Tu es peut-être marxiste… sans le savoir !

My friends, good evening. What if you were a Marxist without knowing it? In fact, anyone who is critical of capitalism today means anyone who says, I work a lot, I toil, I create value, and then in the end, I'm not very well paid while the CEO of our company earns millions. And clearly, in a Marxist discourse, all these people say there are inequalities. We have to toil, we have to struggle. And then we have people in society who are wealthy, who seem to feed off the fruits of our labor, while we have trouble buying new shoes or replacing our glasses. No one who speaks like that. And in a Marxist logic, even if they don't know it, even if they don't clearly define their political affiliation. Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist, but he originally studied philosophy. He had studied Greek philosophy. He was born in Germany in 1818 and very quickly had a falling out with the local authorities. And why? Because he had defended workers struggles. He had defended workers in Germany and had problems with the authorities. He had to leave. Where did he go? He went to Paris, France, which knew France very. And in his book, the most famous book by Karl Marx, although it's not the only one, he wrote Capital. Well, that book, he often talks about France. And then from France he came to the United Kingdom. And in the United Kingdom he stayed until his death. And most of his work was written in the United Kingdom. So if you like, Karl Marx was basically a critic. Because when you look at his book Capital, the subtitle is Critique of Political Economy. In Karl Marx's critique, the solutions are not clearly formulated, they are implied. If I criticize you for something, you will always try to guess what I mean, what solution I want to provide. But I have never verbalized it clearly. I have only criticized. So if we take Karl Marx, he criticized capitalism and why we are in the 1800s. So if I said 1818, 1883, you can say 19th century. He was born at the beginning of it, he died towards the end of it. Who was still alive, who was a contemporary of Karl Marx? I will give you a few names. Victor Hugo, Balzac, Zola. In the United Kingdom we have Charles Dickens, who wrote Oliver Twist. What is the universe of these authors? What is he describing? What is the Europe they are describing? Like misery, hardship, mass unemployment, famine, disease, exhausted people, people living in absolute poverty in the heart of Europe. So if we look at this period of the 1800s and go back a century by convention, roughly to 1760, we have the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It began in the United Kingdom it began in the Ruini with the arrival of the steam engine. And at that time workers began to be brought together in places called factories, plants. And then they each had to work. And it was quite mind numbing work. That means that it's more like the craftsman, the craftsman who masters all or almost all of his work. If we go to a pottery workshop, we'll find either one guy working alone, or maybe two or three guys working and dividing their work into steps, but each one mastering the entire work cycle. Whereas once we get to the factory, well, people only see a very small part of this work. They do repetitive work for which they are paid the minimum wage. So when Karl Marx arrived, we were about a century after the Industrial revolution. And with it came what we call capitalism, because broadly speaking, if you like, there were other systems. But broadly speaking, we can say that in terms of systems before capitalism, what did we have? We had two major systems that practically inherited from antiquity. We had the feudal system. What does the feudal system mean? It means that you have rich people who own all the land. All the land is owned by rich people. In general, it was a king who owned them, or a sovereign who would distribute the land. He would give one to his son, another to his cousin, another to someone to buy peace with him, another to a knight, and so on. And so this meant that the land was concentrated in the hands of very few people. The others had no land. What were they supposed to do? They had to work the land and give the largest percentage of the fruits of their labor. They had to give it to the landowner. So they would cultivate it and so on. And then at the end of the day, they would give it to the landowner. And in addition, they had to work for him. For example, he had to do the chores. He had to work. For example, he would say to you work three days a month for me, huh? Every month you give me three days of work. But be careful. The three days of work is a three days defined in a conceptual way. It means, well, three days. Uh, we understand each other. He can bring you back and tell you, look, this is a plot of land that's several hectares long and needs to be cleared. I think that's three days work. But you can spend 15 days on it. But he doesn't care. He thinks it's three days. You have to work for three days on it. And in fact, you're going to work 15 days. So there was that system and there was the slavery system. The slavery system really began to collapse in the mid-1800s. When the Civil War in the United States. I don't remember when the war ended. I think it was 1856. And with it the banning of slavery in the United States. You wouldn't believe that it profoundly changed the quality of life of workers. We'll talk about that in another video. The difference between an employee and a slave. But you will see that the slave, as much as the employee, is a social construct, let's say more modern or more evolved than the slave. You