The Rurals vs the Far Left - from Marx to AOC

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  • čas přidán 1. 06. 2024
  • 83% of America's counties voted for Trump in the 2020 election but these counties account for only 29% of America's GDP. Why aren't this lesser off rural/exurban population voting for the party that theoretically are most aligned with their interests i.e. the Democratic Socialists?
    The answer might lie with Karl Marx who saw this population as "rural idiots" representing "barbarism within civilisation". For Marx only the urban working class could bring about societal transformation. Every successful Communist revolution had to unlearn this bias of Marx.
    Looking at the American political situation today we see two Americas: a rural/exurban ocean and a densely populated urban and suburban archipelago. And like Marx rather than his successful revolutionary followers, the Far Left of today dismiss these ruralites as Conservative Reactionaries rather than the most readily mobilisable support.
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    🎼Media Used:
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    ⌛ Timestamps:
    0:00 Introduction
    1:23 The Urban Rural Divide
    2:55 The Deeper Roots of the Problem
    5:52 Revisiting America's 21st-century Divide

Komentáře • 353

  • @aresmars2003
    @aresmars2003 Před 11 měsíci +94

    Minnesota's Paul Wellstone was maybe the last Democrat to gain both urban and rural votes, with his simple motto "We all do better when we all do better."

    • @tony10980
      @tony10980 Před 11 měsíci +6

      Unfortunately, I think few politicians could win off of a message like that these days.

    • @aresmars2003
      @aresmars2003 Před 9 měsíci +4

      @@alwaysgreatusa223 The problem isn't the obsession with "me", even if that's a problem. The problem is "we" now means "people I approve of, people with correct beliefs, people in my tribe."

    • @aresmars2003
      @aresmars2003 Před 9 měsíci +2

      @@alwaysgreatusa223 Sure, but not as simple as narcissism, but a part of socialization that allows cooperation to exist. It's good at one level, and deadly at another.
      As GW Bush said in Dallas 2016
      "Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples - while judging ourselves by our best intentions. And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose."

    • @robertdabob8939
      @robertdabob8939 Před 8 měsíci +2

      ​@@aresmars2003so in other words, the problem is group identification as compensation for a lack of individual self awareness.

  • @jessl1934
    @jessl1934 Před 11 měsíci +48

    "The countryside surrounds the city"
    - Mao

    • @Alex11V
      @Alex11V Před 11 měsíci +3

      Holly BASED

    • @SpiritualPsychotherapyServices
      @SpiritualPsychotherapyServices Před 26 dny

      Respected British anthropology professor, Dr. Edward Dutton, has demonstrated that “LEFTISM” is due to genetic mutations, caused by poor breeding strategies.
      🤡
      To put it simply, in recent decades, those persons who exhibit leftist traits such as egalitarianism, feminism, gynocentrism, socialism, multiculturalism, transvestism, homosexuality, perverse morality, and laziness, have been reproducing at rates far exceeding the previous norm, leading to an explosion of insane, narcissistic SOCIOPATHS in (mostly) Western societies.

    • @SpiritualPsychotherapyServices
      @SpiritualPsychotherapyServices Před 26 dny

      @@Alex11V, kindly repeat that in ENGLISH, Miss.☝️
      Incidentally, Slave, are you VEGAN? 🌱

  • @Oliver_without_a_twist
    @Oliver_without_a_twist Před 8 měsíci +6

    There's no organized mainstream far left in USA

  • @azhadial7396
    @azhadial7396 Před 11 měsíci +63

    There is a similar trend in France.
    The geographer Christophe Guilly showed that the historical bastions of the PCF (French Communist Party), that is to say rural and poorer parts of France, began to vote massively for the RN (National Rally/National Front) and almost completely stopped voting for radical left or extreme left political parties.
    Although, he does not put the blame on Marx, but considers that the evolution of the left with the increased attention given to societal issues (sexism, racism, welcoming refugees, LGBT+ rights, etc.) at the expense of economic issues is in part to blame (especially because they are associated with both a form globalization - when it comes to a more open policy toward accepting migrants, which are already very numerous in France - and with the abandonment of the social question relevant to that poorest part of France).

    • @jacavanheesch4593
      @jacavanheesch4593 Před 11 měsíci +22

      so basically the left expanding its defence of marginalised people in only a class sense to other forms like women in relation to sexism or minorities has made the mostly white working class move away from it. this has been a trend since the 60s especially when right wingers exploited working class racism and sexism more in order to get them to vote against their own interests. i think its telling how almost exclusively middle class affluent people are now leftists instead of the people it concerns. if working class people cannot be intersectional then they will continue to be exploited and see their living standards become worse. the right only offers distractions people to hate while the people who you should hate run way with your money.

    • @arareanddifferenttune3130
      @arareanddifferenttune3130 Před 9 měsíci +1

      @@jacavanheesch4593very well put!

    • @jacavanheesch4593
      @jacavanheesch4593 Před 9 měsíci

      @@arareanddifferenttune3130 thanks :)

    • @Azrael__
      @Azrael__ Před 9 měsíci +10

      ​@@jacavanheesch4593Not an expansion, they have actively dropped genuine economic causes, championed cultural causes to an irrational disproportionate extent, which has worked out to be a distraction from the economic policies that would actually improve the lives of all.

    • @Azrael__
      @Azrael__ Před 9 měsíci

      ​@@jacavanheesch4593​​​Not only that, they have actively demonized rural and working class people, labelling them as bigots when they simply are people who are being left behind, leading to the current backlash.

  • @lachlanraidal5100
    @lachlanraidal5100 Před 9 měsíci +25

    If you want a political framework designed to build wealth in rural areas I suggest the philosophy of Mutualism - i.e. ownership through use. In practice this means policy and community lead direct action favouring small businesses and co-ops especially, whilst actively pushing out mega-corporations when they compete with local industry. Other features are an emphasis on direct voting on local issues, community assemblies (like the meetings at town halls of old), and voluntary associations instead of reliance on governmental authority. With regards to co-ops they are an essential building block of a mutualist society as they keep wealth within a community rather than paying it out to shareholders who are mostly located in the cities. They work on the principle that every patron and worker of the enterprise is a member and every member gets one vote when deciding on how things are to be run or on appointing the board. Profits are either reinvested into the co-op, donated to the community, or paid to members as bonuses or discounts. This makes everyone involved a part owner of the enterprise, and prevents wealth being transferred outside of the community.
    Co-op structures are essential for anything operating at scale, like wholesalers, warehouses, supermarkets, factories, utilities and distributors as these big pillars are the first to be monopolised by corporations to extract wealth from rural areas. The fact that centralisation and economies of scale are essential to the efficiency of these services means that they really can only avoid this pitfall with user-ownership model. Traditional style small businesses are fine for retail, boutique and specialist stores as they are more subject to consumer competition and more directly accountable to their workers.
    The only other major elements are credit unions (basically cooperative banks that don't make profit, they instead minimise overhead to give better rates to lenders and borrowers) and the phasing out of long-term rentals - ownership by use means homeownership because it is the occupier who uses the property not the speculator. Changing local property codes, rates, and regulations could push investment out of buying up existing homes for rentals and into building new homes or investing in local business.
    The best part about Mutualism is that you can do far more than just vote, but you also don't need to join some socialist revolution, instead by making conscious day-to-day decisions about where you buy from (support your local co-operative, if you don't have one see if people might be interested in starting one!), joining or starting community associations, and most of all spreading the ideas of Mutualism around your community as solutions to existing problems. You can make a difference, you don't have to wait for permission, and you can do it constructively. The only catch is it will take teamwork, an organised group that supports the idea, and discipline (especially when you're trying to get it started in your town) but the results will bring prosperity for generations to come.
    If you want to learn more about Mutualism here's a good jumping off point:
    www.mutualist.org/id24.html
    And here's a reddit community if you'd like to talk to some Mutualists:
    www.reddit.com/r/mutualism/comments/jewn4c/intro_to_mutualism_and_posting_guidelines/

    • @jichaelmorgan3796
      @jichaelmorgan3796 Před 9 měsíci +4

      Sounds a little like what Amish already do, and tightnit Jewish communities do in a more integrated way

    • @hugov1951
      @hugov1951 Před 9 měsíci +1

      You can’t just “design” a new economic system

    • @lachlanraidal5100
      @lachlanraidal5100 Před 9 měsíci +3

      @@hugov1951 why not? People certainly have done in the past. In fact that's largely what the IMF does when it sets out the terms and conditions of its development loans or what China does when it gives out its loans in Africa. In fact just about every policy maker tries to do so domestically whenever they reform some area or aspect of an economy. How has what I've described different from people trying to advocate for privatisation or nationalisation? We are all advocating for the economy at large or some aspect of the economy to work according to a particular set of rules and norms, and we all have our own expected results in mind - whether those rules will actually achieve those results largely depends on how well our model forecasts how such rules would play out.

