Thanks for the kind words - Gabriel was an excellent guest! I recommend checking out other episodes of the podcast when you have the chance - which can be listened to wherever you can get podcasts (Apple, Spotify, Libsyn etc.) So far on the show I've covered countries like the DPRK, Laos, China, USSR (focusing on specific republics), Ghana (during its socialist period), Poland, Cuba and more! In some other episodes I speak with people who experienced Actually Existing Socialism in the 20th century first hand!
I'm grateful for this conversation. I only recently started listening to Gabriel on youtube, and normally he talks mostly about his current project on French critical theory. I've been wishing I could hear him discuss his basic philosophy in beginners terms, and this podcast does a lot of that. I only wish there was more! I was especially happy to hear a discussion of how materialism and empiricism are different - but it felt like it could have been just the beginning of a series of lectures on materialism and dialectics.
If you are fishing for compliments, then *incert gushing about your brilliance*, if the question was genuine, then *incert big-eyed pleading look*.@@criticaltheoryworkshop5299
08:03 “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past....” ― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (One might also add, that these circumstances are in the present as well, and that would perfectly describe the situation of capitalist encirclement which faced the fledgeling socialist anti-states.
most marxist in the western world never lived/experienced the devastating nature of marxism first handed so they study and make up theories in the mind never listening to those who actually came from there. cultural marxism which was established to use deception mainly in the west has aimed to win western citizens to the cause by whitewashing what happened in the former eastern bloc or china or south/central america exploiting the experiental ignorance of those in the west.
Yes but stalinism never existed according to soviet primary sources. Read Dr Furr's Stalin vs. Yezhov. Dugin has drawn the same conclusion in his book of the same name (in Russian). Alexander Dugin is definitely NOT a communist! lol!
In the 1930s, in the Soviet Union, the book Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), by Joseph Stalin, set forth the Soviet formulation of dialectical materialism and of historical materialism, which were taught in the Soviet system of education
I know what you mean. Dialectics were further emphasized during my degree in Ecology; nature (and material existence, in general) proceed dialectically. Change is the only constant!
I second this: One of the greatest podcasts I have ever listened to - this clearly rebuts the so-called communist creeps whose take on US imperialism and its opponents is always somehow congruent with US foreign policy.
I believe Trotsky was a great revolutionary leader. He would have contempt for those who claim his political heritage today with their petty bourgeois "campism" and refusal to defend existing Socialist states
Operation Galatia and Paperclip would be strong suggestions. "Dulles’ involvement in Operation Paperclip was part of a larger conspiracy that bypassed both law and presidential directive to keep the program going until the mid-1950s"
Politically the west does not think like this part lazy and are usually not involved in ML type of thinking they want it right away right now politics in the USA doesn't involved it self to think like a Stalinist
Great work by Rockhill, however he is missing something from his analysis. He speaks of Tactics and Strategy, but did not speak of the Operational. A key concept in use by the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis, the operational level is what set the Red Army apart from the rest.
I don't want to hang it over China's head forever because what's done is done, but for historical accuracy's sake, China did collaborate with American imperialism against the Soviet Union. They didn't like how the Soviets supposedly threw Stalin under the bus (Btw, I don't think that's quite accurate We don't really know exactly what Khrushchev's speech contained after the CIA doctored it up) but they completely threw the Soviet Union under the bus.
Yeah, that's a neat trick - China deciding that it didn't want conflict with the West and voila - no conflict. Just like that. The Soviet Union was the primary target of American imperialism, and China capitulated. That was the price.
Hang on, capitalism being above all the right to choose as a individual your own path in life and get out what you put in. The introduction portrays enemies all around aswell within a society...well thats exactly how a socialist would view someone who would, for example want to own their own busines or farm and sell their products or services at the price they see fit.
"you can't simply get rid of money. It has nothing to do with building it in the real world. It's idealist" How exactly does money help these real movements build productive forces in order to produce to meet need? If governments simply print money and put into place by fiat, then why couldn't workers who create a revolution decide they don't want to work for profit and that money is no help about determining how to produce and meet needs?
It's a question of transition. And no worker's state is a separate bubble. There is trade with other states. Distribution without money requires a stable state with stable relationships with other state.
@@casteretpollux so how would you make the transition then? What would be the necessary conditions to abolish money? 5 other states abolishing it with you? 10? 15?
Because money is needed for its exchange value and "price signaling" of supply and demand (that's Marx's idea, not Friedman's). Prices, on average, do follow the labor value of commodities. (Your question is about monetary policy, which is a technical, not ideological problem.) At the start of the transition to socialism -- after the means of production have been socialized -- all the capitalist modes and relations of production will still be in place, and people won't know any other way of life. But with the major contradiction of profit gone, capitalist relations and modes are a sufficient springboard for the transition to socialized relations and modes of production. The transition from capitalism will be guided through education, and the application and development of Marxist (socialist) theory and practice. The long-term goal will be to achieve a classless society that provides the material conditions needed for individual development to every person. It will be a new kind of civilization and building it will take generations, probably. Every society will have to do this in its own unique way, while staying true to the guiding principles of socialism. Some people might think it will be easy, but those people are "utopian socialists." Actually it is an ongoing revolutionary struggle, if only conceptually, and there may be dramatic pitfalls. It's a dialectical process. PS. According to Karl Marx, after some time living in classless society free from want or oppression, people will live ever more creatively according to their consciences and inclinations, because 1) they will have developed to that level of consciousness individually and as a society, and 2) the forces of production will be so advanced as to flexibly support everyone's individual needs appropriately. At this point, the power of the state, which exists mainly to protect the ruling class from other classes, will be resorted to less and less until it becomes irrelevant. The next and, according to Marx, ultimate state of human existence is communism, which will be a "one for all, and all for one" society typified by mutual and collective cooperation, and individual fulfillment. Technology will be at the level where people will be able to use whatever productive forces they deem appropriate. Marx's famous edict is: "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Some might build mega-structures in the solar system while others might live in a simple and hardy agrarian paradise. PPS. I'm not a communist myself, so, anyone here? please LMK where I effed up. Thank you.
Hey man is that Barbie? Anyway capitalism is necessary to develop the productive forces necessary for a successful transition to socialism. Didn't anyone ever tell you that? Like Karl Marx maybe?
