I've heard all of this from James Lindsay. The common denominator? They've both deeply read the source material. They both know exactly what they're talking about.
What tough questions can there be? Calling Fascism right wing is one of Marxism's early obfuscations. The only hard differences between the two are; internationalism vs nationalism, and killing the middle-classes vs co-opting the middle-classes.
@@Si_Mondo What I mean the audience could ask him to back up his conclusions(e.g. respond to their questions as if he's talking to a skeptic, who'll challenge his claims and fact check his conclusions).
You gave a talk about eight years ago stating that federal marshals would come to your house and have a gunfight with you, if you didn't pay your taxes. I tried searching in the Internet for any such incidents of this and could not find one. I'm sure an event like this surely would've made the news. Could you please share some more insight or provide links for any such cases. Thanks.
If you don't pay your taxes, they will throw you in prison. If you resist when they come to arrest you, they will shoot you to death. This is not a hard argument to follow.
AGAIN!!! very inaccurate of what is written in MK ;adolf hitler never said that. what translation is he reading? because if its not James murphey's version of MK you're dealing with interpretations. he defines Egotism as the present moment is deemed the most important and that nothing is left to the future. "The animal lives only for itself, searching for food only when it feels hunger and fighting only for the preservation of its own life. As long as the instinct for self-preservation manifests itself exclusively in such a way, there is no basis for the establishment of a community" "The readiness to sacrifice one's personal work and, if necessary, even one's life for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race. The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual powers, but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of the community. Here the instinct for self-preservation has reached its noblest form; for the Aryan willingly subordinates his own ego to the common weal and when necessity calls he will even sacrifice his own life for the community."
I disagree. The word "socialism" was quite popular in the 19th century and in the early 20th century. It meant different things to different people. That goes for today's usage of the word, too. I, therefore, appreciate Di Lorenzo's attempt to clarify his terminology. That is an important condition for speaking and writing scientifically. When I listen to Di Lorenzo, I get the impression that he thinks there is an essential demarcation line separating national socialists from the communists belonging to a Marxian tradition. According to him, the main difference is that the Nazis were nationalists whereas the communists were internationalists. I hold there are several major differences between the society that Marx and Engels envisioned and the aims of the Nazis (ideology and real economic policies). In order to see some main differences, one can start with the notion of capital, which is at the very heart of the notion of capitalism. The way in which they conceptualized capitalism tells you something about what they wanted to negate. This negation essentially determines the concept of socialism. So what did they mean by "capital"? The Nazis differentiated between good and bad capital, or rather, between creative capital and parasite capital ("schaffendes und raffendes Kapital"). Industrial capital, for instance, creates, whereas interest bearing capital was, in their view, an exploitative parasite. The latter was associated with banks and stock exchanges - and especially with the the Jews, of course. The good aryan capitalists and workers were located in the agricultural sector, in manufacturing, in the industry. Marx, on the other hand, did not make such a distinction. According to Marx, capital as such is based on exploitation, be it industrial capital or commercial capital or interest bearing capital. He did not intend to condemn capitalists for being greedy exploiters. That the industrial capitalist, for instance, exploites workers, only means that the worker creates more value than he receives in the form of his wage. According to Marx, that is not unjust in a capitalist society. Marx says that, according to the rules of a capitalist society, if a capitalist pays the worker the value of labour power, it is perfectly alright. Marx did not intend to blame one particular group. Instead he analyses the coercive structure of capital. Capital is value in motion aimed at growing. In the first chapters of Capital Marx uses the rather general and abstract formula M-C-M' (money - commodity - more money) which describes a repeating cycle in which the growth of value is an end in itself. The capitalist as such makes this cycle become his primary goal. He hands over his mind and his will to capital. It does not matter whether a capitalist is greedy or not. Competition forces him to try maximizing value. When a capitalist competes with other capitalists, it is not sufficient for him to simply seek profit. Instead he must try to maximize his profits. Only by doing so he can make sure that he has enough financial means to modernize his means of production and to upgrade his technology. This is necessary to keep pace or, in the ideal scenario, become even better than other competitors. The other side of maximizing profits is trying to minimize the costs and therefore the costs of labour. A single capitalist can try to ignore this fact, but he then takes the risk of losing against other competitors, so that the game goes on. Every capitalist puts his competitors under pressure and they put him under pressure. According to this account of capital, it does not matter whether the persons playing the game are Jewish or not. The worker is an essential part of this structure. The capitalist and the worker meet each other on the labour market. The worker is free in two ways. First, the worker is free in so far as he is entitled to sell his labour power and to sign a contract. On the other hand, he has to sell his labour power to any capitalist in order to make a living, since the worker does not possess means of production, that is, he is free from them. The Nazis were regulating the economy more and more but they did not get rid off certain economic forms, namely the commodity-form, money and capital as such. All three of them are at the very centre of any capitalist society. Marx envisioned a society without these forms. Marx thought of a communist society as a society in which there is no class exploiting another class. The Nazis did not intend to overcome capital as such and wage labour. Furthermore, they invaded several countries and sent many war prisoners to enterprises that exploited them to the utmost.They justified that by their racist agenda. Even after their planned victory they would have continued exploiting people they thought of as being inferior. The Nazis did not want their strong national state to die. On the contrary, they wanted to establish an empire. Engels, on the other hand, thought the state would die, or rather, the working class would take it over and help the state to die, step by step. Engels (in Anti-Dühring) described the state as the ideal capitalist fulfilling the function of protecting the conditions for capital accumulation. The more enterprises the state really ownes the more the state becomes a real capitalist. The working class would finally take over but instead of simply declaring the death of the state, the working class would make the state more and more superfluous in every branch of its activities. Engels was no enthusiast, but tried to be critical towards attempts made by the state to overtake and run formerly private enterprises. According to Engels, there is a conservative type of nationalization and a progressive type. If the government just wants to gain more revenues or control more workers (no longer allowed to strike) or gain control over foreign critical infrastructure, it is a conservative type of nationalization. A progressive type of nationalization stems primarily from the economic development. When the company in question is huge and fulfills a function in the economy that is to central to let it go down, for instance, in the midst of a crisis, the state must intervene. Engels preferred the latter over the former. The conservative type of nationalization tends to harm the cause of real socialism, since the government would just control more workers and create a monopoly and deliver bad goods or services at a high price. Marx recommended that cooperatives should better not get financial help from the state or private companies. He thought only independent cooperatives would be important on the way to socialism.