    • @longiusaescius2537
      @longiusaescius2537 Před 8 měsíci +2

      @lachlanraidal5100 thank you, very interesting stuff bro

    • @kaimarmalade9660
      @kaimarmalade9660 Před 8 měsíci

      Your economic model ends up destroying the generational wealth that families would need to ever be middle class. The create a poverty society this way. Read Adam Smith (like actually read the book. Don't just read the Wikpedia page) and spend 10 years thinking and working and get back to me slick.

  • @LittleMushroomGuy
    @LittleMushroomGuy Před 11 měsíci +30

    thing is that Marxism is a urban ideology, it was created in the industrial revolution and critiques the society that emerged when rural People were forced into cities and factories. Marx historical analysis is just Hegels analysis of freedom with a sticker on top that says "capitalism"
    If you look at communist nations like Yugoslavia and the USSR, they continued the urbanization of the industrial revolution (resulting in the now infamous brutalist apartment complexes) since that's what Marx only worked with. In yugoslavia they forced poor peasants to sell their land and moved them into cities, and the Soviets demonized them as if the free peasantry was the same as the feudal lords that once rented them out the land. Marxism is ultimately an inauthentic philosophy, since it only knows the urban man.
    Want to truly end capitalism and alienation? Live of your own land

    • @dontdoxme1730
      @dontdoxme1730 Před 11 měsíci +2

      "the society that emerged when rural People were forced into cities and factories"
      "Live of your own land"
      how in a society that forces people back into the city lmao

    • @FourtyParsecs
      @FourtyParsecs Před 11 měsíci +3

      I think Vietnam is a counter-argument to this. Also, this perspective is too simplistic and your solution is even more simplistic. Ignoring the phenomenon of industrialization completely isn't a solution to anything in the real world.
      We can A) allow capitalism to industrial the world or B) allow the people to do so using principles of Marxism.
      Rural areas were, themselves, products of other systems. Are we saying Feudal systems were better then? That their product was more correct and moral?
      Socialism will keep elements of all systems before it. That's what new systems do (see: dialectics). Current versions of socialism tend to keep industrialization, if only because this is necessary to defend against reverting to capitalism (or being bombed by the capitalists).
      Anyway. Keep your utopian ideals I guess. The rest of us have to deal with the real world as it is.

    • @LittleMushroomGuy
      @LittleMushroomGuy Před 11 měsíci

      ​@@dontdoxme1730 By fighting the mass privatization of land. Look up the Enclosure Movement in England which was the reason people were forced into cities and didnt just move willingly to find work. And then look at Bill Gates, he is currently the largest land owner in the US and keep buying and renting farm land to farmers. Since we aren't living in the 19th century people actually have the opportunity again to become independent, and to work office jobs out of your own home/can afford to travel to work longer distances

    • @LittleMushroomGuy
      @LittleMushroomGuy Před 11 měsíci +2

      @@FourtyParsecs >Rural areas were, themselves, products of other systems.
      Rural areas existed before feudalism, and serfs =/= free peasants. Id say that you should stop getting your history lessons from Crusader Kings, I assume.
      >Are we saying Feudal systems were better then? That their product was more correct and moral?
      Lmao
      >Keep your utopian ideals I guess. The rest of us have to deal with the real world as it is.
      You literally just presented a utopian idea of a Socialist utopia that does everything right and has no wrongs. I just said that people should try to become independent lmao
      And its not industrialization but urbanization that is the main problem

    • @katelynmeaghan3410
      @katelynmeaghan3410 Před 11 měsíci +3

      @@LittleMushroomGuy Yeah, no. Spouting utopian anarcho-ruralism because you hate civilization is bullshit. Some of actually care about human progress as opposed to progressivism like your pushing. Radical individualism will never advance humanity; only collectivism can do that.

  • @AmericanCastlesBookClub.
    @AmericanCastlesBookClub. Před 9 měsíci +17

    There's not much like this on CZcams. Thanks for what you do, James. I'd love to support your work once finances permit. Can't wait to explore more of your work!

  • @nessimrihani5962
    @nessimrihani5962 Před 11 měsíci +33

    Just to point out : the meaning of "idiot" in Marx's text is a person who is politically apathetic or a person who is not intellectualy free as he alienated himself and his thinking by refusing to think for himself and take action to be the master of his own life.
    The word idiot traces back its meaning from the greek origin. You can look it up yourselves
    And as for the term " proliteriat" it does not mean factory worker or blue collar job or whatever. It means people who do not posess nor wealth nor proprety. All they posess is their labour wether physical or even intellectual.
    So could you please correct the video or something.

    • @slappy8941
      @slappy8941 Před 9 měsíci +1

      Well that makes it so much better. 😂😂😂😂😂

    • @polkunus
      @polkunus Před 9 měsíci +7

      There's a lot that this video misses in context of that time, for example socialism and communism were interchangeable.

    • @strategicowl192
      @strategicowl192 Před 8 měsíci +1

      Also let's not forget that Marx may have discounted people living in rural areas when it came to revolution, this only applied to industrialised/western nations. Iirc he wrote in a letter to a Russian communist that a revolution in Russia would most likely not follow the ideas outlined in the Communist Manifesto. Also the Paris Commune massively changed his and Engels' minds, which is something you need to consider as well.

  • @kuweit
    @kuweit Před 9 měsíci +6

    Looking at the comments, I barely see anyone have a good take to show on this subject. I agree with much of this video, however. And I appreciate tackling this largely under-discussed question.

  • @nickhanlon9331
    @nickhanlon9331 Před 9 měsíci +2

    I'm from Australia and the idea that anyone would be a communist in the countryside is hilarious. Unless you count the Aborigines who practiced communism as hunter-gatherers amongst their own tribes.

  • @rangerpritchard7546
    @rangerpritchard7546 Před 9 měsíci +21

    In my experience, the Democratic party favor a more centralized heavy handed approach to government, which pushes for hospitals instead of independent doctors, trains instead of cars, more taxes in exchange for centralized government services and less ability for individuals to commit violence in their own defence. None of these policies work out well for the very decentralized rural poor.

    • @rutessian
      @rutessian Před 9 měsíci +5

      They don't appear to work that well for cities either.

    • @jichaelmorgan3796
      @jichaelmorgan3796 Před 9 měsíci +4

      Heavy handedness is right. The left played their hand too soon. Things have been changing too fast for rural America, which still shared freedom and liberty still as core political values. The left playing "rules for radicals" will not work on such a crowd that is already alert. The name calling, ridicule, and ostricization just alienated them even further. At this point, the left is so lost in these radical ways, classical persuasion techniques are completely foreign to them and would go against all the years of indoctrination. So the only thing that would work is force, which betrays what the rural suspected all along, that freedom is not a core value of the far left movements ...unless they can learn to come clean and take an authentic approach that everyone can agree with, win hearts and minds, or else a far right reaction is very likely out of self preservation instinct when push comes to shove. Iow, they done fucked up and are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The whole thought processes needs to be reworked immediately.

    • @jontalbot1
      @jontalbot1 Před 8 měsíci +1

      The same tendency to centralised power by the organised left is the same everywhere.

    • @jichaelmorgan3796
      @jichaelmorgan3796 Před 8 měsíci

      @jontalbot1 It comes down to values. If the population values decentralization and freedom/ liberty, those become resistance to centralization and authoritarianism. The left has gradually devalued freedom and liberty and does not value decentralization and the right values freedom and liberty but has devalued decentralization over time, and continues to be reactionary to the devaluing on the other side. This will get worse from both sides if polarization continues. So yeah, unless some kind of mass consciousness develops, looks bad.

    • @jontalbot1
      @jontalbot1 Před 8 měsíci

      @@jichaelmorgan3796 I am not American and we do not have anything like the degree of polarization in the US. Historically we have the most centralised state in the western world. There has been some devolution in recent years (eg the Scottish Parliament) but the tendency to centralization is not a left right issue here. But the whole tradition of coops and self help which was there 100 years ago has died out in leftist thinking

  • @mistressfreezepeach
    @mistressfreezepeach Před 11 měsíci +7

    There was a great article on this after the trucker protests "Reality Honks Back", where he talks about Virtuals versus Physicals as classes

  • @bonghead6621
    @bonghead6621 Před 10 měsíci +9

    Biden's a corporate democrat not a leftist.

  • @marcgrant2225
    @marcgrant2225 Před 11 měsíci +9

    as the 90% of 19th century Europeans that worked in agriculture were removed from the soil and became in their disenfranchisement the wage slaves of what came to be the proletariat, they were in no more of a position to overturn an existing economic order than the plantation slaves in America who until needed in the union army were getting nowhere. That rural Americans that were once landowners and productive in agriculture whereby they could at least feed themselves are now to be found working at Walmarts and Jiffy Lubes and just getting by and are essentially unavailable politically in any meaningful way (Evangelicalism and Populist Nationalism are dead ends) portends badly for our country’s future stability as its politics instead of putting bread and butter on the table serve up culture wars and blame. The Left should definitely and defiantly be addressing this. Thank you for this video and your good work.

