Jordan Peterson's Critique of the Communist Manifesto

What I did instead was go back to what I considered the original cause of all the problems, let's say what the

communist

manifesto

was and what I tried to do because that's Marx and we're here to talk about Marxism, let's say and um, what I tried. to do was to read it and to read something you don't just follow the words and you follow the meaning but you separate the sentences and you ask yourself at this sentence level and at the sentence level and at the paragraph level is this It's true that counterarguments can be presented. that are credible.

It's this solid thought. I have to tell you, and I'm not trying to be flippant, that I have rarely read a treatise. I read it when I was 18 years old. It was a long time ago, true, 40 years ago, but I have rarely read a song that made as many errors per sentence, conceptual heirs per sentence as the

communist

manifesto

, it was a miracle to read it again and it was interesting to think about. psychologically also because I have read articles by students who were of the same type in a certain sense, although I am not suggesting that they had the same level of literary brilliance and polemical quality and I also understand that the communist manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument, but even though I have some things to say psychologically about the authors, the first thing is that it doesn't seem to me that either Marx or English wrestled with one particular fundamental truth, which is that um, almost all ideas are wrong, so if you and it doesn't matter if it's your ideas or someone else's, they're probably wrong and even if they hit you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume first of all. that they are probably wrong and then attack them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive and what struck me about the communist manifesto was that it was similar to something that Jung said about typical thinking and this was the thinking of people who were not trained to think, said the typical thinker has a thought, it seems to them as if an object could appear in a room, the thought appears and then they just accept it as true, they don't go to the second step. which is thinking about thinking and that is the true essence of critical thinking and that is what you try to teach people in college is to read a text and think about it critically, not to destroy the usefulness of the text but to separate the wheat . from the chaff, so what I tried to do when I was reading the communist manifesto was to separate the wheat from the chaff and I'm afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mainly chaff, and I'm going to explain why, hopefully, in relatively Little time.

In a short time, I am going to summarize 10 of the fundamental axioms of the communist manifesto and, therefore, these are truths that the authors consider basically self-evident and they are truths that are presented in a sense as unquestionable and I am going to interrogate you and tell you why. I think they are not reliable. Now we must remember that this treatise was actually written 170 years ago, that is, a long time ago, and since then we have learned quite a bit about human nature, society, politics over economics, there are many mysteries left to solve, but there are still many to be solved , but I guess we're a little wiser than we were at one point, so you can forgive the authors to some extent for what they didn't know, but not that.

No matter, since the essence of this doctrine is still considered a sanchros act by a large proportion of scholars, they are probably among those most guilty of that particular sin, so the story's number one proposition should be seen primarily as an economic class. fight, okay, so let's think about that for a minute. First of all is the proposition that history should be viewed primarily through an economic lens and I think that is a debatable proposition because there are so many other motivations that drive human beings. There are more human beings than the economy and those that drive other people in addition to economic competition must be taken into account, such as economic cooperation, for example, and that is a problem.

The other problem is that it's actually not a pessimistic enough description of the real problem because history this is to give the devil the idea that one of the driving forces between history is hierarchical struggle is absolutely true, but the idea of that that is actually history is not true because it is deeper than history, it is biology itself because organisms of all types are organized in hierarchies and one of the problems with hierarchies is that they tend to organize themselves in a situation where the winner takes all and that is implicit in some sense in Marx's thinking because of course Marx believed that in a capitalist society capital would accumulate. in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that is actually in line with the nature of hierarchical organizations.

Now the problem with that is not so much the fact that there is accuracy in the accusation that it is an eternal form of motivation. for the fight, but it is an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem because it attributes it to the structure of human societies rather than to the deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical structures per se that, as they also largely characterize the animal kingdom, They clearly are not. Just human constructs and the idea that there is hierarchical competition between human beings; There is evidence of that going back at least to Paleolithic times and that is the next problem: Well, this ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism because it existed a long time in human history before capitalism existed and then it was prior to human history itself, so the question arises as to why the class struggle would necessarily, at least implicitly, be linked to capitalism, given that it is a much deeper problem and now must also be understood.

That this is a deeper problem for people on the left, not just people on the right, is that hierarchical structures dispossess the people who are at the bottom, those creatures who are at the bottom speaking, let's say, of animals, but to people who are at the bottom and that is a fundamental existential problem, but the other thing that Marx did not seem to take into account is that there are many more reasons why human beings fight than their struggle of economic classes, even if the hierarchical idea is built into that. Which is a more holistic way of thinking about it, human beings struggle with themselves, with the malevolence that is within them, with the evil that they are capable of doing, with the spiritual and psychological warfare that occurs within them and, in reality, We are also always at odds with nature and this never seems to appear in Marx and does not appear in Marxist Marxism in general it is as if nature does not exist primary conflict as far as I am concerned or a primary conflict that humans engage in It is this struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world and it is as if to say that if that does not exist in the Marxist domain, if human beings have a problem it is because there is a class struggle that is essentially economic, it is as if it does not exist. human beings existed.

