Hello everybody, today on ideology explained we will go over an actual ideology and not
just an economic system!
I will tell you about Marxism.
To sum it up shortly you could say Marxism is the school of thought started by Karl Marx.
I don’t like that answer because it’s quite obvious and it doesn’t actually tell
us what Marxism is.
So, what is Marxism?
Simply put it’s a mostly scientific way to criticize capitalism.
I often see people confuse or conflate it with socialism or communism, cough Jordan
Peterson, cough but those are actually very different things.
Please remember this: Marxism tells you what’s wrong with capitalism but doesn’t tell you
how to fix it.
Communism is a utopia in which the problems of capitalism don’t exist anymore, and socialism
is the attempt to get as close to that as possible.
Let’s now get back to Marxism.
How does it criticise capitalism?
Well there are a lot of things to choose from, Marx spend his whole life refining his theories
while I have just a few minutes.
Let me start by saying that Marxism is part of dialectics, this means that Marxists look
at society in terms of contradictions.
This means they have a look at our society and try to determine if there is a useful
distinction to be made between the people.
And they found these contradictions in multiple places.
For example, property values, landlords like them high, tenants like them low.
Or pay, employees like it high, employers like it low.
So, Marxists look at these opposing desires and classify people accordingly.
Those who own a factory or land against those who don’t.
Generally, you could say society consists of people who make money by owning and people
who make money by working.
Those who have the money, or capital, to afford to let others work for them where called capitalists
and the other people are called workers.
And in our current society those two groups are always fighting for dominance and depending
on who is winning the conditions change.
For example, the workers would increase the minimum wage while the capitalists would reduce
it.
This is called the class struggle or class warfare.
And if we look at this, we can see that the capitalists need employees to work in their
factories while the employees do not need a capitalist to be able to work.
This is why Marx thought that the only way this could be resolved would be an overthrow
of the capitalist class.
I’ll now name a few more problems of capitalism according to Marxism; alienation.
Capitalism puts people into assembly line jobs which prevents them from being proud
of what they create or even to be able to recognise something as the product of their
labour.
Another problem: Capital accumulates, I could explain this but really if you’ve ever played
monopoly you know how the free market ends up.
This is also why the poor have been getting poorer and the rich have been getting richer
for decades.
And here I would explain the labour theory of value, but I’ve already done that in
two other videos so just click the link in the top right and ignore the bad audio, it
was one of my first videos.
TLDR: Employers always steal value from employees.
There are many more points and I’ve made a video on why capitalism is bad as well so
you can watch that one instead.
Before the end let’s have a look at the way Marxism looks at history.
Basically, remember that class struggle?
Marx thought that all history is a class struggle.
This means that all significant historic developments where influenced or caused by a class struggle.
Keep in mind that in the past the classes where different.
An example: The rich private capitalists in France where unhappy with their king so they
abolished feudalism and replaced it with capitalism.
That was the French revolution.
Alternatively, the private landowners of the thirteen colonies weren’t happy with a feudal
king above them, issuing taxes and telling them what to do so they declared independence
and enshrined capitalism in their constitution.
That was the American war of independence.
If you want to see how fascism is interpreted by Marxism watch my video on “Fascism is
capitalism in decay” and if you want to see how a Marxist would explain the bee movie
I also have a video on that.
There is also the theory that peoples behaviours is caused by material conditions.
This means Marx didn’t think that rich people are evil for being rich but that being rich
in capitalism puts you in positions in which you have to be evil.
Like cutting down the rain forest for profit.
And that’s about it.
Thanks for watching!
C ya!
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