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NOTE The Emergence of Communism

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Communism starts as a doctrine, that's all I can say, by the way, there's a great book on it, it's a marvelously written book,

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a famous book by Norman Cone called Pursuit of the Millennium, it's in paperback.

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He writes about these guys in loving, quote unquote, loving detail.

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Now, obviously, there's a proper attitude of contempt and hatred, sardonic hatred, the suit of the millennium.

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It starts apparently with an extremely influential, extraordinarily influential, earlier than that, heretic, late 12th century Italian mystic, Joachim of Fiore,

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Born and lived in Calabria in southern Italy, became an abbot and also a hermit, let's see his...

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He lived in 45, 1202, late 12th century.

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The thing about Joachim of Fiore, you have to realize, he was not just a lone nut.

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He was extremely influential and he almost converted a couple of popes.

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In other words, he was just this close to translating this to orthodox Catholic doctrine.

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Basically what he said was...

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Well, first of all, you watch the idea of the prophecy. You have to look at the Bible to find out the prophecy of the end of the world, etc., concentrating, of course, on the book of Revelation.

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And it came to the conclusion that history was destined to move through three successive stages. There are always three, by the way, in all these things.

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It's very much, again, like the Plotinus thing, the first stage is unity with God, and the second stage is alienation. This is a different version, but more advanced, so to speak.

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The first age was the age of the Old Testament, okay, so we have the age one Old Testament.

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This was the age of the Father in Holy Trinity, it was the era of the Father or the era of

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the age of the Law.

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We have the Father and the Law, we call that Theonomic, the Theotokos, also ruled by fear

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and servitude.

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The second age, ushered in by Jesus, was the age of the Son, okay, so this is the New Testament

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The Age of the Son, Christian Era, which is the age of faith and submission, and then is coming, inevitably and soon, the Third Age.

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This is always the age to watch out for, the Age of the Holy Spirit.

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This is an all hell breaks loose, so to speak.

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The Age of the Holy Spirit, the era of perfect joy, love and freedom, and the end of human history.

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And, of course, the era of perfect joy and freedom is also the end of property.

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Nobody has any property, nobody works.

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See, we envision the Kingdom of God on Earth, very few people go about working.

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It's never part of anybody's real utopian vision.

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So, nobody works.

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Norman Cone puts it, paraphrasing Jorachim of Fiora,

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the world will become, quote, one vast monastery in which all men will be contemplative monks,

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wrapped continuously in mystical ecstasy until the day of the Last Judgment, unquote.

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Now, the interesting thing, the reason why this would, quote, work, unquote,

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The first thing you talk about communist utopia is who works, how do they allocate economic

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resources and all that stuff, who does all these things.

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The answer is, they don't have to do any of that because all men would be pure spirit.

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The body would have moved it away or disappeared, it's everybody's pure spirit.

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If you're pure spirit, you don't have to worry about economics, you don't have to worry about

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labor, property, food, all these things disappear and everybody's pure spirit chanting praise

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to God.

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That sort of solved the economic problem. There ain't no economic problem because there's no bodies.

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Unfortunately, the other communists came later. Marx, for example, obviously, did not believe in pure spirit,

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and so he faced the economic problem, which Joergam avoided.

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So, again, so you have the whole thing, the whole pre-Marxist, so to speak, era.

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The first age is the age of primitive communism, and then you have the second age,

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the age of the sun, the age of class conflict and class separation,

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and then finally have the realm of perfect freedom, total communism, and no division of labor in the end of human history.

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You don't have to have any labor at all, obviously.

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As with many chili-asts or messianic types, you all can be sure that the date of the advent of the third age, the final age,

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was going to be soon, but not too soon.

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We didn't make the mistake of Miller, the Miller license, saying it's going to be October 22nd, 1844.

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It said it would be about 50 years from now.

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50 years is a good time because it makes everybody hopped up, and yet it's not soon enough to be attested quickly

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in the Third Age, by a cadre of vanguard order of people who will usher in this Third Age,

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And when the Franciscan movement, Franciscan order started around this early 13th, the

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rigorous Franciscan, the wing, the rigorous wing I mentioned just last night, the anti-property

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wing or the pro-property wing, many of them felt that they were the Fiori, they were the

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Joachimites, they were the people destined to usher in the final age.

