Zoe sent me here. We need more comprehensive yet accurate theoretical explanatory videos in Leftist KZread. You two are doing great work :) Also I'd also be interested in learning more about the synthesis of Marxism and Anarchism that you seem to be going for if I'm not mistaken.

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

Hey! Thank you so much for that! Well, in this series and some upcoming responses we're just trying to explain Marx's ideas. We will, however, be looking at some ways in which a dialogue between certain bits of Marxist and anarchist ideas would be useful, e.g. in thinking about things like prefigurative politics, democracy, social movement politics, and so on. One of us is doing some work on that right now and our first video donig some of it - the one on prefigurative politics - is in the works.

@RURK_

4 жыл бұрын

@@RedPlateaus Sounds awesome. Don't take my comment the wrong way, I'd love learning more about Marx's philosophy and ideas regardless if there's an anarchist synthesis or not so don't give up on those it's honestly extremely interesting to watch. It's just that I'm still fairly uneducated with both Anarchism and Marxism so combining both would be convenient for me lol. Keep up the great work comrades :)

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

@@RURK_ In that case great - we're planning to do a bit of both going forwards.

@johnnybigoode

4 жыл бұрын

Who's Zoe?

@RURK_

4 жыл бұрын

@@johnnybigoode One of the best anarchist KZreadrs imo. Her name in KZread is anarchopac.

anarchopac sent me here :)

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

She kinda sent us here too.

Great way to end the series! This channel, and anarchopac, have been essential to my understanding of Marx and leftism is general, so thanks for that

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks! We hope to keep on helping with that.

I'm so happy to see more content from this channel!

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

Great to hear!

Incredible video about a complex topic. Thank you for the clear and engaging explanation.

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks, glad to hear you liked it!

Excellent series of videos. Coming myself to Marx from an Anarchist tradition it is extremely heartening to see serious discussion about what the two traditions share & in what they differ. This series is very helpful in its contribution towards hopefully moving beyond the destructive sectarianism of the past.

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks, that's exactly one of the things we're trying to help with!

Loved this series. Very helpful and lucid

Loved the video Red Plateaus! Keep up the great work comrade!

@Germinaal

4 жыл бұрын

Here's a second comment for the algorithm

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

@@Germinaal Thank you very much for both, and great name by the way!

@Germinaal

4 жыл бұрын

@@RedPlateaus Oh thank you!! I put a lot of effort in choosing this channel's name! I'm happy someone likes it hahah

Finally, someone explains the epistemological break meme.

One of the best left contents online ever

Unique reading technique. I quite like it. It reminds me of how math builds upon itself as you age, providing new mechanics based on the same fundamental propositions. Well done!

Thanks for the hard work.

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

You're very welcome, and thanks for your comment.

