Why Marxism? with Dr. C Bradley Thompson 

This is absolute gold. Thank you.

I'll select just one thing to criticize from this silly speech, Thompson claiming that "under communism for example, it became a crime punishable by death to be a member of the bourgeoisie." At no point did Marx and Engels call for the bourgeoisie to be "punished by death" for the mere act of being bourgeois. Engels wrote that, "In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity." They certainly did believe that the state primarily exists as an organ of repression in the hands of a particular class (whether of slaveowners, feudal nobility, or capitalists), and that the working-class would need to build its own state for the transition period between capitalism and communism in order to defend itself against efforts by capitalists to overthrow it. But this has nothing to do with executing people merely for being capitalists. Engels, again, noted that in regard to capitalist owners of large tracts of land, "We by no means consider compensation [for nationalization] as impermissible in any event; Marx told me (and how many times!) that, in his opinion, we would get off cheapest if we could buy out the whole lot of them." This would obviously be nonsensical if the recipients of such compensation were to subsequently be taken out back and shot. Lenin similarly wrote of the workers' state making use of capitalist initiative in the transitional period, and Mao (in the early-mid 1950s, before his swing to ultra-left positions from the late 50s onward) went so far as to say that, "The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods. However, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie will change into a contradiction between ourselves and the enemy if we do not handle it properly and do not follow the policy of uniting with, criticizing and educating the national bourgeoisie, or if the national bourgeoisie does not accept this policy of ours." But of course, it is certainly true that attempting to become a capitalist in the Soviet Union from the 1930s onward, and in the bulk of other socialist and socialist-oriented countries, could get you imprisoned if not shot. The reason is quite simple: the ruling parties in these countries believed, erroneously, that they had the material and technical prerequisites to live in a socialist society. The fact that socialism as it actually existed in the USSR and other countries during the 20th century was accompanied by black markets, corruption, and other problems was a consequence of the fact that these countries' productive forces were backward compared to that which makes socialism necessary. Rather than acknowledge this, the ruling parties doubled down and tried to suppress unauthorized manifestations of market activity, no matter on how meager a scale. Marx and Engels (and not just them) repeatedly pointed out that socialism requires a requisite level of productive forces. To quote Marx, "No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society." This is a lesson that Deng Xiaoping and his successors have cited. Once the requisite level of productive forces are reached and socialist/communist society established on this basis, capitalism will have become obsolete and there would no longer be any objective basis for the emergence of a new bourgeoisie, just like nobody in America fears that slaveowners or feudal nobility are going to reemerge. Thus, leaving aside instances where individual capitalists seek to overthrow the workers' state, there is nothing in Marxism that necessitates violence against the bourgeoisie. Marxists certainly expect many if not most capitalists to violently react to the loss of their political and economic domination as a class, much as American slaveowners feared their economic prospects and command over national politics were jeopardized by the election of Lincoln, but it would be silly to blame "Marxism" as such for that.

I'd like to call this propaganda, but it's way too stupid for that. It's just bad TV.