to try to get the stuff approved for your kind of business. You have to jump through all these hoops. That's time and money. And once you have the business up and running, you are still doing labor.

You have to manage and oversee your company. You have to make sure everything is on the up and up. If you're the CEO, you're going to meetings and all sorts of things. isn't that labor? Mark says, yes, it is.

So he's not saying that it's not labor. He's saying that if you're starting a company, of course, you should be paid back for that. Because yes, you did put in work and effort.

And he does acknowledge that intellectual labor is labor. He's a philosopher, right? So he definitely understands that.

But he says, once you get paid back for that labor, you don't keep getting paid once you stop doing the work. You don't get paid in perpetuity. Because theoretically, and I know Marks knows this, you could be a CEO of a company and not do work.

You could actually do that. You could own, let's say that you inherit a business from your parents. And yes, on the legal papers, you're the owner of that business. But technically, you don't have to do a day of work in order to continue to own that business and to continue getting profit from it. Just the fact that that's possible for Marx is like it blows his brain.

And you might say, well, why? Because if you inherit something that your parents own, that's just a gift. And Locke says that you can gain private property by being gifted. Marx says, yes, but the only reason why a business can continue giving you profits is because there's labor still going on in the part of the proletariat.

So if you like, if you inherited a business from your parents, and then like you sold a business or something, That money is right, fine, you get the money. Although Marx would say that the history, the legacy of the labor of how your parents got rich was still on the backs of the proletariat. So it's complicated. But for the sake of argument, like, fine, whatever, that's a gift, and that's yours.

But that's not what happens if you continue being the CEO of a company. It's that the company is still working, and the only way that it exists is through the actual physical labor of the proletariat. So... For Marx, his other thing is that managerial positions are made-up jobs.

They're fake. They are not real, and they are not necessary. So when a lot of rich people say, oh, like, I manage a business, Marx is going to say, that's total BS. You're just looking and making sure that other people are doing their work.

That's not actual work. It's a fake job so that you can sort of lie to people in your society and say, oh, I'm still doing work too. But he's going to say, how is managerial work worth more than physical labor? Think about it. Most of you are going to DePaul to get a degree so that you don't have to do blue-collar kinds of labor, where you are physically, right, like factory work is the most common example of that, right?

We don't like doing those kinds of jobs, not only because they don't pay a good wage, but because they're tedious, they're repetitive, they don't really ask of us much intellectual labor. They're not fulfilling emotionally or intellectually. They can also be really physically demanding to the point of being dangerous, right?

So many kinds of factory work is you're dealing with a lot of plastics, like the computer industry. Any kind of computer technology is incredibly polluting to humans and to our environment. People who work in factories that produce a lot of plastics have higher rates, much higher rates of cancer compared to the rest of the general population, right? If you work in coal mining.

right that is a huge physical risk to you right and there's a lot of reasons why most of us don't want to be coal miners it's dangerous it's dirty and it's not a lot of fun so proletariat work in capitalism is is looked down upon in a way right and how we know that to be true not just socially like you don't get people don't respect you as much right for being a farm worker versus being in the tech industry, but also financially. Capitalist economics favors the kinds of jobs that create as much capital or wealth as possible. So working on Wall Street, for instance, the reason why you can get rich doing that is because that kind of labor produces, it actually creates more money versus if I work on a farm, I'm producing product, but I'm not producing capital.

That's the difference. If I'm working at an auto factory and I'm helping to make cars, I'm making product. I'm not creating wealth. And this is very important.

And this is why proletariat work is not respected in capitalism. Because it's not helping to increase overall wealth in the economy. This is why teachers are not well respected in capitalism because we do not create wealth. You could argue like, yes, you're creating brilliant minds to then... help society, but that's too...

capitalism is very short-term thinking, so no, it doesn't work. I'm not creating capital, and that's why I don't get paid a lot compared to other kinds of jobs. So for Marx, again, the managerial positions, the CEOs, the board of directors, they are not doing real work. An example of this, because I know that sounds...

that's... you might be very skeptical of that. There is a really interesting documentary called The Take, and it's an Argentinian...

documentary and I think it was made by, I don't know, she was the producer or she just worked on it. But it was made with Naomi Klein, K-L-E-I-N. And she's very famous.

