PREVIEW-Episode 70: Marx on the Human Condition

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 70 is something like, what is human nature? And we read part one of Karl Marx's book, the German Ideology, written in 1846 but unpublished until something like 1932. You can join the discussion, get the text, and read loads of supplemental material@the partselexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmeier in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:42 Mark: Shall we do some ground rules?

0:44 Wes: Sure.

0:46 Mark: Number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy.

0:52 Seth: Number two, no name dropping. Oh, shit. I picked the one that you have to come up with. The clever thing.

1:01 Mark: Don't say.

1:02 Seth: Don't say. Just make your point. For example, you don't say. Well, you'd only understand if you'd read the Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason.

1:15 Wes: Back to you, Mark.

1:16 Mark: I think that number three is for you, Wesley.

1:19 Wes: What's number three?

1:19 Mark: Number 70. 70. We've had 70 episodes. We've read the rules at least 40 times in those 70 episodes.

1:28 Wes: Wait, what was number one again?

1:31 Mark: Try to assume that our audience is dumbasses. Number three is something about rigor.

1:39 Wes: Oh, we will try to be rigorous and exact. Unless it's more fun not to. Something like that.

1:48 Mark: There you go.

1:52 Wes: I really don't know the rules.

1:56 Mark: And yet you follow them nonetheless.

1:59 Wes: I do. I'm a stickler for the unwritten rule.

2:02 Mark: It's the knowledge. How rather than knowledge that.

2:05 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

2:07 Mark: Praxis. Hey, why? The guy we're reading today is someone who advocates praxis. Mr. Karl Marx? Pretty much. If I say anything that is outside the scope of the immediate text that we read here, it's because I listened to some lectures by Ivan Szelenyi. S, Z E L E N Y I from Yale. I'll link folks to that. But he has a course on social theory and about five lectures on Marx in there. And one of his big things to emphasize is the difference between the Marx that people know about, which is the later Marx who wrote Das Kapital and. And was very. Just this adamant revolutionary and really eschewed philosophy altogether.

Obviously he wrote a lot, but he was a practical dude. And the earlier Marx who. Well, there's still some of that in there. In fact, the book that we read this time is largely an attack on contemporary German philosophy to say that philosophy itself is just what you've been programmed because of your social class.

3:10 Wes: He actually, he failed to get an appointment as a professor. Think he was like 23 when he was looking. And then he basically became a journalist. So that may be part of his disillusionment with philosophy.

3:23 Mark: Yeah, but he started out, and by the time of this book, he wrote this when he was 26, 27, he was still engaging, at least with the philosophical establishment, which was Hegel. Yeah, Hegel and more. So the young Hegelians, in the wake of Hegel's death, there are all these people, and of course, we've done some Hegel episodes and there are so many different directions one can go from Hegel. And Hegel wrote on so many different things and wrote so obscurely that you can come up with just completely contradictory philosophies that both call themselves Hegelian for

3:53 Wes: our purposes and Mark's purposes. The most important and fashionable idea at the time was that ideas drive history, basically. So we remember from the phenomenology of spirit, Hegel sort of maps out this history of consciousness, you could call it, which in many ways is a history of the spirit of various different epochs. You know, at some point you get this transition, say from Stoicism to skepticism or something like that, you know, unhappy consciousness. All these different forms of collective consciousness that Hegel characterizes. Human beings are human beings of their own times.

They're shaped by this form of collective consciousness. And it has its own dynamic in a way. The history of human beings in this sense is a history of thought because the kinds of great ideas that philosophers have actually filter into the public discourse and social life. And lots is determined by that. And so this is part of what Marx is going to object to. I guess we should also say something about what the young Hegelians were doing with Hegel.

4:57 Seth: Yeah.

4:58 Mark: So a lot of this book, which we should say, so the book itself is this giant, sprawling two volume thing that was submitted for publication and I guess rejected that. The publisher said, yes, things have changed and we're not going to publish this. And so they.

5:11 Wes: It's also a repetitive, irritable, sarcastic rant, right?

5:16 Mark: And a lot of it is like there's whole sections, parts that we did not read largely that are ripping on some of these young Hegelians. So Bruno Bauer is one guy he calls St. Bruno and Max Stirner. St. Max he calls throughout here. The book as a whole is written by Marx and Engels, but at least the editor of The Marx collection that I am reading here, Robert Tucker, I see, opined that this part that we read, which is the part that people generally read of the German ideology, is pretty much all Marx. It's elaborating the notes of this other work called Theses on Feuerbach, who's another one of the young Hegelians, that he was writing at the same time. Right. As they kicked off this collaborative work.

5:57 Wes: We'll refer to the collective Marx and Engels as just Marx.

6:02 Mark: Right, right. From what I hear, from what the lectures told me, Marx was the genius who came up with the original ideas anyway. Engels was actually kind of a clear writer, clearer thinker. Maybe he was a good editor on this particular. Well, a good editor, an editor on this particular work that we read. But yeah, we don't really have to worry about them. So the young Hegelians, a lot of what they were concerned with were the theological parts of Hegel, that in fact this absolute spirit, you were saying the phenomenology is kind of a picture of the evolution of consciousness.

Well, the end point, when you take that to the philosophy of history and we have an episode on that, if you look way Back to episode 15, it's sort of the collective understanding of humanity gradually understanding itself. And that actually becomes equivalent to the creation of God that we create God. God is existence itself coming to understand itself so that it might start as this blind bunch of forces. But then is there a God? Well, maybe there's a Spinozic God or something to start with, or a will in the way that Schopenhauer would talk about it or who knows.

But by the end of history you would have this full blown personal God. Yeah, so that's a crazy ass view.

7:15 Wes: And this, you know, and the state is co, relatively evolving as well. So for Hegel, this sort of history of consciousness, of spirit had reached its end point and it reached it in the Prussian state and in philosophically it reached it in Hegel and religiously it reached it in Christianity and Jesus. These are all the end points of this historical development and essentially the perfection of it. So the end of history has reached there.

7:40 Seth: Yeah, yeah. There's another important point that is going to be a huge issue for Marx with respect to Hegel and that's that this development of spirit's consciousness or of consciousness, it's a movement towards freedom and the realization of reason in spirit, in the world, blah, blah, blah, ultimately is an expression of realization of the freedom that corresponds to this development of consciousness where you come to this realization of self consciousness. Marx obviously is going to be putting forth the thesis that we're actually moving the other direction. That's a critical element as well.

8:19 Mark: Right. But they both share a conception of freedom that we've talked about in terms of Kant and others before. That freedom is not freedom from. It's not just being left alone. It's having sort of support in a certain way. So having a supportive society. For Marx, it comes down, I think, a lot of this to having productive interactions with others, that they're dealing with you as a whole person and not as an instrument.

8:44 Seth: Yeah, I get that. I'm not saying that they had necessarily radically different ideas of freedom. What I'm saying is that for Hegel there's been this inexorable unidirectional march towards freedom. And what Marx is basically saying is actually we haven't been moving towards freedom, We've been moving quite away from that with respect to individuals being free to self determine and self act actualize.

9:06 Wes: But I think he'll see this progression from early communities to feudalism to capitalism and then to communism. That's a similar sort of progression to the one we see in Hegel. It's just material. So I think with Marx will be sort of embracing Hegel's structure but rejecting his idealism. And he's pivoting off the young Hegelians who, you know, the young Hegelians came along and rejected or criticized the religious aspect of Hegel, and they were essentially atheists and they criticized his abstractness and his idealism. And you know, one of the criticisms of the religion, for instance, is the idea of an incarnation of Jesus as this idea of the spirit being incarnated in one individual.

Marx comes along at a certain point. He was a young Hegelian himself, and then he breaks with him. But for Marx, their criticisms don't really go far enough because they still see religion and ideas as the driving force of history, and they still see the road to emancipation as paved with the development of new ideas. But for Marx, that development actually comes from what he calls material conditions. So you can't come along and write the Communist Manifesto at the wrong time in history when the forces of production don't line up and when other material conditions don't line up properly, you're not going to produce communism simply through the propagation of ideas.

The propagation of ideas is actually secondary to or superstructure to, or you might say epiphenomenal to these material conditions.

10:40 Seth: Yeah, I say we table it, But I'll just say that where hegel sees a kind of linear progression from a state of freedom only for the few towards freedom for the many, or freedom in itself. I think because Marx talks about the revolutionary moment, his progression is not towards. But actually it's almost like you have to go away from it and get to a point. That's kind of what I meant by that is.

11:02 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a great point. Yeah. One of the conditions of revolution is that you have this tremendous amount of conflict or tension, which, again, you know, this is reflective of the Hegelian dialectic, where you have to produce a contradiction to move on to the next stage.

11:15 Mark: Just one more thing on the young Hegelians. So another way of referring to the movements after Hegel that I was reading about was to break them down into the right Hegelians and the left Hegelian. So the right Hegelians would be following Hegel's conservatism. Right. Hegel actually thought that the endpoint of this progression of spirit through history is the current Prussian state, which was a constitutional monarchy. And he was politically pretty conservative. That's where he came down at the end of his life. The young Hegelians or Left Hegelians. Now, I don't know if they're called young because they were young or because they are followers of the young Hegel who wrote the phenomenology rather than the old Hegel, who wrote the philosophy of Right. I'm not clear on that. But in any case, the Left Hegelians were politically radical. Right as well as being atheists for the most part.

11:57 Wes: Yet they eventually became radical. I think they started out less radical. Yeah, sure.

12:01 Mark: Interpreting miracles in naturalistic terms, for instance. So some of this was even in Hegel and his own way of modifying theology, which Schleiermacher is a figure that we had an episode on who's very much in this tradition. So Hegel had already broken orthodoxy. And already we said he has this very weird notion of God with that is an emphasis on things like reading the miracles in a naturalistic, metaphorical manner. So like one of the biggest young Hegelians was this guy named David Strauss, wrote the Life of Jesus critically Examined, who is a student of Schleiermacher's.

You know, it was caused a huge scandal because he characterized elements in the gospel as mythical in character. And then Bruno Bauer, one of the guys that Marx criticizes, actually is most famous for criticizing Strauss on this. Incidentally, Nietzsche was another guy that criticized Strauss and was encouraged by Bruno Bauer, one of these people that Marx Hates. So I know I'm name dropping like hell, but there was a lot of philosophical concentration going on here. And this all feeds into why Marx thinks that this critique that he's giving in German ideology is necessary because philosophy was a big freaking deal apparently in Germany at the time.

He says, like even sort of normal, decent citizens feel a flush of pride at this edifice of German philosophy. So I don't know that much about the history of the time, what was really going. But at least it's certainly described as if there was much more permeation of philosophy into the life of regular citizens than maybe we have today. I don't know.

13:28 Wes: The more that's at stake, apparently, the more nasty you need to be to your philosopher. Yes, I think he associated with at some point.