About the dialectic materialism: this may work for the understanding of certain problems but it reduces the view to contradictions and leads to a black-white thinking in which the different shades of grey vanish. Despide the fact that neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin nor Mao Zedong differentiated between a contradiction (either - or) and an opposite (as well as). Mao Zedong wrote a whole book without understanding this difference.
I think you meant to say that there was no distinction between contradictions and contraries? Which is what Karl Popper critisized Marxism for. That's only really a criticism that works if you're attacking the mere formal structure of Marxist terminology not adhering to 21st century analytical philosophy which Marxism, as it is a philosophical system, is not concerned with. And therefore seems a bit unreasonable. That one point about greys doesn't seem fleshed out enough to be worth responding for. I can only tell you that the Dialectical Method is a precise rejection of black and white thinking since it takes into account that things inevitavly change and never stay the same and therefore dodges the Principle of Contradiction (I dunno how it is called in english) which would be what you seem to have a problem with Edit: I don't see how and why you would call the most relativistic popular philosophical system 'too black and white'. What does that make you? What is your counter proposal for what wouldn't be as 'black and white'?
@@giratina6665 Yes, that's what I meant, though I never red Popper. But this differentiation is decisive if you want to use the method because it leads to different results (false method - false results, the law of methodology). The alternative would be to analyse the number of the different sides of a problem because every coin has more then two sides. Mao Zedong says about this that then one contrary is the major one which explains everything. For example a cube dialectically is described as upside and downside, front and backside, left and right and inside and outside. From this contradictions only the last one describes the cube because it is the only one which shows that it is a physical body.
the problem with capitalist society is that the means of production does not have to share its spoils with the workers. and so they don’t share. if they were socially minded there would be no problem as the working class would do okay. but they are not fair minded and can’t be held responsible for a societies wellbeing. as that wellbeing depends upon its workers making enough in salary to spend and support their communities it must be mandated and hold the greedy accountable. don’t get me wrong. its human nature to hold on to what you have accomplished and i would give up very little for the welfare of the whole if i didn’t have to. i pay my taxes, but i wouldn’t if i didn’t have to. our economies must be structured so that those willing to work do okay and not just barely make it to the next paycheck. for that kind of society only leads eventually to big trouble for everyone.
Capitalist concessions to the working class would (and has) lead to an improved society, evidenced by the New Deal. However, those concessions can lead to complacency in the masses and undermines further progress. I don't have any real answers but I think we need a new constitution, an ammendment, or an ENFORCABLE international policy that ensures essential needs for all; where a proportion of all profits are distributed equitably. That way, social circumstances would continually improve the more that the economy grows. With the caveat that ecological stability is not unjustifiably compromised.
@@CaptPeonbut you cannot have an enforceable policy if you don't have enforcers who have an interest shared with the working class. and in order to have that, you would need the state aparatus to be operated by the working class - aristocratic state aparatus have no interest in protecting worker rights, their profits literally depend on NOT protecting workers. Even the New Deal, it was forced, by a militant working class and outside threat of real socialism in the Soviet Union, those created the interest in the aristocrats to treat workers a bit better.
@@garrethoien6666 its better to view capitalism as an economic tool. and so in and of itself doesn’t achieve but is used to achieve some end. clearly it can be used to achieve a better economic wellbeing for far more people and,it follows, a more stable society.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger at Harvard has some great political economy lectures on his RUclips channel. I recommend the 2016 lectures on political economy after the financial crisis. One of the background points he makes is that liberalism and socialism both shared the same 19th century premise of a universal society that operated all one way. The "hundred years war" after 1848 was more or less a total war of religion for two universalist ideologies. We haven't seen such a contest since Muslims and Christians in the crusades, or Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century. Since the fall of the 1917 socialist world in 1989, there has been a general acknowledgment that universal projects don't work. Neoliberalism briefly tried to pick up where socialism failed, but liberalism too has dead ended. So the only way forward for socialism is to pioneer a system that does not have to be universally socialist. Prof. Unger proposes a sort of democratic meritocracy based on the universalization of the knowledge economy. China was building something similar before Xi, a socialist market meritocracy. But China is autocratic i.e. Leninist or right-deviationist. What we need in America is a democratic meritocracy. That allows for alternative visions of the national future to compete in a brutally fair contest to turn society into a project of post-Fordist knowledge economy for all. That vision proposed by Prof. Unger seems to me more compelling and realizable than some sort of new universal Marxism-Leninism.
This is interesting. I actually very much appreciate the philisophical sophistication and analytical honesty. This is actually why I am anti-Marxist, and I would use the analysis in this video to explain why.
It is laughable to call countries like the USSR, China, North Corea or Cuba "socialist countries". They were never socialist countries, they are not and they will not be! Socialism is characterised by four things: 1. The ruling of the working class, 2. The power of disposal of the working class over the means of production, 3. The abolition of the market and 4. The withering away of the state. Non of them was realized in this so called "socialist states". They were just a bourgeois society of a special type (ruling of the petty bourgeoisie instead of the upper class) comparable to the Politie of Aristoteles or the Asien Production Method of Karl Marx and Karl August Witfogel.
The theoretical concept of socialism as given by the works of Karl Marx and W.I. Lenin cannot work and has already proven that it cannot work. There are two economical reasons for that: 1. The stupid idea of a plan-economy and 2. The problem of the accumulation of the capitals in socialism. This are the reasons for the failure of the "socialist states". Let me show it in detail: A plan-economy could only work if you would plan individually which means: you would need to plan for every single citizen of the state never mind of his/her age. It is not enough to plan the number of shoes needed in the country. For men high heel sneekers don't fit. For children also not. Okay then you can plan for all tree groups separately. But this also isn't enough. The question arises which kind of shoes do you need (boots, sneakers, sandals and so on) and of which size. And then you have to consider the location where the specific kind of shoes were needed. This is in my opinion enough to show (beneath the fact that an exceeding burocracy of unproductive workers then must be feeded, which makes the goods more expensive) that this idea of plan-economy is stupid. The effect will be, that there will be excess at some places and deficiency at others (which realy was the case) and this will lead to the solution to take part at the world market to sell the excess and buy the deficiency goods. And this happened in reality. The second problem of the accumulation in a socialist state is based on the depiction of the destribution of goods in a socialist society in Volume 2 of the Capital of Karl Marx. This depiction in fact is based on a plan-economy because in capitalism this relations are much more complicated. This system only can work as long as the proportions of the included capitals stay untouched. But if you then accumulate the capitals in percentage (which happened in reality) the proportions between the capitals will change (while the summ of the production will fit the summ of the needs which makes it difficult to understand what happened!). This leads to excess in some capitals and to deficit in others, because with the same percentage of accumation a bigger capital will grow faster and a smaller less fast. You can avoid this by accumulation in fixed money but this will slow down the speed of your developement in comparison to the capitalism. All this proves that such a system cannot survive against capitalism.
