- 7/9/2025
To some, Marxism is the solution to all capitalism’s problems. To others, it’s a major threat to democracy. But what did Karl Marx really say about capitalism and communism, and how can that help shape our discussions today?
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00:00You may have noticed people talking about Marxism lately.
00:05The unchecked spread of Marxist influence.
00:08As our nation has been taken over by the Marxists.
00:11The demands of the anarchists and Marxists rampaging across America.
00:16Will threaten our very survival.
00:19Okay, whoa, should I be alarmed?
00:21The Marxists are threatening my survival?
00:23It seems like our elected officials are pretty worked up about this.
00:27But what does Marxism actually mean?
00:28Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson, and this is Crash Course Political Theory.
00:37A specter is haunting Europe.
00:40The specter of communism.
00:42That's literally the opening line to the Communist Manifesto.
00:45You can't deny it's a total banger.
00:47Ever since Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels wrote this line in the late 1840s,
00:52people have agonized about the supposed evils of communism.
00:55In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy infamously made his political career, rooting out alleged communists,
01:03coming for everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Lucille Ball.
01:06And we're still haunted by that ghost today.
01:10A 2024 bill would require high schools in New Hampshire to teach anti-communism.
01:15And in Florida, Republican lawmakers are trying to mandate anti-communist education from kindergarten up.
01:21But are Marx's ideas really such a threat to freedom?
01:25Before I can answer that question, I have to back up into some very philosophical territory.
01:31I'm going to need a lot more coffee.
01:34Okay, bear with me while I attempt to explain a concept that's a tough one even for philosophy grad students.
02:02Dialectical materialism.
02:03I know, even the name sounds scary.
02:06But we're in this together.
02:07Let's do it.
02:08So, Karl Marx was a fan of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who had this theory about how ideas evolve.
02:16Basically, he thought that any general way you think about the world, any philosophy, model, or theory,
02:22isn't one solid idea, but rather the result of a bunch of contradictory perspectives in conflict with each other.
02:29And as people try to reconcile their opposing viewpoints, they create new ideas.
02:35An ongoing process he called the dialectic.
02:38Think dia like dialogue, lectic like lecture.
02:42Two conflicting ideas talking and eventually synthesizing into new ones.
02:47Still with me?
02:47Okay.
02:48Now, in Hegel's view, if you want to understand why the world is the way it is, you have to look at the realm of ideas, a perspective called idealism.
02:58But Marx turned Hegel on his head.
03:00He said, if you want to understand why the world is the way it is, you have to look not at ideas, but at the physical world, the material conditions of the world, especially the economic ones.
03:12This is called materialism.
03:14So, want to understand why religion is the way it is?
03:17You need to understand wages.
03:19Want to understand why a society has the moral values it does?
03:23You need to look at the market.
03:25In other words, in Marx's view, material economic systems are the root of everything.
03:32Not just how goods are exchanged, but who controls what gets made, who actually makes the things, the conditions they're under, and so on.
03:40As he put it, every class struggle is a political struggle.
03:45And when we put these two big ideas together, the dialectic and materialism, we get a view called dialectical materialism.
03:54I know, great name.
03:55This is Marx's real bread and butter.
03:58It's a view that once we understand the world in terms of its material economic realities, we can better understand how history works, how things change over time.
04:09And much like what would happen if you gave a room full of hungry grad students a single sandwich, conflict is inevitable.
04:16So, most of what Marx talked about were problems with capitalism.
04:20And in contemporary American society, many people associate critiques of capitalism with communism.
04:27Which explains why a lot of people today think of Marx as the spokesperson for communism.
04:31Well, that and the fact that he co-authored a pamphlet called The Communist Manifesto.
04:36Which, if you don't want to be associated with communism, is just bad branding.
04:39But hindsight is 20-20.
04:40In reality, Marx didn't actually write very much about what a communist government might look like.
04:46But he did have a lot to say about the problems with capitalism.
04:49Including these three hot takes.
04:52First, Marx believed that humans are productive by nature.
04:57An idea called homo faber.
04:59Homo, human.
05:01Faber, fabricate.
05:02People make stuff.
05:04It's what we do.
05:05But not just for creativity's sake.
05:08We control our environment through the use of tools.
05:11And according to Marx, we get our sense of self partly from seeing the impact of our work on the world.
05:18If that's true, then making stuff and not seeing the impact is going to really screw people up.
05:24Hot take number two.
05:26Under a capitalist system, workers make stuff to get money.
05:29And that's all they get.
05:30The person who owns the factory gets all the extra value created by that work.
05:35What we would call the profit.
05:38And when the worker is doing all this life-affirming labor just to make more profit for the dude at the top,
05:43she feels estranged.
05:45Not only from the things she makes, but even from the work.
05:49From herself.
05:51And even from her fellow homo fabers.
05:54This is what Marx called alienation.
05:56And finally, there's the cash workers get for their labor.
06:01It's not much.
06:02In a capitalist system, Marx said, workers compete with each other to accept the lowest pay.
06:08Meanwhile, capitalists compete with each other to pay the least while producing the most.
06:13If a worker demands a higher wage, they'll be out of a job.
06:16The whole system, Marx thought, was built on exploitation.
06:21All this alienation and exploitation leaves me wondering.
06:25Has anyone ever tried to do it differently?
06:27Turns out, yeah.
06:29Let's head to the tape.
06:33Mondragon, the world's largest existing worker-owned cooperative, emerged in 1956,
06:39when a Spanish priest named Jose Maria Ariz Mendierieta was assigned to an impoverished town in the Basque region of northern Spain.