She's, she writes, she's a left winger. And she's written a lot of books. Her latest book was, no, she's written a book after that. The last book I read of hers is the book This Changes Everything, which is about climate change.

So she's super famous. And she helped to make this documentary. I think her husband actually made it.

And it's about, there's a law in Argentina, there's similar laws in Venezuela and other countries as well in South America, that if you own a business, principally like factories, and you go out of business, so you're like the factory is shut down and you're not using it. The business is not operating. After seven years of that land and that factory being inoperable, the government can take over that land against your will. your private property, and open it back up to the workers that used to work there.

So this has happened many times in Argentina. And in the particular case of the take, the documentary, it was a factory that made men's button-down shirts. And the employees were women. And so the factory was given to the women. And so the women started owning the factory.

And that's a very communist thing. So communist business are... called co-operatives or co-ops.

We actually have co-ops right here in America, right here today. So even though we don't live in a communist country, we can have versions of communist labor. It's really interesting. We have co-ops right here in Chicago.

I think one of the most famous national co-operatives is REI. They sell like ski gear and like cold weather stuff. You might be a member. of that co-op and in fact as a shopper you can actually buy stock like you can become a member of the co-op.

own part of REI. We'll go into it, but you can look online. I can give you more resources about how cooperatives work.

But in a nutshell, cooperatives are owned communally by everybody who works. And everybody has an equal share. So there's no hierarchy in communism. There are no bosses and then the proletariat. Everybody is equal in communism.

Why would this be fair? Because It is the people that are democratically making decisions about who gets what. So it is not the case, actually, that you have to pay everybody exactly the same in a cooperative.

It usually happens that way, but not always. Because if democratically, I know that, okay, Bob is doing a lot more work than I am, or he's just doing a job that's harder than mine, then we can agree that Bob gets paid a little bit more. It's never going to be to the point where he's rich and everybody else isn't, but he might get paid a little bit more.

So the point of a cooperative is that no decision is made just by a chosen few. Everybody works together. It is democratic. If you think that co-ops are not democratic because everybody gets paid the same, you have to realize how is that decision being made?

By the people. So it's not tyranny. How could it be tyranny if everybody is working together and agreeing upon how the wages are set?

So please understand that because a lot of people are like, oh, but that's not... fair or democratic, it's the most democratic. Because in capitalism, like if you work at McDonald's, you don't get to decide what your wage is. You have no input on that.

It's people above you that get to decide how much you're worth. And how is that democratic? That's weird. So riddle me that, says Karl Marx.

If you're like a capitalist, you're like, oh my god, it's not democratic. Be a word, please. Whenever you have a hierarchy, you don't really have democracy. According to common works and a lot of democratic theorists. So cooperative gain, everybody, all the women in this factory in Argentina, they all own equally the factory.

And so they all make decisions. So not only are they being paid the same or a similar wage, everybody gets a say in how the business is run, which is really important, equally important to what you're getting paid. And what they say, these women are to our standards. uneducated, so they don't usually have more than like a grade school education.

Many of them are illiterate. They cannot read. They didn't go to business school, and yet they were able to manage the business better because what happened was when they were working under the people who owned it in the first place, under capitalism, it went out of business because the bourgeoisie mismanaged their money.

They took out too much money in terms of profits, and they weren't able to support the business. And so the women, there's a quote, I'm paraphrasing because it's been a while since I've seen this documentary, but they said, we used to think that it took experts to run a business, that it was really hard and that you needed to be educated in a special way. But what we realized when we were given back this factory was it's actually really easy to make a business work because all you have to do is pay yourself a fair wage, enough that you can live on it and live well.

but not so much that it actually makes the business collapse. And all you have to do is basically balance your books. And I always thought that was a really funny thing.