You need to contact Walmart, GM, Chev, Amazon and the other transnationals immediately. They have had central planning for years and perhaps you can stop them before they run into the problems you explain.
@@dinnerwithfranklin2451 Learn to read! And also they are not planing their production but their developement, meaning the occupation of market shares.
@@penoge They plan every aspect of their business. And their economies are larger than many nations. You apparently are someone who will lie to "win". I guess that makes you american.
@@penoge they are definitely planning their production, mate. Anyway, why do so many people have trouble understanding planned economy? We all plan our household economies, and we are called stupid if we don't. Just apply the same strategy further - if a 100 people express the need or desire for a good, there is no reason to produce much more than hundred of that good. I don't understand how producing thousands of them would be more beneficial or efficient, and the market is just one way of expressing needs - iz is not the only one. Finally, the economic planning is not dictatorial, it is supposed to be done in a truly democratic society, with democratic institutions. You don't need Stalin to rise from the grave to start guessing how many shorlaces people need on the planet - that information should come from the people or their representstives.
@@vebdaklu Nonsense. And what a stupid equation! We can plan our household because we know all the necessary data. But on the level of the state this is impossible (though some stupid intellectuals think they would be able to do it). Try to plan the number of shoes which this 100 people need and tell me the result. Then we will see whether you are able even to understand the difficulty.
I do not understand what Rockhill said about the ship of Theseus. You cannot just throw out identity, sameness, difference. For some cases--well, many--you can talk about vagueness. .but whatever Rockhill really has in mind is not elucidated in this snippet. Otherwise his characterization of dialectic is anodyne, a plausible general description of science, but where is it uniquely Marxian? I think less generality and abstraction and an example of dialectic at work would help. (Of course, "explaining" via magic or supernatural entities is not science or explanation.). But you do not have an epistemology or metaphysics of abstract or theoretical entities merely because you appeal to social construction--s.t. possibly suggested by some of Rockhill's remarks
You didn't understand. The identity of the ship is a construct. There is no atom of 'identity' in the ship. The identity is simply a label. Change one plank, one footprint, one atom and it's no longer exactly the same. Yet it's probably close enough. But does the ship have the same use? Same value? Probably, yes.
Dialectics isn't Marxian per se. But the eschewal of idealism is. The ship of Theseus illustrates a conceptual fallacy. The fallacy, which is idealistic, is that anything can physically exist which isn't subject to change. Change is observably a constant condition of physical (material) existence. This is a dialectical relationship, and also an empirical basis for the rejection of idealism, leaving us with materialism. I'm not used to dialectics myself, so please LMK if I effed up.
I exist, people know a name for me and call me this name. Yet practically all atoms in my body are constantly replaced. I therefor exist more in these processes of renewal rather than in the atoms that constitute my body at this very moment. I will stop existing when stuff goes wrong in these processes. The name given to me doesn’t define me, it just labels a process in nature which makes communication among humans possible. My name will exist for a while after my death, but it won’t be to my advantage in any way. That at least is how I understand the ship of Theseus.
@@antediluvianatheist5262 Well,actually,,if you replace rotten planks with new planks,the ship does not have the same value or use value. Thank you for your response. I do not know what a "construct" is. That is a theoretical term, and it needs to be explained. And even if "same ship" is a label, it is not "simply" a label. You can see that if you think about "same person". Your lover does not want to wake up in the morning with a different person in the bed. Professor Rockhill is supposed to be illustrating the superiority of Marxist (or Marx--Engels) dialectic to something Engels called "metaphysics". I am complaining that Professor Rockhill is being unfair to the broad tradition which discusses identity. The point of such examples is precisely that identity is not given to us by the sense. Insofar as Professor Rockhill (or Engels) is not an empiricist, he should embrace that point. In any case, talking about "construction" itself threatens to collapse into a form off Idealism. I understand that when people are dissatisfied with racism and sexism, it is nice to think: humans made this, so other humans (us) can change it. On the contrary, the problem is that these "constructions" have come to have a life o[f their own in existing institutions, and the process of change is difficult and complex.
So according to Dr. Rockhill Lenin had proved to be a "brilliant tactician" by introducing NEP after he drowned in blood the last gasp of the Soviet power (the Kronshtadt Soviet) and banning factions in his own party? Perhaps. But then the common problem with brilliant tacticians is that they brilliantly fail in strategy. Lenin was a sore loser in this respect. He lost to Kautsky in the central strategic question of ultra-imperialism ("the West") and he became the grave-digger of the Soviet principle of the workers' state. His theoretical revision of Marxism (What Is to Be Done) open the way for "party communism" that politically castrated Labor in its organic development no less so than Bernstein's revisionism (with Engels behind him) did for the working classes of Germany and Europe. In one of his podcasts, Dr. Rockhill confessed that he got in touch with the real world of class struggle and imperialism for the first time only in 2001. Understandably, it takes a long time and courage as well for a US academician to bail out of the panopticon of the French "critical theory" and its epigons in the US English departments. He's done a great job in describing the (ultra)imperialist roots of the post-war Left Boot of NATO, even though not those of Marx and Engels themselves (let alone their German issue of the Second International like Wilhelm Liebknecht et al). Let's hope that with the same courage and intelligence he will approach the problematics of the Third Thesis on Feuerbach, the history of party communism and the Soviet Catastrophe that today keeps mushrooming in the fields of Eastern Ukraine.