13:37 Mark: Right. Just to throw another name from our past into here. So remember, Kierkegaard was another one who in the wake of this Hegelianism that was dominating the church and Germany and its surrounding area at the time, reacted very violently against that in the opposite direction from Marx. That Kierkegaard was all about this personal authenticity. And that actually seems to be also what Feuerbach, who Marx talks about quite a bit in this work. Ludwig Feuerbach was another one of these young Hegelians, and Marx was very influenced by him. That's why this theses on Feuerbach is the work right before this and written contemporaneously with this.

Who is somebody that had already made this move that Marx is making toward materialism, but he just didn't think that he made the move toward materialism, but didn't make the move all the way toward praxis. I thought maybe a good way to kick this off is actually to read. Since this theses on Feuerbach thing is only 11 theses over just a little over two pages, is to read a couple of the theses because these kind of give in aphoristic form some of the things that are in German ideology that sound reasonable?

14:38 Wes: Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead.

14:40 Mark: So just the actual connection toward Feuerbach, which is this is the only one that mentions it spread over Thesis 5 and 8. Is Feuerbach not satisfied with abstract thinking? Appears to sensuous contemplation, but he does not conceive sensuous as practical human sensuous activity.

14:55 Seth: Why, yes, Socrates, you could say that.

14:58 Wes: Yes.

14:59 Mark: And then sort of following up a few theses later, the highest point attained by contemplative materialism, I.e. materialism, which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in civil society. So it's still taking the route that Kierkegaard took or somebody like this took taking the existentialist route, which almost all these guys following Hegel were existentialists of one sort or other. Marx is entirely against that. That you can't actually understand human nature or the human condition or any of that. As long as you're absorbed in navel gazing. As long as you're absorbed in making your own individual belief authentic and examining the psychology of the individual, it's a dead end.

15:39 Wes: Yeah, so Feuerbach, he was advocating this materialistic or humanist materialism, is that what it was called? But he doesn't attempt to derive the course of history from economics. Essentially, that's really the complaint. So he doesn't get beyond again, this idea that philosophical and religious ideas are the driving force of history. I don't know enough about Feuerbach to know whether that's true.

16:03 Mark: I'm just trying to set up that even before economics comes in, there's still this mood toward what we might call pragmatism or positivism, depending on what circles you're talking in. So one of these other theses, Feuerbach

16:14 Wes: has already made that. Yep, I already made that move.

16:17 Mark: The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but it is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, that is the reality and power the this sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. All of your griping about individual philosophic theories that are isolated from practice is a waste of freaking time. Yeah, it's just funny that, you know, we were just complaining at the end of the last episode about people who take this attitude. Well, it turns out there's many points of view from which one can criticize philosophy.

16:52 Wes: Yeah, yeah, no, I really, I thought of Callicles, especially at a certain part of this when he really starts to go off on people like section two of one, a production of consciousness, when he's in that tirade, it's worthy of Callicles.

17:08 Mark: And then the last thesis in here I wanted to read. And then I'll be done with this and I'm okay, there's two more. Three, the materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, that therefore changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. Hence this Doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as a revolutionizing practice.

So again, you might recognize we're influenced by our society or something like that, but you have to go further than that and actually do a hist analysis that if you're talking about nature versus nurture, you're still dwelling on the individual psychology, and you're not dwelling on, well, why is the nurture done that way?

17:55 Wes: Yeah. And you can call yourself a materialist and a positivist and still want to talk about things in terms of cultural influences, for instance. Right. How are individuals determined by their cultural influences? But as you're saying, for Marx, that's not going far enough because those cultural influences, culture, and the types of society we have are determined again by these material conditions, including. The thing that Marx is most concerned with is how it is we make our living, essentially what kind of work we do to fulfill our basic needs. And that, according to Marx, will have a very important role in shaping what it is that our culture is. And so what those cultural influences end up being.

18:40 Mark: Yep. And then the very last thesis Here, number 11, is the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

18:49 Seth: Now there's a famous quote.

18:50 Mark: Yeah.

18:51 Wes: You know, he could have just said, I'm less interested in being a philosopher now and I want to be an activist. I want to be a community organizer.

19:00 Mark: Which is one of the other reasons I heard. I guess I read in the intro here of why, when it got rejected for publication the first time, why they didn't sort of keep pushing this. Well, part of it is just that some of this is made up of this historical story of why communism necessarily comes to pass. And he revised that story a number of times before he got to his big work. Das Kapital, which was the one was actually ready for publication, was his big contribution to the philosophy. But that's like 20 years later. So that's part of it. But also just because he thought this whole thing was too philosophical, why am I still doing philosophy after I'm complaining that philosophy is a load of crap.

19:35 Wes: So something about mice at the very beginning? Yes. Okay. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose, self clarification. This is actually in a little introductory paragraph in the Marx Engels Reader. Yeah, but it's quoting Marx. We achieved our main Purpose, self, clarification. It wasn't published, but it helped him think through the pointlessness of thinking through.

20:01 Mark: Yep. Well, for the ideology proper. So there's a preface that's just three paragraphs that I wanted to read a little of, just to get a sense of the fun language used here. Hitherto, men have constantly made for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationship according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creation. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.

Let us revolt against the rules of thoughts. Let us teach men, says ones who exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man, says the second. To take up a critical attitude to them, says the third, to knock them out of their heads and existing reality will collapse. These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the young Hegelian philosophy, which is not only received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness.

The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep who take themselves and are taken for wolves, of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class. The boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions of Germany. Its aim is to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation. Once upon a time, a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity.

If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say, by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole lifelong he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

21:50 Wes: And that's where prospective publishers stopped reading the manuscript and put it into the. Into the pile marked crank. But it is fun.

22:02 Seth: Yeah, just a little side note on style. It's actually a tremendously readable text. There's definitely a lot of quasi Screed content where he goes off on various people, or continues in the first section in particular, talking about the young Hegelians. But in terms of laying out the theses and the ideas, it's very clearly written and very sort of. I would say, structurally, it makes a lot of sense. It builds on itself. It's not to be feared, at least the abridged version I have.

22:33 Mark: Well, it's funny that this is a text that's now cited as one of the most important ones for understanding Marx. But the text itself, there's parts in here that it's abridged because the original was too damaged to read. Like, oh, there's supposed to be four more pages here, but we can't read them. Sorry.

22:50 Wes: Yeah, the full version is. Yeah, abridged by necessity.

22:54 Mark: It's like we're reading one of the pre Socratics we're reading. This is not an extant text.

23:00 Wes: That's right. It's abridged by a material condition.

23:04 Mark: Well, like Kierkegaard, Marx, and then Marx and Engels working together. He just wrote a lot. And there are about four different unpublished attempts at writing a book from this era.

23:15 Wes: Engels was funding him. Right. Didn't Engels own a factory or something?

23:19 Mark: I'm not sure.

23:20 Wes: Marx didn't really have a source of income other than benefactors like Engels, who himself was the factory owner, ironically, which is probably completely wrong, as my things usually are.

23:34 Seth: Well, shall we get into it?

23:37 Wes: Yeah. Ideology in general, baby.

23:40 Seth: All right. For the listeners, they should know that I think all three of us are using different versions of the text, so we'll do our best to stay synced up here. The last section in the very first couple of pages, where he starts off opposition of the materialist and idealist outlook. He gives a criticism, or he sort of describes Hegel, the young Hegelians and the old Hegelians, and he sums up at the end of it sort of what his concern is, and I'll go ahead and read a quote. It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.

And essentially what he's saying is that the exercise of doing history from the idealist perspective, where you create a concept that you call consciousness or man or the one or self consciousness or substance or the unique, and then it becomes a thing, you reify it, and then it gains a sort of more reality than the actual material conditions of human beings, has been the great error that all the Hegelians have undertaken. Would you guys agree that that's a fair characterization?

24:55 Wes: Yeah. And then directly after that, he goes on to talk about this need, not for dogma, but for quote unquote, real premises.

25:03 Seth: Yes.

25:04 Wes: Who turn out to be the individuals and their activity and the material conditions under which they live.

25:10 Seth: I think I laughed out loud when I read this and I felt like I had to tell somebody else. This is in the section First Premises of Materialist Method. It says the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. The first premise of all human history is of course the existence of living human individuals.

Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relations to the rest of nature. He kind of goes on, the writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. So he makes a point about this, that there's nothing, at least in his criticism, there's nothing in the Hegelian model that actually requires or assumes the existence of individual living humans, actual, individual, particular human beings.

26:17 Wes: Its logic doesn't flow from the individuals, it goes in the opposite direction. Right. Marx is sort of a bottom up guy where Hegel is a top down guy.

26:27 Mark: Right. I actually re listened to our episode on Hegel and Philosophy History just to check about this. And Hegel did think that these movements of spirit took place through the action of actual individuals. So when Marx characterizes these Hegelians as talking about spirit as something that is self conscious, it's an entity that was not evident in the Hegel that we read from his Introduction to Philosophy of History. So either that's a mischaracterization by Marx or is something that the followers of Hegel that he's making fun of were saying.

26:59 Wes: Well, you can say, even if it's their activity. I mean, what Marx is saying here is kind of absurd. Right? Individuals are premises in a chain of reasoning. No, they can't be an actual physical thing or a human being cannot be a premise. Sorry, Marx. It's judgments about individuals. It can be a premise.

27:18 Mark: Well, observations.

27:19 Seth: Whoa, whoa, whoa.

27:20 Wes: Yeah, but it has to be in the form of a proposition or a judgment. The premise is a proposition or a judgment. A premise can't be something running around in the world. It's a logical entity.

27:30 Seth: No, the premise is the existence of living human individuals. The premise is not the individuals themselves. It's that there exists.

27:38 Wes: Well, first he says they, meaning the premises, are the real individuals. And then you can say the existence. And then you could say, yes, the exact. There's a proposition that the existence of individuals is itself a premise. But that's not what he means. If we took there exists individuals as our proposition, that doesn't lead anywhere. What we're interested in is actual facts about human physiology. About what types of jobs they have, what kinds of activities they're engaged in, what they're doing for work, how they're sustaining themselves.

All these things have to be articulated as. What I'm pointing to is actually very minor. I mean, I think Marx's general point holds, which is that you want to focus on these sorts of propositions that I just talked about. These sorts of empirical facts about individuals. What I'm saying is that Marx is so anti abstraction. That he wants to pretend that these sorts of things that he's talking about can avoid abstraction. You can avoid abstraction. You simply cannot avoid abstraction. It's nice to think of premises as actual human beings. And so that you're circumventing all the problems that go into scientific inquiry and abstraction, so on and so forth.

But you're not really circumventing that. That's my point.