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A new ingredient comes into this whole witch's brew, and I call it that, around the same

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At the same time, at the end of the 12th century, a little bit later than Joachim, the University of Paris, which in those days was the great center for theological studies, a learned professor of theology, a favorite of the French royal court,

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He came up with this doctrine, it was following the Amorites, whose followers became the Amorites, the Amorites movement.

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Amorites doctrines were condemned by the Pope, he almost converted the Pope, and forced the public recantation, and he died shortly thereafter.

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The Amorites were students of theology in Paris, usually his students or students of his students,

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and they influenced many people and distributed many popular works of theology in the vernacular,

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The Amorians believed they had very similar doctrines, they added some more spice to this.

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In the old times, they said each age had its own incarnation, where God is incarnated in man.

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The first age, Abraham was the first incarnation.

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The second age, of course, Jesus was the incarnation.

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The question is, who would be the incarnation of God in the third age?

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Well, obviously it was them, the Amorians. They were the incarnation of God in the third age.

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And it usually is, by the way, with the third age types.

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They become the big father, the messiah, fulfill human history, end it and fulfill it, fulfill it and end it, I should say.

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So they consider themselves as their own incarnation. In other words, they proclaim themselves as living gods, the embodiment of the Holy Spirit.

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And of course, they start out as a divine elite, but eventually everybody would become, especially after various tribulations or whatever, everybody would become the Holy Spirit, living gods.

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In the early 14th century, 100 years later, there comes another group, various groups

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who are sort of decentralized, continuing this tradition called the Brethren of the

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Free Spirit.

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The Amorites, by the way, were wiped out, the Amorites were mostly wiped out.

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But anyway, it continues on, bubbles underneath.

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Germans call them Luftmenschen, in other words, people of the wind, they're sort of like hippie

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types of wandering around, no fixed abode, no fixed means of support.

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And they added another important ingredient, the ingredient which we mentioned with Plotinus,

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the reabsorption into God on the final stage.

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You have the communism stuff and then you have the reabsorption, the final unity.

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They also added a new elitist twist.

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The brethren of the free spirit had two types of people of their brethren.

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The crude in spirit, who would have to die first, and the glorious minority,

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This minority, namely themselves in leadership, were subtle in spirit, who could and did become reabsorbed and therefore living gods in their own lifetime, where they already had their own individual reabsorption, and therefore they would be eternal gods.

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This minority was of course the brethren themselves in their leadership, who achieved a status of divinity by years of training, self-torture, visions, and so forth and so on.

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Free Spirits are a form of the antinomian heresy, namely that some people regard them as impossible for them to sin.

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Anything they do can't be sinned by definition, because they're already divine.

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And whatever they do is necessarily moral and perfect.

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And of course, the free spirits, like other antinomies, are tempted to demonstrate their freedom from sin by doing all sorts of sinful things.

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And there's a catch with the free spirits. Only minorities, I said, were divine.

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These were the leadership of the free spirit. The rank and file was destined to become God. They were striving to make it. They'll make it eventually.

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And there was only one sin for all these people. In other words, all the other sins were out because they're living gods and so forth and so on.

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For example, Nicholas of Basel was one of the top free spirits, had his own cult. So the rank and file is there's only one sin ever. That's disobeying Nicholas of Basel, right?

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Because Nicholas of Basel is God, that's it. Any disobedience before the sin form should be met by immediate punishment.

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So, each disciple took an oath of absolute obedience to Nicholas of Basel being a living God. This is, I guess, true of most of the other pre-spiritors.

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So, in return, so everybody, every member of the Nicholas of Basel group took an oath of complete obedience to Nicholas of Basel in return for which he granted them freedom from all sin, because he was God.

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In an ultimately neatly packaged circle. And what about the rest of mankind outside of the cult? So, their role was to be exploited, used and exploited by the elect.

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And so along with this came a solving institution of private property.

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In other words, to them communism was essentially theft.

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In other words, the idea was that the elect could steal property and money from anybody because they were the elect.

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They were divine, and therefore to them communism essentially meant everybody, your goods are my goods.

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So the Bishop of Strasbourg summed it up, 1317, summed up their doctrine.

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They believe that all things are common, once they conclude a theft is lawful for them, for them, of course.

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I think other people stealing from them, they wouldn't look on very benignly.

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For example, Johann Hartmann was a free spirit Abbot from Erfurt in Germany.

