 Ideas have consequences, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes catastrophic. Greetings fellow humans. This is a response to PragerU's video titled Who Is Karl Marx? Given that more and more people are supporting Marx's ideas, and that he's officially the most important thinker of the last millennium, it's really important to understand what these ideas are. Since this is a response, we would recommend that you watch the original video first to see what they say, we've put a link for you in the description. Briefly put, PragerU's video argues that Marx thinks that capitalism is unjust, that Marx wants communism, because it would give us justice, that Marx advocates communism, by which he means a society where the state owns and controls everything, and that Marx wants to sacrifice freedom, democracy, the family, and so on, to get to communism. Facts, as they say, don't care about your feelings. And we're going to argue that here, PragerU simply gets the facts wrong, which we'll show you by looking at what Marx really says. But before we do that, we want to be clear on one thing that we won't be doing here. It's a truth universally acknowledged that the best way to criticize Marx is to blame him for things he never did, and that happened long after he died, like everything ever done by the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and so on. This is a bit like blaming Adam Smith for everything that any capitalist society has ever done, like all of European and North American imperialism and colonialism, how the capitalist empires brought literal slavery to the Americas, or blaming Jesus personally for everything that everyone calling themselves Christian has ever done, which includes all of the aforementioned things, as well as historical highlights, like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. Marx was never a politician, never the head of any state, and the first Marxist revolution was in 1917, decades after he died. Being an ardent anti-utopian, Marx always refused to lay down blueprints for what the future should be like, or detailed plans for how to get there. That makes it a bit weird to blame him for what a bunch of other people did. Instead of playing the collective blame game, or getting into detail about loads of different societies, we're going to focus on the same thing that Prager use video claims to, namely, what Karl Marx actually thinks and argues for. For each of our four main points, we'll start by showing you clips of Prager use video so you can remind yourself of what exactly they are claiming, before we show you what Marx actually writes. We recommend that you watch the whole thing in order, however, in case you want to watch this in parts or just want to check out specific points that you're most interested in, we've put links in the description to each main part to make things easier for you. Get ready, people, because this is going to get nerdy. Part 1. Karl Marx on why capitalism is not unjust. Marx believed that workers, specifically those who did manual labor, were exploited by capitalists. The people who owned, as Marx put it, the means of production, specifically factories, but who did very little physical labor themselves. Only a worker's revolution, Marx wrote in Das Kapitel, could correct this injustice. Let's break this down. Fashion icon and Reagan fanboy Paul Kengor is saying that Marx thinks that under capitalism, capitalists exploit their workers, that Marx thinks that exploitation is morally unjust, and that to fix this injustice, he recommends a worker's revolution. Does Marx really think that capitalism is unjust? You have to wonder, if Marx really said this, wouldn't Prager you have found us a quote or pointed us to where he says it? The reason they don't is because actually, he simply doesn't say that capitalism is unjust. You can check this out for yourself. Find a PDF of capital volumes one, two and three, and just search your way through every single use of unjust, injustice and so on. Marx says a lot of things in capital, but as you'll see, he never says that capitalism is unjust. Now, you might think, doesn't Marx think that capitalists exploit workers? Doesn't that imply that capitalism is unjust? To answer this, we need to understand what Marx means by exploitation. Marx indeed thinks that those who own the means of production exploit workers, but Prager you is wrong to think that Marx thinks that this is unjust. Exploitation in both Marx's original German and in English can refer to kind of moral condemnation, but it can also refer to kind of morally neutral meaning of taking advantage of something, say intelligently exploiting one's gold reserves. In these cases, we're not implying that anything unjust is happening when we use the term exploitation. This is what Marx is talking about when he talks about exploitation. Marx defines the degree of exploitation in terms of the relationship between the value the capitalist gets from the labor they buy and the value they pay in wages. In other words, it's about how much the capitalist manages to get out of their workers, much like when we talk about exploiting your gold reserves. Marx is very clear about whether he thinks this is just or not. He explicitly says that it is just. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day's labor power. He therefore has the use of it for a day. A day's labor belongs to him. On the one hand, the daily sustenance of labor power costs one half a day's labor. While on the other hand, the very same labor power can remain effective, can work during the whole day, and consequently, the value which it's used during one day creates is stubble what the capitalist pays for that use. This circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller. Marx is clear as day here. When capitalists pay workers to work for them and make a profit from it, it is by no means an injustice. When Marx talks about exploitation in capital, he's not making a point about whether it's just or moral. It's part of an analysis of how capitalism in fact works. And it's not even that exciting. Marx didn't write thousands of pages of capital to whine about capitalism being bad. He did it to write the scientific work of political economy, trying to figure out how it in fact works. If other Paul or Prager you in general cared about, well, the truth, they could have just searched capital for the uses of the word injustice and found it. Did they not bother to read it? Why are they telling us that Marx says the exact opposite of what he really says? There's a general right-wing frame that Prager you is trying to push here, even though it flies in the face of the facts. They present socialists as obsessing over who gets what, while ignoring the more important questions of things like a free and fair society where we can be in control over our own lives. There are good reasons why you might want to be concerned with these ways of thinking. Because focusing on the justness of outcomes or fair distributions really make that much sense given how people have all sorts of different ideas about what that would be. Isn't focusing on who gets how much less important than thinking about who has the power to make decisions in our society? Shouldn't we care much more about how we can organize society in a way where we rule ourselves, rather than being ordered around by bosses and bureaucrats? And shouldn't we above all focus on that most important political value, freedom? If that's what you think, you might be interested to know that Marx agrees with you on each and every one of those points, and we're going to prove it to you. Part 2 – Karl Marx on Justice, Freedom and Communism In Marx's day, there were quite a few socialists who criticized capitalism for being unjust, arguing that capitalist profit-making was unjust because it deprived workers of value that they created and advocating socialism for supposedly giving it back to them. Marx thinks that this whole approach is a mistake. What is a just distribution? Doesn't the bourgeoisie claim that the present distribution is just, and on the basis of the present mode of production, isn't it in fact the only just distribution? Are economic relations regulated by legal concepts or, on the contrary, don't legal relations arise from economic ones? Don't sectarian socialists have the most varied ideas about just distribution? Against the Lasallians who criticize capitalism for its opposed injustice, Marx argues that it was an overall mistake of them to make an issue of so-called distribution and to make it the focus of attention. Not only does Marx never argue that capitalism is unjust and explicitly say that capitalist exchange is no injustice, he also criticizes socialists who reject capitalism for supposedly being unjust. If someone tells you that Marx is all about equality or distributive justice, they probably haven't really looked into what they're talking about, unless they're deliberately lying to us, but who would possibly do that on the internet? So if Marx didn't support communism because it gives us justice, why did he? Marx supported communism because it will give us freedom. For Marx, freedom consists in self-directed activity. He thinks that free, conscious activity constitutes the species character of human beings, and that capitalism rips this species' life away from us. For Marx, capitalism is inherently unfree. While we're at work, we're ruled by unaccountable dictators called bosses, the managers and CEOs of the companies we work for. They decide what we do and how, they decide who gets hired and fired, and they can interfere with us and coerce us in a million different ways without us being able to control them. These days, some even go so far as to punish workers for critical face-becomements or tweets, so much for freedom of speech. For the massive chunk of our lives we're at work, we're subjected to the domination of bosses, which makes us unfree. Marx therefore attacks capitalism for how it confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. And let's not pretend that this is voluntary. We all know that ordinary workers are forced to work if they want to avoid poverty, homelessness and starvation, much less if they want any kind of hope for the future. Labour under capitalism is therefore not voluntary, but forced. It is forced labour. The worker's relationship to their work is thus a relationship to his own activity as something which is alien and does not belong to him. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Another way that capitalism makes us unfree is that under capitalism we are continuously producing and reproducing capitalist social relations, which come to wield a kind of impersonal power over us. Marx thus writes about how the more the worker produces, the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital, and about the material relations which are individuals under capitalism's lord and master. The basic idea here is that under capitalism the so called competitive market becomes a socially creative power that we've made, but are no longer able to control. Just like the Sorcerous Apprentice, we've created and unleashed this new force that, almost like an artificial force of nature, is wreaking havoc on our society, forcing wages down, creating devastating economic crises time after time, driving people out of their jobs, and preventing us from addressing the ecological crisis in anything like a serious way. Marx doesn't worry about some people having more than others, working harder than others, or being better