Marx: A Complete Guide to Capitalism (“All I know is that I am no Marxist. God save me from my friends.”- Marx/and real Marxist Michael Hudson on current events)

I often hear people using “Marxist” and “socialist” as insults, typically without understanding what they mean, having been fed only dogmas and propaganda. I don’t fully agree with everything in this video, but it’s the most comprehensive overview I’ve seen, even though it only scratches the surface, and it’s over two hours long. I’ve selected a few parts that I hope will motivate you to watch it, especially if you’re inclined to call others “socialist” or “Marxist” as insults. Marx’s work is not some kind of bible; it’s not about finding someone to tell you what to do. Instead, Marx’s work should simply make you think.

The most simplified takeaway I got from Marx is that capital generates capital, which naturally leads to its accumulation. A person with capital will generate more capital than someone without it, and the natural result is the concentration of capital. (I heard someone describe it even more simply: capitalism is like a game of coin tossing. If you gave every person in the world one coin and let everyone play for an infinite amount of time, in the end, one person would have all the coins. Just like with unrestricted capital, in the end, one person would have all the capital.)

30:29

“For Marx, this new focus on material conditions, social relations, and physical life demanded a new method to understand capitalism. The old philosophy just wouldn’t suffice. He was fascinated by aspects of life that couldn’t be adequately understood by simply reflecting on ideas. For example, he asked, would machines protest?

He borrows from Benjamin Franklin the notion that humans are a tool-making species, which distinguishes us from animals. Engels studied the working conditions in and around his father’s factories in Manchester, seeking to bring philosophy down from the heavens.

For a long time, peasants in rural France and Germany had a traditional right to collect wood and twigs from forests for their fires. But in the 1820s, as enclosures advanced and capitalism and property rights expanded, laws were passed that ended these ancient rights.

Hegel and Rousseau had argued that the state could be a neutral representation of the general will, unbiased and representing everyone’s interests. But these new wood theft laws revealed a flaw in that logic for Marx. By banning poor peasants from collecting wood to keep warm, the government sided with wealthy landowners over ordinary people.

In other words, the state had become a vehicle for the property-owning class, holding economic power above all else and acting against the poor. Engels later wrote that he often heard Marx say that it was precisely his concern with the wood theft law and the situation of the Moselle peasants that shifted his focus from pure politics to economic conditions, eventually leading him to socialism.

…

This perspective led Marx into economics, where he combined it with philosophy. His German newspaper had been shut down, so he moved to Paris but was expelled again, finally ending up in Britain. He spent months in the British Library studying economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, filling notebook after notebook.

Marx was critical of economists like Smith, who attempted to explain commercial society’s new logic by assuming a foundational individual selfishness. Smith famously argued that it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interests. Marx rejected this view, writing that production by an isolated individual outside of society is as absurd as developing language without other people. He criticized economists for viewing society as a collection of isolated individuals lacking true relations with one another, creating a disjointed social system.”

1:26:25

“If a single capitalist can produce more—more tables, for instance—within a working day, while paying the same wages, they can either sell these tables at a lower price than competitors or sell them at the same price and keep more profit. However, the competitive logic of capitalism dictates that if one capitalist doesn’t make this choice, a competitor will. This is a fundamental insight of Marx. He does not argue dogmatically that this happens everywhere, all the time, nor that capitalists are intentionally cruel or malicious. Instead, he asserts that there is an inherent motivation, a force, that compels capital to operate in this way; otherwise, someone else will step in, make a cheaper product, and capture the market. He writes, ‘The influence of individual capitals on one another has the effect precisely that they must conduct themselves as capital.’

In other words, capital is a system with its own logic, independent of individual capitalists. This system exerts downward pressure on wages and demands increased productivity, not necessarily to generate immense wealth, but simply to stay competitive. Marx writes, ‘The minimum wage is the center towards which the current rates of wages gravitate.’ There may be cultural expectations regarding minimum wages, such as safe working conditions, regulations, oversight, and even journalists who occasionally push for better wages, improved safety, or more holiday time. But ultimately, a force puts downward pressure on wages. If a capitalist pays workers more than their competitors out of kindness, the final product costs more, and they risk going out of business. If they shorten the working day while competitors extend theirs, making their product cheaper and production more efficient, they also risk going out of business.

This is how individual capitals merge into a single, homogenous force, and capital itself becomes an impersonal, inhuman force. It exerts a ‘magical’ effect on those within its influence, compelling them to abide by the logic of capitalist production.”

1:45:23

“Well, they’re certainly not everything, because machines owned by a few extract productivity from the rest. The motivation to increase productivity is the desire to sell more and sell cheaper. So, while capitalism makes some things cheaper, workers—who make up a large portion of society—are also commodities, subject to the same forces and pressures on wages, hours, and productivity.