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He said, a truly free man is king and lord of all creatures.

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All things belong to him and he has the right to use whatever pleases him.

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If anyone tries to prevent him, the free man may kill him and take his goods.

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So, free man being one of the elect.

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And one of the favorite sayings of the Brethren of the Free Spirit was,

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Whatever the eye sees in covetous, let the hand grasp it.

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The great moral theory.

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Then we have, in the early 15th century, we have the final ingredient for all this.

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The extreme wing of the Tamborite movement, which is itself the left wing of the radical wing of the Hussite movement,

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which bubble up in Bohemia, the pre-Protestant group in 15th century Czechia,

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Which blended, by the way, religious struggle against Catholic Church, nationality, Czechs

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versus German, class, artisans versus the patrician, sort of a blend of all three of

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these things, the tabloid movement.

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The extreme wing of the tabloids added to this, they adopted all this stuff, added something

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else, the duty, the divine duty to exterminate all heretics, which means everybody except

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themselves.

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So the last days are coming soon, the final days, and the elect must go out and stamp

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out sin by exterminating all sinners.

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The easiest way to stamp out sin, of course, is to exterminate the sinners, which means all non-table rights, at the very least.

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So, the sinners are enemies of Christ, and, quote, a curse would be the man who withholds his sword from shitting the blood of the enemies of Christ.

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Every believer must wash his hands in that blood. Having that mindset, of course, they didn't stop at intellectual destruction.

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In addition to killing all non-heretics, they would burn all non-heretical things, like books, images, paintings, libraries, and so forth, and so on.

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and so on. Besides, you like to have no need for books. When the King of God on Earth arrives, there will no longer be, quote, need for anyone to teach another. There will be no need for books or scriptures and all worldly wisdom will perish. I guess all people too. There's a general destruction of everything, theft and general destruction. And of course, again, the tabloids were going to return to a lost age, an alleged lost age of early communism. Everything was great. Society with no private property. And of course, in order to do that, you have to exterminate the cities, which are centers of sin and avarice and luxury and greed.

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of Merchants and Landlords and virtually everybody else.

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And after we elected and established the Communist Kingdom of God on Earth in Bohemia by revolutionary means,

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it was then spread out to the rest of the world.

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Now Bohemia, today Bohemia, tomorrow the world.

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In addition to that, they were very consistent in Communism.

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This is true, by the way, of Communists in general, which has sort of been dropped out of the literature.

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Also, Communism of women, personal bodies,

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The Kabbalite preachers, left-wing preachers, taught that everything would become, including wives, there'd be no marriage, etc., etc.

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They found that one of the first things the Hussite Revolution breaks out in 1419,

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in the same year that the left-wing Kabbalists got together and captured a town called Usti in northern Bohemia.

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They renamed it Tabor, which I guess means Jesus in the Mount of Olives or something, right?

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There's some biblical New Testament reference with Tabor.

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And they renamed this town Tabloid, and they installed tabloid-like communism, so to speak.

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Engaging in a communist experiment, owning everything in common, dedicated to the proposition,

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quote, that whoever owns private property commits a mortal sin, unquote.

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All women were owned in common, true to their doctrines.

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If husband and wife were ever seen together, they were beaten to death or otherwise executed.

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A form of execution can lead to your imagination.

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They also believe that they, they believe in the unlimited right to consume from a common storehouse.

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The Senate of the Moderate Taborites were of course very much against this. They said that the many communities never think of earning their own living by the work of their hands were only willing to live on other people's property and to undertake unjust campaigns for the sole purpose of robbing.

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Anyway, with alienating everybody around them, the peasants and everybody else, the Taborite, the Usti experiment quickly collapsed.

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The idea is picked up by other groups. One group is the Bohemia Adomites, who added another special contribution to this great movement.

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The Adomites, again, like the Free Spirits, believe they're a living God, superior to Christ.

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And one of the reasons why they were superior to Christ is because Christ is dead and they're still alive.

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This is one of the least convincing reasons I've ever heard. At least short-sighted, certainly.

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Again, not only are all goods strictly owned and common by the Adamites, the marriage was considered a heinous sin.

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The community was compulsory for the Adamites, since the chaste were unwilling to enter the Messianic Kingdom.

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Any man could choose any woman at will, and one would have to be obeyed.

