Really great lecture. Thanks for making the connections to current events, examples, and personalities. Makes the material immediately understandable and simple.
The problem that Mark‘s sites and capitalism pre-dates capitalism itself Mark says nothing about nature, and a struggle to of life itself. Marks attributes all of man’s woes to class struggle Major problem all the good is on the side of the proletariat, all the bad is the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are evil and must be eradicated. Major problem of class identity… someone’s moral worth by their economic standing The dictatorship of the proletariat.
Another complication in the relationship between the work and the owner or owners of the business is the degree of training required for the worker to efficiently perform the work assigned. Henry Ford discovered fairly quickly that work on his assembly lines was so mind-numbing that his plants experienced a very high level of turnover. He solved the turnover problem and increased his net profits by increasing the wages of his employees well above what they could otherwise obtain. Eventually, organized labor negotiated an industry-wide level playing field for working conditions, wages and benefits. And, eventually, workers were trained to perform multiple tasks and to work as teams -- innovations that yielded greater worker satisfaction and, hence, a commitment to quality performance, which eventually resulted in the manufacturing of automobiles competitive with those manufactured in other countries.
I love this series... were there only seven lectures? I'm curious about the format... who was the original audience intended to be? Clearly us on RU-vid, but is this a graduate or an undergrad audience in the room? Just curious. Thanks so much for this!
Yep, there were only 7 lectures. The audience was primarily a mix of graduate and undergraduate students, but I believe that there was also a prof or two who would occasionally sit in.
@@bksocha292 Yea, if I remember correctly, he originally planned 10 lectures or something like that but eventually decided to do the whole thing in 7 lectures and cut some of the later stuff that he had planned.
Whatever the structure of the ownership of the means of production, the motivation of human invention is to increase productivity, to increase the output of each unit of input of land, labor and capital goods. Every year the aggregate output of goods increases even as the labor input is reduced. Part of the reason is improved technologies. Part of the reason is improved forms of capital goods. And, part of the reason is the improved knowledge and skills of human beings. A worker-owned and worker-managed cooperative business enterprise will still pursue efficient use of inputs in the same way that a business owned by passive holders of corporate shares of stock. With regard to cycles of boom and bust, Henry George recognized as a fundamental driver what Marx also observed but dismissed the solution George came to as a mitigation only. Research by economists such as Mason Gaffney (emeritus, University of California) confirm George's analysis. Absent the significant public collection of the rent of land, land markets will succumb every 18-21 years to the stresses of land speculation. The crash that occurs is deeper and lasts longer when fueled by cheap and readily available credit (as occurred in the 2000s, leading to the crash of 2008).
Actually the first part just isn’t historically true. Angela Davis gives a brilliant example (although I’m not sure it’s original): one of the key drivers of tension between the northern and southern states was that slave labour was technologically stagnating. Northern capitalists had developed a relatively advanced factory economy, while southern slave owners were still mostly dependant on raw manual labour because they could get it so, so cheap. The north wanted to abolish slavery, in part for humanitarian reasons but also because it would eliminate inconvenient competition from people who didn’t have to pay their workers, but the south knew that the north had such a technological head start that it would be virtually impossible for them to compete in the Sweet Olde Free Market once they started paying labourers.
Efficiency is always pursued, yes, but changing the distribution of the means of production changes 1. what goal is driven towards efficiently (e.g feudal economies and capitalist economies drive after very different economic goals) and 2. what types of changes are prioritised in the push for efficiency (e.g more efficient control over slaves and slave families, more efficient use of factory technology to drive down the cost of labour, etc)
All this stuff gets analysed in Capital Vol. 1, so if this video has peaked your interest I really strongly encourage you to check out David Harvey’s very comprehensive lecture series on the book, all of which is on RU-vid
First I would like to say that I greatly appreciate your lectures even tough I have no significant philosophical background. There is however something that is bothering me about the objection Marxs is giving to the concepts of profit and maybe someone here might be able to remove them. When he describes the way how profits are generated by paying the workers less for their Labour then what is generated with it he presents that as an alternativ for previous ideas. However it seems to me that it is perfectly comapatabel with those he just focuses on a different aspect. Both the rather simpel minded concept of having a fixed profit margin applied at every step of production or the concept that without financial compensation no capital would be invested since doing nothing would be equally beneficial for thee capitalist dont make a claim to why these concepts would work or where these profits are taken from. I might misunderstand something here but especially in the second case this is rather munificent in my opinion. The fact that the additional value generated through the act of combining Labour an resources would have to necessarily be given to the capitalist, since otherwise non would exist seems to strengthen his objections to capitalism as a whole.
I think this is the standard claim, that the profit should go to the risk taker, the employer. And labour is an expense impacting profit. And the price is as high as you can get away with.
Great lecture. Marx's criticism of Capitalism was of his time. I wonder about painting with the same brush for our times. All of us listening are part of the present capitalism. Wolff is of his time, and it looks like he did very well in the present system. I would ask about the practical historical development of Capitalism and Socialism? Are all capitalists lovers of money or is there something else driving modern capitalists? While talking about the 'class struggle' did Marx consider that there would rise up a middle class? For example, most of us live better now than the elites of times past. And consider also the countries that are actually products of Marxism, like China or the former USSR alongside the Democratic Republic for all its faults? People do not want to immigrate to China.