than others at various things. What he cares about is freedom, and that means you being in control over your own life and activities, not being dictated to by rich and powerful elites. That's why Marx and Engels write that communism deprived no one of their power to appropriate products in society. It merely removes the power to subjugate the labour of others through this appropriation. The real reason that Marx supports communism is that he thinks it will give us freedom. Marx wants a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. In the Communist Manifesto, he writes that in place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class conflicts, there will be an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Prager, you say that Marx criticizes capitalism for being unjust, and wants to replace capitalism with communism to correct this injustice. What we've shown so far is that both of these claims are wrong, and they're not just wrong, they're the exact opposite of what Marx really writes. As we've shown, Marx says that capitalism is just, criticizes those who argue for socialism based on justice, and wants to replace capitalism with communism not to give us justice, but to achieve freedom, to achieve universal human emancipation. Now you, the critical viewer, might think that so far, we've just looked at Marx's values. Maybe Comrade Paul is wrong about the reasons why Marx wants communism, but still writes about what Marx thinks communism is. Let's have a look. Part 3. Karl Marx on Communism Communism we are told is, at its essence, about sharing what we have, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, as Marx put it. Maybe that sounds good to you, but what does it mean? Who determines ability? Who determines need? The answer is the state, the ruling elite. Under Marxism, that's who has all the power. That's why the truth is this. Marxist dictators like Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot really did get Marxism right. They wanted absolute power, and Marxism gave them the way to get it. Here for once, Comrade Paul gets things right. Marx's idea that the future society will distribute according to needs is part of his description of what he calls communism. However, if Prager you were right about the rest, we'd expect Marx to say something about how, under communism, you'd have a single person or a small group having absolute power at the cost of freedom. But he doesn't. He writes the exact opposite. Marx writes that free conscious activity constitutes the species character of man, and that communism is the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man, it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being. This will bring about, he writes, the emancipation of the producing class, which is that of all human beings, without distinction of sex or race. This can only be achieved by a society that is collectively self-determined by us all. He therefore argues that modern universal intercourse cannot be controlled by individuals unless it is controlled by all, and describes communism as a society where all class distinctions have disappeared and all production is concentrated in the hands of associated individuals, not by the state or unaccountable corporate tyrannies. Such a society will be organized on the basis of free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production. Thus, he asks us to imagine for a change an association of free men working with the means of production held in common and expending their many different forms of labour power in full self-awareness as a single social labour force, in which the social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production, as well as in distribution. To prevent the impersonal domination of capitalist-type competitive markets, with their constant crises and devastating effects on the natural environment and human life, communism requires the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production. Not by the state, but by the aforementioned associated producers themselves. Communism will also eliminate the capitalist division of labour, which forces working people to do all the hard, boring, unempowering and unrewarding work regardless of their individual potentials and preferences, while others, bosses, managers, dominate and control their working lives. Marx therefore describes communism as a society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes. Society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow. Of course, this doesn't mean an end to subdividing tasks between us, or giving up on modern day technology. Rather, it means that a person does not give himself to one activity only, that he does not relate to any of his several activities as to a role in a fixed social structure, and that generally what he does is something he wishes to do. Finally, a free future society needs a principle that gives us some rough idea of how to distribute goods and services, which, and for once Prager you get something right here, is from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. By reorganizing society in ways that eliminate all forms of domination and unfreedom, democracy will be a form of society where individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association. The point to notice here is that Marx nowhere says that any ruling elite is opposed to decide what counts as need. As we've seen, not only does Marx explicitly say that the communism he advocates has no ruling minorities, his entire idea of a communist society is developed to be a society without ruling elites, and the one attempted socialist revolution he did observe from afar, the Paris Commune, he praised precisely for being an expression of ordinary people's bottom-up collective self-rule, as opposed