We have problems because we come into life hungry and alone and we have to continually solve that problem and we make our social arrangements at least in part to ameliorate that and sometimes it is exacerbated and that is also why there is very little understanding in the communist manifesto that any of The hierarchical organizations that human beings have created could have a positive element and that is an absolute catastrophe because hierarchical structures are really necessary to solve complicated social problems, we have to organize ourselves in some way and we have to give the devil what he deserves. deserves and that is why hierarchies dispossess people and that is a big problem, the fundamental problem of inequality, but it is also true that hierarchies turn out to be a very efficient way of distributing resources and finally it is the case that human beings Hierarchies are not fundamentally based on power and I would say that the biological anthropological data on that is very clear, you do not achieve a position of authority that is trustworthy in a human society primarily by exploiting other people, it is a very unstable means of obtaining power , so then that's a problem, well, people who laugh could do it that way.

Well, the other problem that immediately arises is that Marx also assumes that you can think of history as a binary class struggle with clear divisions between, say, the proletariat and the proletariat. the bourgeoisie and that is actually a problem because it is not so easy to make a firm division between who is the exploiter and who is exploited, let's say because it is not obvious as in the case of the small shareholders, let's say whether or not they are part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor. This actually turned out to be a big problem in the Russian revolution and by big problem I mean a tremendously big problem because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple identities and that's a pretty easy thing to do and you could usually do that. find some access for which they were part of the oppressor class, it could have been a consequence of their upbringing or it could have been a consequence of the wealth they strove to accumulate during their life or it could have been a consequence of the wealth they strove to to accumulate during your life.

They have been a consequence of having educated or rich parents or grandparents or that they were members of the priesthood or that they were socialists or in short that the list of how it was possible for you to be bourgeois instead of a proletariat grew immensely and that was one of the reasons why that the red terror claimed all the victims it did and, therefore, was a huge problem. Probably the best example was the demolition of the kulaks, who were basically peasants, although they were effective in the Soviet regime. union who had managed to get out of serfdom over a period of about 40 years and gather some degree of material security about them and about 1.8 million of them were exiled about 400,000 were killed and the net consequence of that elimination of their private property due to its bourgeois status was possibly the death of six million Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s, so the binary idea of ​​class struggle was a bad idea, it was a very, very bad idea, It is also bad in this way and that and this is a real sleight of hand that Marx achieves since you have a proletarian bourgeoisie with binary class division and you have an implicit idea that all the good is on the side of the proletariat and all the wrong is on the side of the bourgeoisie and That's classic group identity, to think that one of the reasons I don't like identity politics is because once you divide people into groups and pit them against each other, it's very easy to assume that all the evil in the world can be attributed to one. lump together the hypothetical oppressors and all the good for the other and that good and that's that's that's naive that's naive beyond comprehension because um it's absolutely silly to make the presumption that you can identify someone's moral worth with their position. economic so and that actually turned out to be a real problem too because um Marx also came up with this idea, which is a crazy idea, as far as I can tell, it's a technical term, crazy idea of ​​the dictatorship of the proletariat and that's the next idea I really stumbled upon.

It was fine, so what's the problem? Well, the problem is that the capitalists own everything, they own all the means of production and they are oppressing everyone, that is, all the workers, and there will be a race to the bottom of wages for the workers. as capitalists strive to extract more and more value from the labor of the proletariat by competing with other capitalists to drive down wages, which by the way has not happened in part because the wages of wage earners can become scarce and that actually drives up the market value, but the fact that it was assumed a priori that all evil could be attributed to capitalists and all good that the bourgeoisie and all good could be attributed to the proletariat meant that it could be hypothesized that a dictatorship could emerge of the proletariat and That was the first stage of the communist revolution and remember that this is a call for revolution and not just revolution, but a bloody and violent revolution and the overthrow of all existing social structures.