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Also, the Adamites went around naked most of the time, imitating the original state of Adam and Eve, the alleged original state.

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Also another peculiar thing, you know, the government has a famous quip that whatever in the 20th century or whatever is not prohibited as compulsory.

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Well, the atomites both make public security compulsory and restricted, because it was compulsory, but only under the permission of the atomite leader, who was named Adam Moses.

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And so, in order to engage in the public security, you have to have his permission.

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Again, like all these other guys, the atomites regarded it as their sacred, divine mission to exterminate all the unbelievers in the world.

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So, wielding a sword as a marvelous image, I think, wielding a sword until blood floods

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the world and the height of a horse is bridle, and this is, it's high, something like that.

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They were God's size sent to cut down and eradicate the unrighteous.

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These groups began to use the agricultural image of a scythe, I am God's scythe, and

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And, at any rate, they were finally crushed by the moderate Hussites, moderate Haberites,

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as you might expect, and they were robbing and killing everybody they could, selling forth

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a commando raid to rob and kill the unrighteous.

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They were finally smashed.

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But again, it keeps popping up, and we get now to the Anabaptists.

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This is after the Reformation comes and lets loose a lot more of these people.

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I could easily spend the rest of the hour talking about the Anabaptists, but it's rich in narratives and examples.

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It really starts with Thomas Muenzer, who was a first coercive Anabaptist, a communist Anabaptist, M-U-N-T-Z-E-R, or the Umlaut.

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It starts off as a young priest and then becomes a Lutheran, who's quite learned in the scriptures and the writing of the German mystics.

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Luther launches the Reformation in 1520, he's there, and Luther recommends him for one of the top pastorates, he then continues on, as a matter of fact he meets a bohemian, one of the old bohemian movements, a weaver named Nicholas Storch, and Storch converts him to the old tabloid doctrine, and Menzer picks it up and says, okay, I'm the prophet, and he goes from one city in Germany to another, usually getting kicked out, but getting more and more followers,

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The Duke seems like a real dimwit to me because he's preaching his doctrine, he lays it all out, he tells the Duke, the Duke and the princes have an obligation to exterminate the unrighteous.

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And then he says, if they don't do it, if the princes fail in this divine obligation, then we will have to rise up.

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As he puts it, a sword shall be taken from them if they resist and let them be slaughtered without mercy.

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He was marching with his, the peasants, and he was the, the princes and the landlady's had a huge number of cavalry and artillery, had a lot of firepower, the peasants had practically nothing, had no arms.

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And he tells the peasants, he gives his last flaming speech, holding on to his naked sword, Monsignor, and he says, don't worry about it, because God had promised me personally, personally promised me victory, and he would catch all the enemy cannonballs in the sleeves of his cloak, and God would protect them all.

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This is the strategic moment that he spoke, just as he got to the peroration of a rainbow that emerged in the sky, and the rainbow was considered the symbol of his movement, sort of like an early rainbow coalition.

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And that was it. That was a sign that he would be triumphant. Of course, the whole gang was slaughtered. Peasants, him, whole business.

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But at any rate, he misinterpreted the sign, I guess. And so other followers popped up, and finally we get a town.

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of Town, of course, get a real city, I mean, 10,000, which is a big city in those days.

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They get a city in northwestern Germany called Minster, I had difficulty in myself distinguishing

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between Minster and Minster, but anyway, Minster was dead by this time, and Minster was the

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final, I think, a year's experiment in compulsory communism. This was the 1530s, I think, 1532,

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1334, around that period, sort of a climax of the compulsory and the Baptist movement.

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And when they capture Minster, all the good guys, so to speak, leave, I mean, they have

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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The best way to get control over a population is to outlaw money.

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In other words, they confiscate all the money. From then on, anything which you receive is received by the ration and kind of the beloved elect, namely equality. It's all equality, of course, but some are more equal than others, as we all know.

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And the elect were running everything. The elect decides who gets how much food and whatever against the bad imagined situation.

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Because you can't really have total totalitarianism unless you abolish money and the state then provides you with every coin of their wisdom and large S and benevolence, right?

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The money, by the way, was all confiscated and used for Bokkelsen and Cadre to buy stuff

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from the outside world.

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So first they stole any Catholic Lutherans or whatever else was around.

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There was also, for a while, this compulsory marriage of only the elect, and then there

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was a little bit of rebellion against that.