28:53 Seth: Okay, I read that a bit differently. Because he has a pretty extended discussion later on in the essay. About the individual as an individual. As opposed to being determined by class or by the guild structure or whatever. And I got the sense that what he was trying to point to here was that the first premise of human history. Is that there are actual individual human beings that exist and act. As opposed to human beings kind of seen as tokens of a type. Or as instruments being moved by external forces.

29:27 Wes: I think that's right. And I think that larger point still holds. Okay, you could see what I said as a quibble. But really it's more of a matter of pointing out something about Marx's attempt to immunize himself from the sorts of objections that no thinker can really immunize himself from by calling individuals premises. But the larger point still holds, which is that he wants to focus on individuals. Not just their existence, but their properties and activities, their physiology. And what environment they find themselves in. And again, especially really what it comes down to is what sorts of jobs they're engaged in. In what kind of work that they do to sustain their existence, to meet their initial needs.

30:08 Mark: I did think he was being snarky in the way that you're describing and calling a human being a premise. But then I started to think a little more about it. And premise can also just. It doesn't have to mean a proposition that starts an argument. It could just be the setup. What do you start with? You know, leave the premises. Now that's the land you're on. You're building things. What is it we're building our system on? It's not like Descartes on some self evident proposition.

30:34 Wes: Well, we can't assume the German word has the same double meaning that it does in English.

30:38 Mark: Just reading this from context. I wasn't actually.

30:41 Wes: No, the context is Hegel. Hegel is all about premises, the whole logical progression of things. This is where Marx is still writing in this tradition. So the premise, the reason why he's using the word premise is because we're talking about a logical dialectic.

30:57 Mark: Right. But part of Hegel's logic is that it's not just a connection between symbols, between propositions, that there is a logic between things themselves. This is what made it so abhorrent to Bertrand Russell and Frege and people like that, is that it is phenomena themselves that then logically lead to other phenomena. And we would have to have a whole episode on the logic to actually make sense of that.

31:23 Wes: Yeah, but they don't logically, they causally lead to other.

31:27 Mark: Well, they causally, but then also it's a. Oh, if you posit a something, well that implies that there is a nothing beyond the something or something, you know, so the somethingness implies the nothingness, which implies. And you know, start to talk about physical structures this way. That's a rabbit hole.

31:44 Wes: Yeah, he's conflating the logical and the physical causality. He's conflating logical entailment and physical causality. So someone could come along just in the same snarky way that he's treated the young Hegelians and say, look, you haven't even divested yourself of this sort of confusion. But that's not my point. My point is not to quibble. He's making that typical philosopher's move of thinking, that he's immunizing himself from criticism in this way and calling it empirical. And we'll see other points in this where he and all philosophical problems are dissolved. We get that at some point in the text by making this move.

32:18 Mark: Yes, well, let's talk about that in a minute. But I wasn't trying to quibble either. I think that there's something about Hegel's logic. There's a reason that Marx is usually characterized as taking Hegel's. Hegel's logic is always thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And that's just what Marx was doing. That he talked about the progression of society from feudalism to capitalism, and then out of that would come revolution and communism. And that the way that it's characterized is that activities themselves, that is the progression of one type of society for another, moves according to a logic that again, you could interpret in the same way as Hegel's logic conflates the logic of propositions and the causal relationship between things that is not just mistakenly conflating these things, but is making the active claim that there is a relationship between these things.

And that's more difficult for Hegel. If you have this weird idea of spirit permeating everything or something, maybe you could defend that as purposeful in history. And maybe it's even self consciousness, it's God making it happen or something like that. But for Marx, who is eschewing all that, he really shouldn't be committed then to this idea that history is directed and will for sure get to communism. But yet about half of him is still holding on to Hegel. That's the only reason he could come up with such a falsifiable scientific theory of history.

Which is again why a lot of people dismiss Marx. Because he made falsifiable predictions about things that would happen in history that haven't happened.

33:49 Wes: It's hard to falsify because he's talking about what happens in a way at the limit of history. And I think that's a worthy exercise. And he's thinking about what happens when technology is so advanced and technology and what he calls productive forces are intimately related and what happens politically and socially as a result of that. And Marx says communism. So to falsify that, you first have to establish on a worldwide basis we've maxed out technology's effect on the forces of production. This goes to sort of popular culture idea of, well, as technology gets more advanced, why aren't we all just free to do what we want with robot slaves?

And that actually is an idea that's actually relevant to Marx here. What happens when this leverage that we have with machinery and technology over what we can produce, it ought to produce all this leisure for everyone. But of course, Seth pointed out from Marx initially, it's going to produce an opposite situation where everyone is actually impoverished and a few people are enriched. I'm just addressing this falsifiability Point, how do you falsify until you've something which is talking about sort of an end limit of history?

34:57 Mark: I'm not sure if that view of technology is even something that Marx was considering, that he was looking at the Industrial Revolution. And so the outcome of increased technology is people having to do drudge work on machines owned by the bourgeoisie.

35:14 Wes: Yeah. He's thinking, though, about the way also that technology has increased productive power. That's really important. And this goes back to Adam Smith, and this is something we should just comment on briefly because Marx is talking about the division of labor. Division of labor is what produces wealth, according to Adam Smith, not gold, not actual assets, not land and stuff or gold that a nation can put in its bank. The whole point of Adam Smith's wealth of nations is to argue that trade and the division of labor are the things that actually produce wealth.

So through this whole process of an increasing division of labor and the increase in technology, you actually essentially produce more. Today we would say you increase the standard of living potentially for every individual. But that's not the way it works out. It ends up being for a few individuals and then everyone else at a certain point gets pauperized or gets impoverished.

36:06 Seth: I was just wondering if maybe we're getting a little ahead of ourselves and try to bring it back. I had written a bunch of notes when I was reading through this, and I thought for some reason that the meat on his materialist bone started here. But I guess he kind of goes through a little digression. But there is kind of a side note that I wondered what you guys thought about. So after he says that human history essentially requires living humans. So let's just grant that whatever we may think about that as a using the word premise, he says that you can pick any method you want to distinguish human beings from animals, but they really begin to distinguish themselves as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.

And that's something that's going to be dependent or conditioned by the physical organization both of them and of their environment. And it's sort of like a side note or a little side comment in the text. But it's pretty significant philosophical claim to say that what distinguishes human beings, what defines what a human being is, is the ability to produce their means of subsistence.

37:11 Wes: What does produce the means of subsistence means? It means where an animal goes out and grazes. We eat bread that we've actually made. We've worked on, we actually do work to make these things that we then subsist on. That's A really significant psychological fact. And this sort of thing is there in Hegel as well. Right. Our relationship to the products of our work is really a key part of our development of consciousness and self consciousness. Because in a way they act like a mirror. We put ourselves into these objects when we work on them. So he's harkening back in a way to the same sort of idea that work plays this central part in the development of consciousness. So we produce the means of our subsistence instead of simply finding it in nature.

37:59 Seth: That has the practical consequence of saying human beings are animals until they produce the means of their subsistence, until they take control of their environment in such a way that they're no longer simply foraging or dependent. But it also is intended to get away from the idea where we say man is a. Or human beings are political creatures or they're rational creatures or they're tool making creatures or whatever. Again, consciousness, reason, politics, any sort of thing that you can select which is just an idea or a concept. He's trying to say we don't become fully human. Which is him saying we don't begin to create history until we are able to produce the means of our own subsistence. It seems a pretty significant. It just kind of. He sort of drops it and moves on. But I liked it.

38:49 Mark: Yeah. That's why I made the starting question of this whole thing. What is human nature? Because he has this very, you could say, cynical view of human nature. That it's not that we're rational animals, it's that, well, you want to know what human nature is? Well, what is it that we actually do all day? That's your nature. That's your essence. Your essence is your existence.

39:10 Wes: You are your job.

39:12 Mark: Well, but then it also makes it so that your essence is going to change depending on the current state of your society. Because at least in these old times, if you're just working on the farm communally with your family to make food for yourselves, then there's integrity to your life. Whereas if you're a cog in the great industrial machine, then there's nothing.

39:38 Wes: Yeah. If you go from milking cows and making bread and doing that sort of thing to being on an assembly line, sure. I think that changes your nature, your character and lots of important things about you.

39:50 Mark: And I like that he uses the Aristotelian terms of accidental properties versus essential properties for these things that sort of how these things seem to you. So he is giving kind of existentialist sounding proclamations here when he's talking about how we're alienated from our labor is if our essence lacks integrity in this way. Because the things we produced we don't own. Or maybe we don't even know where they go. Or we just feel no sense of ownership for our work. Then there's a schism. There's an existential split. It's exactly the kind of thing that an existentialist would feel great anxiety about. But Marx does want to stress that this is not a subjective feeling. There might be that that goes along with it. But it is primarily an objective relation. Between the individual and his or her society.

40:39 Wes: Yeah, you're talking about the subjective feeling of alienation. Or estrangement, as he calls it in this text.

40:45 Seth: Yeah, let's not bring alienation in just yet. Before you can get to the concept. It's really important that when he's saying the way you produce. Your means of subsistence determines that you're a human being. It also determines who you are. And since the means of producing subsistence. Is going to differ in an interesting way. What he's saying is that human beings are essentially different in who they are at this stage of development. Where if you grow up on the coast of an island nation. And you subsist by fishing. Then you're essentially different from someone who grows up inland on a continent.

Who subsists primarily via farming. Right. And then somebody else who hunts. And the reason this is important is, as he talks through later on in the text. The development of moving out of this sort of, like, rudimentary family association. To tribal association and guilds and all that. It's not until we're all doing the same kind of proletarian work. That we get to the point where there's a kind of universalization. That's going to ultimately make it possible for all these revolutionary movements and all that. And the alienation that you're talking about, Mark.

So he says, look, it's important to understand that you are what you do to survive. And that in the initial stages, people do different things. And they're very different. They have different natures. They're different types of people. But that the development of history. The means of the productive forces. Gradually kind of consolidate human activity out of this both regionally separated and multifarious types of activities. Into a very limited set of activities. That are universal across geographies.

42:29 Wes: You brought us back, and then you brought us all the way to the very end.

42:32 Seth: I know. I'm sorry.

42:34 Wes: It's a good overview.

42:36 Mark: Yeah. Also, just to clarify my use of essential versus accidental. That we might essentially, according to Marx always be whatever it is that we do to survive. But in this sort of primitive state. Where we're making our own things and we experience the benefit of them. That essence is clear to us. Whereas right now you might just say, well, that's just my job. That's just the means to my survival. The survival is the end in itself. It's really just an accident that I'm doing this particular thing. I sort of. I have to get some kind of job, and that's me doing it. And so he thinks there's something screwed up about that. That we're out of touch with our own essence. Which, again, sounds very existential.

