 Let's talk about Marx, Karl Marx. Karl Marx, maybe one of the most, clearly one of the most influential intellectuals of the last 200 years, shaped the world. Karl Marx was very much a materialist. In other words, he believed in kind of a mechanistic determinism. Individuals did not have, for you well, indeed individuals were meaningless. There was no meaning for the individual. Karl Marx was, as I think many, unfortunately of intellectuals have been, was a collectivist in every aspect of his life. What mattered was not the individual, what mattered was the group. What mattered ultimately was not the content of one's mind, because the content of one's mind was determined. The content of one's mind was not shaped by one's choices, was not shaped by one's decisions, but was shaped by the environment one was in, by the class one was born into, and by the race or nation or ethnic group, all terms that he were interchangeable for Marx, one belonged to, and think about it. The race stuff is inevitable. If you think people are just determined that they have no free will, that they have no ability to shape their own souls, and they don't have any souls, they're just mechanistic things, then what is it that shapes human beings? Well, there were two things, two things both recognized by Marx. You're shaped by your genes, now he didn't know there were such things as genes, but you're shaped by evolution, you're shaped by your biological nature. And we'll talk about how you get that biological nature, because evolution, evolution is he understood it, and as people at the time understood it, or I mean there were a number of theories, there were a number of theories at the time of evolution, but of how evolution with human beings worked, and how it explained different races, different skin colors, different ethnic groups, and things like that, Marx had a particular view of that. So it's determined by your biology, and it's determined by your environment, by things like the hard-working conditions of the working class, the soft and easy life of the capitalist class. So ultimately you as an individual were meaningless, were unimportant, you belong to several groups, and one could categorize you, and Marx was into this, categorizing you based on the group that you belong to, the dominant group, the group that ultimately shaped human history was your class, because ultimately what determined human history was production, and this is interesting, because this is where much of Marx deviates from much of the modern leftist theory. Marx was all about economic growth, was all about production, was all about increased production, increased productivity, and he believed that it was inevitable that we were just increased production, increased production, and that communism was actually, and particularly the communist utopia at the end game, at this utopian final place, which you never quite explained how we get to, was a place where we could produce anything, where all the material wants, all the material desires, all the material needs of human beings were almost instantaneously taken care of by this amazing engine of production that first capitalism and then communism had created. But the essence was growth, economic success, economic prosperity, wealth in some way, standard of living, quality of life. Marx did not envision a world in which the parliamentarian is hungry. He did not envision a world in a Soviet Union-like world in which people are starving, in which nobody has anything. In his world, everybody is rich. Everybody's needs once desires are taken care of, and we all live happily again. Again, he does not tell us exactly how he gets there and what happens. But if you understand his theory of evolution, then I think that shines a bit of a light into how we get there. So, and of course, his theory of evolution is relative, so relative to race. So class is the determining factor in economic production is the destiny, it's where history is heading. It's what happens. But Marx was also a nationalist in a funny sense. He was very much supportive of the nationalist revolutions like in 1848. He very much had a view of different nations, their qualities, their abilities, their characteristics as nations. He definitely had a view of superior races, nations, ethnic groups, and inferior ones. So Marx was very much into categorizing different peoples by where they came from and by what he considered the biology. And again, if you don't have free will, if you don't shape your own soul, you're determined by your biology. So where does this biology come from? So let's talk about this theory of evolution that he has. Well, the idea is that your experiences and you know, even he talks about the soil, the kind of land that you cultivate and the food that it generates has an impact on you. Then impact is somehow encoded in your genes and passed on to your children. And he talks about the fact that different peoples have different characteristics, characters based on the type of soil. This was a theory that was going around that he supported. The kind of soil that they had, that they cultivated, that they lived with. And so therefore, your biology could change over a few generations. If your environment changed. So if your environment changed, you adapted to that environment, that adaptation was encoded in your biology and passed on to future generations. So Marx didn't, you know, obviously didn't know about DNA and didn't know about genes and didn't know about how evolution actually happens. Had this idea that races, nations, improve over time and some degrade over time. For example, blacks, he believed, had degraded. There was some noble black race in the past and over time, blacks had degraded. So during his time, he considered blacks to be significantly inferior and inferior race. They were clearly less intelligent, less able than for example, whites or semites. Now, even though he was an anti-semite, he considered semites particularly able and particularly smart. They just used this smartness for deviousness, for bad stuff. You can see how all the anti-semitics have really capitalized on this and integrated this. Semites use their abilities, their capabilities, particularly the Jews among the semites, to deceive or really to make money, to be good capitalists, to be self-interested, which he considered the real sin of the Jews and what made them so evil and what made them so corrupting of other peoples and they couldn't help themselves because it was encoded. It was encoded. It was in their biology to be that way. So Marx and Engels were clearly racists. Now race to them didn't just mean color of skin, race to them meant, to some extent, nationality, race to them meant ethnicity. But