06:46He started a technical school and helped workers get their engineering degrees.
06:50And then the workers started leaving the factory to launch their own cooperatively-owned companies.
06:55In a worker-owned co-op, there's no capitalists at the top scraping off the profit for themselves.
07:02The business is owned by the workers.
07:05And when a profit is made, the workers share it.
07:08The co-ops grew and grew and grew into the Mondragon Corporation,
07:13a group of over 90 cooperatives, including a grocery chain, a consulting firm, and a bike manufacturer.
07:21At Mondragon, all the worker-owners vote on big decisions like strategy and salaries.
07:27The highest-paid executive makes at most six times the salary of its lowest-paid worker.
07:32That might sound like a lot, but to put it in a perspective,
07:35American CEOs are paid, on average,
07:38344 times as much as typical workers.
07:46You're sure that's not a typo?
07:48Nope.
07:49Okay.
07:50Still, Mondragon exists within a broader capitalist system,
07:53which means they have to compete with non-worker-owned competitors.
07:57So they do things like outsource production to factories in cheaper markets,
08:02whose workers don't own the means of production.
08:04Okay, so Mondragon isn't perfect.
08:07But it offers an alternative to some of the problems Marx had with capitalism.
08:12Because crucially, Marx didn't think that a bunch of exploited and unfulfilled workers
08:16would just put up with it forever.
08:18And here's where Marx's view of dialectical materialism
08:22and his thinking about capitalism come together.
08:25See, as I mentioned, at its core,
08:28dialectical materialism is a perspective on how history works.
08:32To Marx, he was explaining something inevitable,
08:35a cause and effect, like a science experiment.
08:39And if the material reality that people were living under was capitalism,
08:43if that was the cause,
08:45Marx thought there was only one possible effect,
08:48the proletarian revolution.
08:50These alienated, unhappy workers, the proletariat,
08:55would attack the means of production.
08:57They'd take down the actual factories.
09:00Here's how Marx thought it would go down.
09:02First, the workers would organize once they recognized their power.
09:06They'd form trade unions to combine efforts.
09:09There would be walkouts, strikes, picket lines.
09:12And finally, the united workers would become a political party
09:16and seize the means of production.
09:18Capitalists would no longer own the factories or exploit the workers.
09:23Workers would collectively control it all.
09:28And here's the thing.
09:30Marx believed this was absolutely inevitable,
09:33almost like the laws of physics,
09:35but instead like the laws of history.
09:37Because he believed capitalism was inherently unsustainable.
09:41Its internal contradictions would lead to a dialectical shift
09:45where it would eventually bring about its own demise.
09:48But he didn't say when this would happen,
09:50which is a source of contention among Marxists.
09:54Hey guys, where are you going?
09:56Wait, is it happening right now?
09:58Well, false alarm.
10:04Anyway, turn on the news today and you're likely to hear people still talking about Marx centuries later.
10:10And often in a pretty negative way.
10:14But other people think he did at least get some things right.
10:17I mean, it seems to me that a lot of Marxist predictions about capitalism have come true.
10:22For instance, he predicted there would be increasingly rampant income inequality.
10:27And look at this.
10:29In 2023, the bottom 50% of earners in the U.S. held less than 3% of all household wealth,
10:37while the top 10% held over 60%.
10:41But can we really boil down all struggle to class struggle?
10:46What about racism, sexism, or homophobia?
10:50Would giving power to the working class really solve all those problems?
10:54These questions have led some critics to believe that Marx is way overhyped.
10:59They'd argue that class isn't the most important thing to consider.
11:02Race and gender are.
11:04And then there are the folks who lie somewhere in the middle,
11:07who may consider themselves Marxist, but don't think he had all the pieces in place.
11:10Many contemporary Marxist perspectives recognize that class does matter,
11:15but that other aspects of identity impact people's lives in overlapping and complex ways.
11:21Intersectionality considers how race, gender, sexual orientation, class,
11:25and other social identities affect each other.
11:28There's more on intersectionality in Crash Course Sociology.
11:32The point is, Marx didn't consider different kinds of discrimination
11:35and identity perspectives in his theories.
11:37But modern Marxists can, and often do.
11:41And what about Marxist concept of alienation?
11:44Is that really a capitalist problem, or simply a human one?
11:48Some claim that we can ease our alienation through socialist practices like worker co-ops.
11:54That way, we can get the benefits without chopping capitalism to bits.
11:58But, as we saw with Mondragon, there are limitations there too.
12:02We also don't know how much more alienation we'll have to experience before the proletarian revolution happens.
12:09Unless, really guys?
12:12It's happening again?
12:14Nope.
12:15Anyway, the thing about Marx is, we're still talking about it.
12:20No matter what we think about his theories and ideas, you can't deny they had an impact.
12:25This old German philosopher's name is still in the mouths of right-wing pundits and socialist activists alike,
12:32thrown around as a political buzzword to ruffle feathers.
12:35But by understanding what Marx really had to say, and where his ideas came from,
12:40we can have a more productive conversation about what is and isn't working in our current system,
12:45how class and other aspects of identity affect our lives,
12:49and what we can expect for the future.
12:51Next time, we'll ask if anarchism is really the dystopian nightmare it's been made out to be.
12:57See you then.
12:58Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Political Theory,
13:01which was filmed at the Bastille Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people.
13:06If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever,
13:09you can join our community on Patreon.
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