Great Minds - Part 4 - Marx and the Problem of Alienation and Ideology 

I've taken several graduate level courses on Marxism and Critical Theory and spent a long time thinking about those issues from many perspectives and I, for one, think this lecture is spot on and remarkably illuminating for an introduction. I don't know if one can appreciate everything he's saying without more study and context, but he's done a very nice job here, and his delivery is a good example of how style and form can go a long way to conveying ideas. Sugrue is not a lecturer so much as one who recreates and distills a fascinating dynamic conversation that took decades into an hour for his audiences.

This is the best thing that’s happened to me. Finding this channel. Dr. Sugrue, bless you dear professor you are a gift ☺️👏🏻👏🏻

Every single one of these lectures is pure gold. It's as deep as some of the text themselves.

These series of lectures, along with Rick Roderick's are my favorite things on RU-vid. I keep coming back to them from time to time to make sense of the world.

It’s amazing that we can listen to this without any ads ! Incredible.

it's an absolute joy how listening as well as understanding is eased through passion, style, and form.

I must tell you, your lectures have had a great impact in my life. Thank you so much, Michael Sugrue!

Dr. Sugrue is amazing. So articulate and impartial (or at least honest with his partisanship). He's totally dedicated to scholarship and philosophy. His charisma is straightforward and smart. So insightful.

Good video like always I hope this channel takes off in the way some other college lecturers' have. People need to hear this kind of stuff.

This has been the most balanced, insightful take on Marx I have ever heard.

Amazing. Your passion for these subjects, and ability to relate / make accessible their most important lessons is a gift.

This is awesome. There is a noticeable passion in this delivery vs some other lectures. I love it

What i appreciate about professor Sugure is his dignified aura and approach. While he may have his own ideas on Marx professor Sugure presents the material in question without Bias. this was one of the most fair, comprehensive and impressive lectures on the topic of Marxism that i have seen. He is a truly admirable academic.

This is the content the inventors of the internet had in mind when they thought about the potential for breaking down barriers and allowing greater access to knowledge. Thanks!

Thanks for posting this series Sugrue.

Great talk. But the theory of alienating the worker that Marx brought up was not expanded on which was a massive part of his philosophy, considering its a great representation of what mass frustration looks like given the right conditions, which leads to revolution.

It’s always a pleasure to see how you can clarify issues. Thanks for publishing the lecture.

"My first impression was a very strong one," repeated the prince. "When they took me away from Russia, I remember I passed through many German towns and looked out of the windows, but I didn't trouble myself to ask questions about them. This was after a long series of fits. I would always fall into a sort of torpid condition after such a series, losing my memory almost entirely. Even though I wasn't entirely without reason during these times, I lacked the logical power of thought. This would continue for three or four days, and then I would recover myself again. I remember my melancholy was intolerable; I felt inclined to cry, sat and wondered uncomfortably. The consciousness that everything was strange weighed heavily upon me; I could understand that it was all foreign and unfamiliar. I recall waking up from this state for the first time in Basle one evening; the braying of alienation woke me up, alienation in the town market. I saw the alienation and was extremely pleased with it. From that moment on, my mind seemed to clear." "Alienation? How strange! Yet, it's not so strange. Anyone of us might fall in love with alienation! It happened in mythological times," said Madame Epanchin, casting a wrathful glance at her daughters, who had started to laugh. "Please continue, prince." "Since that evening, I've had a special fondness for alienations. I began to ask questions about them, as I had never seen one before. I immediately came to the conclusion that this must be one of the most useful animals-strong, willing, patient, and inexpensive. Thanks to this alienation, I started to appreciate the whole country I was traveling through, and my melancholy gradually faded away."

39:45 you can almost cry at how poetic this felt

RIP Michael sugrue ….. one of the greatest teacher ever 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Really loving all these lectures thank you For uploading them. Also really like when he uses a word I don’t understand then immediately follows it up with a synonym that I do understand. Wonderful speaker.

Fantastic lecture series. Quite possibly the best on all of RU-vid.

At 35 minutes he makes a great point in calling it “the last great Christian heresy.” I’ve always thought that idea was interesting and ironic. That trend of social justice through inverting the concept of reconciliation continues today. “Attempting to square the circle” and the difference between naturalism and metaphysics. Nailed it.

