James Lindsay: Marxism Is a Cult of Power, Not an Economic Theory

0:01 This phrase, the immiseration of workers, Mhm. is a fundamental prediction of Marx as I understand it. >> That because um because capitalists will compete and there is a reserve army of unemployed people out there that they can always draw on to drive down wages and also drive down profits. So, he recognizes the capitalists beat each other up and drive down profits. Mhm. You will end up with a mass of miserable workers who have been bled to death.

0:37 And so, here's the United States of America, the the most economically liberal in the classical sense, free market economy the world has ever seen with strong protections for me and you as consenting adults to come to an agreement and have the courts uphold it. That's what private property actually is. It's just an agreement between adults. Yeah. >> That gives rise not to the worker immiseration, but a middle class. Yeah. And that's what Horkheimer said specifically. He said Marx predicted that capitalism would immiserate the worker, but in fact it allows him to build a better life. And he saw this as a problem, right?

1:16 Yeah. That's a problem to be that you have to figure out how to get around because they believed the critical theorists believed that there was this new flattening out of life by the capitalist program. And what he's saying is what the what their argument was is that the logic of capitalism actually steals away your ability to see an even better socialist existence because you live your life by going to work all day and working your part, doing your thing to earn your meager you know, middle class existence.

1:48 Meanwhile, Corvette or Chevrolet is over here advertising Corvettes to you all along so that by the time you finally get the kind of nest egg where you might be able to move upwardly, you blow it on a Corvette. And so, you're just part of the system of capitalism being capitalistic. And this is what the kind of you know, essence of so-called one-dimensional man as Herbert Marcuse wrote it was. Is that the logic of capitalism teaches people to work to make a little bit of money so that they can get sucked into the capitalist system and blow it all on capitalist stuff that they don't need. What he called false needs versus true needs.

2:23 When you have a theory and you assert a a prediction. And and Marx as I understand it, believed himself to be doing science. That there this was a social science. >> Scientific socialism. >> the only scientific description of history according to him. The only one. Yeah. So, he has his science and he makes predictions. And those predictions don't work.

2:54 So, there's a there's obviously a couple ways you can respond if you're like a big fan of Marx and you know what he's predicting and you're like this didn't work. One is he's wrong, right? Like and I rethink my position and I he he what and then you try to understand well, what did he get wrong? Um one is he's right, but we need to wait a little longer. You know, this is the old real Marxism has never been tried um or you know, the stimulus didn't work because it wasn't big enough.

3:30 And how would you know and and what are you using to measure? But it you know, so there's he's wrong. There's no, no, no, it's still we just need to keep on waiting. So, but then there's this other response, the response you're talking about which is okay. No, we acknowledge the prediction didn't hold. And that we're not saying that we can wait it out and it'll still be true. There's an un but we still want communism or something.

4:02 Yeah. So, >> So, so, so, let me just finish and then I I want I want you to have it cuz here's the part I want I'm trying to grapple with here in real time. >> Uh-huh. What that suggests to me is that there is something there is like a deeper goal that isn't exactly what Marx said specifically. You're not being motivated by helping the working class cuz the working class are doing better and you don't care.

4:27 So, if it's like the issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution and we'll just keep shifting the goalposts. Only you're literally talking about all of reality. Like what do they want? Like why what what was the underlying motivational force in your view having read all these people that caused the >> But to what end? Just to be a selfish dictator? Like what what how >> Yeah, more or less actually. If you look at the way that the the Communist Manifesto was structured, you get that.

4:53 Um and by the way, what you're looking at, this logic, this third answer that you bring up, this logic is um the logic of a cult that has been disproven. It's the UFO cult where the UFO never showed up. And um Leon Festinger was pretty clear in the '50s showing that when you're in a cult and then the central doctrine is disproved, most people don't leave the cult. They actually become stronger in the cult, but they make the central beliefs of the cult less falsifiable. In fact, maybe unfalsifiable. The UFO actually did come and it stopped whatever thing and then they went away happy or whatever, but nobody could see it cuz it's you know, stealth or whatever. Cloaking device. Some falsifiable claim. And this is what the um critical theorists did is that they said, oh you know, well yeah, the working class has a better life, but they don't have an ideal life, right?