And that's what Marx would say, that there's no... What Kablos often will say is, you need expertise. You need specialized people with degrees in business in order to know how to make a business.

And Marx is like, you don't. It's not that hard. You will learn on the job.

You don't need that at all. And so business is actually really easy to do. Anybody can do it. You don't need a special education. And that kind of expertise knowledge is really just like a, it's like a Ponzi scheme that just tries to legitimize people having power over others for no really good democratic reason.

So that's his argument. And again, I just want to say this again. I know we already said it, but it's something that people don't really understand.

In communism, it is a democratic system of economics, even if you disagree with it. Why? Because Everybody who's involved in that system is making a choice, including, weirdly, the consumers.

So in America right now, the most popular or common forms of cooperatives are, apart from like, you can actually have housing co-ops, but apart from that, because that's not a business, apart from that, it's grocery stores. And so you might even have gone to a cooperative here in... in Chicago, maybe even belong to a co-op. And the cool thing is that even if you don't work there, if you shop there, you can... you can become an owner and you pay like yearly dues and you can go to like meetings and have your input so in cooperatives they'll often ask the consumers what do you want us to stock what are the things that you feel like need to be changed about how we run the store so it's sort of very communal it's like the community comes together and like is deciding what kinds of businesses they need because in capitalism often if they create like perceived needs like oh you need this product But you don't really need that product.

They just want to sell something that you don't really need to use so they can make a profit. They don't really care about you or understand the needs of your community or your neighborhood. They just want to foist something on you. And this is why a lot of communities want to reject Walmart or Amazon because they think it'll take over or destroy small businesses and things like that that actually will harm that local economy in favor of this national or international.

economy that has no bearing on on the people who live in that physical place but communism does the opposite it's always small scale you're not going to have these big corporations that are international or even national they're always going to be smaller um because that's the only way to do it democratically where everybody has a say right you can't really have a corporation that's 10 000 strong and to have democracy because it's really hard to like there's no meeting room that can seat 10,000 people, right, where everybody can be heard. So it's necessarily smaller scale, it's local, where the needs of that particular neighborhood or community are being reflected in the kinds of businesses that you see presented there. And usually, like, the people hired are going to be local. So it's very much grassroots kind of thing. So again, to the idea like, okay, well, I started the business, I should get paid, Marx agrees, you should get paid back for that.

But you cannot make profit off of other people. And yet, the problem with profit is that there's no other way to make a profit but to steal from the proletariat. So let me break that down a little bit more. How do they actually steal from the labor of the proletariat or the property of the proletariat? Let's go back to John Locke.

How do you gain property other from gifts or inheritance or you find something that is not previously owned? Like there's a tree in nature, nobody owns it, and you claim ownership. You do it through your labor, right?

For Marx, you mix your labor. So think about the apple idea that I talked about way back at the beginning of the class. When you mix your labor by plucking an apple from a tree, and that tree is not previously owned by anybody else, that apple becomes your property.

It becomes a part of your body metaphysically. So when you are part of the working class, the proletariat, you are mixing your labor with, in our case, our tables, or if you're working in an autumn. mobile factory, you're mixing your labor with the car that you're making.

If you are a farm worker, you're mixing your labor with the land and the food that you are harvesting. And because of that, because you're mixing your labor with those objects, those objects become a part of your body. You have created the objects. So you might say, well, but the business, like, they bought the raw materials to make that table.

And that's true, but... The table itself, the thing that you're actually selling, it has not been created until you have the pull to make the table. And so it's not to say that the business owners don't have any rights to that at all.

What's really happening in this kind of industrial labor is that that final product is shared by many people. Because usually in factories, you're not making, it's not artisanal, right? Where it's a craftsperson who is making a table all by themselves. Usually The workers are, right, I'm in charge of putting the right leg on, right? I'm in charge of putting the wheels on the car that we're selling.