Siege socialism means Stalin had to do all those purges lol. The only actions that are excusable is engaging in the global economic system which is capitalist but that doesn’t mean it's okay if you have a an anti-democratic system of governance or oligarchical economic divisions. Plain and fucking simple guys. Stop with the liberal great men theory of history and worshiping Stalin and Mao. It's not dialectical materialism to simply justify every crime against humanity in the name of socialism. Might as well justify everything in the name of religion while we're at it.
"Siege socialism means Stalin had to do all those purges lol." Literally, yes. Without those purges, the revolution would have failed. Look up how many real plots they caught.
capitalism is a crime against humanity. Capitalism will always demonize socialism because it is the Nemesis of capitalism. Believe what you will but the truth is there anyway.
Go read Losurdo and stop parroting Nazi and Western Cold War propaganda. And Khrushchev's lies, for which Gorbachev could not find any real evidence no matter how hard he tried. Trotsky turned into a counter-revolutionary working with allies within the USSR that had to be defeated.
"I'm not buying your junk!" Luis Aldamiz boldly exclaimed, after a cursory listen of 3 minutes, for he knew well what he was up against. His reading circle of around 17 people, composed of trotskyists and anarchists, was on the cusp of immediate world revolution. They only needed to finally finish the 4 month long assembly in their polycule commune, on whose responsibility it really was to do the dishes, with anarchists arguing that doing dishes was a form of capitalist oppression, and trotskyists countering, that unless all dishes, in all households, everywhere in the world were done simultaneously, beginning the process of doing dishes would be meaningless. After this theoretical dispute would be solved, Luis Aldamiz knew, that it would be easy to convince the population of his country to simply abandon the idea of having a state, as people would simply organize what's best for them in a decentralized way, after having read his manifesto. Once people would show themselves capable of managing nuclear power plants and airports without any central authority in his own country, this way of thinking would quickly spread all around the world, and the wall street bankers and CIA directors would bow their heads in shame, as the capitalist world order practically crumbled overnight. Years of watching the first 3 minutes of RUclips videos had taught Luis Aldamiz this much.
@@jonirischx8925 - I listened to about 80% of the video and I agree with lots of stuff of what is said but I can't buy the manipulative conclusion of "Capitalism is socialism", when it's not and they're exactly the opposite. They are also not considering the many dangers of developism, remember the Aral Sea.
@@LuisAldamiz Luis Aldamiz! Please do not compromise the glorius people's dishwashing assembly! Your listening comprehension, and capacity to summarize complex topics into simplistic orwellian paradoxes (in 100% good faith) is sorely needed there! The workers of the world need you, Luis Aldamiz, please resolve the 'dishwashing question' with your comrades at once!
@@jonirischx8925 It's not so complex: socialism = worker ownership of the means of production, capitalism = oligarch (few privileged ones) ownership of the means of production. As simple as that. Which category falls modern PR China in? Obviously and very strongly in the second one, all the rest is propaganda and manipulation of wording. Western (or also non-western) people is not as stupid as (in most cases) fall for that narrative. Socialism is demonstrated by collectivizing, internationalism is demonstrated by supporting popular revolutionary struggles such as that of West Sahara and not by selling drones to Morocco.
@@LuisAldamiz Then you'll be glad to know, that China has the most state-owned enterprises in the world, and state control and acquisition of enterprises is increasing at a rapid rate. Also, many small to medium sized state enterprises have a mechanism, in which the workers can collectively purchase the enterprise from the state, and run it themselves. I know this first-hand, as I know people who've worked in such enterprises. These businesses would then technically be classified as 'private', but they are worker run! The state is the representation of the people. What percentage of businesses do you require to be state-owned, to call it socialism, if I may ask?
Why put that trashy hiphop beat? that too slowly fading away... like some room freshener. The voice and words were not enough? Anyways.. As to what Gabriel Rockhill claims as "Marxist Science" has no ecological basis. Folks who believe that form of governance can make people lives better, are but trying to raise hope, while ignoring every ecological concern posed by Nature, by the biophysical limits of the earth, by the carrying capacity of the host planet. Instead yacking away about imaginary forms of governance seems a way easier route out...
One of the greatest podcasts I have ever listened to
Same!
Awesome 👍😎👍
Thanks for the kind words - Gabriel was an excellent guest! I recommend checking out other episodes of the podcast when you have the chance - which can be listened to wherever you can get podcasts (Apple, Spotify, Libsyn etc.)
So far on the show I've covered countries like the DPRK, Laos, China, USSR (focusing on specific republics), Ghana (during its socialist period), Poland, Cuba and more! In some other episodes I speak with people who experienced Actually Existing Socialism in the 20th century first hand!
1:01:45 Fake references to ultra leftism.
.You look like weeckers, gate keepers
I'm grateful for this conversation. I only recently started listening to Gabriel on youtube, and normally he talks mostly about his current project on French critical theory. I've been wishing I could hear him discuss his basic philosophy in beginners terms, and this podcast does a lot of that. I only wish there was more! I was especially happy to hear a discussion of how materialism and empiricism are different - but it felt like it could have been just the beginning of a series of lectures on materialism and dialectics.
Yes, I very much wish it was longer! Fantastic discussion!
We've been discussing offering an online course on Marxism, likely team-taught by Gabriel and others. Would that be of interest?
@@criticaltheoryworkshop5299 Very much YES.
@@criticaltheoryworkshop5299 That would be great!
If you are fishing for compliments, then *incert gushing about your brilliance*, if the question was genuine, then *incert big-eyed pleading look*.@@criticaltheoryworkshop5299
08:03 “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past....”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(One might also add, that these circumstances are in the present as well, and that would perfectly describe the situation of capitalist encirclement which faced the fledgeling socialist anti-states.
most marxist in the western world never lived/experienced the devastating nature of marxism first handed so they study and make up theories in the mind never listening to those who actually came from there. cultural marxism which was established to use deception mainly in the west has aimed to win western citizens to the cause by whitewashing what happened in the former eastern bloc or china or south/central america exploiting the experiental ignorance of those in the west.
I love this quote! Fellow Traveler opened with it when he debated V*ush
A perfect rejoinder to the utterly thoughtless liberal criticism of “But, Stalinism!!” Thank you, comrade.