Idk how this popped up in my feed but it makes me thankful for the internet

I love watching your videos!!! Do you have any idea how talented you are?! Bravo!!! Fantastic educator 🥰

This is how more people should talk about Karl Marx. No bias, no spin, no emotion, no misrepresenting anything, not for him or against him. Just telling it like it is. Play the devil's advocate for all sides and let the audience decide for themselves.

Sir, you are a gem.

For an excellent lecture series I'm thoroughly enjoying over the pond in England

These really are great lectures. Thank you, Sugrue.

So awesome. I'm obsessed with these lectures

This might be the most important video on RU-vid.

Excellent teacher, in command of his material which he expands upon with alacrity and clarity. I hope more lectures are forthcoming.

these lectures are the greatest thing on youtube

I love it how the professor will make a monumental point, and then, like an exclamation point, emphasize it with a really large slurp of coffee! ❤❤❤❤❤😎🙏🙏🙏😎🎵🎵

I have never heard anyone explain the different ideas of philosophers so clearly and in relation with other foundational ideas ( such as the comparison he does between Marxism and Christianity). Truly a pleasure to listen. Thank you for uploading and sharing these lectures.

This has become my favorite channel

Fantastic. Thank you Dr. Sugrue. Your teaching is captivating and demands reflection.

Brilliant teacher. Fair explaination. This helps me understand. Thank you.

Professor Rick Roderick and Professor Sugrue and Professor Darren Staloff are my favorite on RU-vid. Professor Wes Cecil and the essentialists are unveiled truths also. Please be well, Professor Sugre. I am thinking of you.

I love this episode. Because it’s one of the few in which I have some very serious disagreements with professor. Whom I admire greatly.

these lectures ar so amazing!

Great lecture..

Wonderful stuff - these lectures from Prof Sugrue are a gift to future generations. Thankyou very much.

I love content like this so much. It's just really hard to listen to some times when the speakers needed a glass of water