to the existing hierarchical states defended by liberals, republicans and conservatives. We'll talk more about this in the next part. Prager used claim that Marx thinks that ruling elites should decide what counts as needs is just not true. As we've seen, Marx's entire vision of communism is the exact opposite of this. It's designed to envision a free and self-governing society without any rich and powerful ruling elites we're familiar with from capitalist, feudal and slave societies. This again, is why Prager you don't give any evidence for their claim, because there isn't any and they know it. Or Paul might respond that, ok, maybe Marx's communism will be free and stateless and all these good things, but if you try to distribute according to need, a state or ruling elite will always end up making decisions about what counts as needs, which we see in Marx's societies, like the Soviet Union. Here the problem isn't just that Prager you are wrong about Marx, they're wrong about the basic facts about the societies they talk about. Like the Soviet Union, Lenin himself never tried to distribute according to need, nor did he introduce the system of five year plans that the USSR became associated with. In fact, after the chaotic civil war and its rather ad hoc war economy, complete with rationing cards and all, much like war economies elsewhere in Europe before and after, Lenin introduced a new economic policy in 1921. This included a much greater role for private enterprise, with the state controlling the economy's commanding heights, like heavy industry, transport, communications and foreign trade. Neither the state nor the private sector during this period ever tried to distribute according to need, so distributing according to need can't have helped Lenin gain absolute power in the Soviet Union because it never happened. But you, the critical viewer, might think that when the Soviet Union under Stalin introduced their famous five year plans, they paid everyone the same and are distributed according to need, right? Well first of all, those things actually contradict each other. As we saw earlier, since people have different needs, if you pay everyone the same, you're not distributing according to need. Secondly, it also gets all the facts wrong. During the Stalin period, from the first five year plan in 1928 onwards, Donald Filzer, one of the world's leading experts on Soviet history, writes that the vast majority of workers were placed on peace rates, with remuneration tied to output quotas or norms. The normal set, so that if a worker fulfilled her or his quota by 100%, she or he would earn the basic wage. Overfulfillment obviously meant higher earnings, the system of progressive peace rates favored for a time in the 1930s and again after World War II, allowed the rate page for each unit to rise as overfulfillment increased, thus allowing the boost in earnings to accelerate. Underfulfillment, on the other hand, meant that the worker earned less than the basic wage, which under Soviet conditions entailed real material hardship. The theory behind Stalinist policy was that the basic wage should be kept relatively low so that workers would exert as much effort as possible to overfulfill their norms. Peace rate payment, paying people per unit of output or action performed, is of course familiar for many capitalist industries, which is where they got it from. After Stalin passed away, a bunch of reforms were passed that increased the level of many wages, raised quotas to reduce overfulfillment, reduced the number of different wage scales and rates, limited and regulated bonuses, and some work was moved from peace rate to time rate payment. Importantly, neither Stalin nor his successors tried to distribute goods and services according to need. Instead, they paid workers in the same way that lots of capitalist corporations do. Distributing according to need cannot have helped people like Lenin or Stalin end up with absolute power, because these societies never distributed according to need. If we look at what Marx says, it's clear to see that, by communism, he doesn't mean a society where any one single person or minority elite wields absolute power. He does think that communism will distribute according to need, but as we've seen, states like the Soviet Union didn't actually do that. For a political scientist, Comrade Paul is being very political, but not very scientific, to the point of being wrong about basic facts. This is not controversial, and you can find out about it simply by searching online or looking at Wikipedia, but there's one bit of argument where they do give some evidence, which is on Marx's views on the transition to communism. So let's turn to that. Part four, Karl Marx on Freedom and Democracy. What would that revolution look like? Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels spelled it out point by point in the communist manifesto. It included the abolition of property and inheritance, and the centralization of credit, communication, and transport in the hands of the state, and a lot more along the same lines. In other words, the state owns and controls pretty much everything. The Marx who wrote the communist manifesto lived in a world covered with what we call dictatorships, powerful arbitrary monarchies, and republics were only a small minority of people were allowed to vote, unless of course you think that women, slaves, and other working class people aren't people. Marx was fundamentally committed to the idea that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, and early on he and Engels thought that they could do this through states with universal suffrage. They initially thought that working class uprisings would force states to adopt freedoms of speech, press, conviction, and