Yes but stalinism never existed according to soviet primary sources. Read Dr Furr's Stalin vs. Yezhov. Dugin has drawn the same conclusion in his book of the same name (in Russian). Alexander Dugin is definitely NOT a communist! lol!
In the 1930s, in the Soviet Union, the book Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), by Joseph Stalin, set forth the Soviet formulation of dialectical materialism and of historical materialism, which were taught in the Soviet system of education
Stalin....the world renowned academic and philosopher. Lol
@@fruitingfungi According to anti-communist historian Geoffrey Roberts he had a prodigious intellect. Source "Stalin's Library". What a lazy comment!
It is a good introductory text. Stalin's style was terse, concise and lucid. More so if you know Russian.
@@fruitingfungi Grow up and learn to read!!
What an education. 👍
Parentiiii!
The real question is, where is Rockhill at with his book The Intellectual World War. No pressure!
Thanks so much for this talk. Very sensical and informative 😊
That description of dialectics is basically what psilocybin has hammered into my head lmaoooo
candy flipping did it for me
did the same to me in 1979 bro. Its been hard living in a capitalist world. But here we are.
I know what you mean. Dialectics were further emphasized during my degree in Ecology; nature (and material existence, in general) proceed dialectically. Change is the only constant!
I second this: One of the greatest podcasts I have ever listened to - this clearly rebuts the so-called communist creeps whose take on US imperialism and its opponents is always somehow congruent with US foreign policy.
You mean trots!
@@phoenixartist1 Thanks for the tip! Trotsky sure is lionized in the US.
I believe Trotsky was a great revolutionary leader. He would have contempt for those who claim his political heritage today with their petty bourgeois "campism" and refusal to defend existing Socialist states
Excellent discussion ❤
Oh, lovely voice and manner. Thank you. I will stream other programs. Again, thanks. This is a new topic for me.
Losurdo for the win
Brilliant!
Lovely!
great video
I find these comrades that run around preaching purity to be a trip!
THANK YOU SO MUCH PROFESSOR ROCKHILL. YOU ARE THE TRUE INCORRUPTIBLE
Yes a thousands times
Ten thousand times!
Wonderful podcast.
THanks for this!
great topic ❤
Exceptional discussion, should have a much wider dissemination.
Loved this discussion! Professor Wolff often discusses China in the same way in his lectures. It's definitely something to admire.
Wolff is compatible left.
GOOD LECTURE
☭🔻
When does your next book cone out Gabriel?
FYI there aren’t ads on Actually existing Socialism, RUclips page. Absolutely no reason to re-post this video
4:00 definitions of dialectical materialism and historical materialism
Where does Gabriel get his info on Allen Dulles ('we're supporting the wrong side in WW2, we should be supporting the nazis') from? Thanks...
Operation Galatia and Paperclip would be strong suggestions. "Dulles’ involvement in Operation Paperclip was part of a larger conspiracy that bypassed both law and presidential directive to keep the program going until the mid-1950s"
I know that he references it in a couple of papers, but he doesn't give any footnotes or direct quotations
I have read David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard but there are other sources.
Politically the west does not think like this part lazy and are usually not involved in ML type of thinking they want it right away right now politics in the USA doesn't involved it self to think like a Stalinist
Great work by Rockhill, however he is missing something from his analysis. He speaks of Tactics and Strategy, but did not speak of the Operational. A key concept in use by the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis, the operational level is what set the Red Army apart from the rest.
The Soviet union used three levels of military planning for war, Tactical, Operational and Strategic.
I don't want to hang it over China's head
forever because what's done is done, but for
historical accuracy's sake, China did
collaborate with American imperialism
against the Soviet Union. They didn't like how
the Soviets supposedly threw Stalin under the
bus (Btw, I don't think that's quite accurate
We don't really know exactly what
Khrushchev's speech contained after the CIA
doctored it up) but they completely threw the
Soviet Union under the bus.
Yeah, that's a neat trick - China deciding that it didn't want conflict with the West and voila - no conflict. Just like that. The Soviet Union was the primary target of American imperialism, and China capitulated. That was the price.
Hang on, capitalism being above all the right to choose as a individual your own path in life and get out what you put in.
The introduction portrays enemies all around aswell within a society...well thats exactly how a socialist would view someone who would, for example want to own their own busines or farm and sell their products or services at the price they see fit.
"you can't simply get rid of money. It has nothing to do with building it in the real world. It's idealist"
How exactly does money help these real movements build productive forces in order to produce to meet need? If governments simply print money and put into place by fiat, then why couldn't workers who create a revolution decide they don't want to work for profit and that money is no help about determining how to produce and meet needs?
It's a question of transition. And no worker's state is a separate bubble. There is trade with other states. Distribution without money requires a stable state with stable relationships with other state.
@@casteretpollux so how would you make the transition then? What would be the necessary conditions to abolish money? 5 other states abolishing it with you? 10? 15?
Because money is needed for its exchange value and "price signaling" of supply and demand (that's Marx's idea, not Friedman's). Prices, on average, do follow the labor value of commodities. (Your question is about monetary policy, which is a technical, not ideological problem.) At the start of the transition to socialism -- after the means of production have been socialized -- all the capitalist modes and relations of production will still be in place, and people won't know any other way of life. But with the major contradiction of profit gone, capitalist relations and modes are a sufficient springboard for the transition to socialized relations and modes of production.
The transition from capitalism will be guided through education, and the application and development of Marxist (socialist) theory and practice. The long-term goal will be to achieve a classless society that provides the material conditions needed for individual development to every person. It will be a new kind of civilization and building it will take generations, probably. Every society will have to do this in its own unique way, while staying true to the guiding principles of socialism. Some people might think it will be easy, but those people are "utopian socialists." Actually it is an ongoing revolutionary struggle, if only conceptually, and there may be dramatic pitfalls. It's a dialectical process.
PS. According to Karl Marx, after some time living in classless society free from want or oppression, people will live ever more creatively according to their consciences and inclinations, because 1) they will have developed to that level of consciousness individually and as a society, and 2) the forces of production will be so advanced as to flexibly support everyone's individual needs appropriately. At this point, the power of the state, which exists mainly to protect the ruling class from other classes, will be resorted to less and less until it becomes irrelevant.