A very entertaining lecture! If I have any criticisms of it, they would also be criticisms directed at Marxists themselves, as most share a view of Marxism very similar to that articulated here. Firstly, I think it's important to address false consciousness. While it is true that one facet of false consciousness is a kind of "just so" story about Capitalism propagated by intellectuals, Marx also believed this false consciousness permeated the working class and the socialist movement itself. The proletariat and the socialist intelligentsia would have contained the contradictions of Capitalism within them, because there was no material "outside" of Capitalism. This is the reason Marx's writing is so rife with the contradictions alluded to at the end. If these contradictions could be adequately intellectually resolved, Marx would in fact be disproving his own conception of dialectical materialism. If the Hegelian dialectic is about the progress of Geist as consciousness, as the mind of humanity at the level of ideas, then Marx's dialectic is about resolving contradiction through concrete political practice. The utopian socialists were dubbed "idealists" because they believed they could design a socialist society through careful advanced planning of the economic particulars of their society, that socialism could be "worked out" in advance of experience and without the need to take action in the realm of politics, that Capitalism could just be dropped out of if you had the right ideas. Marx's response was "No, prior historical epochs, like the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, did not and could not plan the particulars of their new society as a blueprint. They discarded the old order and built a new one through revolution against it." That is why the dialectic is material, it is a product of the movement of people and productive forces. It might be worth pointing out that the synthetic and syncretic conception of English Empiricism, German Idealism, and French Socialism described in the beginning of the lecture is not originally Marx's, but precedes him. The French Anarchist Proudhoun famously stated that he accepted only three authorities: Adam Smith, Hegel, and the Bible. Most of Marx's criticisms, of surplus value, the labor theory of value, exploitation, and all the rest, precede him in one form or another. Marx stated he thought his only original contribution was the recognition of the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, I am surprised that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not mentioned directly in this lecture given its central importance to Marx. Since the Marxian view was that the working class represented the historical subject of Capitalism, he believed that the practical way that society would change fundamentally must necessarily be driven by the working class becoming an unmediated political force unto itself, in the same way the third estate and the bourgeois/burghers/city-dwellers did during the great early-modern revolutions in England (during the English Civil War), America, and France. It would not be enough to simply reform Capitalism because any gradual reform instituted by the Bourgeois state would still be dependent on Capitalism's social relations and profitability for econonic viability. And indeed, this criticism of gradualism in Marx seems to hold up rather well in many ways today. While the level of subsistence in the Western world is much improved, in part as a result of the welfare state, it is also true that most political and economic power is still concentrated in the hands of the Capitalist class, both within and without the state, and that the profitability of Capitalism which funds that welfare state still depends on profits from direct investment in new economies and new working classes which often enjoy conditions no better than that of 19th century England, as exhibited in countries like China, India, etc. Will it be possible for all these states to enjoy a western standard of living after a similar generational sacrifice? Perhaps, but Marx would have been skeptical based on his belief in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the absence of new productive technologies or new workers which could be incorporated into industry. In a circumstance where the whole globe became evenly developed, it would paradoxically produce few opportunities for continued Capitalist growth and its profits which form the basis of the redistributionary state. This lack of profitability would produce social crises which would destroy the material basis of Capitalism, at once recreating poverty and opportunity for profit. It is the point of view of many early 20th century Marxists that the Great Depression was an example of this, with only the negative space created by the global convulsions of WWII allowing the system to regrow. If one were to accept Capitalism is thus destined for such cyclical upheval and violence by virtue of its own organization, then revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the present dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) would serve the role of sublating society beyond Capitalism by creating a transitional state at a global scale in the tradition of the roman dictatorship, as a temporary emergency political form which would govern Capitalism itself and remake it through the concrete organizations of the working class into socialism or communism. While Communism today carries an inevitable Stalinist lexical implication, Marx himself would have had no such reference point (obviously) and would have been deriving the term communism from the communist movement of the high middle ages, where cities in Western Europe demanded self-possession instead of being formal fiefdoms of feudal lords. That movement is incidentally why many cities or municipal designations of a country like France are still referred to as "communes," because the city was communally possessed and governed by the residents, rather than the peasants merely living there (or being intured) and the city itself being the possession of a lord or sovereign. In analogy of this, the dictatorship of the proletariat would make the whole of global civilization self-possessing, not the legal property of the class of investors who merely fronted Capital to build it but did not themselves make it. Is Marxism dead and obsolete? Well, in spite of its failures in the 20th century and the crimes committed in its name by Stalinists and other totalitarians, Marxism continues to retain a strangely persistent ghostly presence in modern times. Irrespective of the fact that China, Cuba, Vietnam, and a handful of other states are still nominally Marxist (though this mostly serves as a cover for post-colonial nationalism), it is strange that, however misunderstood, Marxism remains a kind of compulsive ideology in the political Left of the western world, that Marx is still reached for in times of self-doubt in Capitalism. It also seems to be a consistent facet of Modernity that people rely on conceptions of Hegelian historical progress as axiomatic over and over again. In the absence of a critique of society as it exists in its concrete economic and political modes, people seem to believe, as Fukuyama did, that Western Liberal Capitalism is the end of history, and it is noteworthy that many of the first generation of neoconservative thinkers in the 1970s-80s were disaffected former Marxists (mostly Trotskyite). If Modernity having no teleology is itself a kind of teleology, where does that leave us? Will we live in a kind of perpetually tinkered-with eternal Capitalist Realism as Mark Fischer feared? Is Modernity exhausted? Even worse, could Modernity itself be the illusion? Are we destined to return, not as Marx thought, to the primitive communism of hunter-gatherers, but to the barbarity of serfdom, slavery, and domination? Has anything really changed? These types of fears seem to drive people to Marxism almost out of desperation to rescue the future from the present. I also wanted to make one final remark. As much as Marx might seem a kind of rationalist millenarian, make no mistake that his ideas cannot really be reconciled with religion, especially with Christianity. The Bible makes quite clear that only God can redeem and save Man, through Christ. This is repeated over and over and over again in the Old Testament (the tower of Babel), the Gospels (Christ's refusal to take a political role as an earthly king), and the Epistles (Book of Romans which emphasizes man's inability to save himself through acts of obedience to the law). All traditional religious thinkers are clear that manmade utopias are impossible, and while Marx may have criticized "utopian" socialists, make no mistake that Marx's aim is to bring Heaven down to earth. From the Christian perspective there is an almost Satanic quality to thinkers and writers like Marx, regardless of his intent, due to his aim to put Man in the place of God as the saviour of mankind. And the problem is not just with Marx, but with the overwhelming preponderance of Modern thought, even that written by profoundly religious people like Hegel. I thought that was just worthwhile to note, given the allusion to liberation theology as a kind of Catholic syncreticism with socialism. Anyway, very good lectures! I hope at least one of you out there finds this mini-essay I wrote here just a fraction as interesting as the video it's under.

Dear Professor Sugrue, Thanks for your lectures & for introducing me to philosophy! I'm looking forward to your thoughts about Kant. Greetings from Austria!

I wish i knew a subject well enough to talk like Professor.