awesome video, thank you

One of the most problematic things I've noticed with a lot of Marxists, especially Leninists and derivatives of Leninism, is the either complete ignorance or intentional downplaying of lesser known writings or transcripts of Marx/Engels and Lenin. This is obviously also true of anarchism and other tendencies, which is why ya see some very annoying anarchists that don't seem to fully grasp the concept of justifiable hierarchy vs power and mistaken a lack of faith in bourgeois institutions to effect change with a refusal to tactically and pragmatically interact with it to further our ends, etc. However I think it impacts Marxists far more unfortunately simply due to the sheer amount of text and the many derivatives that lay claim to the "true continuation" of Marxist thought whereas most anarchists oppose things like "post-left" thought and other deviations and warping of anarchism. To me, some of the most valuable and important information is included in personal correspondence and other letters, speeches, minutes of meetings, conversations and debates, etc. Especially where they are criticizing a fellow socialist, speaking more frankly than in their main body of work, correcting misunderstandings of their ideas, adding context or clarification, etc. Good examples of this are Engels' critique via letter of the SDWP surrounding their interpretation of M&E's work where he also admits that part of the issue is pressure from anarchists. Lenin's absurd insistence that anarchism is a "petit bourgeois ideology" as well as ineffective and incapable publicly while privately admitting it's successes and mass appeal to proletarians in many parts of the world (especially the US), when Bakunin challenged: “There are about 40 million Germans. Does this mean that all 40 million will be members of the government?”, Marx wrote (in his notes): “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”. As well as Lenin's insistence on using manipulation of terminology by co-opted left-com and anarchist slogans and rhetoric but actually meaning things like "all power to the party" instead of "all power to the soviets" as he stated publicly and saying "worker management" but meaning "party management", all of which is clear when you understand his lack of confidence in the working class and peasantry to be revolutionary forces despite Marx echoing Proudhon (as he was curiously prone to do lol) when he said “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves" which is spookily close to Proudhon’s “the proletariat must emancipate itself without the help of the government.”. The list could go one but it's VERY important to remember also that Marx was a petty, petty man lol As well as hyper competitive and always looking to further spread his ideas. He was far from alone in all of this and in environments like that mistakes are made and corrections and clarification is required. So many of his critiques of contemporaries and predecessors are hatchet jobs and slander due to influence struggles and personal beef as well as misunderstandings and so much context is added through these lesser known/lesser acknowledged sources. Having these understandings is largely why I am a Marxist and why I am not a Leninist/Vanguardist and identify with the autonomist and anarchist movement more despite my positions being a blend. We have far too many dogmatic people who are married to a particular interpretation of Marxism (and anarchism) and while they're able to quote sections of Kapital vols 1-3, Critique of the Gothica Program, etc yet don't seem to have a full understanding of the full context or that M&E were fallible men who lived in a very different time, weren't correct about every last thing and had major personal flaws, like all of their contemporaries. This way of thinking leads to atrocity apologetics, insane justifications and explanations of things to maintain the purity of themselves and other things as well as toxic behavior that scare people away and are fundamentally anti-Marxist as far as I'm concerned and they do more damage to our cause than any western capitalist propaganda ever could. It's very nice to find a channel that seems to have a more complete understanding of Marx the man and his ideas. Keep it up, friend ✊

@stinkiesttwink

4 жыл бұрын

Tiger Style civil war in france gang

@johnmccrae2932

3 жыл бұрын

@@stinkiesttwink Hell yeah!

@whatabouttheearth

Жыл бұрын

Stop thinking with empathy for the people you counter revolutionary. Without a dictatorship of the proletariat how can we oppress the proletariat that forms the dictatorship that oppresses itself and its own comrades as counter revolutionary petit bourgeois dictators? ...what came first? The pizza or the bread?

@TheRevolutionaryWorkersofTheBl

Ай бұрын

This is complete Anarchist cope, Marx wasn't influenced by Anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin, because the dude made entire books critiquing them from The German Ideology, to The Holy Family, to The Poverty of Philosophy, to other obscure later works like Political Indifferentism. Hell he even actively comment on Proudhon's problems in his unpublished notes like Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Moreover Proudhon never argued for working-class self-emancipation, in fact he argued the proletariat are too weak and degenerate to actually lead a political struggle against capitalism as a whole and though that only these struggles could only take into the form of economic struggles. “The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!"- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, On the Political Capacity of the Working-Classes “If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form. Workers must not even form organs of a single class, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society; this division, which fragments the working class, is the true basis of their present enslavement."- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, On the Political Capacity of the Working-Classes And Karl Marx correctly critiques Proudhon by saying "That false translations of the original Statutes have given rise to various interpretations which were mischievous to the development and action of the International Working Men's Association; In presence of an unbridled reaction which violently crushes every effort at emancipation on the part of the working men, and pretends to maintain by brute force the distinction of classes and the political domination of the propertied classes resulting from it; Considering, that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes; That this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end - the abolition of classes; That the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economical struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists - The Conference recalls to the members of the International: That in the militant state of the working class, its economical movement and its political action are indissolubly united."- Karl Marx, Resolution of the London Conference on Working-Class Political Action

@TheRevolutionaryWorkersofTheBl

Ай бұрын

and again "It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. However the working-class movement is today so powerful that these philanthropic sectarians dare not repeat for the economic struggle those great truths which they used incessantly to proclaim on the subject of the political struggle. They are simply too cowardly to apply them any longer to strikes, combinations, single-craft unions, laws on the labour of women and children, on the limitation of the working day etc., etc."- Karl Marx, Political Indifferentism

Thank you for this.

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

You're welcome!

This was excellent.