So it's not that any one member of the company owns the final product. They own a part of it. But what's happening is that they're not getting their fair share because the people on top are not mixing their labor with it as much or at all.

And that's the problem, right? So if I'm not getting... what I rightfully own, the true cost of my labor, you are stealing from me. You are stealing my private property away from me.

And this is how, according to Marx, capitalism is violating the sacred right of private property. In other ways, the reason why a lot of industrialized labor, and this is really hard for Marx because Marx is of two minds. He actually really likes cities.

He likes technological advancements. He thinks there's there are a lot of positives to industrialization because he was writing around the time of industrialization in Europe. And so he thinks it's a lot of positive, but he also thinks that it's negative because the kind of labor that we have, like factory labor, is alienating. And so this is the other key part of his theory.

Not only does capitalism steal from the private property of the proletariat, but it steals like their souls. So it's very interesting. So for Marx, humans actually love to work. They love to labor. This goes against our kind of prejudices against communism.

Because a lot of people will say, look, if there's no way to make a profit, if everybody's getting paid more or less the same amount as anybody else, regardless of what kind of job you're doing, people will become lazy. Because why should I become a doctor and spend all that time and energy to learn this thing that's really hard to do, when I could get paid about the same and be a bus driver? Which takes some skill, but not as much, right? So...

The capitalist fears of a communist state is everybody would be kind of stupid. Nobody would push themselves to be innovators. No one would push themselves to become doctors or lawyers or professors because there's no financial incentive to do that extra work. Here is Marx's response to that. And it's very similar to some of the things that we talked about with Rawls.

He says that anything... that is inherently worth doing, you will do without money. And in fact, you want people to do things not because they want them to get rich, but because they actually like doing it.

Here's an example. If you have to have heart surgery, do you want a doctor that loves and has a passion for heart surgery, that is also knowledgeable and very good at it, but really like, oh, they just want to help people, right? And they're actively doing research every year to keep up on all the latest surgery techniques and ideas.

because of their passion, or do you want to go to a heart surgeon who's just in it for the money? There's going to be a disparity, perhaps, in the quality of care that you get. Do you want a professor that just is in it for the money, or really cares about what they're doing, is constantly trying to improve and expand their knowledge?

They really care about the students because their heart is in it. Marx says that we are not inherently lazy. He just really disagrees with capitalism. that you do not need to beat people over the head and force people to work. Meaningful labor.

And Marx's problem with capitalism is that most of the jobs that we have are not meaningful and they're not actually necessary for society. Think about it, right? We have lots of products in capitalism and this on the surface looks positive, right? That we have a tremendous amount of consumer choice in capitalism. A lot of products to choose from.

Think about just like the makeup industry and like just the infinity amount of different companies that you can choose from if you want to have a red lipstick there are thousands of choices that you can make and kablis will say this is a good thing but mark should say do people need makeup like what about the sexism inherent in the creation of the cosmetic industry um do you need a thousand choices no right that anything that people would truly want and truly need in a society will create it out of their own volition without money as an incentive. Because if I truly feel like I need makeup, I need that red lipstick, I will find a way to make it myself or to create a company or I will, there will be enough of a demand in my community such that someone's going to to produce it for me. So anything that you need and truly want, you will have in communism and you have at a great reasonable price. Because the great thing about communism for Marx is that goods are very cheap.

that there is no like luxury good. There would be nothing that we produce in communism that you couldn't afford. Everybody can afford everything that is produced in communism.

And so you might think, well, then that means like luxuries, like yachts would never be created. That's not true. Anybody who loves yachting and really thinks like yachts are really important, they will be made and they will be made at a cheap price and affordable to people. The reason why that would be possible in a communist society.

is because not everybody loves yachts. This is the great thing that most luxuries, right, they're about preferences, and not everybody has the same preference. So you don't need a yacht for every single person, which would be hard to create for every single person, because you'd have to have a lot of jobs for that.