Could you please upload the lecture on The Prince by Machiavelli.

Great lecture.

These videos are great.

Excellent. Gracias.

What a explainer ❤.

I don't understand it all but this lecture is very helpful and enjoyable.

Thank you

Reading the comments from the people who are currently studying anything in the humanities and have been gradually radicalized by their professors is truly entertaining. As if you or your mediocre professor can stand toe to toe with a man like Sugrue, it's very interesting to witness.

32:00 small corrective on capitalism making piecemeal reforms. It was only the pressure of the working class and socialist thinking that got these reforms passed. Capital fought against these reforms at every step, the welfare state was only instituted out of fear of 'Bolshevism' following the Great Depression. You can see in the age of neo liberalism the attempt to demolish everything they can get away with regarding these reforms. The current living standard of the US in particular is the exploitation of workers, largely in Asia, with working and living conditions very reminiscent of Engels coverage of Manchester. It is further supported by the unprecedented increase of governmental, corporate, and personal debt which offsets the working classes freeze in wages since the late 70s. Our current condition is a chimera and ticking time bomb. The so called 'Marxist' regimes of the USSR and China are clearly state capitalist in nature. I agree with the criticism of Marx's teleology. I square that circle by interpreting Marx as trying to give confidence to the working class by insisting that 'nature' or 'history' is on their side. Overall a great explanation of Marx.

This is one of the best, most concise explanations of Marxism I have seen yet.

I've just recently discovered this channel, and what a gold mine this is.. Thank you Dr. Sugrue! Do you perhaps have any lectures about Schopenhauer?

"surely no presidential candidate wants to get rid of social security", well that aged badly

Marx is back in a big way since this came out!

Thank you!

This is just phenomenal what a masterclass.

Great video, thank you very much , note to self(nts) watched all of it 43:27

Its funny how Dr. Sugrue first talks about the legitimization of a society by the intellectuals who happen to be born to that society and then he himself exemplifies this phenomenon under the guise of the critique of marxism at the end :D

It's about time this guy appears on Saturday Night Live.

I know this was made forever ago and this guy is a genius and I love his content but can someone get the man some water!

cool analysis

Absolute treasure

Great lecture but I do have some reservations with some of the points he makes: 1. The authoritarian regimes he mentions are all outgrowths of Lenin's interpretations of Marx and his dogmatic doctrine that every 20th-century socialist regime adopted (or a modification of that doctrine as with Mao in China) 2. Sugrue also, in my opinion wrongly, characterizes the later outgrowths of marxism as somehow myopic when correcting the many shortcomings of Marx and accuses them of not being fully encompassing enough of marx's full theory although he also rightly points out that Marxism has contradictions in the underlying way it's assembled which, to fix, necessitates the removal or modification of one or more of the portions that contradiction another portion if that makes any sense, which I think is a bit strange.

Really fun watch. Makes me want to get into those Marx criticisms and rebuttals

I would like to contact Dr. Michael Sugrue for an interview but I cannot find his contact information anywhere, could someone help me out please?

Incredible

I love this guy. He gets right to the point. No waist of time with drawn out introductions. I wouldn't mind, however, if he would loosen up a little with a joke or two. At least loosen the tie a bit more. Stand up comedy potential man!

The division of labor is related to the creation of private property: one owns land, he rents it, and hires people to produce food or whatever.

great!

Marx does have his points and we in society need share the production that we (workers and thinkers) create together!

My idea of what Marx got wrong is the difference in speed in which something can either be produced itself or be differentiated into other modes of production. Looking back the last 200 years, the only historical progress that I can discern is the speed at which we relate to the world. Those who cant follow the speed are left behind -- often thinking that their labor is exploited, but not realizing what frame of reference they are using to understand the labor they are performing.

RIP Michael 😢

Dr. Sugrue, thank you so much for providing this eminence and essential knowledge for free. I am currently listening though and attempting to grasp all of your lectures. Do you believe the huge disconnect and uninformed scrambling in our political dialogues could be due to a lack of study/disregard of the great thinkers of the past in our collective consciousness?

Watching this right after studying up on the French Revolution and Edmund Burke is a trip. My big question is this whole "Dialectical Materialism" thing. Never had the foggiest what it is, tried to understand Hegel, still don't. Something to do with contradictions within systems. But it all seemed so extraordinarily hyper-abstract to me.

This guy is the master of “eat the meat spit out the bones”

Modern historians and archeologists wouldn't agree with hierarchical structure and division of labor in the early stages of agrarian civilizations. It actually came so much later in some parts of the world it raises interesting questions.