43:16 Wes: Yeah. So we're getting at this line. The nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production. So what do these material conditions turn out to be? They turn out to be basically how human beings cooperate. He calls this intercourse at some point. But basically how human beings cooperate to do things. Which means who has what job. Once you start cooperating, you start assigning different tasks to different people. And that's where you get this division of labor. So now that launches us into this whole thesis. That basically, as these material conditions change, as the division of labor changes, so the social circumstances and the relative social positions of peoples with different types of jobs, that changes as well.

And then, Seth, you pointed to this little section. And then he sort of outlines a history of how different property relations led to different social forms. It's not like we have a certain type of culture or social existence. That's humming along according to its own dynamic. And then that determines all these important economic and other facts. It's that these very basic material conditions about who's doing what job and how people cooperate. Those end up producing all these social and political consequences. And then ultimately they'll end up producing rationalizations or ideology in terms of philosophy and religion.

Which turn out, again, not to be their own, the driving forces of things. But merely the sort of effects of this more fundamental engine.

44:58 Unknown speaker: Right.

44:58 Mark: That's the root of, again, ripping on all these philosophers. Which sounds very much like what we were saying about Nietzsche. That he would criticize positions not by arguing against them. But by looking at the psychology of the individuals involved. Well, Marx is doing a similar thing. But looking at the social circumstances involved. And he really takes this to an extreme. Just even in terms of consciousness itself. It's not that you have a particular philosophy. As a result of your particular socioeconomic status. It's that you have consciousness at all.

Is a result of needs that came out of production. And the intercourse required for progress in cooperation. He says about language here. This is in the history section, still a few pages in. Language is as old as consciousness. Language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men. For that reason alone, it really exists for me personally as well. Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men. The going around a little. Consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.

Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual's growing self conscious. At the same time, it is consciousness of nature which first appears to man as completely alien, all powerful and an unassailable force with which men's relations are purely animal, by which they are overawed like beasts. It is a purely animal consciousness of nature. Natural religion. He's giving the beginning of a story, and I want to read that much because it sounds like part of Hegel's phenomenology.

46:34 Wes: Yeah, and we should say by natural religion, he just means the sense of awe, primitive awe that you would have

46:42 Mark: from nature, shamanism or something, you know?

46:44 Wes: Yeah, I think it's still something that we can all experience today to some extent, the sense of awe. But yeah, that knew it can lead to systems of magic or certain types of early religions. But the thing that sounds like Hegel is that you get a story of this development of consciousness that's co. Relative to the development of these material conditions. So you start out with very basic needs and the work to meet those needs to produce our means of subsistence. And then he says you get more needs because of that. Once those needs are met, new needs come on the scene.

And those require different types of productivity, different types of cooperation as people start cooperating in different ways to meet the new needs. And then also you get one of the other conditions as an increased population, you also get this different sorts of division of labor. Really, these different forms of cooperation lead directly to different forms of division of labor. And as that division increases, then you get correlatively these different types of consciousness that go on with. Basically, they parallel the level of division of labor that you have.

47:56 Mark: Right. And the division specifically between. In order to have philosophy at all, you have to have the division between physical labor and mental labor. If you're spending all your time growing your crops and dragging things around and hunting, then you don't have time for philosophy. If you're telling somebody else to do that, then you could expand your thinking and look into pure theory if you go far.

48:19 Wes: One caveat here, and this is kind of a disputed thing. Right. Is Marx saying that ideas have no efficacy in the world. Because it's one thing to say that ideas are not the primary driving force of history. It's another to say that they lack efficacy completely. And there's evidence that. Because Marx wants to say that revolutions, you know, he wrote a manifesto. Revolutions involve the propagation of certain ideas. The material conditions have to be ripe for that. There has to be the right conditions. But I don't think we can say necessarily that Marx thinks that what is often called superstructure level this philosophy and religion and anything else theoretical. That it's completely impotent, that it's completely without any effect in the world.

49:04 Mark: It seems like the metaphor of this to epiphenomenalism.

49:07 Wes: Yeah. That would be to say it has no effect. Yeah. Right.

49:10 Mark: So it could be that if you see that it seems to have an effect. Well, he at least definitely says in this text that you only get the possibility of an idea against the status quo is if there's already a division that has grown between the system of production and the form of life. Right. This is page 159 somewhere. So only when you have the division between physical, mental, labor can consciousness emancipate itself from the world and form pure theory, philosophy, etc. But even if this comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production.

So it's the determinism in the social structure itself. And I'm not sure this is where I kind of got lost. And I think this is also where he kind of changed his story over time. And so I wasn't really sure how much time I should put into trying to understand exactly how the historical progressions are supposed to work here. But somehow there comes to be a disconnect. I mean, so let's say you've a certain mode of production. So we have factories. And so we've set up all these factory workers, the class system. And on top of that, the culture has formed around a particular mode of production.

Well, then you have a technological advance which puts all these workers out of work, say. And then you have a contradiction between the new forces of production and the existing social relations. And that would put all these people who maybe their minds would have been occupied or whatever, doing their jobs now because they're thrown into chaos, then truly revolutionary thought can happen. Something like that.

50:46 Wes: Or take, for example, if you Have a set of feudal social relations, and you have technological advances that allow creation of manufactured goods, and you start to have a demand for those manufactured goods. The feudal setup no longer serves that. You have forces of production and technologies that the existing set of social circumstances can no longer serve. And that's when you get a change in those social circumstances. The new technologies come along and forces of production and people have to start cooperating differently. And then that different sort of cooperation is inherently a different sort of social organization.

51:28 Mark: I mean, I get that, but just the idea then, that intellectual activity, and in particular, he says elsewhere that the philosophy of a time is just the opinions of the ruling class. It's their ideology to keep their power, basically, that the intellectual leaders and the economic leaders of a given society are going to be the same right now, as crazy as that sounds. But if you accept that, then how are revolutionary ideas possible? How is it possible to have an idea that seems to fly in the face of the status quo? Well, it's because of these shifts that you're talking about that gives us the mental space to have these revolutionary ideas.

52:10 Wes: Yeah, and by the way, when we're using this word ideology, he uses that word remarkably little in the actual text, even though it's the name of. But we can define ideology as the representation by a powerful class of their own particular interests as being in the general interest or as being for the good of everyone. So what you get as part of the. And I call this kind of a rationalization, but it sort of infects the lower classes. Everyone comes to believe it, oh, this system is natural. It's the way things are. It's the way it ought to be. I work on an assembly line, but that's just the way capitalism works.

And then maybe you might even have the idea that anyone can rise. And so I sustain this hope that I might one day become a successful capitalist myself. So the ideology there, what makes something an ideology, again, is this representation of something which is really just for the good of a few people as being for the good of the whole society.

53:11 Mark: I don't feel like in the section we read, though, it's fully connected up for how the current state of German philosophy exemplifies that. He says in the preface that we read that the German philosophy is really just the middle class expressing its psychological damage or something.

53:29 Wes: He thinks they're just. They're furthering the status quo, though, right? They're not helping.

53:33 Mark: Okay, but. So the status quo. But the kind of thing the German philosophers are saying is not that working on factory is great and capitalism is great and part of this religion is the opiate of the masses. Which is a quote of his from an earlier work. But it's the same period of his development that he came up with this. That German philosophy at the time is navel gazing nonsense and having navel gazing nonsense. Now that's not the content of what the upper class would say is the ideal life or something. But it is a way that the upper class can distract everyone from being dissatisfied. They're all just focused on theology in some sense. Then they're not going to try to change economic circumstances.

54:18 Wes: Yeah, exactly. I think that's right. He's criticizing them for this idea that their critiques can lead to any sort of change. And again, that ideas in general can lead to any sort of change. But Mark, you were trying to get at this developmental question of what's the in between stage? Or what's the. Can you start to have a revolutionary idea if everyone is just infected by the ideology of the ruling class? And I'm not sure what that looks like exactly, but it seems like social relations, even though they haven't fully changed, have already begun to change. Let's say, I guess it's the existence of the contradiction. Right. A lot of people become very unhappy. The ideology of the ruling class no longer works. If people are pauperized, if they're really miserable, then they're not going to by the BS anymore. And so that's where you can start to introduce these new ideas.

55:11 Mark: I like his idea that until you have somebody, the ancient Greek slaves doing the work, then you don't get the philosophers. But once thought then becomes unmoored from practical activity. It seems like it can go in any which way. So we could come up with revolutionary ideas immediately. You don't need to have the extra step and talk about this disjunction between the particular mode of production and a society that isn't changing quick enough or something like you've already got plenty of cognitive space.

55:42 Wes: Yeah, I agree.

55:43 Mark: In philosophy itself for whatever kind of ideas you want, you could then go further to say, well, but those are just going to be ideas and thus not efficacious until you have something else. Until you have these other conditions. Sure, yeah.

55:57 Wes: But he also might criticize you for thinking that you have that much intellectual freedom that you can transcend your times. Right, right. And I think he's wrong about that.

56:08 Mark: He is criticizing all these Hegelians of various sorts. As you know, you think you have these big important disagreements but you're all. It's like arguing of which boy band is the best. No, they all suck. Sorry.

56:23 Wes: You know what's interesting is that it's not like they're saying a lot of stuff he disagrees with. It's just they haven't had the new big idea that he's had. It's a really petty form of criticism. You know, you didn't think of this, even though I agree with you on a lot of other stuff. So therefore I'm going to bitterly rail against you. But that bitterness seems to be this reaction to what he sees as their lack of efficacy and a lack of efficacy of philosophy. In a way, it's a bitterness towards ideas and philosophy in general.

56:52 Mark: I think one of the things I was reading was that, you know, one of the guys he rips on so much here and here, Bruno Bauer, was a personal friend and teacher of his until they had some sort of break.

57:02 Wes: Yeah.

57:03 Mark: So it's not just railing against, like, when you show up at school and take a few philosophy classes and you say, wow, the mainstream of philosophy just sucks. And so I'm gonna write this screed that, you know, in other words, make the Ayn Rand move, or the Zen

57:17 Wes: and the art of German ideology.

57:19 Mark: Exactly.

57:20 Wes: It's.

57:21 Mark: He was hooked into this stuff. Where are we, Seth?

57:25 Wes: Yeah, Seth.

57:27 Seth: We go to the next section where we talk about fundamental conditions. And I actually really like this section. Let me see if I can characterize it real quick. And again, see if you guys agree with me. What does history on a material basis look like? What does it require? And he says, well, the first thing is that we acknowledge that in order for there to be history, there have to be human beings. And those human beings need to have the ability to live. So that's food, clothing, shelter, those sorts of things. The fundamental needs. The second condition is that once the fundamental needs, the ability to live, is satisfied, then other needs will follow from having that need satisfied.

And he says this is the first historical act. And then finally, third condition is that people make more people. In other words, history requires fucking and reproduction, for that matter, which I guess is ultimately the goal. So materialist history really starts from the basis of people satisfy their fundamental needs, those give rise to other needs, and they reproduce. And the reason this is important is that this extension of the additional needs, along with the need for reproducing, gives rise to the family, which is just the social relationship.