People do immigrate to China. Make sure to investigate that for yourself. The climate for US and EU students and investors or entrepreneurs has changed in the past decade with regards to desire to love to China, but these past decades of its development drew in a lot of people. There's also a surprising amount of people from around the world that immigrate to China for various reasons, including Africans. Then, not surprisingly, regional immigrants from other Asian and east Asian countries as well. We might materially live better than elites in eras past, but the class structures are still in place while exacerbated to an even higher degree than in the past. Elon Musk for example is rewarded as though he were millions of times smarter than the median income people he employs, but maybe the worth is a bad measure. The power dynamics seem a bit more exaggerated as well. Industrial militaristic capital for example vaporizing non-combatant children abroad, there's almost no parallel comparison to that level of power in feudal or early modern times; maybe it's the equivalent of the British imperials gunning down Zulu's, but even that is manual and personal compared to 2000 lbs bombs dropped on apartments in the middle east. Last I checked each head in Gaza costs the US around $700k. Macabre, but these are the extremities of power and capital on the bleeding edge - no pun intended. Marx did describe the middle class, they were the bourgeois of his day as well as ours. Today we might describe them as upper middle class, and the remainder of our remaining and shrinking middle class is hybridized and being re-subsumed into the proletariat (paradoxically or not, in part due to historic relocation of capital and manufacturing to places like China, turns out those communists made for keen capitalists! for all that labor exploration!) Liberalism and capitalism, as he described it, were products of the bourgeois-middle class - these things were intertwined him his historical materialism dialectic. And as discussed in the previous lectures, Marx considered capitalism and the bourgeoisie as the most revolutionary force that had existed up until that point (and he probably wouldn't have been all that surprised by how far things went into the 20th century, and he would've been very disappointed with the Soviet hipsters that thought state heavy suppression of the revolutionary elements had anything to do with Marx. Oh but how well the American and European middle class did when a little bit of socialism was sprinkled into capitalism, chefs kiss!) Marx was trying to go beyond liberalism, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary and extend and catalyze that revolution to the proletariat instead of only cloistering the liberal and capitalist revolutions solely into the suburbs and the towers of capital. Imagine if class was abolished upward in a similar fashion as the bourgeoisie had emerged. Whatever the means, that was the goal. Surplus and dignity for all, so to speak. But his critique remains dizzyingly accurate to this day for sure. If capitalists have been subsuming the state for some time for example, companies with profits and worth higher than many gdp's of nations (even US states!) It's a very fun and ghastly exercise to go around looking at things through Marx's lens. Survival and competition are driving capital, as far as I understand, but those are alienating forces. A lot of people feel they work for nothing, and for a lot of people the job market is completely alienating, you are your resumé instead of a person. Have an in depth conversation with an owl servant person about their place of work and there's a lot of counterintuitive contradictions that illustrate how much the economy isn't working for people. (Keynesian principle if I recall correctly: is the economy within society or society within an economy?) My girlfriend for example, as the lowest senior manager of a medium sized engineering firm, not only paid at least $20k less than industry standard, and the employer just seemed to conveniently forget about the benefits and pension in her contract, whilst she's saddled with at least twice her workload from different departments, and then her business related travel expenses are reneged at the last minute. Yes, she needs to quit and better job, but she has to wait for that opportunity, because getting hired somewhere could take a year or two, can't risk quitting or unemployment or getting fired (for her tenuous "low" performance because she's inherently undervalued). Capitalism doesn't know how to solve these contradictions, and the pathological, poor, and possibly even illegal management of the company's owner and core partners is simply rewarded as good and capable business practice. This is just a snapshot up and down the entire economy, globally. Laden with inherent injustices; it robs your dignity in many cases instead of providing it for you; as it grinds your spirit and health down, as your life drips away; meanwhile everyone's wondering what happened to society. Marx KNEW exactly what he was talking about and more or less predicted all of the outcomes. How much further can it go? Wait until Elon gets to Mars or the Moon and can evade labor rights laws, or laws in general for that matter lol. Good show, good comment and questions sir, thank you for the exercise.