5:41 They're they So, what has actually been happen has happened is they they've been co-opted by capitalism itself. And so, the entire it's not capitalism as an economic doctrine. It's capitalism as a culture that has co-opted all of them to keep them in their immiseration to the point where they can't even see the fact that yeah, they have a comfortable life, but they don't have an ideal life. And I'm not joking. That's what they did. But this is the logic of a cult. But this goes back when I when I said what they're after actually is power. That Marx was as um Eric Voegelin called him an intellectual swindler. And he meaning he's very specific. Voegelin is very very specific when he says this is that Marx wasn't wrong. Marx knew he was wrong and said it anyway.

6:28 He's a swindler. He's very clear on what he means by this. He knows Marx knows by reading Marx that it's not really what he's about. It's not about the working class at all. And the structure in my opinion of the Communist Manifesto, I don't remember Voegelin's argument for it, but the structure of the Communist Manifesto actually shows this. Okay? So, chapter taking out all of the stuff, there's technically four chapters. The third one is just them arguing with people that aren't there. The fourth one is like a page and then there's a bunch of preface and ancillary stuff afterwards.

7:00 The main body of the Communist Manifesto is chapters one and two. In fact, if you ask me what it is, it's what the Communist Manifesto should be if you're going to read it straight through would be preface, chapter one, chapter two, chapter four with chapter three is just kind of like them arguing with people they disagree with. And then there's a bunch of list of their demands, the history of how the document came to be and so on.

7:20 Okay. So, chapter one is titled bourgeois and proletarian and it explains the intrinsic relationship of society in this oppressed or oppressed conflict. That's why it does. And it explains that the bourgeoisie actually produces the proletariat which is its negation in the kind of you know, dialectical framework. It produces that by exploiting it and then the proletariat can come to realize that they are that exploited class who is part of the dynamic of exploitation. They're not just an exploited class. There's a bigger picture and they're part of it. So, you can awaken to being part of the dynamic of history even when you're oppressed by the dynamic of history. This is class consciousness. That's right. And so then the second chapter is titled proletarians and communists or maybe it's communists and proletarians. I forget which order the two words go in.

8:15 But it's to explain the relationship between the Communist Party and the proletariat. Okay. And what Marx explicitly says is that the communists disagree with the proletariat nowhere at all. They're just its most advanced form. They're the part that understands the issue the most. Therefore, they're the necessary leaders of the proletariat. Okay? So, chapter one, the proletariat is a revolutionary class that needs to overthrow society in the name of the proletariat. Chapter two, that will be led by the communists who will then have to make sure everything goes according to plan. So, then you end up with this concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat which is going to be run not by the proletariat, but by the Communist Party which is the logic of chapter two. So, the whole thing is we the communists are a new elite who are going to use your working you know, worker manpower to overthrow the system to install us as your new leaders because we care about you. But then you go one step further and you say, at the time when they were writing this, who was in charge of the Communist Party?

9:22 And it was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. So, it was who was going to if if they would have been able in say 1850, Communist Manifesto comes out in 1848. Let's say they pulled off a revolution through Europe in 1850. Who would have been the boss? Who would have been in charge? Karl Marx would have been king of Europe. The Communist king, not really a king, of Europe. So, the whole thing is a boon doggle to put the leaders of the Communist Party through the the Party as its Praetorian Guard, as the leaders of the new society that has deposed the old society and gets to amass all of its riches to itself. So, the point of communism has always been to amass the maximum amount of power and money in the smallest number of hands who are considered ideologically in line enough with the Communist Party itself and its leadership. So, it's always just been a power grab. The whole thing is a Like Karl Marx's character comes into play here. You have a bunch of dysfunctional louds who think that they should run everything in the world would be better if they did. And they're trying to motivate the working class to do their dirty work so that they can become the new bosses using all these intellectual swindles that trick people into thinking that, you know, it's actually in the in in the benefit in the name of in uh the working class.

10:49 So, that's what's really going on. So, then when it doesn't work and they can't get power that way in the West. And if you look over at Soviet Union, yeah, they have power, but it's like something bad's going on over there. Like even by the time Horkheimer's I mean the the quote I gave you from Horkheimer is actually from '69. So, this is all after, you know, Khrushchev's secret speech. So, by that that point everybody knew something everybody knew something bad was going on Soviet Union even by the '30s. Yeah.