It's sort of the fundamental social relationship. And this is going to be the basis upon which he Builds the rest of the notion of tracing the history of social development. Which is going to ultimately lead to the division of labor. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But this is kind of the foundation for the materialist history.

59:02 Mark: And it's funny that Rousseau started with the family, too. But that Marx's description of the family is proto slavery.

59:08 Wes: Yeah, but he's going to argue against the family being the prototype here for other subordinated. In his words. In the history section, the third paragraph. Where he says the family. Which to begin with is the only social relationship. Becomes later. When increased needs create new social relations. And increased population. New needs, a subordinate one. Except in Germany.

59:36 Seth: All right.

59:37 Wes: And so must be treated and analyzed. According to the existing empirical data. Not according to the concept of the family, as is the custom in Germany. He's objecting to this idea of social relations. Seen as being modeled on familial relations. I think he thinks that the familial relation is quickly transcended. Because, again, the social relationships are determined primarily by the different kinds of cooperation and production. That go along with meeting new needs.

1:00:03 Seth: Yeah, absolutely. I think for him, the critical point is that the family is sort of, for him. The first or the most rudimentary social organization. In the paragraph that immediately follows what you just said, Wes, he says the production of life. Both of one's own in labor and of fresh life and procreation. Now appears as a double relationship. On the one hand as a natural. On the other, as a social relationship by social. We understand the cooperation of several individuals. No matter under what conditions, in what matter, and to what end. It's his way of introducing the idea that human beings have to come together for some purposes. And the most basic purpose for which they come together is to reproduce. This is, in a certain way, a very early or the prototypical form of the division of labor. Even though we don't call it that until social organization becomes more complex.

1:00:55 Wes: I think when he says that, he's talking about a division of labor between the sexes. He's thinking about hunting and gathering. But, yeah, I think you're right. Sex is like a fundamental form of cooperation. So if two people cooperate to produce this product, a child. And at the next level, Seth and I are in the kitchen and making a meal. And I say, seth, you cut the meat, and I'll cut the vegetables. And so Seth becomes the meat cutter and I become the vegetable cutter. Those become our roles. That's cooperation. And those are the social events which transform us as individuals. In that case, in a Kind of a minor way, probably because it's temporary. But if I became the vegetable cutter and Seth became the butcher as a full time job, then it would be much more significant.

1:01:39 Seth: Yep. This section, by the way, leads into that discussion about language that Mark brought up earlier. This is the point at which he introduces the idea. And he says language only arises in a social relation.

1:01:51 Wes: The need for intercourse and the need for cooperation produces language.

1:01:55 Seth: Yes.

1:01:55 Wes: Yeah. It reminds me of Wittgenstein's laborers. Right. It's interesting that in our late Wittgenstein episode, when we're talking about basic language, we're talking about something that people are using to cooperate for work.

1:02:09 Seth: The implication is that if there was no social relation, if there was no need for cooperation, there would be no language. It seems to me that he's giving an account of human evolution. This isn't really state of nature. It's more like a genealogy than a history in some sense, I guess. But human beings by nature desire to satisfy their needs and fundamentally will join together in a form of cooperation in order to satisfy these needs. That's the foundation of materialist history. Not human beings fundamentally want to acquire shit and attack each other with violence in order to take each other's stuff.

1:02:47 Wes: Well, at some point acquiring shit becomes a need, though.

1:02:50 Seth: True.

1:02:50 Wes: Depending on the shape of society.

1:02:53 Seth: Yeah, but your fundamental stance vis a vis an other or another human being is cooperation for the purpose of mutual gain.

1:03:03 Mark: Well, but he also talks about again, the family as proto slavery. And that the first kind of property is controlling someone else's labor that you've made your slave. So it's very much this Hegelian picture.

1:03:16 Seth: That's a very good point.

1:03:17 Mark: Relationship of the beginning of society. So the thing I've been mulling over during all this is you could see how with the greater division of labor, we become more alienated from the products of our labor, blah, blah, blah. But another part of Marx's story here, the other bad current social thing that he would point out is the depersonalized interactions that more and more, as we become just a cog in the machine, then we are using each other merely as means. I need somebody to show up and. And operate that machine to make my goods. I don't care who it is, I don't care who you are.

I just want the job done. So you could contrast that then with some sort of idyllic early stage where we are in the family, getting to know each other as human beings. But his picture of the family seems pretty bleak as well. So when do we lose this? It seems like only at the end of history. Only when we've it's not the noble savages and now we've fallen into this horrible industrial period. We have to go through the industrial period and transcend that. Only then can we deal with each other as full individuals when our needs are met so we don't have to worry about that and when we're not having to oppress each other.

So it's when we're in the position of the characters in the Socratic dialogue that can just do philosophy with each other and aren't using each other.

1:04:35 Wes: It's an ironic consequence even that you could be cynical.

1:04:40 Mark: That man Socrates needs his interlocutors to get his fix. He needs to test his mettle against them. He doesn't care who steps up.

1:04:48 Wes: Well the point is the interlocutors aren't on a Socratic assembly line forced into forced interlocutor labor. Yes Socrates. Yes Socrates. Yes Socrates.

1:05:01 Seth: That's a good point.

1:05:02 Wes: They don't have to do it to survive.

1:05:04 Seth: Yeah, and Mark, you're right, I mean that's a good point that my reading of it is probably rose colored because ultimately doesn't he say that children are really like the proto form of property, Children and wives. Yeah, so that's a very naive and Seth looking view of interpretation of the word cooperation.

1:05:22 Mark: It all just goes with as soon as you, as Marx does say come on, get real, you think you're a thinking human being. You think you're fundamentally a rational animal, something like that. You are what you do and that's a form of cynicism. It's a form of I don't care what kind of love you feel for your neighbor. What is fundamental about your relationship with them is what needs they fulfill of yours and what needs you fulfill of theirs. And how are you cooperating to get mutual things done. It's a form of reductionism which is of course the thing that he's accused of. In the same way that Freud is accused of reducing everything to sex.

1:05:57 Wes: Freud reduces things to ulterior motives and Marx reduces everything to something that's ulterior to motives, the material conditions. Right?

1:06:08 Mark: Yes. And it's so annoying this notion of false consciousness. You think you're talking about real philosophical ideas but really you're just regurgitating the clap trap promulgated by the rulers of your society. Or something like the fact that you can't know really, which is another Hegelian thing that self knowledge is very limited. But to have that then, as one of the legacies of Marx, has been then aimed at you to say you're just perpetuating the status quo. You think you're doing something cool, but it's tiresome. However, one of the things that the Hegelians were concerned with was about looking at the relationships over time between dominant ideas and given societies.

And they thought that you could examine this by just looking at the ideas themselves and doing again, that thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing. And Marx is going to say, that's going to be kind of a dead end. You're not going to find the logic in the ideas themselves because it really is just a matter of how the society evolved for socioeconomic reasons. So it's like you're trying to make sense of, again, the epiphenomena without understanding what the mechanism is. And it could be that those epiphenomena have a pattern, have a logic to them, but not necessarily.

1:07:22 Wes: To look at history, you can't just look at the history of ideas. You have to look at economics and sociology.

1:07:27 Mark: You can't just say everything is progressing because truth will conquer all in time. And bad ideas get tested and they get ruled out. And so over time, steadily, at least insofar as the ideas don't get lost by a flood that kills all the philosophers or the scientists or whatever, then we will keep progressing forward. That. That's all nonsense. Okay, I was just trying to find the quote. I thought it was. Every profound philosophical problem can be resolved into an empirical fact. He says that's something like that somewhere, incidentally, when we conceive things thus as they really are and happen.

So in other words, when we look at history, every profound philosophical problem is resolved. It's very unsatisfying. He gives some examples of how he thinks this is supposed to work by talking about Bruno and people like this. But there was nothing meaty enough for me to. I feel like he does not argue for his central premises here. It's just. Get real. Of course, it's a matter of the social relations. If he had given then a critique, maybe he does in the other sections. Maybe this is what we're missing. In fact, one of the things in Wikipedia says that the amount of railing against Stirner in here is of a greater length than the entirety of Stirner's

1:08:40 Wes: works,

1:08:43 Seth: his written work.

1:08:44 Wes: Wow.

1:08:45 Mark: So I would imagine with all that length that they really deconstruct these Neo Hegelians to show that at bottom they're just expressing the will of their class. That's hard for me. To make any judgment about that.

1:08:58 Seth: Yeah.

1:08:58 Wes: He'd have to argue this kind of general thesis about what the driving force of history is and that it's driven by these material conditions. And I'm not sure how you would go about demonstrating that. And then the other factor here is it's unclear whether he's saying ideas are completely causally inert, whether this is epiphenomenalism or whether they produce some effects in the world, but that they're not the primary ones.

1:09:25 Seth: Let me just read a quick passage here. So with these, there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act. Then that division of labor which develops spontaneously or quote, unquote, naturally by virtue of natural predisposition, for example, physical strength, needs accidents, etc. Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. The first form of ideologists, priests is concurrent. From this moment onwards, consciousness can flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real.

From now on, consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of pure. That's in quotes, theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, et cetera, comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production. So I think what he's saying is when he says that these ideas are all reducible or what have you, is that ultimately the idea of a consciousness that does nothing but manipulate ideas or labor that simply does nothing but manipulate idea, owes its existence to a division of labor that made it possible, separated from the material conditions.

Meaning there has to be the material conditions in the environment. And the division of labor that. Such that there is room for somebody to just be a manipulator of ideas or primarily a manipulator of ideas. Hence the.

1:11:03 Wes: You have to have a society. Yeah.

1:11:05 Seth: You have to have the slaves to have Greek philosophy.

1:11:07 Wes: Yep.

1:11:07 Mark: All right. Well, so maybe we don't have to look any deeper in terms of what are the specific content of your ideas, Bruno Bauer. And how that has been enabled by your. The specifics of the German bourgeoisie. It's just really a matter that you're a philosopher in the first place. That's the crime. Yeah. That's interesting. By being a philosopher, you're being a leech.

1:11:28 Seth: Well, I think this may be an example of where what Marx is really pushing at here we're seeing it from the perspective of 21st century Americans. But he was probably here saying, look, don't sit in Germany in a university and talk about the Prussian state and generalize it. Pay attention to the fact that the material conditions that made it possible for you to sit around and do nothing but be Hegel are really what is made possible. This idea of universal spirit and all that. Not that it's some real thing out there that you grasp through pure reason.