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 11 měsíci +2

      Yeah it's a very interesting cocktail we are drinking right now. I'm kneedeep in Marx at the moment and while I think his predictions of how the dialectic was going to play out in the culture I'm thinking about how it actually is playing out. One think I've been thinking a lot about is Lenin's comment that the proletarian consciousness isn't revolutionary but trade unionist. Lenin was able to make that observation with a few extra decades of distance. I'm wondering now how this is supposed to play out for the rural Americans. It seems more like the story of how Fascism came to power which is interesting. Still need to get clearer on it all but that's what's coming to me now. One author I read wrote that Marx didn't quite reckon with the power of religion and nationalism since he thought they would be ironed out in the decreasing alienation of dialectical progress and yet today it seems these are the two leviathans that are swimming in this rural American ocean gathering power

  • @omarqasirov8754
    @omarqasirov8754 Před 9 měsíci +5

    A lot of the work of Thomas Frank is about explicitly addressing the issue of how Democrats and socially liberal politicians gave up on engaging with rural voters, but he doesn't use terminology like the far left but works mostly in terms of the major political parties and major political movements in the US, the far left (relative to American politics) not being either of those until engaging in Bernie Sanders' runs in 2016 and later in 2020. He really goes into this in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and "Listen Liberal". But to your point, some of the first progressive, populist, and socialist parties in the US had their first electoral successes in the Midwest.

  • @Elygh33
    @Elygh33 Před 11 měsíci +16

    I feel like this video makes way too many generalizations about the left to be relevant. While AOC and Bernie are the face of a New Democrat movement, I really doubt any of them are well versed in Marxist theory, let alone Lenin. For the most part, they’re still liberals in their policy decisions and strategies.
    I think the video also misses the mark on the central topic. Why are the rituals left out? Why do they tend to vote Republican? I really doubt it’s because of Marx’s distaste for them, seeing as how his name is still taboo in US politics

    • @patrickoreilly5528
      @patrickoreilly5528 Před 11 měsíci

      Yeah, this is broad and assumes to the point of inanity. Absolutely nothing said about the persistence of agrarian socialist movements or rural community activism, no consideration that leftists have actively championed rural communities as strong social units with economic value, or analysis of why left wing politics have been so frequently and sometimes violently rejected by rural conservatives. "Universities are all in cities"? There was no research into the actual social fabric of North America here.

  • @jeffreyforeman5031
    @jeffreyforeman5031 Před 11 měsíci +5

    excellent presentation, this guy has a lot of good insight thank you

  • @juamu1132
    @juamu1132 Před 9 měsíci +4

    funny thing is, in Confucianism peasants are above merchants

    • @johkupohkuxd1697
      @johkupohkuxd1697 Před 9 měsíci +1

      Probably due to a distain for traders, hucksters and commerce rather than due to any sort of love for the peasantry.

  • @diogovic1323
    @diogovic1323 Před 11 měsíci +100

    I can’t believe u called Hilary Clinton “the Far Left” candidate. That’s a new one to me.

    • @RTDoh5
      @RTDoh5 Před 11 měsíci +38

      Most of the Democratic party is center right. The U.S. has not had a true left wing candidate since Eugene V. Debs (1855 - 1926)

    • @goodgrief888
      @goodgrief888 Před 11 měsíci +8

      Nixon was farther left than Clinton

    • @Giantcrabz
      @Giantcrabz Před 10 měsíci +3

      Because OP is a Destiny / ancap PCM cringe type commentator most likely

    • @urbaneblobfish9624
      @urbaneblobfish9624 Před 10 měsíci +13

      Judging by his other political content, this is far from his least informed statement lmao.

    • @offthegrid1695
      @offthegrid1695 Před 10 měsíci

      @@RTDoh5Obama?

  • @fedmcglowie7240
    @fedmcglowie7240 Před 10 měsíci +8

    Interestingly, the Latin word from which "pagan" is derived referred to rural people. Since time immemorial, rural people have been the ones sticking to the old ways.

    • @christinecortese9973
      @christinecortese9973 Před 9 měsíci +5

      I live rural by choice and am baffled that people in cities don’t realize where their food comes from. Most of my rural neighbors have college degrees and just enjoy living closer to nature. And all those things we eat require “the old ways” to grow and develop.

  • @Laz3rCat95
    @Laz3rCat95 Před 9 měsíci +4

    To your point at the end, you actually DO see some areas in the US where it's primarily a rural area, but universities have a big presence, and it does bear out that those places tend to lean more left than similarly sized areas without that university presence.

    • @hcp0scratch
      @hcp0scratch Před 8 měsíci

      They lean more left because of the college campus reisdents. The rurals themselves are unchanged and decry the leftist agenda.

  • @sharkchaos5160
    @sharkchaos5160 Před 9 měsíci +1

    Great video.

  • @doyle6000
    @doyle6000 Před 11 měsíci +1

    Thanks!

  • @buddhabillybob
    @buddhabillybob Před 8 měsíci

    Fantastic video!

  • @skramzy6628
    @skramzy6628 Před 9 měsíci +1

    Good video!

  • @chadwhitman1811
    @chadwhitman1811 Před 10 měsíci +3

    The difference between Marxist- Leninism and the Socialist left in this country today is that the proletariat and and dissatisfied rural classes no longer 8:45 exist as politiczed classes .The Critical Theory of Marcuse which is the predominant form of leftistism has no real economic agenda and is closer to anarchism than Marxism. The vast majority of leftist mislabeled progressives are as mentioned, the intellectuals and the lumpenproleteriat which made up street people, illegal aliens, gays ,radicals of various minorities and ethnicities, as radical environmentalist and feminists. Critcal theory has substituted personal liberation and race war for class war

  • @outerspace7391
    @outerspace7391 Před 9 měsíci +3

    Should be pointed out however that Hilary was an extreme establishment representative, the closer politician to working class Americans with populist rhetoric was Trump

    • @blacklite911
      @blacklite911 Před 8 měsíci

      If by closer, you mean being one inch closer to something a mile away. They’re both representatives of the wealthy class. Trump never worked a day in his life. And the wealth he acquired was heavily dependent on serving the wealthiest class (luxury hotels).
      But if you’re just speaking about how the rhetoric was perceived, then sure. He was able to convince a large amount of the working class that he was on their side.

  • @Vak_g
    @Vak_g Před 11 měsíci +44

    Excellent video as always! It will be great if you could make a video about populism and it's power over the Rurals and lower classes. Especially about the differences and similarities in right and left wing populist movements.

    • @kaimarmalade9660
      @kaimarmalade9660 Před 8 měsíci

      The idea was that there wouldn't be a big difference and it's the great embarrassment of a generation of bullshit theorists that the Trump movement despite prolific union participation is a far-right movement. The American Left is a a simple Christian tendency toward sticking up for the weak and less fortunate. Extending it any further than churches, unions, and Woody Guthrie as a conceptual device ends up being an undermining of basic American values. We aren't Kantian Continentalists. The United States isn't a realization of the values of the 18th century. It isn't a slight against those values either.

  • @spicedoliveoil7928
    @spicedoliveoil7928 Před 10 měsíci +6

    7:58 With widespread access to the internet, people needn't have a university degree from a metropolis; all you need is curiosity and open-mindedness.

  • @TomCarberry413
    @TomCarberry413 Před 9 měsíci +3

    Marx came from real wealth. His father became rich as a lawyer. His mother came from the Pressburg family (as in Napoleon's Treaty of Pressburg)and his aunt married into the Philips family, as in Philips Electronics. Their extended family included very wealthy bankers like Hartog, Isaacs, Barent-Cohen, and Brandeis. Karl Marx's grandmother Nanette Barent-Cohen was the first cousin of Henriette Barent-Cohen, who married Nathan Mayer Rothschild. All really bad ideas that hurt the masses come from the super duper rich. Not the petty rich like Bill Gates, although he tries to keep up with the evil as best he can.

  • @levinb1
    @levinb1 Před 9 měsíci +3

    No offense, but you don’t provide many sources for this particular essay. For Marx I don’t him you have any direct quotes on the matter. Marx DID change his mind on the peasantry as he aged. But, by the time of Marx’s latter years there was already an intelligentsia of Marxist’s of bourgeois origin primarily in Russia who did indeed keep that anti-rural and anti-peasant mindset going. Lastly, industrialization destroys the Earth so it’s inherently anti-farmer and anti-“living off the land” to begein with.

  • @markuskosmo
    @markuskosmo Před 10 měsíci +13

    Having a more educated rural population would make systemic changes much easier to accomplish in the US, both by reform and revolution. The rich and powerful don't want to lose their power, though, which has lead to CIA intervention in socialist regimes in other countries, McCarthyism, and Reagan making college expensive to cut off access to liberating education, just to mention a few things. Agriculture is necessary to feed people as well, so the rural population being so uneducated is a huge setback for the left in the US in more ways than one!
    Not sure if I'd call Bernie Sanders and AOC socialists, though. They're moreso social democrats, working for reforms within a capitalist framework. Not sure if you said that they were socialists explicitly, though, so I could be wrong.