Anyway, the problem with that you see is that because all evil is not so easily divided between oppressor and oppressed that when you establish a dictator of the proletariat to the extent that you can do what you actually can't because it is technically impossible and an absurd thing to consider. To begin with, not least because of the problem of centralization, I mean that you have to hypothesize that you can take away all property from the capitalists, you can replace the capitalist class with a minority of proletariats, the way they are going to getting elected isn't exactly It's clear in the communist manifesto that none of the people who are from the proletarian class are going to be corrupted by that sudden access to power because they are good by definition, so then you have the good people who run the world and also have them centralized so that they can make decisions that are tremendouslycomplicated to take, in fact incredibly complicated to take, and that is a conceptual failure on both dimensions because, first of all, the proletariat is not going to be good and when you put people in the same position as evil capitalists, especially if you believe that social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character, something Marxists certainly believe, so why not assume that the proletariat would immediately become the same as evil capitalists? or more corrupt than the capitalists, which of course would say exactly what happened every time this experiment was done and then the next problem is what makes you think that you can take a system as complicated as the free market capitalist society and centralize it. and putting decision-making power in the hands of a few people without specifying the mechanisms by which you are going to choose them, such as making you think that they will have the wisdom or the ability to do what the capitalists were doing unless one assumes, as Marx did, that all evil was in the hands of the capitalists and all good was in the hands of the proletariats and that nothing the capitalists did constituted valid work, which is something else than Marx assumed and that is palpably absurd because people who are like maybe if you're a dissolute aristocrat from 1830 or earlier and you run a feudal estate and all you do is spend your time gambling and chasing prostitutes, then the value of your labor is zero, but if you're running a business and it's a successful business, first of all, you're a damn fool to exploit and exploit your workers because even if you're greedy as sin, because you're not going to extract the maximum amount of work from them doing That and the notion that you are not adding any productive value as a manager rather than a capitalist is absolutely absurd, all it does is indicate that you either know nothing at all about how a real business works or you refuse to know anything about how a real business runs. the business works, that is also a big problem, then the next problem is the criticism of profits, it is like this, what is wrong with profits exactly what is the problem with profits?

Well, the idea from the Marxist perspective was that profits were theft. I know, but profits can be theft because corrupt people can run companies and therefore sometimes profits are theft, but that certainly doesn't mean it's always a threat of theft, which means in part, at But if the capitalist is adding value to the corporation, then there is some utility and some justice in him or her extracting value from his or her abstract labor, his or her thinking, his or her abstract skills, his or her ability to manage the enterprise and engage in adequate competition. and in product development and efficiency and proper treatment of workers and all that, and then If they can make a profit, then they have a little bit of security for times that are not so good and that seems absolutely necessary as far as I'm concerned , and then the next thing is, how can you grow otherwise?

You don't have profits and if you have a company that is valuable and worthwhile and some companies are valuable and worthwhile, then it seems to me that a little profit to help you grow seems to be the right approach and so on, the other question. with profits and you know this, if you've ever run a business, it's a really useful constraint, you know that it's not enough to have a good idea, it's not enough to have a good idea and a sales and marketing plan and then implement it. that and all that is fucking difficult, since it is not easy to have a good idea and it is not easy to come up with a good sales and marketing plan and it is not easy to find customers and satisfy them, so if you allow profits to be made a limitation on what you could reasonably try, provides a good constraint on wasted work and therefore most of the things I've done in my life, even psychologically, that were designed to help people's psychological health, I tried to run them on a for-profit basis and the reason for that, other than the fact that I'm not averse to making profits partly so that my companies can grow, but also so that there were forms of stupidity that I couldn't participate in because would be punished by the market enough to eradicate the company and then it's fine and then the next, the next issue, this one is strange, so Marx and the angles also assume that this dictatorship of the proletariat that implies absurd centralization, the overwhelming probability of corruption and impossible. calculation while the proletariat now tries to rationally calculate the way an entire market economy could work, which cannot be done because it is too complicated for anyone to think about.

The next theory is that somehow the dictatorship of the proletariat would magically become hyperproductive and there is actually no theory as to how that is going to happen, so I had to infer the theory and the theory seems to be that once you eradicate the bourgeoisie because they are bad and you get rid of their private property and you, you, you, you eradicate the profits. Then suddenly, magically, the small percentage of the proletariat that now runs society determines how they can make their productive enterprises productive enough so that they become hyperproductive now and they need to become hyperproductive so that the last mistake is logically consistent in relation to the Marxist theory, which is that at some point the dictatorship of the proletariat will become so hyperproductive that there will be enough material goods for everyone in all dimensions and when that happens, what people will do is spontaneously participate in meaningful activities. creative work, which is what they had been alienated from in the capitalist horror show and utopia will be magically introduced, but there is no indication of how that hyperproductivity will occur and no understanding that well, that's not the case. the utopia that will suit everyone because there are great differences between people and some people are going to find what they want in love and others are going to find it in being social and others are going to find it in conflict and competition and others We are going to find it in creativity, as Marx pointed out, but the notion that this will necessarily be the final goal of the utopian state is absurd and then there is Dostoevsky's observation, which should not be taken lightly, which is a kind of superficiality.