The next and, according to Marx, ultimate state of human existence is communism, which will be a "one for all, and all for one" society typified by mutual and collective cooperation, and individual fulfillment. Technology will be at the level where people will be able to use whatever productive forces they deem appropriate. Marx's famous edict is: "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Some might build mega-structures in the solar system while others might live in a simple and hardy agrarian paradise.
PPS. I'm not a communist myself, so, anyone here? please LMK where I effed up. Thank you.
Couldn't you use the planned economy to advance technology without opening up?
Look at N.Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, dealing with sanctions. You can't just press a red button and get socialism. It's a complex struggle.
@@casteretpollux So dictatorships shouldn't be sanctioned?
@@asdv-gm4yy If they were to be sanctioned, the US would be sanctioning countless of its allies
@@asdv-gm4yyTry sanctioning a US president and report back
Hey man is that Barbie? Anyway capitalism is necessary to develop the productive forces necessary for a successful transition to socialism. Didn't anyone ever tell you that? Like Karl Marx maybe?
About the dialectic materialism: this may work for the understanding of certain problems but it reduces the view to contradictions and leads to a black-white thinking in which the different shades of grey vanish. Despide the fact that neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin nor Mao Zedong differentiated between a contradiction (either - or) and an opposite (as well as). Mao Zedong wrote a whole book without understanding this difference.
I think you meant to say that there was no distinction between contradictions and contraries? Which is what Karl Popper critisized Marxism for.
That's only really a criticism that works if you're attacking the mere formal structure of Marxist terminology not adhering to 21st century analytical philosophy which Marxism, as it is a philosophical system, is not concerned with. And therefore seems a bit unreasonable.
That one point about greys doesn't seem fleshed out enough to be worth responding for. I can only tell you that the Dialectical Method is a precise rejection of black and white thinking since it takes into account that things inevitavly change and never stay the same and therefore dodges the Principle of Contradiction (I dunno how it is called in english) which would be what you seem to have a problem with
Edit: I don't see how and why you would call the most relativistic popular philosophical system 'too black and white'. What does that make you? What is your counter proposal for what wouldn't be as 'black and white'?
@@giratina6665 Yes, that's what I meant, though I never red Popper. But this differentiation is decisive if you want to use the method because it leads to different results (false method - false results, the law of methodology).
The alternative would be to analyse the number of the different sides of a problem because every coin has more then two sides. Mao Zedong says about this that then one contrary is the major one which explains everything. For example a cube dialectically is described as upside and downside, front and backside, left and right and inside and outside. From this contradictions only the last one describes the cube because it is the only one which shows that it is a physical body.
the problem with capitalist society is that the means of production does not have to share its spoils with the workers. and so they don’t share. if they were socially minded there would be no problem as the working class would do okay. but they are not fair minded and can’t be held responsible for a societies wellbeing. as that wellbeing depends upon its workers making enough in salary to spend and support their communities it must be mandated and hold the greedy accountable. don’t get me wrong. its human nature to hold on to what you have accomplished and i would give up very little for the welfare of the whole if i didn’t have to. i pay my taxes, but i wouldn’t if i didn’t have to. our economies must be structured so that those willing to work do okay and not just barely make it to the next paycheck. for that kind of society only leads eventually to big trouble for everyone.
Capitalist concessions to the working class would (and has) lead to an improved society, evidenced by the New Deal. However, those concessions can lead to complacency in the masses and undermines further progress. I don't have any real answers but I think we need a new constitution, an ammendment, or an ENFORCABLE international policy that ensures essential needs for all; where a proportion of all profits are distributed equitably. That way, social circumstances would continually improve the more that the economy grows. With the caveat that ecological stability is not unjustifiably compromised.
@@CaptPeonbut you cannot have an enforceable policy if you don't have enforcers who have an interest shared with the working class. and in order to have that, you would need the state aparatus to be operated by the working class - aristocratic state aparatus have no interest in protecting worker rights, their profits literally depend on NOT protecting workers. Even the New Deal, it was forced, by a militant working class and outside threat of real socialism in the Soviet Union, those created the interest in the aristocrats to treat workers a bit better.
Ignore your thought experiment and look at what capitalism has achieved.
@@garrethoien6666 i think it is better to think of capitalism as an economic tool. it doesn’t of itself achieve anything.
@@garrethoien6666 its better to view capitalism as an economic tool. and so in and of itself doesn’t achieve but is used to achieve some end. clearly it can be used to achieve a better economic wellbeing for far more people and,it follows, a more stable society.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger at Harvard has some great political economy lectures on his RUclips channel. I recommend the 2016 lectures on political economy after the financial crisis. One of the background points he makes is that liberalism and socialism both shared the same 19th century premise of a universal society that operated all one way. The "hundred years war" after 1848 was more or less a total war of religion for two universalist ideologies. We haven't seen such a contest since Muslims and Christians in the crusades, or Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century. Since the fall of the 1917 socialist world in 1989, there has been a general acknowledgment that universal projects don't work. Neoliberalism briefly tried to pick up where socialism failed, but liberalism too has dead ended. So the only way forward for socialism is to pioneer a system that does not have to be universally socialist. Prof. Unger proposes a sort of democratic meritocracy based on the universalization of the knowledge economy. China was building something similar before Xi, a socialist market meritocracy. But China is autocratic i.e. Leninist or right-deviationist. What we need in America is a democratic meritocracy. That allows for alternative visions of the national future to compete in a brutally fair contest to turn society into a project of post-Fordist knowledge economy for all. That vision proposed by Prof. Unger seems to me more compelling and realizable than some sort of new universal Marxism-Leninism.
This is interesting. I actually very much appreciate the philisophical sophistication and analytical honesty.
This is actually why I am anti-Marxist, and I would use the analysis in this video to explain why.
It is laughable to call countries like the USSR, China, North Corea or Cuba "socialist countries". They were never socialist countries, they are not and they will not be! Socialism is characterised by four things:
1. The ruling of the working class,
2. The power of disposal of the working class over the means of production,
3. The abolition of the market and
4. The withering away of the state.
Non of them was realized in this so called "socialist states". They were just a bourgeois society of a special type (ruling of the petty bourgeoisie instead of the upper class) comparable to the Politie of Aristoteles or the Asien Production Method of Karl Marx and Karl August Witfogel.