association, along with universal suffrage, that this would give ordinary working people real power over the state, and they would use this power to take us to communism. However, Marx changed his mind about this before it was ever tried in response to the lessons of the working class uprising of the Paris Commune in 1971. Against the monarchists and bourgeois republicans who defended undemocratic, centralised states, Marx writes that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose, because the political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation. Under the model developed by the Commune, Marx writes, the old centralised government would have to give way to the self-government of the producers, and this would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon and clogging the free movement of society. What would this society look like? It would be fundamentally different than modern states. Instead of voting for a person you'd never met, or a list on a national level only every four years, you would send delegates directly from your local area to central councils for short periods of time. They would be bound by their constituents' formal instructions or what's called imperative mandates, and they'd be instantly recallable in case they don't do what their constituents want. Furthermore, all public servants, including magistrates and judges, rather than unaccountable bureaucrats, were to be elective, responsible and revocable. And were to be paid the same as average working people. Modern states have none of these things. This all combines to give people meaningful power and control over society in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with the top-down rule of the capitalist state machine. This is not exactly authoritarian, quite the contrary. It's a radically free alternative to both hierarchical modern states and the completely unaccountable tyranny of capitalist corporations. The uprising, the Paris Commune, took place in 1871 during the war between France and the German state of Prussia. How do you think that liberals, republicans and conservatives responded to people wanting to rule their own lives? Predictably, they responded by pausing the war to focus on brutally crushing the real enemy, the working classes. Marx writes that when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their natural superiors, the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the red flag. The ruling classes allied together and massacred the communards for daring to fight for true democracy. Historian John Merriman writes that the number of communards who perished at the hands of Versailles forces is still a matter of debate. Conservative accounts accuse the communards of mass murder, estimating that 66 or perhaps 68 hostages had been killed. The Versailles, on the other hand, some merely executed without any real trial as many as 17 thousand people, a figure given by the official government report that followed. The municipal council paid for that number of burials after Bloody Week. But some estimates have reached as high as 35 thousand. Bodies were left in vacant lots, piled into immense ditches, construction sites, and abandoned or torched-in buildings tossed into the Seine or into mass graves. This is how the capitalist government responded to democracy. Marx commented that the civilisation and justice of the bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilisation and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge. It's the deeply democratic model of the Paris commune that Marx advocates literally the rest of his life, until he dies. Did Prager you miss this? Only if they never even bother to read the full communist manifesto, because in the 1872 preface to that manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly point out that they've changed their minds to the Paris commune model, writing that no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of section 2, because that passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. More precisely, they write that in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and then still more in the Paris commune, were the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months. This programme, i.e. the programme of the communist manifesto, has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the commune, is that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. This is in the preface, at the very start of the text. At this point, it's hard to avoid the impression that our favourite fake university either hasn't actually read the basic political texts of the person they're attacking, or that they're deliberately misrepresenting his ideas, and it gets so much worse. His ends could be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions, all existing social conditions. That's religion, family, personal possessions, freedom and democracy. They all had to go, in order to achieve Marx's vision of an earthly paradise. But since few people give up their liberties and property voluntarily, creating a Marxist state has always required guns, prisons and summary executions. The last claim is a bit weird, since the regimes that these revolutions replaced, whether it's the Russian Tsars, the Chinese Nationalists or the Cuban Batista Dictatorship, all had guns, prisons and summer executions as well. And the Russian Revolution was overall peaceful until the Tsarist forces and capitalist countries decided to attack the USSR. Again, knowing who the real enemy is. But let's stick to Marx. Every claim they make about Marx here is a lie. If you read the manifesto, it's obvious that what Marx and Engels are talking about overthrowing are two inherently unfree and undemocratic institutions, the capitalism and the undemocratic states