Now, I think there's a more subtle critique than I'm able to give right now about how ideas and concepts function in the formation of consciousness. And you know that just because the material conditions exist that make it possible for people to entertain higher concepts, the concepts themselves are not traceable to, oh, well, I had a rock, I hit it with a hammer, and now I have the concept of force or, and

1:12:29 Wes: this is what Mark was getting at earlier, that it's not necessarily the case that the ideas of the time will necessarily be those that advance the interests of the ruling class. That we might have enough intellectual freedom to reason our way out of that. Because that's really what he's talking about here. Right. Is that the prevailing ideas will simply further the interests of a certain class at the expense of everyone else.

1:12:54 Mark: I found myself looking for things like Nietzsche will make comments like, philosophers in cold climates have certain kinds of general characteristics to their philosophy. So I want something similar out of Marx.

1:13:06 Wes: But Nietzsche is also a good example of an alternative conception of ideology to Marx. Right. Because going back to our episode on the genealogy of morals, his idea there is. That also involves ideology. We have the slave. Morality is represented as something that's in the interests of everyone, even though it's only in the interests of the weak. But it infects all of society and it's bad for these superior types, these great men. They can't flourish in a society that embraces this type of ideology. So there. It's not the case that the master class is winning the ideology battle. Just the fact that Christianity is so prevalent for Nietzsche means that it's the ideology of the weak that has actually won out and sort of shackled the strong. And then you could combine the views and you could say, well, both of those dynamics are at work, actually.

1:14:03 Mark: Well, Marx does point out that whenever a class is arguing for its interests, it always says, my interest is the general interest.

1:14:11 Wes: Yeah.

1:14:12 Mark: Whether it's the ruling class doing that in very much what sounds like a Nietzschean cynical take on what the ruling class is trying to Shove down the throats of the people that it's oppressing, which maybe those are the strong people that would pursue their own destinies in a different way. Maybe it's just that Marx is not taking an ethical stance. Ultimately, what's going to make communism happen, which is good, is having a group that's so oppressed and that's so numerous that they'll be able to then project as the general interest, their own interest.

But he describes them in various places like, well, they're not a real class. I forget exactly how that argument goes. But before we get to that final stage where we're actually getting communism, really it's just about power struggles. It's a very amoral way of looking at these progressions. Whereas Nietzsche put things more in terms of values and that it was a bad thing that the slaves overcame the strong and important.

1:15:05 Wes: Well, even though Marx is not so obvious about it. I mean, he. The Communist Manifesto, and there's lots of. It's clear that he's an advocate of communism as an ideal. It also happens to be what is necessarily going to come about as part of a historical progression that no one can thwart. It's a necessary historical progression, one stage to another, from serfdom to capitalism to communism.

1:15:33 Mark: Right. The amount of determinism in that is one of the things that, according to the lectures I was listening to, he kind of wavered on that. In works after this, he said, well, I was a little too deterministic. And in earlier works he even kind of rejected because they sounded too much like we all just have to join together and solve this problem. Which is exactly what he was against. And, you know, that is the contradiction of, as you said, writing political tracks designed to influence people with the premise that ideas don't matter.

1:16:04 Wes: But again, you could try and reconcile that. He's not saying ideas don't matter. He's just not saying they're the most important thing. He's just saying that they're not the most important thing or they can't be effective Unless they're the right material conditions there, then they can be effective.

1:16:18 Mark: I think that he was specific enough of what those conditions are supposed to be. It's really just the fact that you have a world market is the thing that he stresses. Right. So this is getting into part B.

1:16:29 Seth: Well, that's tied up in a lot of things, but in that part you're talking about. Right. He's saying what we have is a world market, not a world historical spirit. It's yet another jab but he doesn't really explain what the significance of that is until later.

1:16:42 Wes: Yeah, he gives the conditions. What are the conditions that have to come about before communism can come about? He mentions the world market. The reason why the world market is important is because it can't just be local. Right? Because if you had communism happen on a local scale, it could be basically disrupted by its relations to the outer world. Communism has to happen globally or not at all. Real communism. And the other thing is you have to have this. It's basically pauperization where you get this extreme condition where capital and wealth are so concentrated with a few and everyone else is so miserable.

And that tension, that contradiction, will lead to the next stage. And that contradiction depends again on the development of certain relations of production, meaning this impoverished worker class and then the fat cats, which in turn depends on certain types of technology, these industrial technologies. But we could fit it into a larger view of as hundreds of years go by with the advances in technology, what's going to happen? We can look at this simply in terms of Marx and the Industrial Revolution and all that. But I think why Marx ought to still be interesting to everyone is that this is really an important question.

Obviously the technology hasn't maxed out. The forces of production haven't maxed out as they become kind of ridiculous in 100 or a thousand years, there really are robots that can do everything. The question is, how does that actually affect society? If Marx is right, instead of making everyone wealthy, it first produces this tension between an impoverished class and a class that collects all the benefits. And someone might argue, today, look at what's happened in America, the gap between rich and poor. Even though GDP has grown, our gross domestic product has grown.

Someone might say, well, that ought to suggest that wealth will become less concentrated. But Marx would say no, that means wealth will become more concentrated among a few. And that's exactly what's happened. So now you can write me emails accusing me of being a communist, but that's the point. And that's why, again, I think Marx's question here is really one not to forget, which is how do technological developments ultimately transform society?

1:18:56 Mark: So I guess is the big thing that we're missing here more of the story of the stages and the rise of the state and the rise of private property. Is anybody prepared to give a quick overview of that process so we can at least get it out there?

1:19:09 Seth: Well, I think he's trying to trace the development of the division of labor. The first sort of major thing that happens is that you go from sort of a. I won't say agricultural, but a kind of rural society. Then the feudal state, which concentrates people in singular locations. And initially it's the location of the feudal lord. But the estate. The estate which eventually will evolve into towns. And that creates an antagonism between the townspeople or towns and the rural folks. Two different major types of production. Agricultural and then something else.

And the production in the towns starts off. He uses the term guild. He talks about guilds and towns being concentrations where there's a kind of a hierarchical structure in the guild, where you have journeymen and masters. So those people are doing things like making shoes and shoeing horses and leather goods and metal workers and what have you. And eventually, as the towns grow and as geographical distances can be traversed easily, you'll get merchants who will not necessarily produce either of those goods, but will start to create exchange between towns and also better exchange between the rural areas and the towns.

And that's going to eventually lead to a mercantile class and the rise of the. The petit bourgeois or the small bourgeois. Who are these sort of local. Small classes of people who grow up around the fact that there's now a thriving commerce in addition to the small local industry, surrounded by the rural links. And eventually you'll get what Wes was talking about, which is industrialization, which will give rise to big industry. And this is the point at which, prior to this, when you have sort of these more regional central things. Commerce between states is informal.

And states. Sorry, when I say states, I mean nations will go to war over things like access to resources, but also for religious reasons and so forth. And with the discovery of America in combination with the development of industrialization, then you see the introduction of gold and silver, like money, and financial changes and reforms. So that property becomes movable in the form of money. So instead of landed property, which is the very basic form. Well, property in the form of people is the very basic right. The family and slaves. Then there's landed property in the estate, which is not movable.

Then you get merchants who are moving physical property from place to place. But it's not really until all this gold and silver comes back from the new world. And you create commerce that's based on money, where goods can be turned into money and money is movable. And then the nations start going to war in order to secure access to these places overseas. And he says at one point, this is where trade becomes war. This is where you have sort of the evolution of the modern nation who's establishing maritime laws specifically to protect trade. And to outlaw exporting and put tariffs on importing.

And to go out and collect stuff to bring back. And eventually, as the nations trade with each other. And you have the development of industry where there's mass production of things. This is where you get to the world market. And ultimately you'll get to the point where big industry, which requires tons of labor. That of course, is alienated from the product. And it replaces the petit bourgeois with the true bourgeois class. It does away with the guild structure. And people from the rural countryside who don't have jobs. The itinerants or the vagabonds and all that get pulled into the towns where these industrial centers are.

And they start laboring in exchange for wages. And that's the point at which. Where, if you're English or French or German, if you are laboring in a factory in exchange for wages, there's essentially no difference between you in the way that there would have been previously. Where you were a German fisherman and this guy was a French fisherman. And this guy was an English deer hunter or whatever it is. That this universality or universalization of the market is what creates the grounds where he can start talking about a proletariat. Where the proletariat is essentially this global working class of people who exchange their labor for money.

And they have no longer any meaningful ties in the activities that they pursue. To their local geographies or means of production or anything like that. A factory in Dresden is the same thing as a factory in Manchester.

1:24:05 Wes: Nice.

1:24:06 Mark: The most interesting part of that story I found was where private property in the state. He says that the private property and civil law grow together out of the disintegration of natural community. So, right. We start out as these cooperating families. And then larger units that divide labor to cooperate. But as. As you were saying, as merchants and things come into it. And even when we're the guild structure, it's, you know, what is private property? Well, it's you and your tools. And then the master over the apprentices is like a form of slavery.

But not as bad, because at least the apprentices want to be masters eventually. And that's the purpose of their doing it. So there are all these sort of different degrees of slavery. Which we said is a form of property. These are all movable property. And then you don't get to landed property until a bit after that. There's a movement there when you get to feudalism. Where, as it used to be, the land that you all work together on is common land. And you still need that in some circumstances you need a common marketplace where all the merchants can go and do their business together.

So what the state is then is you finally get this concentration of property. So you have landowners. And then, like you said, people with large amounts of movable property of money. And the state is their way of joining together and keeping their interests represented.

1:25:25 Seth: Yes, it gets to that point.

1:25:27 Mark: So plutocracy is inevitable. That there is no other form of government. Really, no matter whether it's a monarchy, whether it's a aristocracy, it's always going to be the same.

1:25:36 Seth: Well, I don't know if it's inevitable, but I think what Marx is saying here is. So you're talking about some kind of natural relationship. He also uses the term civil society. And in the preface to my book, the editor, the translator, talks about how Hegel used civil society. Essentially, you can think of civil society and political society. And that Marx talks about it in this section at points. But early on, civil society is just the intercourse between people. It's the social, commercial relationships that people enter into each other. So it's as you imagine how people interact without government.

And government in the early stages, when you're talking about feudal or the nation state and all that sort of thing. The political society is an abstraction. And it's a way of organizing individuals. And creating relies on those structures, like the guild, like the estate and so on. But he says when you get to the point where you start moving towards this world market and these universal rules. The government serves the interest of the capital. In that the government or the political society begins to enact laws to protect trade. It enacts laws to regulate labor.

It imposes tariffs. It does all these sorts of things. And ultimately, when the proletariat. I'll try not to use that term. When workers or laborers are completely alienated by virtue of being a member of this working class, they just exchange wages. They're universal, and they're no longer growing up as laborers. That's their future, that's their destiny. There's no moving from one class to another. And you have this division where you have capitalists or capital holders and laborers. Then the political entity no longer has any connection in any meaningful natural way to the civil society.

It exists only as a way to regulate. To basically, like you say, feed the needs of one class and to maintain control over the other.

1:27:43 Wes: All natural relationships are resolved into money relationships. He says, right.