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They finally swung to the other side about three months from the compulsory marriage

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to compulsory promiscuity for everybody.

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Communism women again came in.

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But he took it like a duck takes the water, as a matter of fact. He immediately, very quickly, had 13 wives, as a thing, thereby unifying theory and practice.

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Anyway, Mathis, by the way, the reason why Mathis was the original absolute leader of this group, he got too, he got filled with too much hubris,

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and he was convinced at Easter that God had ordered him and a few people to rush out and defeat the bishops' armies, and he rushed out there and put their books, all hacked to pieces.

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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I mean, like, definitely anything, quarreling, nagging, anything that's kind of like...

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So, instead of the great age of capital punishment, there's also compulsory polygamy, because most of the men had left, leaving the wives and children behind.

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So, it was about three to one ratio of women and men, in most of the time. So, compulsory polygamy was at least technologically feasible.

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And by the way, here's a great thing, I'll wind up on Mockelsen on this note.

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He starts with equality and poverty and all that, he winds up, he takes all the confiscated money, transforms it into gold and jewelry, he and his court, he and his queen and his nobles, whatever they call themselves, the elect, all of fantastic luxury stuff, living in fantastic luxury where everybody else is literally starving, totally desperate, and there's reason for this, because a few people I guess are a little bit edgy about this, how do you explain, here we have absolute equality, absolute communism, how come these guys are living in luxury, so that's why it's been very interesting,

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So that was, I guess, the end of compulsory communist experiments.

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The thing we have to remember is that left-liberal historians and Marxist historians,

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dealing with this issue, how do they react to these people?

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I mean, excuse me, any rational person would react in total horror,

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because of the Bacchusinian movement on Earth. They love them. They're great people.

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Why do they love them? Well, one, they were communists. No question about that. They believe in communism.

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They carried that. And two, there was a mass movement, a popular movement of the people.

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No question about that either. Most of these people were real-life losers. No question about the fact that there was a lower-class movement, a working-class movement, a peasant movement, whatever you want to call it, and a, as Marx would have called it, I guess, should have called it, a lumpen-politarian movement, a movement of marginal types, and it was a communist movement. Therefore, it's great. It's really kind of interesting to read historians, left-wing historians, talking about these people. They love them. It's a setting stage for the rest of history. Communism again pops up again.

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and Compulsory Communism and a baptism for most people, for this time.

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It pops up in the French Revolution, just before the French Revolution, things are being

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overturned in general.

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We have a secularized version of this, but not all secularized.

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We know, of course, that Marx was an atheist, but there was a real conflict, a real dispute

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until the very end, until 1848, really, at the time of the Communist Manifesto, a real

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dispute between Christian communists and atheist communists.

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They both really agree on everything except the groundwork.

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The atheist version, the secularized version, which of course we know about, it's called

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secular.

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And the communist version, which was the Christian version, which was that they are the prophets,

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the same stuff we're talking about.

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I'll just do a little bit on that.

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One problem, of course, the atheist communists had, what we call the agency of social change,

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it was how is this brought about, how is communism being brought about?

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For religious, for post-millennial types, it's easy, God brings it about through history,

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it's inevitable.

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The Messiah returns, or the Prophet returns and makes it a BAP.

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For atheists, however, we have a real problem.

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How is this brought about?

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You can't rely on God or the Third Age anymore.

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Who's going to bring it about?

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And most socialists are communists.

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By the way, socialism and communism was very billowing all throughout Europe in the 1830s and 40s.

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All sorts of socialist groups, Owenites, Fourier rights, a whole bunch of stuff.

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But anyway, all these people said, well, we educate the public, essentially educationists.

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But that, of course, was not suitable for Marx.

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Marx, Marx wanted to show it was inevitable, quote, scientific, unquote. It's got to come

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about, it's got to come about, it's inevitable to creed by history, and of course bringing

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in Hegelianism, alienation of the dialectic is allowed to do it. He found his alleged

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inevitability, which gave him a leg up on everybody else, so it's kind of a lie on people's

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will. There were also communist groups in the 17th century, Civil War in England, I

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The two big philosophic communists, so to speak, before the French Revolution, Mabley and Morelli, Mabley was an aristocrat, and interestingly enough, the brother of the great laissez-faire utility theorist, Condellac, his name was Mabley de Condellac or something, Mabley was a sort of aristocrat, of course, and spent most of his time, he wrote in, I guess, 1709 or 1885,

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in the 18th and 1750s, I believe.