of their day. As we've seen, Marx doesn't want to abolish freedom, he wants to replace capitalist society with a free society. We've also seen, by overthrowing the existing social conditions of 1848, can't possibly mean overthrowing democracy, because democracy, even in a basic sense, didn't exist anywhere in the world at that time. And you can't abolish something if it doesn't exist. That's why in the very same paragraph that other Paul is quoting from here, Marx and Engels actually write that communists work everywhere for the unification and mutual understanding of democratic parties of all countries. They're not fighting to abolish democracy, they're fighting to bring democracy to a world where it doesn't exist. And they're not talking about forcibly overthrowing religion either. Marx and Engels both think that religion will disappear once people are in control of their own lives, because the human needs or feelings of empowerment and consolation that religion really does provide will be better fulfilled by people actually being free and empowered. But at no point do they advocate forcing anyone not to be religious, and suggesting they do is simply dishonest. What about personal possessions? It's common to accuse socialists of wanting to abolish all personal possessions because they want to eliminate private property in the means of production. This accusation is based on a confusion about what private property means in the writings of 18th and 19th century thinkers, as well as among socialists today. When political economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx talked about private property, they weren't mainly talking about personal possessions like clothes and toothbrushes, for some reason toothbrushes are always the example people use. Rather, they were mainly referring to the kinds of property that conveys social power in different societies, like large-scale overship of cattle, land, factories, and so on. Even over 150 years ago, and in the very same communist manifesto, Marx and Engels make this distinction explicit, writing that, we want in no way to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour used for the reproduction of life itself, an appropriation that leaves no pure surplus that could give power over anyone's labour. We want instead to transform the miserable character of this appropriation, through which the worker merely lives in order to increase capital, and only in so far as it suits the interests of the ruling class. Marx and Engels aren't arguing for taking away anyone's ordinary possessions. All that they're arguing for is taking away the power of capitalists to dominate or press and exploit working people. The same way that abolishing slavery doesn't remove anyone's ordinary personal possessions, it just takes away one of the ways in which the ruling class is able to dominate or press and exploit people. Thus, Marx and Engels write that communism deprives no one of the power to appropriate product in society, it merely removes the power to subjugate the labour of others through this appropriation. When it comes to the family, the only thing other polkas seem to find that Marx says is a bit in the communist manifesto where Marx and Engels are making fun of the right-wing hysteria about communism. Transformation of the family? Even the most radical of the radicals flares up at this infamous proposal of the communists. But if you just look at what they go on to say, it's obvious that they're actually making fun of this accusation, like when they make fun of the idea that communists want to institute communal ownership of women. What they go on to say is radical for the time though, like opposing child labour, supporting free and universal education, and freeing people from being forced by fear of poverty and starvation into marrying for money. And they also famously advocated women having political rights and freedoms, like being free to divorce or vote, things that liberals and conservatives at the time almost universally opposed. This is why Marx and Engels are making fun of the accusation that communists want to transform or abolish the family. Do the conservatives who make these accusations really think that women being free to vote, marry and divorce who they want, and not being able to force children to work in factories will abolish the family? Take a step back and think about this for a second. Marx is making fun of conservative scaremongering about communism, and all he argues for is giving women basic human freedoms that people in many countries today take for granted. In addition to a single sentence though, the Prager U video also links to an interview with and book by the video's presenter, Paul Kengor. If you read Kengor's book, we see where his real worry lies, namely in basic freedoms for LGBT plus people. He writes that He goes on saying that But they at long last have the vehicle to make it happen. This entirely novel phenomenon called gay marriage, it is their trojan horse. Same-sex marriage is a crucial final blow to marriage, the only blow that is enabling a formal legal redefinition that will unravel the institution. Women, people of colour, queer people and so on, have basic rights to say and think what they want, express themselves, vote and so on. Because that will destroy something important, possibly all of western civilisation. They don't really give any evidence, apart from some vague conspiracy theories, because they don't actually have any good evidence. It was just bigoted scaremongering all along, and people are waking up to that. This sort of thing was a lot easier before the internet became widespread, you can lie about public healthcare being expensive and harmful, but it's going to be a lot harder for people to believe you, when they can