they clearly had different categories of race and different views on it, right? As I said, whites were more intelligent than blacks, Aryans and semites were more capable than other races. Americans were entrepreneurial and capable, Mexicans were not, not because of culture, not because of ideas, not because of individual views, but because of their biology. And that's the essence of races. Racists is attributing the characteristic of an individual who belongs to a particular group to the group. He is that way because he is from that group. He is that way because it is determined from his biology, from his origins in that group. Somebody says, wasn't Marx a Jew himself? Of course, yes, he was a Jew. He was a self-hating Jew. That's not untypical, not untypical at all. But he viewed himself. I mean, if you would ask him, I think if he was a Jew, he'd say no. Because he viewed the essence of Judaism as self-interest and greed. And since he had overcome self-interest and greed, he wouldn't consider himself a Jew, right? What's a self-hating Jew? It's a Jew who hates Jews. That's what a self-hating Jew is. He hates what it means. He hates whatever he views as the Jew in him. Yes, he believed it. Yeah, I mean, Marx is full of contradictions. Most of these thinkers are full of contradictions, right? History is deterministic. Class is deterministic. Biology is deterministic. There is no free will, except he can change himself. He can come up with new ideas. His new ideas are gonna have an influence in history. How, why, what's the mechanism by which they have an influence in history? When history is mechanistic, who cares about contradictions? Contradictions can exist. We should embrace contradictions. We thrive in contradictions. It's not hypocrisy. It's the acceptance of contradictions. Hegel, who can't, I mean, sorry, he was a follower of Kant and Marx is very much a follower of Hegel. Hegel says life is a contradiction. He embraces the idea of contradictions. Yes, I mean, technically Marx is a Jew in a sense that his heritage is Jewish, but his father had converted to German, to be a German Protestant. But he, you know, genetically, if you will, he was Jewish and he was an atheist. So the Protestant part wouldn't have meant much to him. But look, the key is with Marx is that he was a determinist. He was a determinist. And if you're a determinist and you see, let's say, different parts of the world behaving with their different cultures, different achievements, different levels of achievement, then you're a determinist and then it must be something in the biology of the people that is responsible for the different achievements. This is why in a sense all racists are determinists. All racists, all so-called race realists, it's just a fancy word for collectivist determinists. They look at one group of people, they look at another group of people and might have some common feature like a common heritage or skin color. And they say, these people have achieved more than those people. Therefore, these people are superior to those people because it's in their genes that they're better because there's nothing else to be better. Because what determines the environment? Well, the genes. Now, Marx's view of environment was more complicated, you know, it involved weather and it involved soil, angles, for angles it also involved culture, but where does culture come from? I mean, it's all convoluted and distorted and ultimately contradictory, ultimately contradictory. Jennifer asked that Marx think that humans were capable of using reason. I mean, yes, but his interpretation of reason, following Kant is not ours. And reason did not mean what it means to us. To him, it was more of an internal kind of consistency as he saw it, kind of what he viewed as science, even though science is not describing reality, because reality's unknowable, it comes from Kant, right? So it's, and again, he didn't mean the same thing by reason as we do. And no, if you mean by reason, as we understand reason, observing reality, integrating the facts into concepts, no, not really. So even though race for Karl Marx was not history's main mode of force, production wasn't as a consequence, class was, it was definitely a force. Races endowed with superior qualities would serve as generators of production. I'm reading from an article about Marx and race. Again, races endowed with superior qualities would serve as generators of production. The less endowed ones would hold humanity back. And indeed, if some of those races got wiped out, you know, big deal. That's okay, because they're holding humanity back. And the standard is not individuals. The standard is not any particular death, somebody's death or non-death. The standard is holding humanity back, the ultimate in collectivism, humanity. And therefore, if a certain race or people had to disappear in order to let humanity progress, so be it. I mean, the closest Karl Marx or Engels ever came to actually saying that was Engels in a famous letter talking about the South Slavs. They despised, they really despised the Southern Slavs as compared to Northern Slavs and certainly as compared to the Germanic races or the Germanic people. But, you know, he calls the Slav barbarians, these are the Southern Slavs. This is Engels in a letter to Karl Marx and they exchange letters about the inappropriateness of the Southern Slavs to become good proletarians, to become good producers, as they understood it, to become something that moved civilization forward. And Engels in his final paragraph in this letter writes, the next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth. Not only of reactionary classes, reactionary classes are the capitalists or the aristocrats or anybody trying to prevent this wave of the proletarian and of the taking over, right, of the communist takeover. So, the next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth, not only of the reactionary classes and dynasties. Now, they's already talking about wiping out, now he's not saying they're gonna do it, the next world war, whatever that is. But also, they're the entire reactionary peoples and that too is a step forward. And that too is a step forward. The wiping out of entire reactionary peoples, in this case they're talking about the Slavs, would be wiped out. Now, Marx in spite of being racist, he was not a racist purist like many racists are today. He actually believed that the mixture of the races was a benefit. He actually believed that one of the things that benefited some of the countries in central Europe which he thought were the, in England, for example, which he thought were the pinnacle of civilization, was the fact that they had mixtures of people, that they did not already