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 9 měsíci +6

      A more educated rural population would probably become even more opposed to far left politics if anything, as they would be more informed of the unsound economic policies of those politics, as well as the numerous human rights abuses those ideologies have enacted on rural populations.

    • @jonathanpork-sausage617
      @jonathanpork-sausage617 Před 9 měsíci +1

      Education - I always think of the education act of 1888 (or thereabouts) which was designed to control rather than enable the working class, and even today, children imprisoned by education.

    • @answerman9933
      @answerman9933 Před 9 měsíci +3

      @markuskosmo I think you confuse education with cultural indoctrination. Most people in the world have received a far greater education now than 100 years ago. People may live in rural areas. But many work in cities. Today's "peasant" is often working a low-wage job, not on a farm. In the main difference in rural thought and city thought is based services provided. Cities can afford to provide more social services help to their random citizens. In rural areas, people have learned to depend on themselves, friends, and families.

    • @rogerforsberg3910
      @rogerforsberg3910 Před 9 měsíci +1

      Could you clarify, Mr m, this assertion...
      "...and Reagan making college expensive to cut off access to liberating education, just to mention a few things."
      I may not be as clever a young chappie as you, Mr m, but I'm likely much older & was completely conscious during Reagan's tenure as president. I would be fascinated to learn what legislation -- passed by both chambers of Congress -- he signed that affirms what I consider to be a questionable or "dodgy" (as the Brits would write) claim.

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 9 měsíci

      @@rogerforsberg3910 You'll be waiting a long time for him to respond because no such legislation exists.
      In actuality, college started becoming more expensive when the government started giving out student loans to anyone. Colleges then saw that payment was basically guaranteed by the government, so they jacked up their tuition rates. Prior to this, student loans had to come from places like banks, and they actually vetted out people who wanted useless degrees, the government does not. I believe government student loans started to really become a thing under Clinton, but I could be wrong.

  • @vonBottorff
    @vonBottorff Před 9 měsíci +12

    Alexander Luria, the Soviet neuropsychologist, made a groundbreaking discovery about "rural" people back in the 1920s. He found when he gave the IQ tests of that time to his pre-literate Caucus peasant test people they reacted negatively, i.e., fiercely anti-abstraction, i.e., anti-intellectual. He discovered they were very focused on the most practical ways of thought and behavior. This was found to be the case in subsequent studies in other aboriginal to rural to working-class groups. Very few (I heard about this from James Gleick in his book _Information..._ and IQ researcher James Flynn) seem to be aware of this key piece of the puzzle. I'll add that Goethe eventually split from the Romantics saying that Romanticism is everything sick about modern society. For me Romanticism might (ironically) be the beginning of the intelligentsia losing its grip on leadership, i.e., intellectuals were going too far into abstractions and fantasies -- places where the rural peasants could not follow. And today urban modernism (art, architecture, music, literature, etc.) is like a repellent wall keeping out rural people. Goethe, who had one foot in culture, one in government, tried to develop a new classicism as an antidote. However, the Industrial Revolution was hitting its inflexion point -- and no one IMHO has figured out the Industrial Age. To a great degree modernism, which came on strong in the IA is simply absurdist fatalist. What can a rural farmer do with urban intellectuals whose tastes tend toward absurdism?

    • @lavalampa2020
      @lavalampa2020 Před 8 měsíci

      honestly don't rip too hard on rural people not everyone there is all republican but also they're lives are defiantly excruciatingly harder, ik its "trendy" to hate the urban life but honestly its true that they do live harder lives

    • @vonBottorff
      @vonBottorff Před 8 měsíci

      @@lavalampa2020 I merely meant rural, non-intellectual people are more practical focused and instinctively don't do abstraction like intellectuals do. Nothing to do with worth or IQ or who's right and wrong.

    • @kaimarmalade9660
      @kaimarmalade9660 Před 8 měsíci +2

      @vonBottorff This is exactly why Thomas Jefferson advocated for agrarianism. You're hitting the nail on the head. Too much abstraction is not good for, "romanesque" societies. The Athenians were overcome with hubris in Thucydides', "History of the Peloponnesian War" and they were eventually overcome by, "simpler" people in the Spartans. They had better everything but it got to their heads. Upper middle class liberals are very similar. There's a belief that, "their version" of classical liberalism will win out in the end but largely they fail to see that Smith is a moral philosopher and less an economist. You can't export, "values." There's a reason India is a, "democracy" with a caste system. It's a miscalculation about economics and the division of labor that might terminate in warfare. It's possible it already has.

    • @vonBottorff
      @vonBottorff Před 8 měsíci

      @@kaimarmalade9660 Interesting points. But what if I borrowed from Daniel Quinn, Ted K., and John Zerzan and simply gave up the whole civilization thing for a bad job? At some point I concluded that we're just lost in derivative. Actually, I believe that a brief, narrow window opened in the late-18th, early-19th century in the form of a few of the "Romanticism" poets, e.g., Novalis, Keats, the Brontes, maybe Wordsworth and Poe. They sensed, felt something of Nature, the Beyond, got it down on paper -- and everything exploded around them with people trying to get a piece of this Nature-Beyond. Great efforts were made -- largely expressed as aesthetics -- still, Poe's _The Raven_ can be seen as a metaphor for the death of this quest, i.e., it's a sort of failed Grail knight backstory, then stormed in the Industrial Age. And of course all the Dark Romantic goth stuff being _hommage_ to the doom of this civilization failure. But of course you could argue for "agrarianism" since the world that produced the Romantic poets was some sweet-spot low-tech agriculture-based world. Stasis anyone?

    • @jamesabestos2800
      @jamesabestos2800 Před 8 měsíci +1

      Ugh. Too many words just destroy it all and rebuild nothing.

  • @leanmchungry4735
    @leanmchungry4735 Před 11 měsíci +4

    '...Lenin having learned from practical experience the lessons of Marxism...'
    According to Marx socialism was to grow in the womb of Capitalism, Russia needed to develop capitalism before it was ready for a socialist revolution.
    Marx had a lot of bad students,
    he wrote 5000 pages analysing capitalism and only a couple of hundred pages on politics, much of which turned out to be wrong. Instead of solidarity of workers against capitalists, we've got a stratification of high earners versus low earners, and there is no international solidarity of workers etc.
    The fundamental Marxist truth of Capitalism: Capital rests upon the exploitation of the worker, through labour surplus value feeding into capital accumulation, this still holds up for me.
    But as for politics, my hopeless take, there is no collective fix, only a collective hell, but there is hope for individuals to find freedom.
    I wish Ronald Reagan's quip didn't ring so true to my experience 'The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

    • @neilreynolds3858
      @neilreynolds3858 Před 11 měsíci +2

      They are there to help - they're there to help themselves to whatever you have. That's the purpose of all forms of government: You get to steal without being punished. The populace is supposed to try to defend themselves from government but that no longer happens - the State has become too powerful and we're all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

    • @leanmchungry4735
      @leanmchungry4735 Před 11 měsíci

      @@neilreynolds3858 It is sad to have lost hope in humanities capacity to flourish collectively.
      The world is facing an environmental crisis that will require collective action...we are so fucked.

  • @rickpearson7943
    @rickpearson7943 Před 9 měsíci +1

    You can tell this was made by someone who's never visited the southern or Midwestern rural U.S. Not just by his accent but by his assumption that rural people everywhere are more likely to support Marxist revolution just because it happened in China and Russia. Newsflash, we're not talking about China or Russia. Completely different nation, in a different part of the world, with different culture and values. The rural Midwest and especially the south absolutely are conservative reactionaries. I'd know. I'm born, raised and still live in the region. There is 100% absolutely zero chance 99% of these people would ever support such revolution. They'd support a fascist revolution maybe (probably) but absolutely not anything resembling anything leftist. Not even the black southern rural population. Much less the majority which is white.

  • @goodgrief888
    @goodgrief888 Před 11 měsíci +9

    There’s tons of universities in rural areas in the US. Dartmouth, Norte Dame, Princeton, Cornell, Oberlin, half of the UC system (Davis especially,) Yale and Harvard are in suburbs. Even Stanford is in a suburb. There’s actually only a few big well known universities (UC Berkeley, George Washington, NYU, UCLA, UCSF, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Melon,) are in major metropolitan areas. Most of the universities that people think of as being in a big city are actually in a suburb or rural area just outside of that big city.