hear from people in other countries, showing you concrete evidence that this is bogus. And the same thing for gay marriage, the Netherlands, Norway and other countries have had it for over a decade, and lo and behold, they're still a lot better to live in for everyone than the US is. In his book, Prager use Paul doesn't quite try to pin this one on Marx, because Marx doesn't say anything about marriage rights for LGBT plus people. It looks like what this Paul is really scared of is basic rights and freedoms for women and queer people, which, and here for once we agree, socialists have much more often stood up for than anyone else, and dusty, old homophobic conservatives always fought against, and, as we can see, still do. Personally, I think this tells us something important about how committed other Paul and Prager U really are to individual freedom. Part 5, Conclusion Let's take stock. Prager U and Paul Kengor specifically argue that Marx thinks capitalism is unjust, wants communism to give us justice, wants the state to control everything, and wants to destroy freedom, democracy and the family to get to communism. We've shown how every single one of these accusations is false. Marx literally says that capitalist exploitation is not unjust, and criticizes those who advocate socialism in the name of justice, distribution and equality. Far from sacrificing freedom or democracy, he wants universal human emancipation through working class self emancipation, and thinks the best way of doing this is through a kind of truly participatory democratic society that replaces both capitalism and the capitalist state. Marx is not always easy to read or understand, and there are lots of things where it makes sense that we'd have different interpretations of the same thing and reasonable disagreement. This happens for all major political thinkers and is totally normal. But what we have here is not an example of that. What we have here is someone saying lots of stuff about an important political thinker. They give no meaningful evidence or argument to support what they're saying, and what they say flatly and directly contradicts what Marx himself says about those things. When they say things like, Don't hide behind the It's Never Really Been Tried line. It has. It reminds me of this bit in Rick and Morty. They probably know that if you bother to read even just a little bit of Marx, you'll see for yourself that what they're saying just isn't true. Jokes aside, Paul Kangor is a professor of political science. He knows how to read the people he cites. At a certain point we need to be asking ourselves, are they just too lazy to bother to read any of the things they're talking about? Or are they just lying to us? Why would they do that? Marx was a thinker committed to universal human emancipation through the self-emancipation of the working classes. The rich and powerful rulers of the world are accustomed to ruling their corporations, like the dictatorships they are, as seeing politicians serve at their will, have always, and will always fight against this. Take any basic cause that improves the lives of working people, from decent wages and working conditions, universal healthcare, freedoms of assembly like unionizing, and so on. And you'll always find that it's radicals fighting for them, and liberals and conservatives fighting against. PragerU are simply the paid propagandists for the ruling classes created by Dennis Prager, a radio host with some very rich and powerful friends. A lot of their early funding came from the fracking billionaire Wilkes Brothers, and by 2018, it had a 10 million dollar annual budget, 40% of which goes to advertising. So when you see videos call things like, why you should love fossil fuel, and fossil fuels, the greenest energy, there might be some connection there. Those very same Wilkes Brothers gave Ted Cruz a super pack 15 million dollars in 2015, so it might not be surprising when you see PragerU videos title things like, money in politics, what's the problem? Their other funders include a range of right-wing foundations like the Donors Trust, which allows donors like the Koch Brothers and other right-wing republican billionaires to funnel dark money where they will, including to a variety of climate change deniers, the Lynn and Harry Bradley Foundation, which according to their own website, pursues a mission to restore, strengthen and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism, the Morgan Family Foundation, which donates to a variety of anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT plus organizations, and more. PragerU is attacking Marx because it's a way of attacking the working class movement, the same movement that fought against slavery, fought for basic freedoms of speech, press, conviction and association, and who today are fighting for better lives and a better future for all people against the rich and powerful capitalist class. It's part of their attack on any idea that the ordinary people they look down on can actually take charge of their own lives and society, that they don't need to be ruled over by wealthy and powerful elites. They know which side they're on, and so should you. We're Red Plateaus, a channel dedicated to explaining socialist theory and to the cause of universal human emancipation. We take the time to read people's work before making YouTube videos about it. If you like our work, we have a Patreon. Please like, share and subscribe to the channel, and we have a Twitter account that you can find in the description. We'd like to thank our Patreon comrades for helping out with production costs. If you have any questions about the video, things you'd like us to talk about in the future, or anything else, please just let us know in the comments. Have a good day.