will see that he is not necessarily better. In any case, we are in a society that is extremely torn apart by poverty and we have people who exploit others. Exploitation is nothing new. Before exploitation came through slavery, and then it came through feudalism. Once capitalism arrived with the Industrial Revolution, it took up the same codes of exploitation. So it changed its face. This is at the center of Karl Marx's thesis. So what we have, we have Karl Marx, who will theorize all this in his book Capital A Critique of Political Economy. Now, be careful. Capital, which I have read I don't know how many times, and which I continue to read as soon as I get to the end, I start it from the beginning. An extremely complex book. It takes a lot of reading and sometimes even guided reading. Sometimes that means reading books about the book in order to better understand it and better grasp it and place each element where it should go. It's a very difficult book to understand, even though it's quite enjoyable to read. But sometimes there are some chapters that are a bit boring and with lots of figures and everything which are buried in the text. So it's better perhaps to make tables or graphs or other things to better understand them. What is the strength of the book? Ask Capital. Marx's strength is that in the 1800s he wrote the most pointed, most exhaustive, most timeless critique of capitalism. That means that today, if you are critical of what we are experiencing, if you are just critical, I'm not saying that you have a solution. I'm saying that you are critical of what we are experiencing. Do you think it's abnormal? Do you think it's abnormal that a CEO earns 700 times more than an ordinary worker, for example? If you have a problem with that, the most well constructed and most advanced critique, 250 years after it was written, hasn't aged a bit, is by Karl Marx. And that's why people from the left and the right, intellectuals, even very rich people, read Karl Marx. By the way, I'll tell you something. You're going to find one of the most paradoxical things Perhaps you'll sometimes find rich people, millionaires, who have in their office who have at home an original copy of Karl Marx's book. Whereas the poor or the middle class, especially in Europe and the United States, learn to read it. Especially not. Especially not while millionaires read it. Why? Because in reality, it's a book that very often returns to the mechanics of exploitation. So, you know, take Orwell's book, 1984, for example. You can see it as a warning about the mass surveillance society, but you can also see it as a blueprint for a methodology to create this dystopian society. Well, it's the same with the Critique of Capital. The critique in Das Capital can either be seen as a critique of something that is undesirable, that is not desirable in society, or you can use it as a blueprint to look at all the possible imaginable methodologies of exploitation and see how you can adapt them to a modern sauce and use them. You know what I mean? That's how it is. We're going to find Capitalism, or rather the Critique of Capital. We find it on the left. How do we find it on the right? It's something universally distributed. I was saying that in his way of observing and in his way of analyzing and writing things in terms of concepts, which sometimes makes the book difficult. That is to say that, for example, he will describe a situation, a scene from his time, but from there he will move on to more general, more conceptual ideas which become timeless. So I'll just give you an example. Maybe I'll take a passage here. We'll just read a very short passage to see. We'll see together if it's lost. So this is passage 31. It's the passage from due. So we're on volume one here. There are three volumes. The first was published during the time of Karl Marx's life. The other two were published later. That means we have angels who was very close to Karl Marx, who, let's say, took the notes and all that, and who published the other two volumes. The third volume, for example, is very popular with financiers, people who work on Wall street and who go out into the stock market and all that. Really like the third volume because it talks a lot about finance. So I'm on chapter 31, Genesis of. I don't have the title. I think it was Genesis of Industrial capitalism. Yeah, chapter 31, Genesis of Industrial Capitalism. I'm going to read something and you'll see if it's dated or not. Look at Public Debt. We have an international credit system that often hides one of the sources of primitive accumulation among this or that people. Primitive accumulation. A very important concept for Karl Marx. Complex. We'll come back to it another time, but let me read the rest. Since public debt is based on public income. Well, yes. Debt means debt repayment of debt. How do I repay it? Huh? As a person, if I get into debt, I take on a debt, I repay it with my salary, with my income. When the state takes on a debt, what does it use to repay it? Well, with public revenue. Let's see. Since the public debt is based on public revenue, who has to pay the annual dues? The modern tax system was the core agenda of national loans. You see, borrowing taxation automatically, loans that enable governments to meet extraordinary expenses without the taxpayer feeling the effects immediately result in additional taxes. On the other hand, the additional tax burden caused by the accumulation of successively contracted debts forces governments to resort to new loans. So modern taxation contains within itself the seed of automatic progression. It tells us that the different states, the different