Fascism and communism were kissing cousins, ergo the love Lenin had for Mussolini (Italy's most famous Marxist before his conversion) and why Hitler said he could convert a communist to National Socialism in 10 minutes but never a social democrat. Both led to thuggish one-party states w/ secret police, camps, no free press, and Cult of Personality leaders enshrined w/ statues and mausoleums everywhere. The world's foremost authority on Fascism, Stanley Payne, says Lenin set up the first fascist state by forcefully seizing power via an armed coup (a Marxist heresy) and setting up the apparatus I've just outlined above. There were in fact Bolsheviks who wanted a nationalistic version of communism (As in, we're going to be proud Russians first, communists second) but they got purged, Solzhenitsyn mentions them in "Two-Hundred Years Together." If you want to drill down further, look up Corporatism - that was the fascist business model and it's used today by Putin's Russia and China. It's centralized, top down control of industry - highly corrupt - via "incorporating" all the various industries into the national agenda. It was meant as a "third way" for fascist states between capitalism and communism. Corporatism is why China's Communist Party leadership has over 100 billionaires among its members but meanwhile there is not one billionaire in the entire 535-member US Congress. It's also why some of these billionaires disappear or have their assets seized from time to time - same deal with Russia.
@@edwardrichardson8254 Hello. My main point was that Di Lorenzo gave a wrong account of the communist society envisioned by Marx and people who stood or stand in a Marxian tradition. Di Lorenzo failed to point out essential differences between that vision and, on the other hand, fascist visions or ideologies and real fascist societies. I am not sure how to respond to your comment in a rational way, since I am not certain on what you mean by "communism". Do you mean a communist society? According to Marx's abstract draft, there has not been a communist society yet. Even Soviet Union officials did not claim to have reached that goal. Do you mean the party officials of the Soviet Union? (i) One can argue how many of them were communists. Western visitors from the political left mentioned they did not encounter many communists, but people trying to make a career in the SU. When I talk to people who lived in the so called socialist countries I get the same impression. (ii) The next complication would be to ask to what extent did members of the communist party of the Soviet Union stand in a Marxian tradition? It seems to me there are several fundamental differences. I will mention only three. (1) Marx claimed to present results of his scientific work and to be open for any scientific critique. In the Soviet Union the party made Marx's works become an ideology. They used parts thereof to justify their policy when it suited their goals. Sometimes people who tried to work on Marx's theory in a critical way got blocked or killed. (2) Marx supposed capitalism needs to develop to a certain degree in order to take the next step towards socialism/communism. In the SU people were tought that it was possible to jump from the underdeveloped capitalist elements existing in their society to socialism. (3) Marx and Engels were by no means in favor of a huge state apparatus. In the SU the party build a huge bureaucratic apparatus. I guess by communism you simply mean the Soviet society, the way how it really was. Well, the very first thing you wrote about the kissing cousins irritates me. I concede that Lenin saw potential in Mussolini when Mussolini was a socialist and it may be the case that Hitler claimed that he could convert communists into national socialists more easily than he could convert social democrats. It is true that some former communists switched sides. But if go away from words and take a look at actions, we see that the Italian fascists and the Nazis converted many members of communist parties into prisoners or corpses. They fought war against the SU. On the territory of their states they hunted communists down, banned communist parties and imprisoned communists - or just killed them. Therefore the kissing thing does not seem to be a well chosen expression, does it? I concede that the SU became similar to fascist states in some respects as far as the political overhead is concerned: only one party ruled, cult of personality, suppressed opposition and so on. Yet, the economic basis was different. The fascists saved private property regarding the means of production and they heavily regulated the economy, especially during the war. In the SU, on the other hand, the state almost totally eliminated private property (with regard to the means of production). Lenin build the first fascist state? I concede that one can construct one's own terminology. It seems to me that especially leftists tended to inflate the word's usage and to hollow out its content. I have in mind what we in Germany call the 68ers, which refers to the generation of leftists of 1968. To exaggerate a bit, today everyone trying to force something upon someone else is called fascist. :-) I hold the humble view that historians are ought to find out the specific historical nature of something. A self-conscious movement that determined itself and called itself fascist came into existence in Italy first. If one wanted to use the Italian fascist movement as an empirical basis for defining a more broader concept, one could refer to Nazi Germany, too. Doing so does not deviate totally from how people who lived in the 1920's used the word. Even then some people broadened the concept - communists such as Dimitrov on the nature of fascism, and liberals such as Mises in "Der Liberalismus". Applying the concept to Lenin's state contradicts certain characteristics of Italian fascism and similar movements in Germany, for instance. Fascists wanted to destroy the SU and they tried to fight the red threat within the territories that they controlled. The fascists themselves regarded that as one of their essential properties. Since fascism is something modern, I hold that if one tries to determine the concept "fascism", one should take account of the historical specifics and grasp the modern nature of the phenomenon. Referring only or primarily to the political overhead does not do that. Dictatorship, tyranny, cult of personality, suppressing or eliminating the opposition and so on - nothing of that seems essentially modern to me. One can find that, for instance, in ancient times, as well.