Zany = Chaos. What Hegel was trying to explain was the necessity of the irrational. Your description of the debate that had been going on since Plato left Aristotle out of his will validates my intuitions of Marx going back to 1962. It’s a pleasure to listen to someone who takes such pleasure in actually understanding Marx except for Hegel. Newton, Kant and Hegel recognized that Newton’s calculus had serindipedously tripped over chaos, the dynamical interactions of the elements of the universe that makes thinks actually work. And it is all irrational. Take fire: how does that actually work? How do you build a model to feed New York City for a day? At some point, it just happens. It helps to know the mind of God. ZIP Codes are a snap shot of the mind of GOD. Topology is the mathematics of the mind of God and Number is the metaphysical figure of the mind of God. Those are both Rational components of the Mind of God. I would probably add Euclid as a third element of the mind of God. The fourth element is the the irrational behaviors of the Spirt of the Lord in Genesis 1:2. 19 is the Alpha and Omega of Number. The fact that it originates from the mind of Islam is significant. I’ve studied numerology since I took Finite Math the summer before my Freshman year at IU. The SDS was holding public debates on campus every Thursday in Dunn Meadow basically protesting America’s commitment to Vietnam. I’m an Army brat and I had friends who were in Saigon when the Viet Cong declared war as a proxy for the godless commie cocksuckers in Hanoi and they were evacuated in 24 hours: The Army wasn’t going to let the Philippines happen again to their camp followers. I am mildly dyslexic. It has complicated my life in various ways and a graduate student in the Finite Math course suggested i learn how to do numerology as a method to mediate the effect and it works as well as without it is about the best I can say. Number is a figure of speech in literature and the Bible is just chock full of number in at least three layers. But the adoption of Arabic symbols for basic arithmetic and the invention of “0” as a place holder is a metaphysically necessary game changer. I happen to believe in Intelligent Design, which could be another title for Process Theology, and how we get from the Hebrew Gematria to 0,1 is through Sura 74:32 “ Above it is 19” , This is the clearest portrait of the mind of God in literature and establishes the divine origin of the Meccan verses of the Koran. The rest are the musings of a psychopath. So, the question Kant proposes is: what exactly is the cognitive organization of the mind of God and how can we access a priori data directly. I do not believe in God: God has given me a sample of the torture Mohammad went through to obtain the recitation in order to pass it on. The discovery of chaos at the end of Newton’s dilution of gravity machine makes things like fusion probable. The senses are irrational and are mediated by iNtuition, which is sort of the plasma that occurs from everything that is going on in the experience of the person. Thinking and Feeling are the rational component of the psyche that lets us learn from experience. The problem, of course, is that Feeling are those values anchored in the libido and irrational. A dangerous conceit of the Feeling function is that it can rise above the Pucker Factor. Feeling IS the Pucker Factor that may be potty trained but is eternally anal. Hegel is the guy who gets to the mouth of the Cave and is trying to describe the color red to the guys who are still locked in place watching shadows of the wall. Of course, when he got to the mouth of the cave, he met Newton and Kant trying to convince Hume there was suck a thing as Cause and Effect. Thinking is what Hume is all about. Jung’s Thinking function is the White Horse of Reason pulling the Parable of the Chariot across the Tabula Rasa of Locke’s experiential construct. And Feeling is the Black Horse of Passion in brace with Reason but constantly pulling against the lead drawn by its self-indulgent appeal to lusts and irrational appetites. The Chariot, of course, is the Ego, generally, and consciousness, in particular. As a function of the Pucker Factor, the individual consciousness can Extrovert and Introvert automatically as a function of requisite variety, but, as we satisfy those contingencies, we gain controlling variety and can deliberately dissociate as a creative strategy. And Hegel provides a reliable roadmap for tracing the effects of historic bench marks and as a reliable structure for projecting pro-active strategies forward in time through the mechanisms of capitalism as a tool of intelligent design. Well, I go stuck at timestamp 4:49 . I’ll watch the rest of it. Like I say, my intent is to encourage Biden voters to watch this series and the one on Kant to validate the wisdom of their leap of faith by voting for Biden. It was a good bet and you are helping explaining why. Among other things. it will reveal the fraud in Steve Bannon’s claim that he is a Leninist. Bannon is a George Lincoln Rockwell neo-Nazi and he seduced Trump into thinking that way. Trump was channeling George Lincoln Rockwell in his Inaugural Address. Him and Pat Buchanan.
@@groggod666 Well, you know how it is: Goblins are never very smart, but they are always dangerous. And they taste like bacon to sharks, which is why there has been an up-tick of sharks around Florida, with all the Goblins are produced by the any Fascism of Florida politics
Shouldn’t the owner of capital be compensated for the risk of losing the capital, when the product didn't sell, and that compensation is the profit. The workers if the product did not sell remain with the salary taken from the money advanced by the capitalist and the capitalist will internalize the loss
Risk and loss aren't what contain value, and value is also arbitrary. If those were valuable, then making the worst decisions for risk and loss possible would guarantee the highest order of profit and success. Why should the market reward the capitalist for apparently not taking enough risk and for taking loss? They aren't guaranteed to make profit because they take risks, and (unless they're in a socialistic system) can't be buttressed from total loss (you are advocating for a socialist safety net for the socialist in which the capitalist is guaranteed profit). The true market and true capitalist system doesn't give a damn about the capitalist, the risk, or the loss and they can all go to hell, punished even for the best possible sound decisions and adequate or even low risk. The point is, in capitalism, none of that actually matters, which is how a capitalist venture sows the seeds for its own destruction. Maybe there's more to life - and should be - than risk and return, rewards and losses. The capitalist could've spent more time with his family, or considered a less risky application of his own labor and capital, or studied Marx.