What is with this background music??? Why is it so loud?
Vile stuff.
The theoretical concept of socialism as given by the works of Karl Marx and W.I. Lenin cannot work and has already proven that it cannot work. There are two economical reasons for that:
1. The stupid idea of a plan-economy and
2. The problem of the accumulation of the capitals in socialism.
This are the reasons for the failure of the "socialist states". Let me show it in detail:
A plan-economy could only work if you would plan individually which means: you would need to plan for every single citizen of the state never mind of his/her age. It is not enough to plan the number of shoes needed in the country. For men high heel sneekers don't fit. For children also not. Okay then you can plan for all tree groups separately. But this also isn't enough. The question arises which kind of shoes do you need (boots, sneakers, sandals and so on) and of which size. And then you have to consider the location where the specific kind of shoes were needed. This is in my opinion enough to show (beneath the fact that an exceeding burocracy of unproductive workers then must be feeded, which makes the goods more expensive) that this idea of plan-economy is stupid. The effect will be, that there will be excess at some places and deficiency at others (which realy was the case) and this will lead to the solution to take part at the world market to sell the excess and buy the deficiency goods. And this happened in reality.
The second problem of the accumulation in a socialist state is based on the depiction of the destribution of goods in a socialist society in Volume 2 of the Capital of Karl Marx. This depiction in fact is based on a plan-economy because in capitalism this relations are much more complicated. This system only can work as long as the proportions of the included capitals stay untouched. But if you then accumulate the capitals in percentage (which happened in reality) the proportions between the capitals will change (while the summ of the production will fit the summ of the needs which makes it difficult to understand what happened!). This leads to excess in some capitals and to deficit in others, because with the same percentage of accumation a bigger capital will grow faster and a smaller less fast. You can avoid this by accumulation in fixed money but this will slow down the speed of your developement in comparison to the capitalism.
All this proves that such a system cannot survive against capitalism.
You need to contact Walmart, GM, Chev, Amazon and the other transnationals immediately. They have had central planning for years and perhaps you can stop them before they run into the problems you explain.
@@dinnerwithfranklin2451 Learn to read! And also they are not planing their production but their developement, meaning the occupation of market shares.
@@penoge They plan every aspect of their business. And their economies are larger than many nations.
You apparently are someone who will lie to "win". I guess that makes you american.
@@penoge they are definitely planning their production, mate.
Anyway, why do so many people have trouble understanding planned economy? We all plan our household economies, and we are called stupid if we don't. Just apply the same strategy further - if a 100 people express the need or desire for a good, there is no reason to produce much more than hundred of that good. I don't understand how producing thousands of them would be more beneficial or efficient, and the market is just one way of expressing needs - iz is not the only one.
Finally, the economic planning is not dictatorial, it is supposed to be done in a truly democratic society, with democratic institutions. You don't need Stalin to rise from the grave to start guessing how many shorlaces people need on the planet - that information should come from the people or their representstives.
@@vebdaklu Nonsense. And what a stupid equation! We can plan our household because we know all the necessary data. But on the level of the state this is impossible (though some stupid intellectuals think they would be able to do it).
Try to plan the number of shoes which this 100 people need and tell me the result. Then we will see whether you are able even to understand the difficulty.
I do not understand what Rockhill said about the ship of Theseus. You cannot just throw out identity, sameness, difference. For some cases--well, many--you can talk about vagueness. .but whatever Rockhill really has in mind is not elucidated in this snippet. Otherwise his characterization of dialectic is anodyne, a plausible general description of science, but where is it uniquely Marxian? I think less generality and abstraction and an example of dialectic at work would help. (Of course, "explaining" via magic or supernatural entities is not science or explanation.). But you do not have an epistemology or metaphysics of abstract or theoretical entities merely because you appeal to social construction--s.t. possibly suggested by some of Rockhill's remarks
You didn't understand.
The identity of the ship is a construct. There is no atom of 'identity' in the ship.
The identity is simply a label.
Change one plank, one footprint, one atom and it's no longer exactly the same.
Yet it's probably close enough.
But does the ship have the same use? Same value?
Probably, yes.
Dialectics isn't Marxian per se. But the eschewal of idealism is. The ship of Theseus illustrates a conceptual fallacy. The fallacy, which is idealistic, is that anything can physically exist which isn't subject to change.
Change is observably a constant condition of physical (material) existence. This is a dialectical relationship, and also an empirical basis for the rejection of idealism, leaving us with materialism.
I'm not used to dialectics myself, so please LMK if I effed up.
I exist, people know a name for me and call me this name. Yet practically all atoms in my body are constantly replaced. I therefor exist more in these processes of renewal rather than in the atoms that constitute my body at this very moment. I will stop existing when stuff goes wrong in these processes. The name given to me doesn’t define me, it just labels a process in nature which makes communication among humans possible. My name will exist for a while after my death, but it won’t be to my advantage in any way. That at least is how I understand the ship of Theseus.
It therefor refutes idealism which would emphasise the importance of my name and materialism which would emphasise the importance of my atoms.
@@antediluvianatheist5262 Well,actually,,if you replace rotten planks with new planks,the ship does not have the same value or use value.
Thank you for your response.
I do not know what a "construct" is. That is a theoretical term, and it needs to be explained.
And even if "same ship" is a label, it is not "simply" a label. You can see that if you think about "same person".
Your lover does not want to wake up in the morning with a different person in the bed.
Professor Rockhill is supposed to be illustrating the superiority of Marxist (or Marx--Engels) dialectic to something Engels called "metaphysics". I am complaining that Professor Rockhill is being unfair to the broad tradition which discusses identity.
The point of such examples is precisely that identity is not given to us by the sense. Insofar as Professor Rockhill (or Engels) is not an empiricist, he should embrace that point.
In any case, talking about "construction" itself threatens to collapse into a form off Idealism. I understand that when people are dissatisfied with racism and sexism, it is nice to think: humans made this, so other humans (us) can change it. On the contrary, the problem is that these "constructions" have come to have a life o[f their own in existing institutions, and the process of change is difficult and complex.