@@Maximus1879 What "communist society envisioned by Marx"? Marx never, ever, ANYWHERE outlines what communism is. And it's not like he died early! At the very end of his last book "Das Kapital Vol. III" when he's describing (stupidly) different strata of incomes, there's a note by Engels that says "Here the manuscript breaks off." But he lived another 15 years! Now, it is true that "people who stood... in a Marxian tradition" wrote about it, I'll give you a famous example: Charles Fourier, one of the French Utopian Socialists. Fourier said society should be divided up into small communities of about 2000 called phalanstère, with each phalanstère comprised of 'work groups' of about 10-20 each given a specific task. However, in the course of a day, since labor to salon intellectuals is a dull and stultifying thing, Fourier said they should go from one task to another 4-5 times a day because this would satisfy the "Papillon Instinct" (Butterfly Instinct) in people to go from one flower to another and this would be emotionally satisfying (BWAHAWHAWHAWHAHWAWHAWHWAWHAHWAHWAWHAHWAHAW!!!!!!!). In fact, not only did Marx never explain communism, we must remember he never had a plan for dealing with capitalism in the first place! It was just "science" - sit back and wait and the workers will get poorer (they got richer instead) and the revolution will happen, giving rise to socialism (READ: "Defective communism") then that will whither away on the vine like what came before and then... NEVER EXPLAINED! Why? Because this is idealism for emotional know-nothings. It's why Karl Marx was a philosopher and Thomas DiLorenzo is an economist. And yes, fascism and communism are the same thing. Unless you'd like to show me the other nations that were Single Party States w/ dictators-unto-death, gulags, purges, show trials, secret police, global dominance vision, etc etc. Only a liberal would be surprised to find out Nazi propaganda despised capitalism and spoke like Karl Marx. When the idiot Bolsheviks tried to abolish capital it ended in disaster and the N.E.P. had to formed to save the shithouse from uttelry imploding. Everything except "the commanding heights", as Lenin put it, of the economy would be privatized. They formed a central bank (Gosbank) that worked closely with their Treasury from 1922-1991, just like capitalist nations. They played on international markets, their big problem was all investment was domestic. Nobody in their right mind w/ the exception of morons like the suicide cult at Jonestown (who gave the USSR $2 million) wanted to invest in the Soviet Union.
@@edwardrichardson8254 A) Marx gives us a rather abstract sketch of what he meant by "communist society". I concede Marx did not write a book called communism and there is not a single chapter in his main work bearing a title like "the communist society", for instance. Yet, one can determine a concept not only by positively defining it, but also by referring to what it negates. Omnis definitio negatio est. One can switch it: omnis negatio est definitio. If one reads Capital, one can find out what Marx meant by "capitalist society" and, therefore, one can see what Marx regarded as the starting point of a development that would lead to a new form of society. According to Marx, a communist society is essentially the negation of a capitalist society. Furthermore, there are some remarks where Marx said in a logically positive way what he thought about what the new form of society would look like. One can find that in Capital, if one is ready to read it in a careful way, and in "Kritik des Gothaer Programms". B) It seems to me that you have chosen a wrong example when you referred to Fourier. I referred to Marx and people who stood or stand in a Marxian tradition. Fourier could not become someone who stood in a Marxian tradition, because Fourier died too early. I am by no means an expert when it comes to Fourier. As far as I know Marx heavily criticized the early socialists, such as Proudhon, Darimon or Gray, for instance. I, therefore, have doubts about whether one can save your Fourier-argument by extending "stood in a Marxian tradition" by going backwards in time to people who came before Marx. C) You can claim that communism and fascism were the same thing. Define these expressions it as it pleases you. I guess you are free to do that. I wrote what I see as some of the adequate conditions for determining the concept of fascism in a reasonable way. I fear I do not see that you responded to any of these problems. Therefore, I do not see any reason to change my opinion.
@@Maximus1879 The interesting thing about Marxism is in a strange way its unoriginality. Epistemologically, it’s Hegel (the theory about how it thinks about its own theory) and Heraclitus (everything is in flux. All Marxism is a negation; it’s a critique; it’s feeding on the carcass of something which exists before you. All of the classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith onwards underpinned capitalism as an idea, but Marx doesn’t think up an original theory in relation to them, he just critiques them. In fact, even he concedes his ideas of class were stolen from the French classical liberal thinkers who came before him, as was his dithery phantom of what communism was going to be. Politically it’s the ultra-left of its own time fitted in a made to do service. I'm going to blow your mind in 3rd paragraph w/ details on that and even if you're an avowed Marxist, it's only going to make you a smarter one. But a word on this endless negation: This pattern of simply negating (call it Hegelian dialectic if you want) runs wild in everything in Marxism. You critique something, you turn it around, you re-engineer it and come to its negation. But then you can negate the negation! And then you negate the negation of the negation and you go on and on. This is how you get to Trotskyism which is endless revolution, a regime that renews itself through endless and perpetual struggle. As Trotsky said "Strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible." That kind of ants-in-your-pants endless theorizing gets you an ice axe to the head by a Georgian raised in a seminary by monks who was used to endless administrative work - but that's where the power is, not in speeches of endless theorizing. Marx stole everything he's famous for from the Secessionist French Classical Liberal thinkers, specifically, Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Gustave de Molinari. Comte and Dunoyer were pioneers in developing the thought of the radical laissez-faire philosophy known as industrialism (industrialisme). As they developed their ideas in this area, they launched in 1814 the periodical known as Le Censeur Européen, about 29 years before Marx moved to France. They advocated for gradually replacing all political state institutions with competitive private institutions. These private institutions would provide all the services that states claimed to provide, but at a lower price and without the exploitation present in all state relations between the ruling class and the productive class. For them, class struggle was against classes coercively created by govt through welfare dependency, corporate welfare, spoils systems, monopolies (the term comes from monarchy, which could would grant monopolies - Progressives hijacked it in early 20th century), etc. Comte and Dunoyer developed these ideas into a complex theory of history. For them, govt is the source of your chains. For them, govt expropriates and exploits the masses with their own money to their ends (think blacks today going from less illegitimacy than whites a century ago to 77% illegitimacy today because welfare rewards it). Marxists appropriated this classical liberal exploitation theory idea for their own movement. Comte and Dunoyer saw the natural evolution of society bringing about the gradual replacement of political by market relationships, Marx just inverted it, and took their notion of class distinctions and perverted it into a laughably Medieval one that contains zero economic class, they're all classes defined by the state. But don't take my word for it: czcams.com/video/lPLaKTbNKvA/video.html Now, as to the endstate of communism, which Marx never defines, here is the end state of Industrialisme, a kind of free market libertarian globalism as defined by Dunoyer: "There are absolutely no forces at work in the industrial system which require such vast associations of people. There are no enterprises which require the union of ten, twenty or thirty million people. It is the spirit of domination which has created these monstrous aggregations or which has made them necessary. It is the spirit of industry which will dissolve them - one of its last, greatest and most salutary effects will be the “municipalisation of the world.” Under the influence of industry people will begin to govern themselves more naturally. One will no longer see twenty different groups, foreign to each other, sometimes scattered to the four corners of the globe, often separated more by language and customs than by distance, united under the same political domination. People will draw closer together, will form associations among themselves according to what they really have in common and according to their true interests. Thus these people, once formed out of more homogeneous elements, will be infinitely less antagonistic towards each other."