Alienation? More like Alien Nation *dabs

Superb! If this planet ever survive capitalism, you played a role!

Great video! If you haven't read it already, you might be interested in "The Incomplete Marx" by Felton Shortall. It's been a few years since I read it, but it's sort of about how "late Marx" is less focused on subjectivity not because he abandoned his earlier ideas, but because the later works are unfinished and he never quite got around to integrating the older ideas into the stuff he was working on later. something like that anyway. libcom.org/library/incomplete-marx

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks! We think Lebowitz also makes a similar point about the later Marx focusing much more on the logic of capital than on the revolutionary logic of the working class, both of which are inherent to capitalist society, and we agree. Though we don't think he talks about the latter much in the early works either.

Comment for the algorythm

12:22 I'm just wondering what the point is in him saying that Lenin never used the term alienation, when arguing about Marx's ideas...

From what movie all this images of Marx are?

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

They're from Der Junge Karl Marx (The Young Karl Marx)!

Great video. It's just about at the right level of complexity so that I can still absorb the information after a long days work and the accompanied mental fatigue. I have a question which is perhaps a standard rebuke to Marxism: if theres no competition to develop technology (which there is under capitalism) how would we be able to live in such relative levels of comfort (some of us anyway)? Without competition where is the incentive to ensure quality control? I have somewhat of an answer myself but id like to know what you think. :)

@RedPlateaus

3 жыл бұрын

Well, if I understand the worry correctly it's about how can we have technology in the absence of competition between capitals, e.g. corporations. If that's the case, it's worth mentioning that a huge amount of research and technological development is carried out by scientists who usually don't benefit much individually from what they come up with, whether in the private or public sector. It's perhaps also worth pointing out that the experimental psychology of motivation show that financial/money incentives are of very limited value for any work that requires a minimum of creativity and innovation, while intrinsic motivations are much more powerful. Perhaps more importantly though, is the fact that a huge amount of research is carried out either directly by state institutions or paid for by state institutions and given to the corporate sector. Here a good book to read would be Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths".

do y’all think that by noting what differentiates humans from other animals, marx leaves room to consider things like robots “human” even though they are not human as such?

@leftlane5085

4 жыл бұрын

thinking about blade runner lol

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

@@leftlane5085 In theory yeah, though I think his views on what consciousness consist in would have to be developed more and in a bit more detail if he were alive today.

Hey do you guys pretend on making a video about the various interpretation of the marxist philosophy ? like the people that are in favor of the "DIAMAT (Dialectical and Historical Materialism)" and people that is against ? I would be interesting in see something like that. Like when Luckács first is against this theory, and lather on his mature writtings such as "Ontology of Social Being" that he said that he was wrong about his first interpretation and them accept the dialectical materialism theory, I don't why but I didn't find this part in the english text, but in the portuguese-brazilian text there is an introduction by hinself that shows where he talks about neopositivism, Wittgenstein, existencialism and so on...

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

We plan to yes. Our next series will cover what we think (drawing especially on István Mészáros’s work) is the most accurate understanding of Marx's views on those issues. As part of that we'll also be talking about the orthodox Kautskyite views on Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism.

For me one of the best critiques of “socialist” states is that the workers in them had no more control over production & distribution than in capitalist states, so they are just as alienated from their labour as in capitalism. Could one say that this is (in part) because the Marxists who influenced those states didn’t consider alienation an important component of Marxism?

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

I don't think we have a good answer to that question I'm afraid, but I'd hesitate to say that certain ideas on their own would be enough to explain it.

@Paraves426

4 жыл бұрын

Yes I suppose that would be idealist! A better way to phrase my question would be: is a Marxism that neglects alienation a more useful ideological tool for state socialists?

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

@@Paraves426 It's something we should probably think about, but I think that ignoring Marx's theory alienation could be useful to any brand of socialist that might want to not critically examine the power that bosses and impersonal market forces have over workers.

The theme of a revolutionary humanism is present through all his works. Althusser was a dork blinded by his structuralist interpretation.

@RedPlateaus

4 жыл бұрын

Good point. Also, great name!

@Sazi_de_Afrikan

4 жыл бұрын

@@RedPlateaus Thanks UwU

Proudhon was right