1:27:48 Mark: And when the state becomes like that, that enables again, even though it's the exertion of one class of its will over the others, it's presented as the common good, as the state is taking care of the common good. And this was also a reaction to Hegel that in his philosophy of right, he was talking about the state having to sort of be the intermediary between the classes and represent the common good and thought that that was possible. Marx does not seem to think that that's possible. And so that actually turns all these matters of property into a matter of public will.

That that's the myth that it's not just I have this thing and you have that thing and there's a sort of a fact of possession and that is what is the root of property. No, it becomes that the group wills that you have this amount of riches and you have this amount of riches. And so you don't even have to actually have those things. You can have things like banks. You could have the crazy ass financial system that we have now where you could own all this. Something that you never ever see or interact with in any direct way. And that that's only possible because the state is so thoroughly corrupt as to preserve your claim on this stuff.

1:28:58 Seth: And just in the same way that my reading of Cooperation is overly rosy, I wouldn't use the term corrupt here. I'm not sure that we would say that the political structure is corrupt so much as Marx is saying that in a weird way, even though he's talking about the material conditions dictating the way human beings are, he's suggesting in these passages that capital has kind of its own motive force and the class system is a natural evolution of the material conditions that human beings find themselves in. So it's not so much that politics are corrupt, it's just that the way the system is structured, you need to have this state to prevent laborers from killing the people that employ them when they, they, when they abuse them. Right. And probably vice versa. Right. Although not so much so it's just the way things are that you need to have that structure in place.

1:29:51 Mark: Well, and also saying something is corrupt implies that it's possible for it to not be corrupt.

1:29:56 Seth: True.

1:29:56 Mark: Right. That there is a possible better situation. And he just thinks this is the way states work. This is just what they are.

1:30:02 Seth: I'll just read a quick sentence here. It says by universal competition, it forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. He's talking about big industry. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc. And where it could not do this, it made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first Time, insofar as it made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labor the last semblance of its natural character. So in essence, this capital driven market, you can see, if it makes science subservient, it destroys ideology, then it just makes sense that a political framework would exist only to help it self perpetuate.

1:30:56 Mark: And what do we think of all this?

1:30:58 Wes: Well, did we get to communism? How do we get to communism?

1:31:03 Seth: Well, even if you don't buy this premise, let's just go with the logic of what he's saying. So there's this material development of human beings that leads ultimately to this state where it's a class system, where there's this alienated class called laborers, proletariat, who are connected in the world by virtue of the fact that nations now have commerce with each other and industry, blah blah, blah, capital markets, you know, all that stuff. And at this point where Marx starts talking about, okay, well, there used to be some movement. You could come in from the countryside and sign on as a journeyman in a guild, and if you were a merchant, the petit bourgeois could kind of somehow morph into the big bourgeois.

There was some way of movement, but now class movement is almost forbidden or almost impossible. So there's no place for these alienated laborers to go. And he suggests, although I don't know if he says it explicitly, that there's really no further development of capitalism that is going to change the material conditions of laborers in any positive way. Although he also kind of suggests that there's really no other place to go with the material conditions for laborers. And so he says if all of these create the conditions for which laborers can have a revolution materially, it would be a revolution against the state.

But what you would be doing in that revolution is gaining control of yourself as an individual and beginning to self determine as an individual and not as a member of the proletarian class.

1:32:40 Wes: This all comes down to the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse. These social and economic relations, and these have led to revolutions in the past. The question is why? We've reached the point where the revolution is going to lead to communism, right?

1:32:57 Mark: And that's the part that didn't make any sense. That there's something special about this universal proletarian class that made it unlike other classes, and that it really could be that Their will will be the general will that is good for everyone. If it comes to pass of abolishing the current system. And then. And it's not just going to transform. It's going to get rid of.

1:33:16 Wes: Yeah. What this class is going to do is it's not just going to transform. In the past, what you've done is you've transformed the forms of intercourse or the social relations. To undo the contradiction with the productive forces. But in this case, you're going to go from producing the means of subsistence. To producing the form of intercourse itself. You're going to take this even more fundamental step of taking direct control of those social relations. And simply letting them be a product of the productive forces.

1:33:46 Mark: See more concretely what that means.

1:33:48 Wes: Well, in other words, in the past, your class system is based on your division of labor. And who's rich and who's poor depends on what kind of job you have. There's no direct control over class. He talks of sort of being beholden to this thing that we've created. Even though the division of labor is our product, yet we're all sort of enslaved to it. So we take mastery in the sense of. We directly say, okay, no one belongs to any class. We take direct control over the social relations and forms of intercourse. And I think the reason why you reach a point in history where that's possible.

First of all, the division of labor has to reach the right point. And things have to become so universal. I mean, the whole point of talking about wars between nations and so on and so forth. And the increase of industrialization. Is that you need this world historical individual. You need complete globalization before you. You can have communism. And then this revolution is premised on the idea that it's not just that we're miserable. It's that our very existence is threatened. I'm trying to find where he says that.

1:34:58 Seth: There's a part in section D where he says the transformation through the division of labor, of personal powers, AKA relationships into material powers. Can only be abolished by individuals, again, subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labor. This is not possible without the community. Only in the community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions. Only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. So the fact that capitalism and the class system has abolished the community and replaced it with the state.

The state acts as the community mark that you were talking about before then only by abolishing the state can individuals recreate or recapture the community. And then I guess when he says, abolish labor, get rid of the division of labor, that's the part where I get a little lost. But I think that's what Wes was driving at.

1:35:53 Wes: Abolishing the division of labor means you can be a philosopher for part of the day, a fisherman for another part. Right.

1:35:59 Seth: That's how it cashes out. Practically, you're saying that, but in the form in which you were talking about that. That abolishing the division of labor essentially means taking control of the productive force. So that instead of the productive force dictating the activity of the individuals, the individuals somehow control the productive force. Is that right or is that not right?

1:36:19 Wes: Yeah, I think they take control of the means of production of the productive forces. Yeah. But ultimately they're taking control of social relations themselves. And abolishing classes, for instance.

1:36:30 Seth: Yeah. I mean, when I first started reading this section, my initial reaction was that he was being nostalgic and calling for a return to older, more natural relationships. And then I thought about it, and I said, well, that's probably not it, because he's talking about revolution. And you have to get to this point where he's not just talking about civil society. So he's not talking about a return to the civil society that grew up organically or naturally. He's talking about individuals making a conscious choice to create community, create civil society according to which people are not determined by the productive forces.

Right. And that's a disruption or transcending the natural order. It's a pretty significant claim. So I said, okay, well, it's not nostalgia. It's something else. But since he's talked about what it suggests or what it requires is that individuals can come together and consciously, through actual actions, break the organic and natural development of world history. In other words, up until now, we've all just kind of gone along with it unwittingly. But there'll be some kind of awareness. But it's not even awareness. He's saying it has to be a revolution.

Right. This is where I'm kind of like, I don't understand. I'm struggling.

1:37:54 Mark: Look, the ending is fixed. It has to get to communism. And so he sketched out a pretty convincing, detailed picture of how things blunder along, how economic progress occurs. And I know a lot of it is stolen straight from Adam Smith. And yet he thinks that somehow we're gonna throw away all this and make a conscious choice on revamping our social relations. Like, that's not the way collective action works. Collective action is, by necessity blind. Because no matter how many individual geniuses you have that say we should throw aside the chance arbitrary way we've been thrown together and the roles that we come in and create a new thing.

There's gonna be so many more people that don't get that message, don't understand that message, that screw that message up. That's the fucking history of every religion to have existed, that we're gonna transform things through ideas. So he has to say that you can't transform it through ideas. You have to have these material conditions that will some lead us to fix ourselves. And it just.

1:38:57 Wes: And that's because it gets so bad. This large class is so impoverished and that even their very existence is threatened that they have no choice. It's a matter of survival in the end to rise up.

1:39:11 Mark: But then we'll have a post apocalyptic nightmare. We won't have a consciously created communist society, we'll have a complete breakdown. And militias.

1:39:23 Wes: And again, I think one of the premises here, which is that how is it that everyone's going to be on perpetual vacation just doing what they want. This really presupposes that technology is so advanced and in a way it seems that way, right? If one fat cat can make many, many, many billions of dollars by exploiting sweatshop labor, if you redistributed that everyone could live well, in other words, why isn't it that we're all working less? We are, of course, I mean we. But say an eight hour workday, technological increases in productivity ought to suggest that to maintain the same standard of living that we work less and less hours a day.

But that doesn't happen. But ultimately it could happen. And as technology gets more advanced, theoretically we'd only have to work 30 minutes a day because that's just how much leverage we have with the forces of production. But before that gets actualized, someone else is actually going to just take advantage of that and they're going to become ridiculously rich and everyone else is, you know, 99% of the people are going to be ridiculously poor before the tension between that kind of snaps. And then everything is distributed evenly because it can be because the technology is there, we can all have robot slaves.

1:40:42 Seth: The whole system that he describes in the end result, he says, requires two things, private property and labor. And part of this project is that they're going to abolish or get rid of private property. That's the concrete step that you have to take in order for this to happen. I think the question we ask is, is it realistic to think that human beings could come together in a group and make a conscious decision to completely interrupt the course of world history and make that happen. And you could look at the history of the world since all this came down and say, no, or at least it's not sustainable. Or you could just simply say, come up with a theory of human nature that says, you know what, the concept of ownership or possession is inherent in the nature of human beings.

1:41:30 Wes: What does the abolition of private property mean? Does it mean that you can come in, wear my shirt anytime you want, just walk into my house? That's obviously unworkable. But if it's ownership of factories and the means of production by the state or whatever replaces the state, that's something that is not only theoretically possible, but it's happened.

1:41:50 Mark: So I know that this text was actually brought forward, as I said, it was not published at the time and it wasn't discovered until well after the Russian Revolution. And so this was actually brought forward by philosophers to say, ha, look, this is why the Soviet Union didn't work. Because you abolished private property, but you didn't abolish division of labor. The division of labor, which is straight from Smith, is much more emphasized in this text than in Das Kapital. So it's not just abolishing private property is the solution. You have to abolish division of labor and with that will go private property and the state and class. That's just the way. And class. That's the way they all, because they all grow together in the same awful petri dish.

1:42:31 Wes: But again, thinking through the practicalities of getting rid of the division of labor seems to mean I don't have to work a certain eight hour job and I can do what I want during the day. And so what is that? What is the implication there?

1:42:45 Seth: I don't know about that. I mean, I think getting away with the division of labor means doing away with activity determining human nature. So if it wasn't such that you were predetermined to be a pin maker or a shoe cobbler or something like that, but that one week you were doing this and next week you were doing that, and the third week you were doing that, so that your activities did not define who you were, that's at least a necessary. But it might be a sufficient condition to say that you're no longer determined by the division of labor. Now, if you wanted to have a society where people rotated activities and, you know, one week it was leisure week, you were the philosopher that week, and the next week you dug ditches and whatever that would require a kind of organizational structure where people could buy in and believe that there was a fair system and also that sufficient means of subsistence were being produced by everybody.