11:16 >> To a degree, but nobody knew how bad it was until the Khrushchev secret speech in '56. After '56, that's it. Everybody knew what was going on in in Soviet Union was a disaster. disaster. Since um our school system only ever teaches our kids about the evils of the Nazis and spends virtually no time on uh the greatest murderers in all of uh modern history, the communists. Yeah. Um what is that speech? Just recount real quickly. What is What is Khrushchev's speech in '56 and and why is that such an important moment? Historically, you know, just very lightly, Stalin died in '53. Obviously, Stalin was uh let's say a figure of power to >> [laughter] >> put it mildly. So, this creates an enormous power vacuum. Nikita Khrushchev ends up filling that vacuum by rising up to the, you know, head of the party.

12:07 And he can't basically get the Soviets under his control. And so, the way he decides to get the Soviets under his control is 3 years later in in 1956, he comes forward and gives a what's called his secret speech. I actually don't know why it's called the secret speech. I should look that up and find that out, but he gives his speech. It's called Khrushchev's secret speech where at least to the party congress, but eventually it goes to the world, he confesses to all the crimes, the brutality, the murders, the mass murders, the genocides, the Holodomor, everything that Stalin did and that he did it intentionally. So, he gives this long speech blaming it all on his predecessor, which means all of the people who were the, you know, post-Stalin Stalinists who were still vying for power and causing problems all of a sudden get cast down as the great evil monsters who cannot possibly be allowed near power.

13:06 And obviously, the Soviets lived it, so they knew when he said it that it rang true. So, it created the ability for Khrushchev to consolidate his power by blaming everything on his predecessor by confessing to the the crimes of crimes against humanity of Stalin that were at that point unparalleled in the world in anything that had ever happened. The liquidation of the kulaks, the mass murder of Ukrainians, the the intentional starvation of millions of people uh Yeah, and also even just smaller political murders where, you know, he would pick people that were in his inner circle and, you know, intentionally just murder them. Um kind of as a show of force or because he just wanted to or, you know, different different motivations for to initiate various purges or accusations or whatever else. So, it all comes out in '56.

13:56 So, by this point, you know, what's going on with the critical theorists is they're trying to figure out they want to have You can say that they're after power or you can say that they're religious fanatics, which I think is another component to the argument that's very important. Stalin probably more of a cynical power broker, maybe fully believed it. Marcuse? I don't know if he wanted power so much as this guy was literally utopian. Like all the critical theorists had given up on the utopia vision and Marcuse brings it back. He's like, "No, no, guys, it's possible.

14:27 We can get the ideal society." So, you start thinking of, you know, you go off in like fantasy land about the ideal perfect functioning society, which is always characterized by the by the way by exactly the same thing, a reduction in the working hours of the day. They want to not work. That's it. The ideal society is one where nobody has to work and there's plenty for everybody all the time. That's the whole goal. And when you look at how they implement things, that's exactly what they're after every single time is less work for everybody, which turns out less productivity, which means no abundance, which means people die in starving and freezing conditions. But at any rate, they might just be high on the Kool-Aid, but they're utterly convinced that they can get there if they can just retool the theory and locate the issue somewhere else. So, their argument was not that Marx was so much wrong as that Marx could not foresee that the capitalists would co-opt the circumstances that should have been their own demise to their own advantage. So, it's basically that the capitalists are even trickier than we thought. But the basic idea isn't wrong. It's just that there were certain parts of the unfolding of history that Marx, based on his limited data in the Industrial Revolution, could not have foreseen.

15:44 One of the pieces of the puzzle that you've talked about uh which is, you know, you you tell the story of the, you know, working class guy factory at the Ford factory in like Detroit in its heyday that can buy a Chevy or no, he'd buy a Ford Mustang, let's say, for himself. And isn't this wonderful that he's been fundamentally brainwashed that there is this uh susceptibility to uh brainwashing in the on the part of the public that makes them dupes and dopes. Oh, well, the reason why Marx failed is because class consciousness was stifled by the capitalists who propagandized the public into thinking that all they needed to do was buy a Mustang and then they would and and they sort of it's like a release valve on the pressure building towards utopia.