Fascism and communism were kissing cousins, ergo the love Lenin had for Mussolini (Italy's most famous Marxist before his conversion) and why Hitler said he could convert a communist to National Socialism in 10 minutes but never a social democrat. Both led to thuggish one-party states w/ secret police, camps, no free press, and Cult of Personality leaders enshrined w/ statues and mausoleums everywhere. The world's foremost authority on Fascism, Stanley Payne, says Lenin set up the first fascist state by forcefully seizing power via an armed coup (a Marxist heresy) and setting up the apparatus I've just outlined above. There were in fact Bolsheviks who wanted a nationalistic version of communism (As in, we're going to be proud Russians first, communists second) but they got purged, Solzhenitsyn mentions them in "Two-Hundred Years Together." If you want to drill down further, look up Corporatism - that was the fascist business model and it's used today by Putin's Russia and China. It's centralized, top down control of industry - highly corrupt - via "incorporating" all the various industries into the national agenda. It was meant as a "third way" for fascist states between capitalism and communism. Corporatism is why China's Communist Party leadership has over 100 billionaires among its members but meanwhile there is not one billionaire in the entire 535-member US Congress. It's also why some of these billionaires disappear or have their assets seized from time to time - same deal with Russia.
Where do you get that Lenin had a "love" for Mussolini? If Payne thinks Lenin set up a fascist regime "by forcefully seizing power via an armed coup," he is speaking nonsense, not only because the Bolsheviks enjoyed the backing of the working-class of Petrograd and urban areas in general and were not carrying out a mere putsch or pronunciamiento, but because fascism clearly cannot be reduced to "forcefully seizing power." If there were indeed "Bolsheviks who wanted a more nationalistic version of communism," why not treat them as deviations from Bolshevism and Marxism rather than using this to claim that "fascism and communism were kissing cousins"? The Chinese billionaire representation you mention is in the People's Political Consultative Conference, an institution which has no equivalent in the United States. One might as well argue that China is a theocracy because this same Conference has had bishops and other clergymen in it. Not to mention that American billionaires have no need to be members of Congress to get their interests represented in it.
Another CZcamsr, I think he goes by TIK, has a series on the relationship between Adolf and Marx. Adolf was, in his own words, a thororgoing Socialist. But, as Thomas said, it was a socialism based on race rather than economic class. Adolf absolute hated Capitalism. TIK has a whole series on the subject of Nazi and fascist ideology.
@@blchamblisscscp8476 Fascism and Nazism were apples and oranges, Italy had to be dragged into WWII and, believe it or not, the #1 largest voting demographic per capita for Fascism in its early days in Italy was... JEWS! Il Duce was a Marxist before his conversion, Lenin praised him as the best Marxist in Italy. Both Fascism and Nazism were nationalist though, communism destroys the nation, its heritage, burns churches, etc (the Russians called it "Sovietization"). There actually was a faction of Bolsheviks who wanted to do a nationalized version of communism in Russia - basically, "We are Russians first, communists second" but they got purged early. The Fascists and Nazis used Corporatism - the "third way" of economics that involves syndicates running the various industries, it is not the sheer economic retardation of communism. It's socialism sure, but nowhere near what Marx wanted, remember socialism is defective communism, it can't go all the way, and when the Russians tried it was a disaster (they tried to abolish markets and money) that led to the NEP - New Economic Policy. The common denominator of all three is SINGLE ONE PARTY STATE. And you will have a state agency like the Organization Bureau in China today that makes sure everything falls in line w/ the Party line.
Science has improved since the 1970s, with far better measurements across land, atmosphere and even ice cores. And we can see the warming, see the dry Colorado river, see habitat loss, see glaciers receding, see polluted oceans/land/air, and the population has gained several billion people.
The fossil record PROVES climate change is real, no measurement necessary. Problem is the broken models and corruption of science through funding. Now, what's your point about the linkage between climate change and man's activities?
And? So what? Even if what you’re saying is true, which it’s not, largely due to the misplaced blame on human activity, the earth has been through far worse conditions long before any human activity
I can’t get enough of DiLorenzo.
How privileged one would be to have taken classes by Tom Dilorenzo.
The privledged chidden of the capitalist bosses are his targeted audience.
In my experience it is rare to hear from an accomplished academic who is not a fool. So much of what Dilorenzo says is simple common sense.
He is just another professor who sings the tune of the bosses.
In all seriousness, I love how your videos get right into the speech and skip the introductions. More orgs should do this.
Can attest to it, lived in the fifties and sixties in socialist Czechoslovakia
Did you leave before or after they went capitalist?
I've heard all of this from James Lindsay. The common denominator? They've both deeply read the source material. They both know exactly what they're talking about.
The are BIG joke.
@@kimobrien. Haha
This guy is brilliant!
Yeah, time listening to him is never time wasted.
Thomas for President.
Great DiLorenzo❤❤
I love Tom so much.
This is awesome.
His distinction between the conservationist and the environmentalist is astute.
good work
Freedom and liberty are the only things that work? Do you see it or not ?
Good grief.Just a misspeak not a commentary on anything.
I would love to see him debate those college students that Charlie Kirk debated
a debate between Dr delorenzo and Kevin MacDonald would be really interesting
It was a good lecture. However, it could be a lot better if the students could ask tough questions and hear Dr. Di Lorenzo's answers.
What tough questions can there be?
Calling Fascism right wing is one of Marxism's early obfuscations.
The only hard differences between the two are; internationalism vs nationalism, and killing the middle-classes vs co-opting the middle-classes.