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 11 měsíci +2

      Very good point I stand corrected. On a side note I love your profile image that artist has some amazing paintings that I love

    • @weschrist
      @weschrist Před 11 měsíci +7

      I went to Davis for 7 years. I would hardly call it rural, sandwiched between Sacramento (15 min away) and the greater Bay Area. I also grew up in Utah and went to the UofU, the most "left" university between Boulder and Davis. I don't think putting more Universities in rural areas would change much. They are likely to be rural echo chambers more than anything. I recall an argument between a professor and a student who refused to answer questions about evolution because it was sacrilegious and indoctrination... in a "Historical Geology" class at the UofU. When I taught a summer coarse that involved students with an agricultural/forestry/geology background one student openly laughed at a mention of evolution, then argued passionately/unprovoked about God and the Bible.
      I think the melting pot has effectively congealed into desperate entities, both believing that knowledge which does not jive with their beliefs is somehow a grand indoctrination scheme designed to undermine their existence. Or perhaps that is just a symptom of the times and the solution is more rural colleges, when the time is right.

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 11 měsíci +3

      @@weschrist Well this actually gives me more hope. I know these interactions are quite negative but aside from the sneering it gives me some hope. I think it's impossible to spend a whole semester with someone and not take away something of the other person's worldview even if you disagree with most of it. My sense is that the growing chasm comes from a lack of communication and a total othering of contradicting points of view. It's quite likely it's all too little though and that such isolated interactions do little to outweigh the deluge of the algorithmic rabbit holes

  • @jstevinik3261
    @jstevinik3261 Před 8 měsíci

    I want to correct some things. The peasantry declined into irrelevancy by the 19th century, so they are not applicable to rural proletarians.
    Lenin only sought support from the peasantry only on the condition that they become proletarians. Mao was for both, which explains why China is a de-facto mixed economy since feudalism has to end first before fully implementing socialism. Keep in that in 1918, the CPSU had their primary support in the cities while peasant support was tenuous.
    The quote on the end is appeal to ignorance that, of course, Marxists want "power" because the state is only a reflection of its ruling class to ensure power of said class. A Marxist state is a supposed to be a dictatorship of the proletariat (wage earners, but increasingly rural, though peasants can become rural proletarians).
    George Orwell spied on other leftists, including anarchists, to the UK government while his book got a CIA funded film adaptation, thus a fed, and thus worthy of dismissal. Plus, he is a mediocre novelists, not a philosopher nor political organizer.
    The reason for rural first worlders to be conservative is that rural areas are less expensive to live, so big welfare programs.
    Also, stop comparing soc dems like Sanders to Marxists, like the pre-1970s Communist Party of France.

  • @pamiu1597
    @pamiu1597 Před 11 měsíci +26

    I think before tackling this important, but complicated topic, you needed to do a video on the three major ideologies of socialism, liberalism and conservatism, and how they map to the left-right political dichotomy (closest is the structure-communitas video)
    over the course of the video, you segue seamlessly between the democrats as the "far left" (true from the POV of the mainstream, false from the POV of history) and the democrats as basically crypto-conservatives (false from the POV of the mainstream, true from the POV of history), and this is before we get to the topics of marxism, revisionism, MLs, MLMs, etc

  • @Bradtheartguy
    @Bradtheartguy Před 9 měsíci +5

    I think George Orwell had a good handle on the kind of Bourgeois Leftist we see today in media, politics and academia.
    "I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists. I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table manners. Yet after all why not? Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting."
    George Orwell
    "

  • @MinaDeborah
    @MinaDeborah Před 11 měsíci +10

    Far left where??

    • @stephencarroll230
      @stephencarroll230 Před 11 měsíci

      Yes! They aren’t the ones trying to overthrow the capital and install a dictator!

    • @Giantcrabz
      @Giantcrabz Před 10 měsíci

      In USA literally everything to the left of Pinochet is considered Communism.
      Affordable higher education for everyone? Impossible pipe dream. Can't be done.
      Universal healthcare like almost every other developed nation? Won't work for... reasons. Think about the shareholders!
      Maybe stop bombing literally everywhere on Earth and drilling for oil during a climate crisis? Sorry, that's postmodern neomarxist zoomer thought with snowflake characteristics.
      Treat everyone with dignity and like, don't commit genocide against sexual and gender minorities? Groomer zoomer pinko libtard #MuskWest2024
      Fuck this channel and the thousands of lookalikes fr dog

  • @slappy8941
    @slappy8941 Před 9 měsíci

    I'm new to this channel, but I really like it, because it really seems to trigger the hell out of a lot of lefties. 😂😂😂

  • @BudVidz0
    @BudVidz0 Před 11 měsíci +12

    “I find myself wondering whether the Left has learned anything from history”…me too buddy, me too.

    • @neilreynolds3858
      @neilreynolds3858 Před 11 měsíci +3

      You don't need to learn anything when you already have the Truth. It's a religion.

    • @jamesmcpherson8599
      @jamesmcpherson8599 Před 10 měsíci

      Leftists tend to be the ones in favor of systemic analysis

  • @TPHimbo
    @TPHimbo Před 11 měsíci +8

    As a rural person of a Marxist bent I appreciate some of the things you are saying here.

    • @garretfox7807
      @garretfox7807 Před 9 měsíci

      Marx was literally a self-hating jew.

  • @bulletbill1104
    @bulletbill1104 Před 8 měsíci +1

    I think you’re completely wrong about this idea of the rural peasantry being the backbone of Communism. Most rural peasants in Russia were anti-Bolshevik. Most supported non-Marxian agrarian socialism. Bolshevism was an urban movement which only spread to the countryside after its initial success within the cities. In mainland Europe you saw rural peasants making political alliances with the fascists.
    The happenings of China and Russia cannot be relayed into rural America, which is not bound to the land. American farmers are more akin to the historically conservative yeomen class which was largely persecuted in Communist countries

  • @BobHank2
    @BobHank2 Před 11 měsíci

    I appreciate the historical facts leading up to a conclusion, rather than finding data to support a predetermined conclusion

  • @polkunus
    @polkunus Před 9 měsíci +4

    I wish this video focused not on the western revolutions or the russian one as the peasantry is also important there, but it was even more important in mao's china. The success of the russian revolution was a surprise to many, considering that russia was not industrialized at that time and germany failed its revolution. If lenin was the pioneer, mao perfected the peasant revolution and incorporatied the peasant struggle, like the red spears and the inner conflict of landlords vs the peasant class into revolutionary rhetoric.
    We should be brothers and sisters with the rural, but there are many challenges, ideological, cultural and sociopolitical. Tools like false consciousness are used to benefit the best interest of the ruling class to pen proles against the rural cultures. If the left wants to challenge this ruling ontology, it must persevere from these obstacles.
    Also this video is poorly skewed in some way, it lacks the nuance and context of marx's writings and takes them out of context. It also lacks understanding although it seems to be made with good intentions. The word "idiot" has a totally different meaning today compared to the 19th century. And proles are people that don't have private property (personal property is fine). They aren't necessarily factory workers.

    • @blacklite911
      @blacklite911 Před 8 měsíci

      This is the best take in the comments. The big divide in the American political population is the perception of cultural divides, not economic philosophy.
      Basically, the powers that be have done a good job of driving their trumped up culture wars. I do think that it’s conservative initiated but the mainstream left have done nothing to push past it. Instead it’s used as a tool to galvanize each respective base.
      In a perfect world, we’d be able to look past lifestyle differences and tackle real injustices but such is not the case currently.

  • @chadwhitman1811
    @chadwhitman1811 Před 10 měsíci +1

    While the Bolsheviks used the peasantry in the millions as soldiers and confiscated their output to feed the true revolutionary class the proletariat they were never seen as a revolutionary class .It was Mao that discovered the revolutionary potential of the peasants and that more than anything else was the cause of rupture in relations the between the Soviets and Mao.

  • @laughinggiraffe9176
    @laughinggiraffe9176 Před 9 měsíci +1

    1 "I can't help wondering, if universities were in rural towns rather than major cities, whether we might see a conversion of America's radical ruralites from the right to the left". Nope. In the USA, universities are generally already in semi-rural towns. For most of the 50 states, you can look at the two biggest universities in the state by enrollment, usually named according to the formula "[name of state] State University" and "University of [name of state]", and neither one will be in the largest city in the state. It makes room and board more affordable. There are other problems with this idea that a little education will make you a leftist, because of course, the leftist point of view is the enlightened and correct one. One is that people educated in the most useful and valued subjects, as measured by pay, are more likely to be conservative than people educated in subjects that are less likely to lead to better paid jobs, like in the humanities. These are often the most challenging subjects when measured by the standardized test scores of students in those majors. If one's education doesn't improve one's salary, did it help you achieve some other goal? If not, do we just call you educated because of the time spent and the piece of paper? If the educated are more leftist, maybe the causality runs the other way. Maybe liberals like academia because there views are more welcome and because they had bad experiences in the job market. "Trump counties are a smaller share of GDP than their share of voters". Have you considered that identical services are cheaper in rural areas, making GDP numbers look smaller there? Have you considered that urban areas have a more unequal income distribution, so that they can have both a higher mean income and a higher fraction of their population in extreme poverty or homeless than rural areas? Don't get me started on this idea that silicon valley and urban areas are the vanguard of "progress". Maybe in the 90s to 2010. Now they're desperately trying to stop change, stop alternative technology platforms, and censor everything. Threads was a flop. They were the printing press, but now they're the Medieval Catholic Church.