16:37 The part in there that if you you don't have to scratch that hard is if you believe this, if you believe that people are that stupid, you can't possibly justify democracy. Right? Cuz how can you have democracy in which the public is has [clears throat] any say in the its form of government, never mind taking stuff by force, but just any say at all because well well, the public is dumb. And they can just be convinced of anything that they anything that anything that anyone tells them.

17:16 And the capitalists are especially good at this. Like like the it's so instantly like where do you go from there? Because people like Mondani and AOC, they all call themselves democratic socialists, but their assumptions are anti-democratic to the core, right? I mean, that's what Lenin's party was was the democratic socialists. So, um before they changed the name to the Bolsheviks, before they changed the name to the Communist, uh it was the Democratic Socialist Party. Okay, so here's the evil part. Like we haven't touched about the evil part yet, right?

17:53 The fanatical part. But here's the evil part. When you conclude that the vast masses are actually basically simpletons who are very easily brainwashed and that this is the nature of society, but you understand the true nature of their humanity, which is that they're ultimately socialists who can live in a liberated society of plenty with no work, you go to seize the means of production of what? Them. Through economic conditions, through social conditions, through cultural conditions, it doesn't matter what it is. You go to seize the means of production of them. Marx called this the inversion of praxis. Praxis is the activism you do in the world, so you change the world and then the changes of the world brainwash people to think this is the way that it is now and so they become the results of your activism. And so, what you do is you establish a state that claims to be democratic later.

18:51 Only the people who understand the theory get to be democratic now. Only the communists get to vote. Only the awakened socialists get to participate because everybody else is too stupid and they're brainwashed and they're trapped by false values and they're trapped in false consciousness, so they have to be excluded from the ability to vote in order to allow the democracy to be pure, which obviously just means only the people who vote for us and agree with us get to vote in practice.

19:22 And the goal is to set up a state. This explains the gulags. This explains the ideological remolding programs and prisons in Mao's China. This explains basically social emotional learning and all the educational manipulations that we have with our kids, education for social for what global citizenship education, education for sustainable development and so on that our kids are getting exposed to. Your job becomes to take all the people who haven't already got it and to brainwash them, because that's what you do with those people. So, the Soviets say, "Ah, capitalism brainwashes everybody. So, what we'll do is take power and brainwash people the right way, so that they'll be socialists. So, then we won't need to have this program anymore when they're all socialists."

20:09 And well, what do you do with the people who are, say, too stupid or too stubborn or too faithful, in a lot of cases, for the brainwashing to work? You You kill them. You get rid of them. You make examples of them, too, the most grotesque ways that you can. So, the evil comes in from believing that they are absolutely right, that the mechanism for dealing with dumb people is societal brainwashing, and that they have every right, therefore, to brainwash them into the correct ideology and out of the evil ideology that is withholding them from their true humanity.

20:43 So, that's where the actually the whole evil mechanism comes from. And this is that idealism again, that they have the ideal vision of what a person should be in the ideal society, the completed perfect society where we've returned to our true socialist nature that's deep hidden within us, that we have been estranged from, is the language, self-estrangement through private property. And we're going to free you up of those beliefs. We're going to get you to the right way of believing. And if we can't, we'll have to get rid of you because you're a problem for the collective and for the party.

21:15 And that's justifies literally all of the horrific evils that they do from their own perspective, that they're literally all all everything. I was going to say education, but it's in in the broadest sense of the word. Every single thing that happens in the development of a human being is a form of brainwashing. But the socialists are the only people on Earth who have the awakened right idea. So, they have every right, and in fact, a duty to brainwash everybody and to get rid of the undesirables who can't take it.

21:49 So, this is why they call it a transformative practice, by the way. This is why they speak in this religious language almost of being born again. You actually have some people who do speak in the language of being born again as a socialist. You must die and re be reborn or die and resurrect on the side of the oppressed. That's a direct quote from one of the critical education guys, Henry Giroux. If you like this clip, you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at Dad Saves America. So, be sure to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring that bell, so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week.