governments borrow very often. You know, you have political promises, you have electoral promises. In the rare cases where they are honored, they are honored with what? Well, with debt we are going to borrow. The public doesn't feel it because we're not going to take money from them now. We're going to take it from creditors instead. We're going to ask them for money on behalf of the public. So we're going to take on debts by storm. And how are we going to repay them? Well, we're going to take money from you and take more and more money from you. Because without debt, before we've even finished paying off the first debt, we're going to take on another one. It's like if I were to buy a car before I'd finished paying it off, I'd buy a TV Before I'd finished paying it off, I'd buy a house. Before I'd finished paying it off, I'd buy a second car. Before I'd finished paying it off, I'd buy a motorcycle. And inevitably what's going to happen is that the debts are going to increase. Their servicing is going to increase in total. I'm going to end up paying increasing amounts. So since states support the debt, they support it with the taxes they levy on their citizens. Well, of course, the debt system automatically contains within itself the seeds of the automatic increase in taxes. There you have it. It was written in the 1800s, as you can see today. So a lot of things that Karl Marx said have been verified and Are verified. That means let's imagine that you want to criticize the modern economic system in terms of inequality, exploitation, unemployment, all that. Well, you can't avoid that. You can't avoid going through Karl Marx. You have to, because he did the most exhaustive work. Once you finish that work, the challenge is to try to find another criticism that isn't in it. You can always find a criticism that isn't in it. But at least start with that because it will save you a lot of time and energy. So I'll continue. The idea behind Karl Marx's fundamental idea is that the problem started when humans started to pool their work to create together. To work together. Why? Humans, unlike animals, do not wander through nature in search of food. That's how animals live. Birds spend their days looking for seeds. Uh, wild animals, I don't know. I sometimes see birds of prey flying around. They spend their time looking for mice or other things. Animals are always looking for their food. Humans produce it. Humans are capable of changing a water course. They are capable of clearing land. They are capable of planting seeds. They are therefore capable of taking things out of the earth, preparing them, cooking them, fermenting them, mixing them with other things and so on. So initially, if we go back to a primitive space, now we are on an island. We are on a desert island. I like the idea of the desert island. It allows us to mentally reduce society to a small group. We arrive on a desert island, there are 100 of us. Each one in his own corner is working for himself. I have my garden. I have maybe a cow or a goat or whatever, or chickens or whatever. I consume what I produce, and that's it. I have no economic relationship with others. In that case, no one can exploit me. I can exploit no one. There is no way to exploit anyone. Okay, now here's the problem. At some point, we decide to start trading. We decide to trade and work together. That means working together. For example, we're going to create a place where I'm going to go in the morning and we're going to work with wood. There you go. I only work with wood. I won't be able to eat the wood. I'm going to have to sell it. We're going to have to sell it. And we sell the object, the wood on the market, either the raw wood by raising a miner who makes tables for him and so on. But the miner who makes the tables isn't going to eat his tables. He needs eggs, he needs milk, he needs things like that. So we're going to Create a market. And in this market there are exchanges. At the heart of Marxist theory is that the product that is manufactured, that is exchanged on the market itself involves human exploitation. How does it work? It works like this. When you look at a desert island, if we create a factory, we're going to make products, but we're going to make more than we need. That's kind of the idea. If you work in a factory or on a farm and you produce, I don't know, one thousand or a thousand eggs per month, you're not going to eat them all, you're going to sell them. So you're creating value. This value exceeds the salary you receive. Because there's a very important rule in this system. As soon as we start creating money on our island, we start paying you in money. In any economic system where there are wages, there's a universal rule that never goes away. It's that the boss will pay you less than what you produce in value. I'm not talking about each individual because someone might say, yeah, I worked for six months, I was an apprentice, I didn't do much, they paid me. That's not the idea. We're talking about workers as a group. If I take this egg factory or this wood factory, or this series of wood, if there are 50 workers in it, they collectively produce more value than the salary they collectively receive. But they produce, I don't know, they produce for €100,000 of value per month, which is what comes into the factory coffers as profit before salary. The boss is going to distribute €40,000 of salary to them collectively. The question that arises, let's forget about it, is at the heart, let's say, of Marxist doctrine, and it is at the heart of the entire economy today. This is what is called surplus value. What do we do with this surplus value? There is a