@@Si_Mondo What I mean the audience could ask him to back up his conclusions(e.g. respond to their questions as if he's talking to a skeptic, who'll challenge his claims and fact check his conclusions).
@@dorisandilands104 look up tikhistory socialism. He has a five hour video with detailed citations backing up everything Tom just said.
@@Sincerely_MrX ok
Thiers ice in Iceland? Thank yousir.
Finally, someone exposing the Lincoln myth.
At 28:08 What does he mean by it was written 1940? Some UN Doc? Any name of doc?
38:38 - wow!
9:45 love the evergreen boomer jokes xD
What are your thoughts on Ezra Pound?
Lincoln pardoned the vast majority of those Indians mentioned, only allowing 30 or so to hand under extreme local protestation.
You gave a talk about eight years ago stating that federal marshals would come to your house and have a gunfight with you, if you didn't pay your taxes.
I tried searching in the Internet for any such incidents of this and could not find one.
I'm sure an event like this surely would've made the news.
Could you please share some more insight or provide links for any such cases.
Thanks.
Look up Irwin Schiff
He died in prison for tax resistance.
If you don't pay your taxes, they will throw you in prison. If you resist when they come to arrest you, they will shoot you to death. This is not a hard argument to follow.
The FBI have raided and arrested pro-Life advocates for praying on the street. Tax evasion is a crime. Praying is a fundamental right.
But then the liberal media wouldn't report that ,would they?
AGAIN!!! very inaccurate of what is written in MK ;adolf hitler never said that. what translation is he reading? because if its not James murphey's version of MK you're dealing with interpretations. he defines Egotism as the present
moment is deemed the most important and that nothing is left to the future. "The animal lives only for itself, searching for food only when it feels hunger and fighting only for the preservation of its own life. As long as the instinct for self-preservation manifests itself exclusively in such a way, there is no basis for the establishment of a community"
"The readiness to sacrifice one's personal work and, if necessary, even one's life for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race. The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual powers, but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of the community. Here the instinct for self-preservation has reached its noblest form; for the Aryan willingly subordinates his own ego to the common weal and when necessity calls he will even sacrifice his own life for the community."
I disagree.
The word "socialism" was quite popular in the 19th century and in the early 20th century. It meant different things to different people. That goes for today's usage of the word, too. I, therefore, appreciate Di Lorenzo's attempt to clarify his terminology. That is an important condition for speaking and writing scientifically.
When I listen to Di Lorenzo, I get the impression that he thinks there is an essential demarcation line separating national socialists from the communists belonging to a Marxian tradition. According to him, the main difference is that the Nazis were nationalists whereas the communists were internationalists.
I hold there are several major differences between the society that Marx and Engels envisioned and the aims of the Nazis (ideology and real economic policies).
In order to see some main differences, one can start with the notion of capital, which is at the very heart of the notion of capitalism. The way in which they conceptualized capitalism tells you something about what they wanted to negate. This negation essentially determines the concept of socialism. So what did they mean by "capital"?
The Nazis differentiated between good and bad capital, or rather, between creative capital and parasite capital ("schaffendes und raffendes Kapital"). Industrial capital, for instance, creates, whereas interest bearing capital was, in their view, an exploitative parasite. The latter was associated with banks and stock exchanges - and especially with the the Jews, of course. The good aryan capitalists and workers were located in the agricultural sector, in manufacturing, in the industry.
Marx, on the other hand, did not make such a distinction. According to Marx, capital as such is based on exploitation, be it industrial capital or commercial capital or interest bearing capital.
He did not intend to condemn capitalists for being greedy exploiters. That the industrial capitalist, for instance, exploites workers, only means that the worker creates more value than he receives in the form of his wage. According to Marx, that is not unjust in a capitalist society. Marx says that, according to the rules of a capitalist society, if a capitalist pays the worker the value of labour power, it is perfectly alright.
Marx did not intend to blame one particular group. Instead he analyses the coercive structure of capital. Capital is value in motion aimed at growing. In the first chapters of Capital Marx uses the rather general and abstract formula M-C-M' (money - commodity - more money) which describes a repeating cycle in which the growth of value is an end in itself. The capitalist as such makes this cycle become his primary goal. He hands over his mind and his will to capital. It does not matter whether a capitalist is greedy or not. Competition forces him to try maximizing value. When a capitalist competes with other capitalists, it is not sufficient for him to simply seek profit. Instead he must try to maximize his profits. Only by doing so he can make sure that he has enough financial means to modernize his means of production and to upgrade his technology. This is necessary to keep pace or, in the ideal scenario, become even better than other competitors. The other side of maximizing profits is trying to minimize the costs and therefore the costs of labour. A single capitalist can try to ignore this fact, but he then takes the risk of losing against other competitors, so that the game goes on. Every capitalist puts his competitors under pressure and they put him under pressure. According to this account of capital, it does not matter whether the persons playing the game are Jewish or not.
The worker is an essential part of this structure. The capitalist and the worker meet each other on the labour market. The worker is free in two ways. First, the worker is free in so far as he is entitled to sell his labour power and to sign a contract. On the other hand, he has to sell his labour power to any capitalist in order to make a living, since the worker does not possess means of production, that is, he is free from them.
The Nazis were regulating the economy more and more but they did not get rid off certain economic forms, namely the commodity-form, money and capital as such. All three of them are at the very centre of any capitalist society. Marx envisioned a society without these forms.
Marx thought of a communist society as a society in which there is no class exploiting another class. The Nazis did not intend to overcome capital as such and wage labour. Furthermore, they invaded several countries and sent many war prisoners to enterprises that exploited them to the utmost.They justified that by their racist agenda. Even after their planned victory they would have continued exploiting people they thought of as being inferior.
The Nazis did not want their strong national state to die. On the contrary, they wanted to establish an empire. Engels, on the other hand, thought the state would die, or rather, the working class would take it over and help the state to die, step by step. Engels (in Anti-Dühring) described the state as the ideal capitalist fulfilling the function of protecting the conditions for capital accumulation. The more enterprises the state really ownes the more the state becomes a real capitalist. The working class would finally take over but instead of simply declaring the death of the state, the working class would make the state more and more superfluous in every branch of its activities.