Do you have a conception of people that makes you think that if you gave people enough bread and cake and Dostoevsky on terms and nothing to do with occupying them except occupying themselves with the continued continuity of the species, they would suddenly become peaceful? and heavenly Dostoevsky's idea was that we knew that we were created for problems and that if we were ever given everything we needed on a silver platter, the first thing we would do would be to engage in some form of creative destruction just so that something unexpected could happen . just so we can have the adventure of our lives and I think there is something good there is something to be said about it like this and then the last mistake let's say although by no means the last was this and this is one of the strangest parts of overt communism, it was marx, agrees, admits and the angles admit repeatedly in the communist manifesto that there has never been a production system in the history of the world that was so effective at producing excess material commodities than capitalism such as is widely documented in communism. manifesto and if your proposal is look, we have to achieve as much material security for everyone as possible as quickly as possible and capitalism already seems to be doing so at a pace unparalleled in the history of humanity, wouldn't that be logical? be to simply let the damn system develop itself, I mean, unless you're assuming that the evil capitalists are just going to take all the flat screen TVs and put them in a big room and not let anyone else have one, the logical assumption is Well, you are already on a path that is supposed to produce adequate material productivity and from what I can tell there are ten reasons, so what I saw in the communist manifesto is seriously flawed in virtually all of them. way, it could be flawed and also all in evidence that Marx was the kind of narcissistic thinker you might think he was.

He was a very intelligent person and so were the angles, but what he thought, what he thought when he thought, was what he thought. correct and never went to the second stage, which is wait a second, how could all this go terribly wrong? If you are a thinker, especially a sociological thinker, especially a large-scale thinker, a social scientist, for example, one of your moral obligations is to think that you know that you may be wrong about one of your fundamental axioms or two or three or ten. and as a consequence you have a moral obligation to walk through the damn system and think well, what if I'm completely wrong here and the tables are turned and go exactly the wrong way like I can't, I just can't understand how anyone can An idea like the dictatorship of the proletariat can occur, especially after advocating its implementation with violent means, which is a direct part of the communist manifesto and, in fact, I think if you were thinking that if you knew something about human beings and the propensity to the malevolence that is part and parcel of the individual human being, that could do anything but lead to a special form of hell, which is precisely what happened and that's why I am.

I'm going to close because I have three minutes with a little bit of evidence also that um Marx also thought that what would inevitably happen as a consequence of capitalism is that the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer, so there would be inequality from the beginning. What I would like to say is that we do not know how to establish a humane economic system without inequality. No one has ever achieved it, including the communists, and the form of inequality changed and it is not obvious by any stretch of the imagination that the free market economies of the West have more inequality than the less free economies of the rest of the world and the only thing that What can be said about capitalism is that, although it produces inequality, which it certainly does, it also produces wealth and all other systems do not.

They just produce inequality, so here are some statistics here are some statistics of the free market. Well, from 1800 to 2017, inflation-adjusted income growth grew 40 times for production workers and 16 times for unskilled labor. Well, GDP fact increased by a factor of about 0.5 from 180 to 1800, so from 180 to 1800 AD it was like nothing flat and then all of a sudden over the last 217 years there has been this incredible upward movement of wealth and it doesn't just characterize the small percentage of people. at the top, who certainly have the most wealth, the question is not just what the inequality is, but what is happening to the absolutely poor at the bottom, and the answer is that they are now getting richer faster than ever. in the history of the world and we are eradicating poverty in countries that have adopted moderate free market policies at an unparalleled pace, so here is an example from the UN.

One of the UN goals was to reduce the absolute poverty rate in the world by 50 between 2000 and 2015 and they defined that as a pretty low $90 a day, you know, but you have to start somewhere, um, we'll reach that. in 2012. three years ahead of schedule and you might be cynical about it. and let's say, well, it's a somewhat arbitrary number, but the curves are exactly the same in dollars and 3.80 cents a day and seven dollars and sixty cents a day, not many people have reached that, but the rate of increase towards that it's the same. The UN believes that we will get out of poverty defined by a dollar ninety a day by the year twenty and thirty, it is incomparable, so the rich may be getting richer, but the poor are also getting richer and that is not the appearance.

I'll leave it at that because I'm out of time, but I'll leave it with this. The poor are not becoming poor under capitalism. The poor are getting richer under capitalism by a wide margin. And I leave you. with a statistic which is that now in Africa the infant mortality rate in Africa is now the same as the infant mortality rate in Europe in 1952 and that has happened in the span of a lifetime, and if you are pro-poor Yes you're pro-poor, if you're really concerned about the world's poorest people rising above their famine levels, then all the evidence suggests that the best way to do this is to implement something resembling a free market economy.