concept of redistribution here. This surplus value is going to be redistributed. That means that it will be distributed in a way that is not controlled by the worker, but it is not the worker who receives it in his pocket. So in the case I am giving you, workers on average receive 40% of the product of their labor as wages, and 60% they do not receive as wages. Furthermore, it will be redistributed. It may go into the pockets of the shareholders, or it will go into the pockets of the owner, or it will be accumulated, or it will be thrown away or whatever. That is not the question. They do not take it out of their pockets. We agree. Collectively, they create €100,000. Of value per month. Collectively, they receive €40,000 of value per month. There is a difference of €60,000. Where did the money go? What does that imply on the ground? What does Marx say that it means? That means that these people, 40% of the time they spend at the wood factory, they are working for themselves. That means for the money they will actually earn, for the money that will really be given to them, and the remaining 60% of the time, they will work for free. Free labor means that capital feeds on free labor. So you work in Marxist theory, you will work every week. For example, you work Monday, Tuesday to create the value that will pay your salary. And then you will work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you will work for free for the company. And what's more, he tells us that you are acting as a banker. Why are you acting as a banker? Because in general, you are paid your salary at the end of the month or at the end of the week, if it is a weekly salary. So you are acting only as a banker. Why? Because you're going to work and you're only going to get paid once you've created value. That means that when you arrive at the company, you're going to work for the company, and you're going to give them, in addition to the free work, you're also going to lend them the value of your salary. And at the end of the month, when they've earned that salary, they're going to give it to you. You see, the thing, there's this part, this surplus value. And what do we do with it? What are we going to do with this surplus value? And that's a question. We'll talk about it. I'm going to read you another passage and we'll talk about it another time. Because that opens the gates of hell, my friends. It opens absolutely unimaginable doors. Why? Because depending on what we decide to do with this surplus value that we create, we will only define these questions of money. Who takes what, how much, what profession values it, and so on. But even better, we will define what we are as a society, you see, we will define what environment we will live in, what our culture will be like, what our country will be like, what our daily lives will be like, right? It's very powerful, it's very strong. And once we start to get into it, wow. It's something that will shed light on the world we live in. So, one thing, there's no orthodox Marxism. What does that mean? I've already read you a section on taxation where he talks about credit and all that creditors and all that. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to read you another passage because I quoted Balzac and Victor Hugo and all that. I'm going to tell you about a passage that shows you how at the time we needed labor, we still need labor today, and how did we bring it back, by the way, and how this will define the society in which we live. Once again, Marx's criticism does not explicitly provide a solution. We can clearly see that he does not agree with the state of affairs, but he does not explicitly provide a solution. So those who do not agree with this state of affairs each try to imagine what the solution that Marx would have provided to this would be. And depending on that, we will find China, we will find the ussr, we will find Cuba, we will find many countries, we will find many Marxists who are not alike, because there is no orthodox Marxist, we must be wary. If someone tells you, you look in a book on YouTube somewhere else, someone tells you Marxism, be careful, you're on a minefield. You can't define Marxism like that. Basically, in the most minimalist way, the way that all Marxists will agree and everyone, even non Marxists, will agree, is that Marxism is basically a critique of capitalism. Basically, that's it. Anyone who criticizes the state of affairs in which we live is criticizing capitalism and by definition on a Marxist path. Subsequently, the solutions that we bring to this, to this critique will define different types of Marxists. But there is no orthodox, there is no one who says, my Marxism is the real one. There is no such thing. I'm going to read you a bit of the book. So I think it's still the part about the birth of. I think it's still chapter 31, the birth of industrial capitalism. So here we're talking about the United Kingdom, we're talking about England, in Derby, Nottingham, and especially Lash called Fielden. So he's quoting another author who was himself a spinner, who worked in the textile industry. The recently invented machines, recently invented were at the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, so the arrival of mechanization. The recently invented machines were used in large factories. People were gathered in factories close to watercourses powerful enough to move the waterwheel. Suddenly, thousands of workers were needed in these places far from the cities. And yes, how do we do it? We're in the north of the country, we're in places far from the cities. We found watercourses, cheap land, we built large factories, we put in