Engels was no enthusiast, but tried to be critical towards attempts made by the state to overtake and run formerly private enterprises. According to Engels, there is a conservative type of nationalization and a progressive type. If the government just wants to gain more revenues or control more workers (no longer allowed to strike) or gain control over foreign critical infrastructure, it is a conservative type of nationalization. A progressive type of nationalization stems primarily from the economic development. When the company in question is huge and fulfills a function in the economy that is to central to let it go down, for instance, in the midst of a crisis, the state must intervene. Engels preferred the latter over the former. The conservative type of nationalization tends to harm the cause of real socialism, since the government would just control more workers and create a monopoly and deliver bad goods or services at a high price.
Marx recommended that cooperatives should better not get financial help from the state or private companies. He thought only independent cooperatives would be important on the way to socialism.
Fascism and communism were kissing cousins, ergo the love Lenin had for Mussolini (Italy's most famous Marxist before his conversion) and why Hitler said he could convert a communist to National Socialism in 10 minutes but never a social democrat. Both led to thuggish one-party states w/ secret police, camps, no free press, and Cult of Personality leaders enshrined w/ statues and mausoleums everywhere. The world's foremost authority on Fascism, Stanley Payne, says Lenin set up the first fascist state by forcefully seizing power via an armed coup (a Marxist heresy) and setting up the apparatus I've just outlined above. There were in fact Bolsheviks who wanted a nationalistic version of communism (As in, we're going to be proud Russians first, communists second) but they got purged, Solzhenitsyn mentions them in "Two-Hundred Years Together."
If you want to drill down further, look up Corporatism - that was the fascist business model and it's used today by Putin's Russia and China. It's centralized, top down control of industry - highly corrupt - via "incorporating" all the various industries into the national agenda. It was meant as a "third way" for fascist states between capitalism and communism. Corporatism is why China's Communist Party leadership has over 100 billionaires among its members but meanwhile there is not one billionaire in the entire 535-member US Congress. It's also why some of these billionaires disappear or have their assets seized from time to time - same deal with Russia.
@@edwardrichardson8254
Hello.
My main point was that Di Lorenzo gave a wrong account of the communist society envisioned by Marx and people who stood or stand in a Marxian tradition. Di Lorenzo failed to point out essential differences between that vision and, on the other hand, fascist visions or ideologies and real fascist societies.
I am not sure how to respond to your comment in a rational way, since I am not certain on what you mean by "communism".
Do you mean a communist society? According to Marx's abstract draft, there has not been a communist society yet. Even Soviet Union officials did not claim to have reached that goal.
Do you mean the party officials of the Soviet Union?
(i) One can argue how many of them were communists. Western visitors from the political left mentioned they did not encounter many communists, but people trying to make a career in the SU. When I talk to people who lived in the so called socialist countries I get the same impression.
(ii) The next complication would be to ask to what extent did members of the communist party of the Soviet Union stand in a Marxian tradition? It seems to me there are several fundamental differences. I will mention only three. (1) Marx claimed to present results of his scientific work and to be open for any scientific critique. In the Soviet Union the party made Marx's works become an ideology. They used parts thereof to justify their policy when it suited their goals. Sometimes people who tried to work on Marx's theory in a critical way got blocked or killed. (2) Marx supposed capitalism needs to develop to a certain degree in order to take the next step towards socialism/communism. In the SU people were tought that it was possible to jump from the underdeveloped capitalist elements existing in their society to socialism. (3) Marx and Engels were by no means in favor of a huge state apparatus. In the SU the party build a huge bureaucratic apparatus.
I guess by communism you simply mean the Soviet society, the way how it really was.
Well, the very first thing you wrote about the kissing cousins irritates me. I concede that Lenin saw potential in Mussolini when Mussolini was a socialist and it may be the case that Hitler claimed that he could convert communists into national socialists more easily than he could convert social democrats. It is true that some former communists switched sides. But if go away from words and take a look at actions, we see that the Italian fascists and the Nazis converted many members of communist parties into prisoners or corpses. They fought war against the SU. On the territory of their states they hunted communists down, banned communist parties and imprisoned communists - or just killed them. Therefore the kissing thing does not seem to be a well chosen expression, does it?
I concede that the SU became similar to fascist states in some respects as far as the political overhead is concerned: only one party ruled, cult of personality, suppressed opposition and so on. Yet, the economic basis was different. The fascists saved private property regarding the means of production and they heavily regulated the economy, especially during the war. In the SU, on the other hand, the state almost totally eliminated private property (with regard to the means of production).
Lenin build the first fascist state?
I concede that one can construct one's own terminology. It seems to me that especially leftists tended to inflate the word's usage and to hollow out its content. I have in mind what we in Germany call the 68ers, which refers to the generation of leftists of 1968. To exaggerate a bit, today everyone trying to force something upon someone else is called fascist. :-)
I hold the humble view that historians are ought to find out the specific historical nature of something.
A self-conscious movement that determined itself and called itself fascist came into existence in Italy first. If one wanted to use the Italian fascist movement as an empirical basis for defining a more broader concept, one could refer to Nazi Germany, too. Doing so does not deviate totally from how people who lived in the 1920's used the word. Even then some people broadened the concept - communists such as Dimitrov on the nature of fascism, and liberals such as Mises in "Der Liberalismus". Applying the concept to Lenin's state contradicts certain characteristics of Italian fascism and similar movements in Germany, for instance. Fascists wanted to destroy the SU and they tried to fight the red threat within the territories that they controlled. The fascists themselves regarded that as one of their essential properties.
Since fascism is something modern, I hold that if one tries to determine the concept "fascism", one should take account of the historical specifics and grasp the modern nature of the phenomenon. Referring only or primarily to the political overhead does not do that. Dictatorship, tyranny, cult of personality, suppressing or eliminating the opposition and so on - nothing of that seems essentially modern to me. One can find that, for instance, in ancient times, as well.