And isn't that what kind of these collective farms and kibbutzes and those sorts of things, those are models where they're attempting to do that. And the big argument between the two opposing big classical economic schools of thought is about whether or not you could plan and organize something like that centrally for a large mass of people or not. Is it better to just let the market determine how people should be organized? Or is the state smart enough to put all that stuff together to say, okay, you're going to do this and you're going to do this?

1:44:14 Wes: Yeah, in the ussr, they, you know, people were actually assigned professions. Right. But it wasn't like you got to do different things. But the whole point of a division of labor and Adam Smith's the Wealth of nations is that you're impoverished just to the extent that you don't have division of labor. Because it's like if I tried to provide for myself all the things my clothing, chairs, and it's not even just a matter of I'd be bad by being a jack of all trades, I'd be bad at all of them. It wouldn't even be humanly possible for me to make my own dresser and my own chair and my own microwave.

Wealth comes about because you have different people specializing in different things and getting really, really, really good at that one specialty. And that's what produces wealth and that's what increases people's standards of living. So you need for all this to work. There has to be a way in which you preserve that benefit of the division of labor even while you've abolished it. And I think again, it has to be technology. That's what has to fill in the gap.

1:45:13 Seth: I hear what you're saying. I think part of the premise here has to be that there has to be a reduction in the desire for consumption. I don't think it's intended that you want to preserve the wealth making capability or result of the division of labor. I think the assumption is that there will be a moderation of needs as well and desires. Because you're not going to desire to be acquisitive and just become wealthy. There just has to be enough to subsist.

1:45:42 Wes: Yeah, but we need to be able to produce enough to have leisure time. Sure, the ability to be a philosopher. Right. Remember that came about through the division of labor. So if I'm spending all my Time meeting my basic needs, then I'm screwed. I'm not going to even have the nicer things. I'm not going to be able to think about things even or have a higher human consciousness. That's one strategy is to moderate needs, but I think that's limited. There's a limit to that because in order to have the kind of again, life that Marx hints at, where I'm a philosopher in the morning and this and that later on, you have to preserve the benefits of the division of labor. You have to preserve quality of life and things like that. Quality of life doesn't just mean having Alexis. It means having time to do stuff.

1:46:26 Seth: Yeah, no, I agree. I guess I'm envisioning a model here where there's a sort of a median or a mean standard of living that all people are given. But the assumption is that you're not going to strive too hard to increase your standard of living. Like that's got to be a prerequisite for this type of society. And that's one of the things. The corruption that came from those other communist societies, that was part of the problem.

1:46:51 Wes: We all want to have a nice couch in this communist society. In the remote past, it was a couch maker, or not even that. You know, there was a carpenter and there was an upholsterer. They were artisans and only took quite a bit of money to afford that. And you know that they had to have that specialization. But with technology, you manufacture that and lots of people can have couches. Everyone can have a couch and a chair, not just the rich. That's the benefit of the division of labor. In a communist society.

1:47:18 Mark: I like the government couch, please.

1:47:20 Wes: In a communist society society, presumably those couch factories are still operating, but they are owned by the people. Yeah, I don't know if it's, you know, we take turns civil service on the assembly line and we don't have to do it that much so it doesn't suck. Or if it's all automated again by technology. That's the question. The feasibility of all of this to me, depends upon this technology question. Otherwise I don't know how abolishing the division of labor works really.

1:47:47 Mark: Well, the only reason I'm not going to take the bait on this is because I think we're going to have a future episode devoted to this. But it's very easy when sort of going through some of these, well, what would have to be in place for this to work out for 90% of our listeners to just grab on it and say, well, that's just silly. Of course that's never going to happen. In the same way that we often dismiss some of these philosophers just because we're trying to make their theory work and we say a couple ways and like that's just evidently silly, you know, so.

But I think it's too important to throw that away. But. So I guess as a closing here, I don't think that he, at least in this text, as is obvious by the fact that you had to go. Go very beyond the text and trying to sketch out what the solution here is. Of course, the solution that he presents that this is just gonna happen as a matter of historical necessity is ridiculous. But a lot of the problem that he's identified in terms of the alienation, in terms of treating each other not like people, like machines, in the way we economically deal with each other, like that all seems right on the money.

And though he completely overstates his point about the, you know, I don't have to argue against your philosophy because I can just point out that you're a white male, whatever, in this particular society and therefore everything you say is full of shit and it's just an expression, you know, that's ridiculous. But there's still an underlying. Looking at people's situation like this and looking at the material conditions beyond why they might be advocating the positions that they're advocating, that's actually a pretty useful strategy to use in conjunction with other things.

1:49:17 Wes: Yeah, my closing kind of pivots off that, which I don't think it's ridiculous, the idea that. That communism might be the necessary end result of a necessary historical progression. I think that's possible. I don't think the USSR is a real counterexample because as Marx says here, it has to happen on a global scale or it doesn't really work. And the right forces of production have to be in place, which I take to be. I'm encouraging people to see Marx as important and plausible by thinking of it in a kind of science fictiony way where you ask yourself the question, what happens as technology continues to increase? We're just at the very beginning of all of this, not much more than a hundred years into it.

1:50:00 Mark: Then the robots kill us. 200 years.

1:50:05 Wes: So in a thousand years, what do things look like when there really is the incredible technological leverage when it comes to producing things? How does that change our social relations? So communism is certainly a possibility and it really doesn't matter. This is a speculation that communism is what it's going to look like. I think it's an important question, and it's too bad that it's not one because communism in a way is taboo in the United States. I'm saying look at this in terms of a sort of historical theory, not as someone advocating a certain type of society, a certain kind of unrealistic utopian society, but someone is asking this very important question, saying, well, this is what it looks like should happen as the productive forces keep increasing exponentially. Anyway, that's my closing.

1:50:53 Mark: You have more? I'm closing.

1:50:54 Seth: Well, I came into this completely apprehensive. So first off, very much enjoyed the reading. Highly recommend that people take a look at it. Like I said, the abridged version I have is. It's very clear and to the point. There's a lot of readings that are intimidating and this is certainly not one of them. He does go off on the young Hegelians a lot in the first part and probably it would make sense to read some Adam Smith before you read this. But, you know, I was apprehensive in the sense of we've been building up a long time to a Marx episode and Marx is such a hot button topic and there's a billion people out there who've read him and scholars and all this that I thought, no way are we going to be able to do this justice because either we're just focusing on kind of a small text, people are going to tell us we should have read something else that.

Well, he answers that question here like any objection we bring up. Right. Is. So I kept thinking, well, as long as we can stay focused on kind of the philosophical aspects of it that are arguable within the context of the text, we should be okay. And I'll this. So I wanted to try to give the most generous reading I could, knowing that people are going to point out to us after we post this. Well, he answers that question here and here's the text where he lays out the vision for what you know. And of course, like you said, Wes, the Soviet Union is not a good counter example or, you know, it's just going to be a raging debate.

And I just thought, not being scholars, that this could be one particular episode where everybody hates it. Right. It might be one of those. But in the discussion, I hope it didn't come off that way. I mean, I hope it was useful and interesting because it certainly was for me. You know, I come away with a stronger conviction about the way I felt about Marx beforehand, which is his ideas are interesting and he's a very legitimate critic of capitalism and the ways in which our material conditions inside of the capitalist system condition who we are and how we act.

At the same time, I don't understand his vision for the alternative, and I'm not so sure that ultimately, by reading other commenters and people who are looking at different ways in which the communist vision can be realized. I don't know if a it's actually possible or b if it is that it's feasible, because I'm not sure that I agree ultimately with the conception that there is such a thing as human nature that can be appealed to in this context and be relied upon.

1:53:08 Mark: Right? I don't even think we can even start the conversation of is human nature compatible with something like the communist vision? And Dylan would jump in and say aren't we by nature competitive? Come on. That discussion bores me. So I like to focus on the parts of the diagnosis that I agree with and just kind of ignore the rest. Ignore his criticism of philosophy, which yes, of course philosophy should be practical and you should do practical things, but that doesn't make all the people that he was criticizing their stuff useless any more than that argument worked when it was by Callicles or the Scientism Advocate or any of the rest of us.

1:53:48 Wes: So ha, you're here.

1:53:51 Mark: Next time we are going to talk about Martin Buber's I and Thou with the return of your favorite guest, Mr. Daniel Horn, who has been reading a lot of secondary literature and will be very well prepared. Probably have a PowerPoint with hundreds of slides. We can only hope. Hey, we are supported by your donations. You can go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and make a contribution. Big donors since our last recording, many of which are the yearly subscribers to our Pel Citizen service have included Roy Spence, David Menarez, Jamie Miller, Cody Fong, Chad Lichleiter, Marci Antonio, William Cromarty, Kevin Johnson, Billy Pritchett, Amy Latour, David Garcia, David Ramsey, and Susan Thompson.

Why many others have made smaller contributions or joined on a monthly basis to our citizenship. Only five bucks a month. You get a lot of great stuff. You can also for free of course go to our blog and see follow up information about this episode. Post your thoughts on what we missed, what you think was wrong, why you think we're all a bunch of communist fuck ups or useless speculative philosophers. Whatever you want to say. And we also have a facebook group with the threads initiated by many people of different levels of sanity. We have a Twitter feed and we hope you just devote your life to hanging out with us in some form or other.

1:55:22 Seth: Wow.

1:55:23 Mark: Thanks, guys.

1:55:24 Seth: Thanks, everybody. Good night.

1:55:26 Wes: Thanks,

1:55:34 Unknown speaker: Sam. I don't think I've ever been this compromisable. Call it to dare show me no mercy show me nurse show me the patience I once held so dearly as something to Pause, pause, pause, pause, pause Leave me alone for a second Let me think over this fantastic scheme do you mean to tell me that just by sitting here I'll completely get open a long history. Show me my action until they are

1:57:11 Seth: good

1:57:15 Unknown speaker: Tell me it's not in a way about money I wish I could show me an outlet and let me mug again show me the meaning of this self destruction and and I'll let you win Pause, pause, pause, pause Leave me alone for a second Let me think over this fantastic scheme do you need to tell me that just by waking up I'll completely get over did you try J. Make me official.

1:58:36 Mark: Make me a clerk

1:58:41 Unknown speaker: Telling me of wonders that lay out before me A typical jerk Follow my fellows and suck it all down Circumstance dictates you squander your talent and work shit around. Pause, pause, pause, pause Leave me alone Let me think over this fantastic scheme do. Do you mean to tell me that just by working here all completely abandoned Even modest dreams. Sam j.

2:01:06 Wes: Sam.