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And he wrote a lot of stuff, it was Alexander Gray.

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By the way, now we get to socialism.

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There's a whole bunch of books I can recommend.

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One of the great works is by Alexander Gray.

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Ritty, Perceptive, Sardonic, called The Socialist Tradition.

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He's also very good at Ricardo and so forth,

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and there's other books.

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There's two books, one is called Development of Economic Thought,

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which is a short book by Gray,

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which deals very well with stuff, Ricardo, et cetera,

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and a larger book called The Socialist Tradition.

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He wrote from the 1930s to the 50s.

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This is what he says about Mambley was, he says Mambley's works are, quote, deplorably

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numerous and extensive, unquote, extremely prolific, tangled kind of stuff.

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He wrote his collected works, he was very popular though at the time, collected works

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ranged from 12 to 26 volumes, depending on the edition, which came out in four different

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editions after he died.

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In other words, he died in 1785, by the time the French Revolution was coming out, four

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different editions of 30-volume work, extremely popular.

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I remember a man who believed he was egalitarian, he believed that all men are perfectly equal and uniform, all men are one and the same everywhere, totally uniform.

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He professed to discern this large truth in the laws of nature, and he advocated communism.

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His problem was, of course, the problem of who does the work, as it used to be said in my day, under socialism, who carries out the garbage.

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If companies own the common and each person is equal, who's going to contribute to the common store?

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The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit

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communism.

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They, of course, did not talk about a calculation debate, that was of course Mises' contribution

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much later.

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The other one was when we give them ribbons or medals, this is the Che Guevara-Matte-Tung

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solution.

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You don't give them more money because everybody's equal, we give them a lot of ribbons, hero

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of the socialist revolution medal and things like that.

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That would provide the incentive to do the work.

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Got a quote from Alexander Gray's magnificent critique of that.

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He says, the idea of the rule may find its driving force in a birthday honors list.

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The King's birthday honors list, giving the king, if necessary, 365 official birthdays

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in the year, occurs with pathetic frequency in the more utopian forms of socialist literature,

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although perhaps few are so badly bitten with the notion as is Mabley.

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So Mabley calls him distinction to give higher, bigger medals for more work and so forth.

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And he said, Gray said, but obviously if any were wiser or depraved enough to say that

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they preferred indolence to a ribbon, there would be many such that would have to be allowed

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How to continue to lead idle lives, sponging on their neighbors, perhaps someone at last

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to tame the ribbon might burst into a blaze of laziness, in a world they might without

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distraction save a bit of pleasure which accompanies this consideration.

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Mabry's world, in short, is expected that work will be done by all, without intermission,

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in the hope of a distinction to come, or in gratitude for a distinction already received.

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He then goes on to say that as you hand out more and more distinctions, the value of each

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distinction becomes less.

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Every third guy down a block has a medal.

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What good is it?

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Then he says, further he says, manly does not say how or by whom his distinctions are to be conferred.

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It is assumed, and always is assumed, says Gray, that there will be universal and unquestioning belief that the fountain of honor has sprayed us refreshing waters on all the most deserving and our none but the most deserving.

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This naively innocent faith does not exist in the world as we know, nor is it likely to exist in any earthly paradise that many may imagine.

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A general or a civil servant kept waiting on duty in the queue for the night of the bath.

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They find his youthful order replaced by a summoner's of hope deferred and zeal made flag.

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In other words, he might start resenting the fact that this guy down the block's got his ribbon and I ain't got my ribbon whole of it.

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And Maverick does not consider these natural human traits.

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Anyway, but at bottom, Maverick was a realist and he said, it's not going to work.

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He said, I love communism.

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Basically, he said, there's no hope for its victory because they won't be able to...

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Man is not good enough to solve this problem, to be a new socialist man, as a Marxist would later say.

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So you're basically a pessimist, and therefore not really inspire or stimulate the revolutionary communist movement.

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On the other hand, you had Morelli. We don't know his first name.

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An unknown figure, writing in 1755, and a Frenchman who, again, worked on one of the five editions in a few years.