But the people who would want it would help to create it. And within communism, also, you don't always have to have a job. Like, you can make things for free, right? Like, I could teach you for free. You don't need to pay me to teach you, in fact, in reality, right?

If you quit DePaul and still wanted to learn philosophy from me, I would teach you for free. That's always the funny thing about education, is that you don't need to pay for it. So because I love to do the work that I do, I love to teach dance, I often regularly offer things, you know, teaching my teaching for free. That's why I teach at a prison for free. You know, I teach at community programs for free.

because it's so important to me inherently. I don't need to be paid for it. And you can even make things for other people.

And you do this all the time. All of you are communists in your everyday lives. You've just never thought about it. When your parents take care of you, right? When you're a baby, do they get paid for that?

No, it actually costs money to bring you into this world. Why do they do it? Because they love you.

And they're not asking you by the time you turn 18, okay, here is all the expenses that you incurred from our caring for you. Now you have to pay all this back, right? When you love or care about someone, you do things for free.

And so communism is actually something that we do all the time. When we're good friends to each other, when we help our friends move and we don't get paid for it, that's unpaid labor, right? You do labor all the time in your life for absolutely no money because those things are inherently worth doing and you care about the people to whom you're giving those products to or that labor to.

That's what Marx would say, that anything that you would want in society would exist just naturally because if people wanted it, it would be there. It's just a natural consequence. And that you don't need money as an incentive to work hard because meaningful labor is its own reward.

And again, he believes that laziness only occurs because of capitalism. So why are you lazy if you have a job that you don't really love? Why don't you work that hard?

Why are you like checking your email, checking Instagram when you should be working? It's not because you're inherently lazy. It's because you don't own the means of production.

That job is alienating you. It's literally for Marx, it's alienating your body from you. That you're working for the man.

You're working for someone else's profit. Someone else is getting rich off of your back. So of course you don't care.

Of course you're not going to be super passionate about working more. then you need to to get your your wage because you're being exploited says Marx. Capitalist labor is necessarily exploitative labor.

We are all prostitutes in capitalism according to Marx. Why? We are literally selling our bodies. We are selling our labor in a locking sense to the man. The man owns our bodies in a sense.

Takes from our bodies without our true and full consent because most of us right the reason why you you work at McDonald's is not because you love McDonald's. It's because you feel like you have to or else The only other option is poverty and death. Starvation. Why do people around the world work for cents on the hour in factories?

It's not because they love factory work. It's because they have no other option. How is that democracy, says Marx. That's not democracy.

In a true democracy, people would only do labor that they truly wanted and felt was necessary. Period. If anybody in a democratic society is doing work that they do not love, that they are not being filled by emotionally, intellectually, physically, that is exploitation, that is slavery. Period.

Just end of story. How is communism not a form, I mean capitalism, not a form of slavery? Because it forces those that don't have a lot of other options, people who live in poverty, to do really shitty work that is dangerous to them.

that is unfulfilling, that is boring, that is mind-numbing, that's taking their time. Time is your life. If you're spending most of your time working at a job that you hate to make profit for someone else, how is that democratic? And yet the vast majority of people on the planet and even in America are doing jobs they don't want to do.

You are going to DePaul, most of you, not because you want to learn at DePaul. It's because you think that if you don't, you will not get the job that you want. And if you don't have the job that you want, you will not have the life that you want. How is that democratic?

You should only be doing things, including education, because you're fulfilled by it emotionally and intellectually and all other ways. And so what communism offers, according to Marx, is the purest form of democracy, not just in terms of like financially, but way more than that. Like finances don't even matter to Marx. He's giving you a kind of labor that is inherently fulfilling and an opportunity.

to do the work that you are suited to and that you love doing. I'm just going to stop right here because we're out of hour and I'll make another quick short video to wrap up on marks so hold on.

Transcript for:LSP 200 - HW 3 - VID 5

Transcript for:
LSP 200 - HW 3 - VID 5