    • @latinhero1818
      @latinhero1818 Před 8 měsíci

      Actually even the Medieval Catholic Church was better than that. They funded universities and scientific research in Galileo’s day. And the reason he got in trouble was not because of his discoveries, though at the time they were not conclusively proven and he had some errors in his theories regarding the nature of comets, but because he decided to play politics and mesh it with religion. It didn’t help that Galileo behaved like an arrogant jerk who couldn’t take legitimate criticism when others threw it back on him.

  • @maynardwayward12
    @maynardwayward12 Před 9 měsíci +5

    Lenin lied to the peasants, he could have given them their land back, but he didn't.

    • @matthewkopp2391
      @matthewkopp2391 Před 9 měsíci

      Lenin allowed peasants to have their land, it was Stalin who collectivized agriculture. Peasant land holdings was part of the NEP (New economic policy). Lenin collectivized major industries, like steel.
      The majority of the economy til 1929 was small businesses of 9 people or less.
      And Stalin had initial productive success for three years, the moment it failed in famine, he and the government gave back 40 hectares to each family to produce whatever they wanted.

    • @maynardwayward12
      @maynardwayward12 Před 9 měsíci

      ​@@matthewkopp2391 democratic workers' councils preceded the Bolsheviks, and sure, at first there was arguably some democracy at the beginning of the revolution, but the soviets were robbed of their autonomy as soon as they disagreed with the Bolsheviks and voted for other left wing parties like Mensheviks and SRs, and they killed anarchists, and I could go on.

    • @maynardwayward12
      @maynardwayward12 Před 9 měsíci

      the Bolshevik system of "democratic centralism" that overtook the country and the autonomy of workers' councils was hardly democratic, quite the opposite. Lenin was a politician to the core

    • @maynardwayward12
      @maynardwayward12 Před 9 měsíci

      and, personally, I find that what Bolsheviks did, and what happened after the revolution, to be pretty irrelevant to modern times, except to illustrate the danger of party politics, particularly when one party views itself as representative and saviour of the working class, nvm when they were rejected at the polls. The entitlement of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was astounding

  • @charlesnunno8377
    @charlesnunno8377 Před měsícem

    I am descended from a peasant. I have far higher appreciation for them than the Marxists. There is goodness in wisdom in people who live from their hands, but cannot even read. Sometimes I think teaching people to read and write WAS THE ISSUE.

  • @coldsnap999
    @coldsnap999 Před 8 měsíci

    Trotsky was like Marx in that he continued favoring the 'urban proletariat' over the 'rural peasantry' as the most capable and inevitable leaders of the revolution

  • @jamesmcpherson8599
    @jamesmcpherson8599 Před 10 měsíci

    The totally non rural area of Vermont

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 9 měsíci +1

      Vermont is the exception, not the rule. And the rural people of Vermont tend to live fairly "un-rural" lifestyles.

  • @matthewkopp2391
    @matthewkopp2391 Před 9 měsíci

    In the 19th century there were many collectivized efforts, for example collectivized sales of agricultural products.
    During Trumps presidency he gained the support of one of the largest surviving collectivized agricultural businesses the dairy farmers of Wisconsin. And Wisconsin voted for both Nadar and Trump.
    Judging from your accent, you may not be from the USA.
    There is no real left in the USA.
    Social Democrats are considered “radical left” here, but the inventor of social democracy as we know today is Otto Von Bismarck who was conservative right wing.
    The issue is the 19th century left ideal was not social democracy it was libertarian socialism. So now in the USA they purposefully separated the two ideas. I’m rural areas you have plenty of libertarians and in urban areas you have some boutique socialists, but both are equally misinformed.
    What could unite a new urban plus rural left in the USA is Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mills ideas.

  • @mileshall9235
    @mileshall9235 Před 9 měsíci

    There has been an underestimation of the inherent dangers of any form of Marxism or Socialism. Not a paranoid frenzy.

  • @ReynaSingh
    @ReynaSingh Před 11 měsíci +15

    Humanity naturally pulls toward polarities. The nuance of the middle is hard to retain

    • @andresdubon2608
      @andresdubon2608 Před 11 měsíci +6

      There's no such thing as the middle postion.
      Atleast not as anything else other than the relative term that may be defined by at least 2 other positions.

    • @andresdubon2608
      @andresdubon2608 Před 11 měsíci +2

      @@SamBeck6090
      I'm sorry, I struggle to see if there was any defence to your proposition or if you just sated as much.
      Would you care to elaborate?

    • @andresdubon2608
      @andresdubon2608 Před 11 měsíci +2

      @@SamBeck6090 Oh, ok.
      It's clearer now.
      You misunderstood me, I was certainly not suggesting things must be one thing or the other.
      Things may be whatever things are, regardless of ones notions.
      What I actually meant to say is that it's not only that things are not discrete but continuos or that things are more than 1 dimensional; it's that regardless of the continuum or the higher dimensional nature of things (political positions in this regard) there are no center but those points that describe in some way the relation between two ideas.
      In other words, to say that the centrist position is the "right" position is to say that whatever truth is, it must position itself between one extreme and the other. (If it were to be a one dimensional consideration, but this realization is not limited to such considerations)
      I deny that.
      And I say that "There's no such thing as the middle position..."

    • @katelynmeaghan3410
      @katelynmeaghan3410 Před 11 měsíci

      Centrism is the political equivalent of a limp dick; pushed by bionic warriors of the status-quo who personally benefit from it the expense of the rest of humanity.

  • @philosopher2king
    @philosopher2king Před 11 měsíci +17

    Thank you for posting this, which is the recurring elusive obvious that is always missed by the left. I’ve seen this gap between the educated middle/upper class, and the peasantry back in the old country, the ongoing joke was how the smart communist activist from university could rap the Marxist rhetoric but could never find the language to explain it to the countryside peasant.
    As long as we try to explain the socialist/communist ideology without using the religious perspective, something will be missed. Besides the altruistic feelings that some socialist/communist have, there is a secret payoff that’s not talked about very often. Much like religion is for some, leftwing ideologies are really an excuse to be petty, cruel, and have a sense of superiority. And, of course, achieve power. I happen to believe that Bernie and AOC are rational in well-meaning human beings. Many other followers, well, that’s a different story.
    For them, the problem has always been that the socialist is “woke“ enough to see through the bullshit that religious conservatives or the lumpen masses supposedly can’t, because of their ignorance. And the socialists remain unaware of their own brainwashing and cultic behavior.
    P.S. Thank you for the video! It’d be helpful if you cited your sources, for example, the quote you used from Marx.

    • @rwatertree
      @rwatertree Před 11 měsíci

      Liberation Theology has already been tried and failed. Many churches in the US have already abandoned Christian teaching in favour of 'Progressive' rhetoric with Biblical references tacked on like pop culture call backs in a Hollywood movie. The pews become emptier every year. Making a pastiche of people's culture is not a strategy that wins their support.
      Rural people are not brainwashed nuts who are unable to understand without ideas being put into "religious" terms. Their class interests are opposed to the Marxian and 'Progressive' Left. They require subsidiarity in governance, the Left wants centralization. They need guns because the police are hours away, the Left wants to prohibit people from owning guns. They need cheap, reliable energy, the Left wants to ban fossil fuels and the domestic production and transport of fossil fuels. They rely on savings, the Left implements inflationary economic policies. I could go on without even getting into the 'culture war' which itself is a form of agitation by the managerial class.

    • @arnigeir1597
      @arnigeir1597 Před 9 měsíci +4

      I feel this is a somewhat deceptive depiction of the ideology at hand, straw manning it through it's worst advocates. You can find plenty of awful and frankly braindead people advocating any politics. It often distracts from more down-to-earth policy talk when you only bring up the most unhinges advocates, that have virtually no say in policy.

    • @philosopher2king
      @philosopher2king Před 9 měsíci

      @arnigeir1597
      Indeed, zealots are everywhere. In the US the MAGA and Woke mobs. Don’t realize how they’re only different by a few degrees. But this topic is about the left and that’s what I’m addressing.

    • @philosopher2king
      @philosopher2king Před 9 měsíci

      @@arnigeir1597 Correct, but alas, in this case we are talking about the left and their excesses. But I also disagree, these zealots do have influence over congress, which is why few on the left criticize them openly.

    • @arnigeir1597
      @arnigeir1597 Před 9 měsíci

      @@philosopher2king What marxist radicals are influencing the Dems? The worst that I know advocate against voting because doing so some how signals support for the capitalist ruling class. They get ignored mostly because they are politically irrelevant.

  • @sarantissporidis391
    @sarantissporidis391 Před 11 měsíci

    Good point there, but too American centered. I mean, do all these apply to other non American societies as well?!