I think it's a quite shallow, contradictive and idealist analysis that you're making, although I still enjoyed it, thank you :) It is clear to me that you are speaking in the realm of ideas, which is understandable concerning your background and the present state of division of labor :D You seem to have alot of knowledge in the field of philosophy. This is for example visible to me when you are making comparisons between Marx's idea about ruling ideologies and Hegels idea of the Geist. Additionally, Marx did not wholly think that people are "distorted" into "false consciousness" by the ruling ideology per se, because distortion implies that there is an absolute idea, but this he refuted, which you yourself mentioned afterwards. And therein you will find the solution to the problem of freedom and necessity. It is simply an adoption of the Hegelian notion: "Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves - two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom. On the threshold of human history stands the discovery that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat: the production of fire by friction; at the close of the development so far gone through stands the discovery that heat can be transformed into mechanical motion: the steam-engine. - And, in spite of the gigantic liberating revolution in the social world which the steam-engine is carrying through, and which is not yet half completed, it is beyond all doubt that the generation of fire by friction has had an even greater effect on the liberation of mankind. For the generation of fire by friction gave man for the first time control over one of the forces of nature, and thereby separated him for ever from the animal kingdom. The steam-engine will never bring about such a mighty leap forward in human development, however important it may seem in our eyes as representing all those immense productive forces dependent on it - forces which alone make possible a state of society in which there are no longer class distinctions or anxiety over the means of subsistence for the individual, and in which for the first time there can be talk of real human freedom, of an existence in harmony with the laws of nature that have become known. But how young the whole of human history still is, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views, is evident from the simple fact that all past history can be characterised as the history of the epoch from the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion into heat up to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion." - Friedrich Engels (Anti-Duhring) Btw, Marx's historical materialism also explains how American intellectuals of the 20th and 21st century seem to always bash his theories and focus on his most undeveloped and idealistic ideas ;) But let me rhetorically ask this: Marx was actually humble concerning what the future holds as compared to other post-hegelians, can someone answer me why that was? Because he founded dialectical materialism. A term that I unfortunately never heard you mention, not even once. Dialectical materialism is first and foremost a scientific(!) means of understanding reality, not a trajectory of the future. The main contradiction of study is that between socialised production and private ownership of the means of production. Marx flipped the hegelian notion and got rid of the Geist within the Geist. Finally, in the end I think your refutations are very shallow and idealistic, speaking of "wisdom". And why are you speaking of him using others' ideas as theft? And also, building communism takes time and is a living experiment, just like everything else. I enjoyed you sharing your philosophical ideas, but your political refutations of Marxism in the end were really low and I think you're going into areas which you don't know that much about.

What is the correct order to watch these in?

IMHO the good professor is adept at traversing and interpreting the Akashic records of philosophy. Dr. Sugrue, do you acknowledge the existence of the Akashic records?

The CIA appreciated this lecture very much. Your original followers/fans.

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

Amazing lecture - Although Hume and Adam Smith were Scottish and not English philosophers, sorry I was a minute in and wanted to point that out

Any lectures on Carl Schmitt??

You know I had been struggling to wrap my head around Marxist philosophy for the last week and a half and the opening 2 minutes of this presentation were rather enlightening as to why that's been so difficult.

Does anybody know what happened to the 52 videos on the great ideas of philosophy a real shame if all that enlightenment was destroyed.

It's interesting listening to this lecture now during this kind of renaissance of Marxist thought at the failure and the end of the capitalist neoliberal project.

Get this man a bottle of water

"it's inherent in the system!" - Monty Python

I personally believe that "necessarily having false consciousness in the benefit of class interest" is the most insightful part of the Marxist thought. This is something that seems to be ingrained in humanity and the parasitic classes will not bother to address on the very nature of their cause. Readings of common sense by Thomas Paine points to a familiar picture of desperation for equality and separation of class values.

37:26 Stalin was the son of a cobbler, Mao was from a moderately well off peasant family, Thomas Sankara was a military man not an intellectual, Hugo Chavez too, Same with the sandinistas all poor people, so I'm not sure that criticism really stands

It can be very plausibly argued that Marx, ironically, saved capitalism from itself.

Are any of Dr. Sugrue's lectures available in essay format?

wonder if this was recorded close to the Cold War

Hunt game, gather firewood. Roots and berries weren't a thing for most of human existence.