wheels, and so on. And here we need workers. What do we do with them? Where are we going to find them? Suddenly, thousands of workers were needed in these places to move the cities away. And the langasher in particular, which until then had been relatively sparsely populated and sterile. And what they needed most of all was a population. So they needed a population. You see, capitalism has this tendency to move the population. This is not an accident. And that's why it redefines society. It redefines it. When you see that up until today, large capitalist groups, for example, need foreign labor and bring this labor in en masse. Because they have this addiction to surplus value. They need a labor force that they pay the minimum so that they can keep most of the value created by it for primitive accumulation or other purposes. So what's going to happen? They're going to change the fabric of our society. They are going to change the face of our cities. They are going to create ethnic divisions in our societies. So the way they are trying to get hold of surplus work and their addiction to it is going to change society profoundly. So small and nimble fingers was the general cry. Those who wanted small and nimble fingers immediately began to procure so called apprentices. These are not real apprentices. They are apprentices, so called apprentice houses belonging to the various parishes of London. When we say parish, we mean a parish. It is just a region that is called a parish. Because each region was under the control of a parish. This still exists today in the workhouses belonging to the various parishes of London and Birmingham and elsewhere. Thousands of these poor little abandoned children aged 7 to 13 and 14. We are talking about children. Children aged 7, 13, 14, okay. Were thus sent north. The master, incidentally, the child thief took charge of clothing, feeding and housing his apprentices in a house very close to the factory. During work, they were under the watchful eye of the supervisors, the N1. It was in the interest of these supervisors to make the children work excessively. Because depending on the quantity of products they were able to extract from them, their own pay would decrease or increase. Well, yes. Why do you always have the N1 on your back? Many N1s, sorry, are descendants of these factory supervisors. And the factory supervisor, he was commissioned, that is to say, without salary, depended on how much work he managed to extract. Capitalism is obsessed with surplus value with the work it manages to extract. And I will talk to you in a video, if you like this one. I will talk to you about the techniques that were described by Marx that are applicable up to now, that are applied up to now to maximize the value of the labor extracted from people. So it was in the interest of these overseers to make the children slave away at work, because depending on the quantity of products they were able to extract from them, their own pay would decrease and increase. Mistreatment was the natural consequence in many manufacturing districts. These innocent beings, without friends or support, who had been handed over to the factory owners, were subjected to the most horrendous tortures. Exhausted by overwork, they were whipped, chained, tormented with the most studied refinements. Often, when the end was too much, the whip kept them working. And it's not just Karl Marx who tells this. You read, you read the other authors that I mentioned earlier. He recounts. He corroborates this testimony. He corroborates the mistreatment. He corroborates the children who were sold. He corroborates his little hands who worked until exhaustion, who worked until death, who were whipped, starved. I don't want the message of this video to be that, oh, yes, you saw the times. It's not. It hasn't changed. It's changed in appearance. But deep down, deep down, it's the same thing. We are in a system of bestial, brutal exploitation of the masses by a minority. Look, to go back to the story of mill. I'll read the rest later. If we lived on an island and we decided to come together and say, what do we do with the surplus value? What do we do with the value, the extra value that we have produced? For example, as a worker, I can say, okay, well, we improved a lot of our children. Children. Children cannot create value. They will create value in the future, but for now they are not creating it. We want better food for them, we want better schools, we want better resources for them. We can say the weakest members of society, for example, we can say that someone is sick, someone is disabled, they cannot produce value, but they have produced their entire life. So we are going to give them. We are going to give them the maximum. We want to improve their quality of life. The surplus value can be distributed for legitimate reasons. Do you see what I am saying here? I am giving legitimate and valid reasons to redistribute the excess value that we create. What do you think? Do you think that if we had control, we would have taken, for example, a woman who lived with a singer for 18 months, and after the divorce she became a millionaire Just because she lived with a singer for 18 months, she divorced him. We unanimously declared on the island that we were going to give her half of our production just because she had sex with this singer for 18 months. Did you really think we would do that? In the newspaper yesterday in the uk we are funding a shrimp factory in Bangladesh with our taxes to fight global warming. Did you really think that if we had control, if we were in a country where we really had control over the surplus value that we