  • @davidalvarez1388
    @davidalvarez1388 Před 9 měsíci

    Marx and Engels were a "vote yourself a farm" kinda guy "In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat - that is, with the agrarian National Reformers" from Principles of Communism

  • @fidelkva4810
    @fidelkva4810 Před 9 měsíci

    economics are only one piece of politics

    • @halguy5745
      @halguy5745 Před 8 měsíci

      in the framework of parliamentary politics, social politics are largely a tool used by the system to antagonise the working class against one another and drive them away from the true struggle, the class struggle

  • @FlagArmadaProductions
    @FlagArmadaProductions Před 9 měsíci +3

    Unfortunately the divide is mainly over social issues. The rurals don't subscribe to gender ideology and free slaughter of fetuses while the Urban's are hell bent on it. However I think if you ran a GOP candidate with an economic socialist campaign that was also socially conservative enough, you could turn out the rurals while also getting defections from urban progressives, especially with the Democrap party moving economically to the right. This is why I support Tulsi Gabbard. If anyone could do it, it would be her.

  • @MartinBraonain
    @MartinBraonain Před 8 měsíci

    Not quite sure what the point of this video is apart from pointing out something obvious (and misquoting Marx). The more interesting point would be why rural communities tend to be more nationalistic and right wing - anyone can Google 'the density divide' and find lots of speculations on the topic. I guess this video is just a cheap shot at the left. Do better.

  • @rogerbartlet5720
    @rogerbartlet5720 Před 9 měsíci +1

    Ideology is a moral justification for power. How it’s packaged and sold is the main distinction.

  • @demo0831
    @demo0831 Před 9 měsíci

    Sure lol, actually look at majority vote lmao

  • @KennyK75
    @KennyK75 Před 8 měsíci

    You seem to be very biased in favour of far left politics. Many reject it as it is by definition totalitarian.

  • @GaryBernstein
    @GaryBernstein Před 9 měsíci

    Wtf would you want this given history?

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 9 měsíci

      More of a thought experiment really - a puzzle rather than a desired reality

  • @chunkyPa
    @chunkyPa Před 8 měsíci

    Incredibly uninformed. “Idiocy of rural life” meant the narrowness of it. It didn’t mean stupidity, but their nonrevolutionary nature. But this was earlier in his life. Read Marx’s later letters to Vera Zasulich and the Russian Social Democrats on the Narodniks and Russian peasantry and their revolutionary potential.

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 7 měsíci

      Hmm maybe you're right about the idiocy of rural life. I remember getting this from Expressive Egg so I must go back and read him and check the quotation to see the broader context but for sure Marx saw the peasantry as being too disconnected and backward to be a revolutionary class. And as for the later letters I do know that Marx changed his tune in later years long after Capital 1 was published but in the biographies I've read of him this seems to be connected to the growing Russian following he had and he began to soften his claim that Communism could only happen in industrialised countries in order to give them some hope

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 7 měsíci

      This seems a better reading:
      IDIOCY OF RURAL LIFE. This oft-quoted A.ET. [authorized English translation] expression is a mistranslation. The German word Idiotismus did not, and does not, mean "idiocy" (Idiotie); it usually means idiom, like its French cognate idiotisme. But here [in paragraph 28 of The Communist Manifesto] it means neither. In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community. In the Manifesto, it was being used by a scholar who had recently written his doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy and liked to read Aeschylus in the original. (For a more detailed account of the philological background and evidence, see [Hal Draper], KMTR [Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978] 2:344f.) What the rural population had to be saved from, then, was the privatized apartness of a life-style isolated from the larger society: the classic stasis of peasant life.
      I'll update my views in future thanks for the input

    • @chunkyPa
      @chunkyPa Před 7 měsíci

      @@TheLivingPhilosophy No problems but Marx didn’t change his tune to accommodate his growing following. Marx never pandered to “cheap democratic popularity.” Not long before he eviscerated the social democrats in his Critique of the Gotha Program, and his works are dominated by polemics with other socialists and even socialist followers. The real reason his “tune changed” was because he observed the phenomenon of nardoniki in Russia and undertook a study of the Russian political economy. Communism could have a basis in nonadvanced countries

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 7 měsíci

      @@chunkyPa interesting stuff thanks for the reply. I haven't gone back and harvested the books I read on Marx so I'll keep this in mind when I'm going through the second reading and push more deeply on where I came across this point

  • @benavraham4397
    @benavraham4397 Před 11 měsíci

    The problem is that by some strange twist of events, the people who work to flatten the disperity☮️ become very rich.💵💵💵

  • @PanSzawu
    @PanSzawu Před 11 měsíci +1

    It's too easy to discredit reactionary attitudes as mere bigotry and idiocy when much of the insecurity and anger that comes out of the right deliberately comes from a genuine origin point of fear, which is the loss of identity, the loss of culture, and the loss of of opportunity. In fact, every form of hatred, war, anger, bigotry, insult, envy all comes from a single source which is fear.
    I feel like the left has to be more compassionate towards its enemies to some degree because reaction doesn't come out of nowhere. I feel that the right has to have more compassion for the left and to understand why people feel disenfranchised economically.
    Mass Immigration is a problem especially economically and for those that like to assume that it is purely beneficial would like to ignore mass immigrations from Europe to the Americas, which had negative impacts on the native American population and the native American population was right to fear that European for multiple reasons.
    Human nature is extremely bleak, hedonistic, war-like and parasitic at its worst and most apparent when people are desperate looking for economic opportunities. They are not going to play around and be nice unless they are forced to do so often under the threat of death.
    When you have multiple cultures coming in from different regions around the world, there will inevitably come a competition for dominance if one or the current dominating culture starts to weaken and fall short. This is how it has always been for the entirety of human existence.
    I do not agree with every single thing that the right has to say because I do not at all consider myself right wing but to consistently ignore warnings about culture whether they come from the Middle East Africa, East Asia, South Asia, etc. and choosing to ignore their extremely patriarchal conservative cultures that disagree with much of the progressive attitudes of the West, and expecting it to all get along is naive and foolish.
    Especially when it gets explosive and violent within their own countries over more trivial matters, What happens when they start to run things economically? What happens when they control the cultural bases and outputs to the rest of another country?
    I think the left has to have a serious discussion with itself or else it will be consumed and destroyed by not anglophone culture but another culture that will not care for the niceties and utopian ideals that are all good and great to strive towards, like feminism, the freedom of religion, tolerance of many people and many nations, equal pay workers rights, the pursuit of happiness, economic freedom, love and compassion for one's neighbor etc.
    All those things will be wiped away and destroyed and replaced by another violent patriarchal culture that was given leeway because it was not European in origin.
    I am not against the left in itself as I agree with many of its ideas. I just think this naivety will kill it eventually and be replaced by a monster it defends out of the false virtue of all encompassing tolerance.

    • @justr6982
      @justr6982 Před 9 měsíci

      I just don't see this happening. Other cultures that establish themselves in the U.S are quickly consumed by secular American culture. By the time you get to 3rd generation they're indistinguishable American.
      Yours is an old argument, and it was applied against Hispanics, Germans, Chinese, The Irish, etc. All of which are indistinguishably American today

    • @NullSeries
      @NullSeries Před 9 měsíci

      Now that's what I call a mask off.

  • @jawneethecurious
    @jawneethecurious Před 8 měsíci

    Hmm... your video is somewhat incomplete.

  • @scotthullinger4684
    @scotthullinger4684 Před 8 měsíci +1

    I for one don't give a crap that the top 1% of people have 27% of the wealth.
    Seriously ... what difference should it make to me, or to anyone? After all, another person's wealth has no bearing on what I can accomplish for myself, and it's not as if there is somehow a limited amount of wealth, because wealth can be created and expanded by any capable hard working person. The vast majority of us are quite content to be pretty much "average" - whatever that might mean.
    Average folks, the stupid ones - they only get upset when they compare themselves to other people who are far more wealthy, and sometimes, even to people who are just barely more wealthy than themselves.
    People need to stop crying & bitching & moaning ... and shift their ass into gear.

    • @sis21141
      @sis21141 Před 8 měsíci +1

      -Official Statement of the Hoover Administration (1931).

    • @NinthSettler
      @NinthSettler Před 8 měsíci

      sad to see the effects of being exposed to capitalist propaganda for your whole life

  • @justr6982
    @justr6982 Před 9 měsíci

    Yikes, this channel has really gone off the rails
    Its pretty clear that this channel has become about chasing the money and the clicks. Just compare the older content to the new

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 9 měsíci +1

      * This video disagrees with my worldview, therefore it cannot have merit *

    • @gristen
      @gristen Před 9 měsíci

      ​@@POCKET-SAND correct

  • @masscreationbroadcasts
    @masscreationbroadcasts Před 9 měsíci

    0:57 Don't the top 1% pay 40% of taxes? If they own 27% of the wealth, that just means they contribute more than they need to.