come from one, and they, again, Marx and Engels talk a lot about this hybrid races, this hybridization of races. So they're not race purists. And they believe races, for the most part, can be improved. It just takes a long time, and in the meantime, they're holding us back and how are they gonna improve? How do races improve? Well, when the proletarian takes over and the environment gets better, and when production happens more, then that gets encoded in the genes of all races and over time, their biology will change. So there's nothing fixed about the biology. Again, which is different from modern races. It's not fixed. The biology changes from the environment. If the environment gets better, gets more hospitable to certain things, then the people will change biologically. Yes, I mean, people, somebody, James says, they're conditioned by the tools of production. Yes, they're conditioned by the tools of production. So as the tools become better, then the other races over several generations will catch up. But it really all, all of this, is, I mean, it really is mind-boggling. And now the racism of Karl Marx, not to excuse it, was somewhat, I don't know how prevalent, but somewhat typical of intellectuals at the time who were struggling to understand what was going on in the world around them and also trying to integrate that with the new theory, the Darwin's New Theory of Evolution. And they were trying to understand why some countries, some places, some peoples did better than others. And they were trying to get it all together and understand it all. And there were lots of different theories of how to apply evolution, Darwinian evolution, to people, to human beings, and to conditions of humanity in different parts of the world. And they were struggling with this. And Karl was not atypical, Karl Marx and Engels were not atypical about this, but they did spend a lot of time talking about this. It's not, there's no definitive work in which they talk about it, but there are a lot of letters. It appears in a lot of their books. It's sprinkled throughout. And there's a lot of literature. There's a lot of academic literature, non-academic literature. Looking at the question of Marx versus race and this interaction, a lot of Marxists who are to some extent embarrassed by Marxist racism have tried to understand is one way, you know, why he was like, why he had these views and how they integrate into the bigger picture of his deterministic theory. Brie asks, I've heard some Marxists talking about technological evolution. They seem to think how current technology evolved and individual inventors are unimportant. Is this from Marx or more modern? No, in many respects this is Marx, right? Again, history is determined. It's not, it's not chosen. It's not about individual choices. It's not about individuals applying their reason. History is inevitable. Particular technology coming about is inevitable. We might be seeing a particular path, but that path was inevitable. The technology was inevitable. This is what determinism means and it's hard to wrap your head around it. And so it is, and it's part of this increase in production, evolution and technology. The last thing you wanna actually give credit for any kind of progress, production, invention is to the individual, into individual success because that undercuts the entire theory, right? You didn't build that or in a deep sense you didn't build that because there is no you. There is only a clump of cells, there's only firing electrons, there's only a sudden biology that gives you the illusion of you, but there is no you. I mean, so many modern non-Marxists believe this, like Sam Harris to some extent. So things happen. There is a certain scientific, he would call it, logic to them, logic he uses, right? Scientific logic to them, they're these forces, but it's all groups' forces, they're the proletarian and reactionary forces. They're different states and different nations and different races all interacting and clashing against each other and banging against each other. And the outcome of those things is inevitable. It is what it is and there is no other option. Now, by the way, if you're interested in this view of Marx of race, where was it? I found this article, I found this article really interesting. It's from the University of Amsterdam. It's titled, Marx and Engels Theory of History, Making Sense of the Race Factor by Van Rhee, Van Rhee. It's published in the Journal of Political Ideologies. So it's an academic publication, academic paper. You can find it online. I got a PDF of it. If you look Marxism Race or Marx Race or Marx and Engels Race, this is one of the things that comes up. There's a lot of interesting things that come up on that. If you're interested in that quote from Engels that I gave you, that is in a Wikipedia entry for this German word that I cannot pronounce, Volkerabfall. But again, if you look up race and Engels, you will find it. And indeed, I remember reading an article years ago. I think I was probably in my early 20s in a conservative British magazine about these letters that Karl Marx and Engels were exchanging. And until that point, I had no idea. And I was shocked by the extent of the racism, the extent in which they identify certain collective characteristics of individuals, but they collectivized them on nationalities and races and ethnic groups. It truly is horrific. And therefore it's not surprising that in our modern world, so many of the Marxists have focused primarily on race. To the extent that I think people who consider themselves real Marxists don't think that people focusing on race are Marxists. So the whole critical race theory, in many respects, is purpued by class theory Marxists. And you can see this tension within the left. Within the left, you can see the people, you can see it in somebody like Norm Chomsky. Norm Chomsky was much more of a class Marxist, a class theory Marxist, a real Marxist, I would say. And he doesn't like this critical race theory. And he thinks there's something really wrong with it. And he objects to it and rejects it. Because to him, the fundamental driver of history is economics. The fundamental driver in history is not a clash between races. It is the clash between the Poletarian, the working class and everyone else. Somebody's gonna say, Chomsky's not a Marxist. That would be new. Wow. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Right. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, I wanna see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I wanna see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this, and you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. 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