@@Maximus1879 What "communist society envisioned by Marx"? Marx never, ever, ANYWHERE outlines what communism is. And it's not like he died early! At the very end of his last book "Das Kapital Vol. III" when he's describing (stupidly) different strata of incomes, there's a note by Engels that says "Here the manuscript breaks off." But he lived another 15 years!
Now, it is true that "people who stood... in a Marxian tradition" wrote about it, I'll give you a famous example: Charles Fourier, one of the French Utopian Socialists. Fourier said society should be divided up into small communities of about 2000 called phalanstère, with each phalanstère comprised of 'work groups' of about 10-20 each given a specific task. However, in the course of a day, since labor to salon intellectuals is a dull and stultifying thing, Fourier said they should go from one task to another 4-5 times a day because this would satisfy the "Papillon Instinct" (Butterfly Instinct) in people to go from one flower to another and this would be emotionally satisfying (BWAHAWHAWHAWHAHWAWHAWHWAWHAHWAHWAWHAHWAHAW!!!!!!!).
In fact, not only did Marx never explain communism, we must remember he never had a plan for dealing with capitalism in the first place! It was just "science" - sit back and wait and the workers will get poorer (they got richer instead) and the revolution will happen, giving rise to socialism (READ: "Defective communism") then that will whither away on the vine like what came before and then... NEVER EXPLAINED! Why? Because this is idealism for emotional know-nothings. It's why Karl Marx was a philosopher and Thomas DiLorenzo is an economist.
And yes, fascism and communism are the same thing. Unless you'd like to show me the other nations that were Single Party States w/ dictators-unto-death, gulags, purges, show trials, secret police, global dominance vision, etc etc. Only a liberal would be surprised to find out Nazi propaganda despised capitalism and spoke like Karl Marx. When the idiot Bolsheviks tried to abolish capital it ended in disaster and the N.E.P. had to formed to save the shithouse from uttelry imploding. Everything except "the commanding heights", as Lenin put it, of the economy would be privatized. They formed a central bank (Gosbank) that worked closely with their Treasury from 1922-1991, just like capitalist nations. They played on international markets, their big problem was all investment was domestic. Nobody in their right mind w/ the exception of morons like the suicide cult at Jonestown (who gave the USSR $2 million) wanted to invest in the Soviet Union.
@@edwardrichardson8254
A) Marx gives us a rather abstract sketch of what he meant by "communist society".
I concede Marx did not write a book called communism and there is not a single chapter in his main work bearing a title like "the communist society", for instance.
Yet, one can determine a concept not only by positively defining it, but also by referring to what it negates. Omnis definitio negatio est. One can switch it: omnis negatio est definitio. If one reads Capital, one can find out what Marx meant by "capitalist society" and, therefore, one can see what Marx regarded as the starting point of a development that would lead to a new form of society. According to Marx, a communist society is essentially the negation of a capitalist society.
Furthermore, there are some remarks where Marx said in a logically positive way what he thought about what the new form of society would look like. One can find that in Capital, if one is ready to read it in a careful way, and in "Kritik des Gothaer Programms".
B) It seems to me that you have chosen a wrong example when you referred to Fourier.
I referred to Marx and people who stood or stand in a Marxian tradition. Fourier could not become someone who stood in a Marxian tradition, because Fourier died too early.
I am by no means an expert when it comes to Fourier. As far as I know Marx heavily criticized the early socialists, such as Proudhon, Darimon or Gray, for instance. I, therefore, have doubts about whether one can save your Fourier-argument by extending "stood in a Marxian tradition" by going backwards in time to people who came before Marx.
C) You can claim that communism and fascism were the same thing. Define these expressions it as it pleases you. I guess you are free to do that.
I wrote what I see as some of the adequate conditions for determining the concept of fascism in a reasonable way. I fear I do not see that you responded to any of these problems. Therefore, I do not see any reason to change my opinion.
@@Maximus1879 The interesting
thing about Marxism is in a strange way its unoriginality. Epistemologically, it’s Hegel (the theory about how it thinks about its own theory) and Heraclitus (everything is in flux. All Marxism is a negation; it’s a critique; it’s feeding on the carcass of something which exists before you. All of the classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith onwards underpinned capitalism as an idea, but Marx doesn’t think up an original theory in relation to them, he just critiques them. In fact, even he concedes his ideas of class were stolen from the French classical liberal thinkers who came before him, as was his dithery phantom of what communism was going to be. Politically it’s the ultra-left of its own time fitted in a made to do service. I'm going to blow your mind in 3rd paragraph w/ details on that and even if you're an avowed Marxist, it's only going to make you a smarter one. But a word on this endless negation:
This pattern of simply negating (call it Hegelian dialectic if you want) runs wild in everything in Marxism. You critique something, you turn it around, you re-engineer it and come to its negation. But then you can negate the negation! And then you negate the negation of the negation and you go on and on. This is how you get to Trotskyism which is endless revolution, a regime that renews itself through endless and perpetual struggle. As Trotsky said "Strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible." That kind of ants-in-your-pants endless theorizing gets you an ice axe to the head by a Georgian raised in a seminary by monks who was used to endless administrative work - but that's where the power is, not in speeches of endless theorizing.