create, do you really think that we would have decided unanimously to pay for a shrimp factory in Bangladesh to fight global warming in a country that looks like a cold, damp sponge? Do you really think we would have done that? That's the problem. Do you think we would have given millions to a CEO just because he is the CEO? We kneel before him and then we give him our thousands and we leave. Those who are dying at 55, who work, work, work like crazy and often die six months after retiring. I really thought we would have done that if we had control over what I was telling you earlier. Control over this excess value that we create defines the society in which we live. It's not just a question of money, it's much deeper. I'll continue reading. So I was saying they were whipped, chained, tormented with the most studied refinements. The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire became dark solitudes where unspeakable atrocities and even murders were committed with impunity. The enormous profits made by the manufacturers only whetted their appetite. Well, yes, of course. You think they brought in children in droves? They worked them to death, they killed them, tortured them. Normally they made huge profits. That should calm them down. But no, that's the problem with the capitalist is that once he's made a lot of profit, well, he wants even more. That's what we see today in terms of accumulation. We have trillionaires today we have billionaires in every country, centimillionaires, people who have hundreds of millions, people who have more money than they could spend in their entire life. They accumulate it and then all this value that is created, as Karl Marx said in another passage, when they grow in numbers, they grow in wealth. It's not an accident, it's not just by chance. There is a cause and effect relationship. There has never been so many of us in the history of humanity. There are over 8 billion of us. There have never been so many of us. Imagine that we have never had so many billionaires. But yes, of course, when you believe in numbers, you believe in wealth because we have created a society. Honestly, if you look at today's inequalities, you might have to go back to ancient Egypt, to the time when the pyramids were being built. To find a system like this. We live in a brutal system. We live in a system that is so unstable that as a father or a mother, your role is to take care of your children and take care of your home. This is not a fixed term contract. It is a permanent contract. Yet you go to work, you are given a fixed term contract. And even when you have a permanent contract, very regularly, bam. The economy collapses and you find yourself without a salary. You risk losing your job, all that. What do you do when the economy collapses? You go to your children, you tell them, listen, I'm going to give you back, because now I don't have any work. You have a lifelong contract, sealed in blood with your family and your family responsibilities. And you suffer a capitalist system that collapses without stopping, regularly. It collapses not even by anomaly, it is substantial. Regular collapse is natural in capitalism. It is not an accident, it is consubstantial. With this system, it collapses regularly. It collapses regularly, regularly and collapse, destroying millions of lives. And that's normal. We accept it like that. During the period of history, when there was slavery, when there was feudalism, millions of people found it normal. During the time of slavery, there were people who found it normal who wrote saying that this was a good system. There was no other. We couldn't imagine another. And there were people who criticized it. Those who criticized this system were seen as a bad thing. However, it collapsed in the end. And today it is seen as an abomination. One day, the system that we are living through now will this system literally, as I told you, inspired, you might say, the pharaohs of Egypt. This system will collapse one day. And one day we won't understand how companies with millions of people earning minimum wage, millions of working poor, millions of workers living in food insecurity. I'm talking about workers, people who toil or food insecure. And in the meantime, you have. You have a young singer or young footballer, or someone else who is paid €350,000 per week. I assure you that when the time comes, people will say, but this company was crazy. It wasn't normal what was going through their minds. That way people will look at us one day. Let me continue reading. The huge profits made by manufacturers only whetted their appetite for even more profit. Of course, they have no limits. In reality, they came up with the practice of night work, meaning that after a group of workers had been exhausted by the day's work, they would keep another group nearby for the night's work. The first group would jump into the beds that the second group had just left at that very moment, and vice versa. Foreign It's a popular tradition in the cashier language that the beds never get cold. I think we'll stop there. We'll stop there. I have 40 minutes. I was supposed to be 20 minutes. I did a double. But I'm telling you, it's an extremely broad subject. And when you start to delve into this subject, you, you start to understand what we're experiencing today, knowing that this is not, once again, a text that provides ready made solutions, but it is a text that allows you to refine your criticism of what's happening. You refine your criticism, and then, of course, you think about solutions. Thank you for listening. If you like this video, ask in the comments. I'll make more. See you soon.