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Morelli was an optimist. No, no, we can't establish man will be good enough to establish communism,

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Because man is, this is of course a Rousseauan or vulgar Roussealization thing, all men are

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good and beautiful and benevolent and will work hard and direction and so forth, only

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institutions are evil, especially of course the institution of private property.

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How you can have, I mean institutions are created by good men, how they can be evil

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is something none of these guys ever talk about, inner contradiction.

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So for Morelli, the administration of the communist utopia would also be easy, and this

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is the beginning by Lenin's famous statement, all you have to do is administer resources

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and so be a record keeper. You don't need entrepreneurs, you don't need allocators, you have to do some list stuff, like a bookkeeper.

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And Morelli, I guess, originated this idea. Why don't you just have a minister of labor and you just enumerate everything, list things and list persons and that's it. That's all you need.

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But then he says, being a pessimist on human nature, even though an optimist on, an alleged optimist, is chiefly prepared to employ brutally coercive methods to keep all of his so-called good citizens in line.

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And also, no differences in doctrine will be tolerated.

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Philosophical and religious doctrine is absolutely prescribed.

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No differences tolerated.

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Children are not to be corrupted by any, quote, fable story or ridiculous fictions, unquote.

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No fairy tales.

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No fiction at all.

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Fiction might be unsound.

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All trade or borders be forbidden by inviolable law.

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All buildings are to be the same.

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The Theory of Money goes into this whole architectural thing. Everybody's got to live in the same barracks, group in equal cloth, all clothing and be made out of the same fabric, etc., etc. All occupations are signed by the state.

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Anybody attempting to change these laws will all be sacred and inviolable forever, eternal. Anybody trying to change or advocating change is going to be isolated and incarcerated for life.

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Co-Gradualism, summing up, talking about all these guys, marbling, moraleing all the socialist-communist utopias, including Marxism, he says,

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You are known as a group.

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We have here writers who set out to describe the ideal state and reveal its functioning through ideal institutions.

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And in all cases we are sure there never was such a happy population.

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Yet in fact, no utopia has ever been described in which any sane man without any conditions consent to live,

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if he could possibly escape.

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During the French Revolution, the Babuff movement comes down as a key thing, as an organized movement to achieve, a revolutionary communist movement to achieve these ideals.

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Caius, Gracchus, Babuff, the conspiracy of the equals.

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By the way, all this stuff is an exciting book on the history of the movement and socialist movements and their interconnections and ramifications.

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He's not totally sound on all the theories he's talking about, but he's excellent on the history of all these things.

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As footnotes about eight different languages, James Billington called The Final of the Minds of Men, huge book, massive work and he shows how each of these people influence each other and pops up in different places and sets up a revolutionary movement and excellent stuff and some very obscure but important communist characters in the 1830s and 40s.

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Bob Buff was the organized leader, Bob Buff was the organizer, the Lenin, so to speak, of this movement during the French Revolution, 1790-93, that whole period.

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Perfect equality, perfect communism, et cetera, et cetera, abolition of property, communal storehouses, all the rest of it.

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And by the way, they'd be kind of superiors because they'd have to be running everything, obviously, in an equal setup, he admits.

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Everybody's controlled from birth to death.

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And he's very strong on punishments.

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All of the punishments were described in loving detail

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about what's going to be done to the centers and heretics

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and people who disobey orders.

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All meals will be eaten in public in every commune,

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compulsory attendance for everybody, for community members,

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and he can't travel without permission of the administration,

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et cetera, et cetera.

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He was also against private entertainment,

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be strictly forbidden.

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Quote, lest imagination released from the supervision

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of a strict judge should engender abominable vices

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All of Divine Revelation, because he was an atheist communist, would be banned by law,

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no belief in it.

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Anyway, he added to it, and as an organizer of the movement, rather than a theoretician

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so much, he said that we have to complete the French Revolution by total upheaval, brûve

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est-cement total, total upheaval and total destruction of all existing things, so that

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out of this new and perfect world could then rise up out of this total rubble.

376
00:39:22.300 --> 00:39:29.300
As usual with these guys, the destruction was fairly clear, the new and perfect world was kind of cloudy, even though they merged eventually.

377
00:39:29.300 --> 00:39:36.300
As Bartholomew wrote, the plebeian manifesto, which was sort of the ancestor of the first manifesto, ancestor of the communist manifesto by about 50 years,

378
00:39:36.300 --> 00:39:43.300
he winds up in his plebeian manifesto, he says, may everything return to chaos, and out of chaos may there emerge a new and regenerated world.