Marx stole everything he's famous for from the Secessionist French Classical Liberal thinkers, specifically, Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Gustave de Molinari. Comte and Dunoyer were pioneers in developing the thought of the radical laissez-faire philosophy known as industrialism (industrialisme). As they developed their ideas in this area, they launched in 1814 the periodical known as Le Censeur Européen, about 29 years before Marx moved to France. They advocated for gradually replacing all political state institutions with competitive private institutions. These private institutions would provide all the services that states claimed to provide, but at a lower price and without the exploitation present in all state relations between the ruling class and the productive class. For them, class struggle was against classes coercively created by govt through welfare dependency, corporate welfare, spoils systems, monopolies (the term comes from monarchy, which could would grant monopolies - Progressives hijacked it in early 20th century), etc. Comte and Dunoyer developed these ideas into a complex theory of history. For them, govt is the source of your chains. For them, govt expropriates and exploits the masses with their own money to their ends (think blacks today going from less illegitimacy than whites a century ago to 77% illegitimacy today because welfare rewards it). Marxists appropriated this classical liberal exploitation theory idea for their own movement. Comte and Dunoyer saw the natural evolution of society bringing about the gradual replacement of political by market relationships, Marx just inverted it, and took their notion of class distinctions and perverted it into a laughably Medieval one that contains zero economic class, they're all classes defined by the state. But don't take my word for it:
czcams.com/video/lPLaKTbNKvA/video.html
Now, as to the endstate of communism, which Marx never defines, here is the end state of Industrialisme, a kind of free market libertarian globalism as defined by Dunoyer:
"There are absolutely no forces at work in the industrial system which require such vast associations of people. There are no enterprises which require the union of ten, twenty or thirty million people. It is the spirit of domination which has created these monstrous aggregations or which has made them necessary. It is the spirit of industry which will dissolve them - one of its last, greatest and most salutary effects will be the “municipalisation of the world.” Under the influence of industry people will begin to govern themselves more naturally. One will no longer see twenty different groups, foreign to each other, sometimes scattered to the four corners of the globe, often separated more by language and customs than by distance, united under the same political domination. People will draw closer together, will form associations among themselves according to what they really have in common and according to their true interests. Thus these people, once formed out of more homogeneous elements, will be infinitely less antagonistic towards each other."
Used to teach at Loyola University… thought they were part and parcel of the big banker mafia?
Excellent economic history, but he hurts his message by the very name-calling that the socialists use ("fat and ugly" etc)
Fascism and communism were kissing cousins, ergo the love Lenin had for Mussolini (Italy's most famous Marxist before his conversion) and why Hitler said he could convert a communist to National Socialism in 10 minutes but never a social democrat. Both led to thuggish one-party states w/ secret police, camps, no free press, and Cult of Personality leaders enshrined w/ statues and mausoleums everywhere. The world's foremost authority on Fascism, Stanley Payne, says Lenin set up the first fascist state by forcefully seizing power via an armed coup (a Marxist heresy) and setting up the apparatus I've just outlined above. There were in fact Bolsheviks who wanted a nationalistic version of communism (As in, we're going to be proud Russians first, communists second) but they got purged, Solzhenitsyn mentions them in "Two-Hundred Years Together."
If you want to drill down further, look up Corporatism - that was the fascist business model and it's used today by Putin's Russia and China. It's centralized, top down control of industry - highly corrupt - via "incorporating" all the various industries into the national agenda. It was meant as a "third way" for fascist states between capitalism and communism. Corporatism is why China's Communist Party leadership has over 100 billionaires among its members but meanwhile there is not one billionaire in the entire 535-member US Congress. It's also why some of these billionaires disappear or have their assets seized from time to time - same deal with Russia.
Where do you get that Lenin had a "love" for Mussolini?
If Payne thinks Lenin set up a fascist regime "by forcefully seizing power via an armed coup," he is speaking nonsense, not only because the Bolsheviks enjoyed the backing of the working-class of Petrograd and urban areas in general and were not carrying out a mere putsch or pronunciamiento, but because fascism clearly cannot be reduced to "forcefully seizing power."
If there were indeed "Bolsheviks who wanted a more nationalistic version of communism," why not treat them as deviations from Bolshevism and Marxism rather than using this to claim that "fascism and communism were kissing cousins"?
The Chinese billionaire representation you mention is in the People's Political Consultative Conference, an institution which has no equivalent in the United States. One might as well argue that China is a theocracy because this same Conference has had bishops and other clergymen in it. Not to mention that American billionaires have no need to be members of Congress to get their interests represented in it.
Another CZcamsr, I think he goes by TIK, has a series on the relationship between Adolf and Marx. Adolf was, in his own words, a thororgoing Socialist. But, as Thomas said, it was a socialism based on race rather than economic class. Adolf absolute hated Capitalism. TIK has a whole series on the subject of Nazi and fascist ideology.
@@blchamblisscscp8476 Fascism and Nazism were apples and oranges, Italy had to be dragged into WWII and, believe it or not, the #1 largest voting demographic per capita for Fascism in its early days in Italy was... JEWS! Il Duce was a Marxist before his conversion, Lenin praised him as the best Marxist in Italy.
Both Fascism and Nazism were nationalist though, communism destroys the nation, its heritage, burns churches, etc (the Russians called it "Sovietization"). There actually was a faction of Bolsheviks who wanted to do a nationalized version of communism in Russia - basically, "We are Russians first, communists second" but they got purged early.
The Fascists and Nazis used Corporatism - the "third way" of economics that involves syndicates running the various industries, it is not the sheer economic retardation of communism. It's socialism sure, but nowhere near what Marx wanted, remember socialism is defective communism, it can't go all the way, and when the Russians tried it was a disaster (they tried to abolish markets and money) that led to the NEP - New Economic Policy.
The common denominator of all three is SINGLE ONE PARTY STATE. And you will have a state agency like the Organization Bureau in China today that makes sure everything falls in line w/ the Party line.
The Silver Legion was an example of American Fascism along with William Dudley Pelley.
36:06 oy vey.
Tom........not so good now. 4/23
"You gotta be a bit dumb to sacrifice for the community" 17:35. No offence but this is why people don't like libertarians.
Science has improved since the 1970s, with far better measurements across land, atmosphere and even ice cores. And we can see the warming, see the dry Colorado river, see habitat loss, see glaciers receding, see polluted oceans/land/air, and the population has gained several billion people.
Does that justify totalitarian government? does totalitarian government ever solve anything?
@@sanniepstein4835 this times a hundred. Entrepreneurs are the solution, but they need freedom within the market to do so. Government is the threat
Yes, “trust the science” on “climate change”. Where have we all heard this before….
The fossil record PROVES climate change is real, no measurement necessary. Problem is the broken models and corruption of science through funding. Now, what's your point about the linkage between climate change and man's activities?
And? So what? Even if what you’re saying is true, which it’s not, largely due to the misplaced blame on human activity, the earth has been through far worse conditions long before any human activity
This is pretty pathetic stuff. Shallow, selective and easily dismissed. Can see why he skipped do Q&A.