    • @tastethecock5203
      @tastethecock5203 Před 9 měsíci

      How would taxing "the rich" more provide much more healthcare? US government lacks money?

    • @tastethecock5203
      @tastethecock5203 Před 9 měsíci

      @@TigerWave01 US already has the highest healthcare spending on the world. Both raw and per capita. The problem with US healthcare is mostly government meddling and corruption. The whole system would be much cheaper if US didn't have such strictrly regulated med schools for the goal of creating artifical scarcity and overall medicine would be cheaper if there weren't choking FDA restrictions on new drugs. But overall of course there isn't such thing as "free healthcare" and only reasons its became common sense is because it has "free" and "health" in its name. Europeans pay for their healthcare with taxes and time, Americans pay with... taxes, time, and cash. Despite all money thrown into it it still manages to combine the worst aspects of private and public healthcare without none of the benefits of both systems. First thingsthat needs to go is that cartel that is american medical association.

    • @tastethecock5203
      @tastethecock5203 Před 9 měsíci

      @@TigerWave01 US government already has trillions and have much things they've fixed with it? Lol, everytime they touch something there's more complains. This should be signal that maybe the lack of money isnt issue in the slighest, and that having more money from taxes to throw at problems is not going to make them better at problem solving. That's one thing i don't understand - with all money US government already spends on everything, why the solution is "More tax and more money for government" and not "less spending for government and more decentralization"?

    • @matthewkopp2391
      @matthewkopp2391 Před 9 měsíci

      Your assuming that they should exist. Adam Smith and Jefferson would vehemently disagree with that assessment.
      The existence of extreme wealth is antithetical to liberalism, even more “moderates” like Adams and Franklin advocated to tax them down to size, not for revenue but the belief that they are contrary to a Republican form of government.

    • @masscreationbroadcasts
      @masscreationbroadcasts Před 9 měsíci

      @@matthewkopp2391 one thing I'd like to hear about that is why. Why is it antithetical?

  • @n8works
    @n8works Před 11 měsíci +6

    You can only be socialist when you are rich, don't you know? 😂

    • @jeffreyforeman5031
      @jeffreyforeman5031 Před 11 měsíci

      the rich or 1 % are solidly capitalists, who are terrified of the impending like french revolution.the 1% own more than the lower 2/3s an 66% live paycheck to paycheck. Something could happen

  • @elFLaako
    @elFLaako Před 9 měsíci

    The hammer is meant to represent the urban factory worker and the sickle is meant to represent the rural peasant. Both proletariat groups are meant to unite

    • @TheLivingPhilosophy
      @TheLivingPhilosophy  Před 9 měsíci +2

      Yeah but as far as I understand it that comes along with the Bolsheviks and is not there in Marx's movement

  • @jonathanpork-sausage617
    @jonathanpork-sausage617 Před 9 měsíci

    PS the people you descibe arn't far left. There is no far left left. Anyway great channel subbed.

    • @nathanielus5296
      @nathanielus5296 Před 9 měsíci

      Just like there aren't no "far-right"

    • @NothingHereForYou
      @NothingHereForYou Před 7 měsíci +1

      At this point that is just putting blinders on to the situation with any group there are sides and far sides.

  • @faresabowandi6476
    @faresabowandi6476 Před 8 měsíci

    In the quote you showed marx criticises the idiocy of rural life. Rural life not rural people. In addtion the statistics you showed earlier that says that the "rural" counties in america mostly vote for republicans rather than democrates is meaningless as both parties are capitalists. Even the bernie sanders people are capitalists as well. Furthermore, the lenin quite you provided doesnt imply that he learnt from practical experience the limitations of marxism. A key idea in marxist theory is the ruthless criticism of everything, including marx's theory. So you could view that quote as a manifestation of that idea. More over you dont provide any evidence that the quote was said after a alleged "realisation of the limitations of marxism". And where exactly did marx say that the rural peasantry are reactionary?

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 8 měsíci +1

      Marx was an idiot whose economic theories have been debunked by actual economists over the years since his death.

  • @fanuluiciorannr1xd212
    @fanuluiciorannr1xd212 Před 11 měsíci +11

    Far Left and AOC. This ain't it chief.

    • @fernandorivera4719
      @fernandorivera4719 Před 9 měsíci

      AOC can be considered far-left, depending on if you put identity politics further left than class struggle.

  • @robertmiller2367
    @robertmiller2367 Před 11 měsíci +6

    I'm a Democrat through and through, being in the navy and living on the east and west coast as well as being from Texas and traveling around the world most all humans want to have a nice peaceful life, we have more in common than politicians from either side try to use to devide us for votes. As a Democrat I was a Bernie fan until I started watching his vids from when he first started and they are the same rhetoric as he gives today so has he accomplished near nothing as a life long politician? Yes that's my opinion. Where Americans have failed it to let politicians convince us that politics are part of our identity and when we adopt identity politics we are lost, defending to the teeth half truths we don't fact check ourselves becoming sheeple. Politicians are the problem with American politics, most Americans are not as extreme as the politicians think they have to be to stand out and get elected. As a Democrat I want to pay as little taxes as possible and feel its a huge waste to have a school every 5 to ten miles in rual Texas but I also feel health care is a right and social security should not be done away with. My point is most Americans are middle of the road and not extreme on either side.

    • @andresdubon2608
      @andresdubon2608 Před 11 měsíci +4

      You should look for what he has accomplished, how and under what circumstances.
      Bernie Sanders will always have the same talking points because those talking points will always find opposition.
      Your inference feels just wrong and evidently so, I wonder if there is another reason you reached that conclusion.

    • @christophmahler
      @christophmahler Před 11 měsíci

      Emerson, not Marx - nor Jefferson - is the lode star of an American civilization.

    • @neilreynolds3858
      @neilreynolds3858 Před 11 měsíci +4

      Bernie managed to become a rich "progressive" but since he talks the talk, people excuse him. Anybody who has the proper vision is forgiven all sins by people who have the same vision.
      The middle would like to be left in peace by the government but they also want the State to take care of all their "problems". You can't have it both ways but that's what they want. To understand American politics as it's presented, you have to live in a world of fantasy. In reality, for all parties it's about growing money and power and convincing the electorate that you're defending their liberties while you steal their money. It's a racket that we like to call democracy.

  • @rajinfootonchuriquen
    @rajinfootonchuriquen Před 11 měsíci +1

    I had listen that Marx liked the luxaries and never worked in his life. If I was leftist, I would rather read socialist from working class, as Stalin or Gramsci.

    • @sri4116
      @sri4116 Před 11 měsíci +3

      I'm not sure regarding your source for Marx liking luxuries as he lived and died in poverty having to sell every item of posession. Sure he did not do physical labour, but that was mainly because he was engrossed in research.

  • @zachk2060
    @zachk2060 Před 9 měsíci

    Bernie's policies would literally be centrist in Europe, slightly right even. Don't call him left just because America on the whole is so far right

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 8 měsíci +2

      Europe is not the center of the world. What is "center" there isn't center across the whole world. In fact it's more localized than even that. It's a Western Europe-centric view of the world.

  • @maynardwayward12
    @maynardwayward12 Před 9 měsíci +1

    There isn't a parallel between rural early 20th century Russia, or rural mid-20th century Vietnam, and the United States today. In the US, rural areas have a disproportionate amount of influence, it's the only way that Trump won, and the reason Republicans can pick up so many senate seats, despite coming from areas with significantly fewer people than cities. It's undemocratic. If anything, rural areas are wielding too much influence over cities!

    • @blackbette07
      @blackbette07 Před 9 měsíci +5

      Odd though considering that farmers in Northern California have to find clever ways to get their crops watered. That doesn't seem to be much wielding of power. Also you forget that that uber rich are buying up American farmlands squeezing family farms. But, I would expect that from an urban dweller. Hate the people who are trying to feed you not the corporate farms who put hormones and poison on your food.

    • @maynardwayward12
      @maynardwayward12 Před 9 měsíci +3

      @@blackbette07 no one forces people in rural areas to vote Republican and support the neoliberal policies you've outlined that are causing their problems.

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 9 měsíci

      It's typically not the rural conservatives forcing things upon liberal cities, but the other way around.

    • @maynardwayward12
      @maynardwayward12 Před 9 měsíci +1

      @@POCKET-SAND not when states with low density are counted as equal as highly urban populous states for senate votes

    • @POCKET-SAND
      @POCKET-SAND Před 9 měsíci

      @@maynardwayward12 Look at the basic frame of our government. What does the federal government do that the states do not and vice-versa?
      Typically, the federal government doesn't micromanage (though the political left wants them to). In reality, most things are done at the local level. Your county commissioner has much more influence over your day-to-day life than the president does. And when you look at things locally, you notice "rural conservatives" rarely impose restrictions on urban areas, unless the urban areas are violating the Constitution. In contrast, urban liberals regularly try to impose their ideology on rural areas.

  • @huarachudo47
    @huarachudo47 Před 8 měsíci

    Terrible misinformation