It becomes a vicious circle. Everywhere you look, machines are doing work that used to be done by people. It’s machine after machine, until things start to feel out of control. You write simply that the machine is a means for producing surplus value. He compares it to traditional handicrafts, where an old worker, like a woodworker, would use a tool. In the new factory, however, the machine uses him. Machines dominate and absorb living labor power.

Technology, then, is a double-edged sword. It can improve our lives, but it also spurs competition, leads to concentration, raises barriers to entry, and makes it harder for startups to compete. As competition grows, more and more people are pushed out of work. Where capitalism once began in small-scale artisan workshops, it ends in highly advanced industries extracting inhuman amounts of surplus value, with global technological conglomerates trampling labor. Capitalist brutalism preys on anything it can find, consolidating surplus into larger and larger piles, expanding factories, and seeking out anything that can be commodified.”

1:52:57

“What we have is a pressure cooker on a large-scale society. Let’s recap and look at the ingredients thrown into this explosive pot. First, the division of labor: workers are fragmented into performing meaningless, single, repetitive tasks, which alienates and dehumanizes them. Then there’s the downward pressure on wages and the relative impoverishment of the proletariat compared to the bourgeoisie. A reserve labor army sits idle with no work.

Then come the booms and busts: overproduction, layoffs, takeovers, and recessions. Next, we see the rise of bigger, more monstrous companies that are impossible to compete with, leading to concentration and monopolies, centralization, and the tendency of profit rates to fall.

All of this polarizes society into two extremes: on one side, an endless drive to ‘accumulate, accumulate,’ as Marx says. On the other, however, something emerges out of this chaos: a class consciousness, a privileged perspective that arises uniquely from these material conditions. This is a state of consciousness that understands its place in history—the consciousness of the proletariat.” (maybe if not dumbing down people and propaganda)

2:11:33

“Marx’s relevance is difficult to escape. If we set aside the idea of needing to be a Marxist or anti-Marxist, a capitalist or socialist, it becomes undeniable that his work still offers relevant insights and useful analyses. He would want his readers to read critically, aiming not to inspire followers, but to inspire change.

In other words, he was emphatically not dogmatic. He sought to encourage a different, fluid, active, and creative way of thinking—and importantly, action. Toward the end of his life, he remarked, “All I know is that I am no Marxist. God save me from my friends.”

I’ll end with a quote from a letter of Marx’s, where he called for a “ruthless criticism of everything that exists.” He wrote, “We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle. Here is the truth; kneel down before it. We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world, ‘See your struggles, they are foolish. We will give you the true slogan of struggle.’ We merely show the world what it is really fighting for. And consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”

Now, if deeper, abstract philosophical concepts aren’t your thing, here is a real Marxist—someone with a view similar to mine—commenting on the current situation. This is Marx’s ideas applied to our present context.

1:29:02

“Crisis and contemporary politics—what do you think the long-term impact of these events will be, and what does the future hold for us? Well, maybe there won’t even be a long-term. We don’t know whether Biden will ultimately yield to the neocons and bomb Iran, in which case Iran might retaliate against Israel. The neocons and the Democrats seem dead set on dominating the entire Near East, essentially aiming to control the world’s oil supply. Oil is key to energy use per worker, for lighting, for fuel. The whole center of American foreign policy revolves around oil, and it’s willing to go to war over this. They are, in many ways, dangerous people. I’ve met them; I know them. They are driven by hatred, and, at a fundamental level, they are fighting against civilization itself.

There’s a common denominator between America, Ukraine, and Israel: they all operate with the belief that those outside their groups are subhuman. The Ukrainians have said they want to eliminate the Slavs, the Russians, viewing them as a different species. The rhetoric claims they’ve evolved into a new species called American democracy, and anyone outside this group is a threat that must be literally exterminated. These are the words they’re using—they’re echoing Nazi ideologies. Netanyahu’s speeches include the same language, referring to certain people as subhuman. If any group claims that another group is subhuman, this is a fight against civilization.

The only thing civilization can do, and this is what China, Russia, and the global majority realize, is to shun and isolate such entities. I don’t know how they’re going to resolve the issue in Israel without drastic measures. It’s the same with Ukraine, which seems almost self-destructive at this point. The struggle of World War II is essentially being refought, with America siding with ideologies similar to those of the Nazis, positioning America and its allies as a new species that feels compelled to eliminate those who don’t align with their orbit, viewing them as a threat to their ‘human species’ and labeling everyone else as subhuman. This form of racism far exceeds anything previously considered in the realm of identity politics, but this is precisely the struggle we’re witnessing.”

“Whoever was not a socialist in youth will be a son of a bitch in old age.” – Józef Piłsudski