Why do you call this “a show”? This is a program.
So according to Dr. Rockhill Lenin had proved to be a "brilliant tactician" by introducing NEP after he drowned in blood the last gasp of the Soviet power (the Kronshtadt Soviet) and banning factions in his own party? Perhaps. But then the common problem with brilliant tacticians is that they brilliantly fail in strategy. Lenin was a sore loser in this respect. He lost to Kautsky in the central strategic question of ultra-imperialism ("the West") and he became the grave-digger of the Soviet principle of the workers' state. His theoretical revision of Marxism (What Is to Be Done) open the way for "party communism" that politically castrated Labor in its organic development no less so than Bernstein's revisionism (with Engels behind him) did for the working classes of Germany and Europe. In one of his podcasts, Dr. Rockhill confessed that he got in touch with the real world of class struggle and imperialism for the first time only in 2001. Understandably, it takes a long time and courage as well for a US academician to bail out of the panopticon of the French "critical theory" and its epigons in the US English departments. He's done a great job in describing the (ultra)imperialist roots of the post-war Left Boot of NATO, even though not those of Marx and Engels themselves (let alone their German issue of the Second International like Wilhelm Liebknecht et al). Let's hope that with the same courage and intelligence he will approach the problematics of the Third Thesis on Feuerbach, the history of party communism and the Soviet Catastrophe that today keeps mushrooming in the fields of Eastern Ukraine.
Siege socialism means Stalin had to do all those purges lol. The only actions that are excusable is engaging in the global economic system which is capitalist but that doesn’t mean it's okay if you have a an anti-democratic system of governance or oligarchical economic divisions. Plain and fucking simple guys. Stop with the liberal great men theory of history and worshiping Stalin and Mao. It's not dialectical materialism to simply justify every crime against humanity in the name of socialism. Might as well justify everything in the name of religion while we're at it.
"Siege socialism means Stalin had to do all those purges lol." Literally, yes.
Without those purges, the revolution would have failed.
Look up how many real plots they caught.
capitalism is a crime against humanity. Capitalism will always demonize socialism because it is the Nemesis of capitalism. Believe what you will but the truth is there anyway.
Go read Losurdo and stop parroting Nazi and Western Cold War propaganda. And Khrushchev's lies, for which Gorbachev could not find any real evidence no matter how hard he tried. Trotsky turned into a counter-revolutionary working with allies within the USSR that had to be defeated.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"
@@antediluvianatheist5262maybe the revolution should have failed considering what it achieved
State capitalist apologism
A nice thought stopping cliche to avoid actually adressing any of the points made
@@paulussturm6572 Longer interventions on any RUclips/Facebook CTW threads have been deleted, so not risking them!
Suffice to say that Marx would turn in his grave
Please elaborate.
@@stephenharper5761 At your idiocy?
Yes.
"Capitalism is socialism, nationalism is internationalism, totalitaritanism is democracy".
I'm not buying your junk, sorry.
"I'm not buying your junk!" Luis Aldamiz boldly exclaimed, after a cursory listen of 3 minutes, for he knew well what he was up against. His reading circle of around 17 people, composed of trotskyists and anarchists, was on the cusp of immediate world revolution. They only needed to finally finish the 4 month long assembly in their polycule commune, on whose responsibility it really was to do the dishes, with anarchists arguing that doing dishes was a form of capitalist oppression, and trotskyists countering, that unless all dishes, in all households, everywhere in the world were done simultaneously, beginning the process of doing dishes would be meaningless.
After this theoretical dispute would be solved, Luis Aldamiz knew, that it would be easy to convince the population of his country to simply abandon the idea of having a state, as people would simply organize what's best for them in a decentralized way, after having read his manifesto. Once people would show themselves capable of managing nuclear power plants and airports without any central authority in his own country, this way of thinking would quickly spread all around the world, and the wall street bankers and CIA directors would bow their heads in shame, as the capitalist world order practically crumbled overnight. Years of watching the first 3 minutes of RUclips videos had taught Luis Aldamiz this much.
@@jonirischx8925 - I listened to about 80% of the video and I agree with lots of stuff of what is said but I can't buy the manipulative conclusion of "Capitalism is socialism", when it's not and they're exactly the opposite.
They are also not considering the many dangers of developism, remember the Aral Sea.
@@LuisAldamiz Luis Aldamiz! Please do not compromise the glorius people's dishwashing assembly! Your listening comprehension, and capacity to summarize complex topics into simplistic orwellian paradoxes (in 100% good faith) is sorely needed there! The workers of the world need you, Luis Aldamiz, please resolve the 'dishwashing question' with your comrades at once!
@@jonirischx8925 It's not so complex: socialism = worker ownership of the means of production, capitalism = oligarch (few privileged ones) ownership of the means of production. As simple as that.
Which category falls modern PR China in? Obviously and very strongly in the second one, all the rest is propaganda and manipulation of wording.
Western (or also non-western) people is not as stupid as (in most cases) fall for that narrative. Socialism is demonstrated by collectivizing, internationalism is demonstrated by supporting popular revolutionary struggles such as that of West Sahara and not by selling drones to Morocco.
@@LuisAldamiz Then you'll be glad to know, that China has the most state-owned enterprises in the world, and state control and acquisition of enterprises is increasing at a rapid rate. Also, many small to medium sized state enterprises have a mechanism, in which the workers can collectively purchase the enterprise from the state, and run it themselves. I know this first-hand, as I know people who've worked in such enterprises. These businesses would then technically be classified as 'private', but they are worker run!
The state is the representation of the people. What percentage of businesses do you require to be state-owned, to call it socialism, if I may ask?
Why put that trashy hiphop beat? that too slowly fading away... like some room freshener.
The voice and words were not enough? Anyways.. As to what Gabriel Rockhill claims as "Marxist Science" has no ecological basis.
Folks who believe that form of governance can make people lives better, are but trying to raise hope, while ignoring every ecological concern
posed by Nature, by the biophysical limits of the earth, by the carrying capacity of the host planet. Instead yacking away about imaginary
forms of governance seems a way easier route out...