379
00:39:43.300 --> 00:39:50.300
As Alexander Gray comments on this, he says, what is the desire of the annihilation of all things, trusting that out of the dust of destruction a fierce city may arise,

380
00:39:50.300 --> 00:40:00.660
The Key to Marx was, I discovered that I was trying to read through Marxism and working

381
00:40:00.660 --> 00:40:04.700
in my book, trying to winnow out from the 10 million words that have been written on

382
00:40:04.700 --> 00:40:07.300
Marx and my Marx, what's all of that.

383
00:40:07.300 --> 00:40:11.300
I finally came to the conclusion that the key to Marx was a commie.

384
00:40:11.300 --> 00:40:14.980
You might think this is a fairly trivial conclusion, but it isn't, because I haven't read the

385
00:40:14.980 --> 00:40:17.700
solo book which has been highly touted, but I understand that he doesn't even mention

386
00:40:17.700 --> 00:40:25.860
In the book, Marx starts as a millenarian communist, atheist version, and then he tries

387
00:40:25.860 --> 00:40:26.860
to find the handle.

388
00:40:26.860 --> 00:40:29.860
He's not interested in convincing people and all the rest of it.

389
00:40:29.860 --> 00:40:34.140
He wants to come to the conclusion that it's inevitable, that the father nature of the

390
00:40:34.140 --> 00:40:36.100
credo, whatever, is going to come inevitably.

391
00:40:36.100 --> 00:40:41.460
That's the so-called scientific aspect, scientific socialism against utopia, scientific, quote

392
00:40:41.460 --> 00:40:45.780
unquote, because the inevitable laws of history, the credo, will come about.

393
00:40:45.780 --> 00:40:48.780
Morality then becomes swinging in with the inevitable.

394
00:40:48.780 --> 00:40:54.780
It's not that Marx is anti-morality, it's that he favors that the moral meant anything which furthered the communist revolution,

395
00:40:54.780 --> 00:41:00.780
inevitable revolution, and the immoral is that which blocks it or stops it, or restrains it, I should say.

396
00:41:00.780 --> 00:41:03.780
So it's the idea of mankind is to help the law and the inevitable.

397
00:41:03.780 --> 00:41:06.780
It's Marx's famous metaphor of becoming the midwife of history.

398
00:41:06.780 --> 00:41:11.780
As Alexander Gray points out, a lot of obstetrical metaphors in Marx.

399
00:41:11.780 --> 00:41:16.780
So Marx starts off with a commie, and then he tries to find the handle of why it's inevitable and what's going to come of that.

400
00:41:16.780 --> 00:41:22.780
And the handle consists of an integration, a very interesting integration, of Hegelian and the alienation stuff.

401
00:41:22.780 --> 00:41:27.780
He starts off in life as a left-hegelian, the dialectic alienation and the rest of it.

402
00:41:27.780 --> 00:41:34.780
And later on, trying to find the economic hand, and then he gets to the class struggle and alienation and class conflict.

403
00:41:34.780 --> 00:41:54.780
And then when the class complex stage, why does capitalism inevitably emerge in a socialist revolution, communist revolution, and then reliever theory of value comes in very late in this thing as part of a handle on theory of crisis and all that, the impoverishment of the proletariat, to show why it is that the proletariat will rise up and smash the capitalist class.

404
00:42:24.780 --> 00:42:32.660
Marxism grew up in Europe not knowing anything about the communist stuff, about so-called

405
00:42:32.660 --> 00:42:35.740
humanist aspects of Marx or Hegelian aspects.

406
00:42:35.740 --> 00:42:42.300
Kowski, who became Engels, anointed this leading disciple, Karl Kowski, in Germany, didn't

407
00:42:42.300 --> 00:42:45.380
know that Marx had any moral theory at all, he just thought that Marx was scientific and

408
00:42:45.380 --> 00:42:49.340
an economist and tried to bring in some morality, I think Darwin or something like that.

409
00:42:49.340 --> 00:42:50.660
He didn't know anything about this.

410
00:42:50.660 --> 00:42:55.780
The question is, why did Marx and Engels suppress the publication of this material, the so-called

411
00:42:55.780 --> 00:43:02.020
early Marx, the humanist, humanist, I think he said it was a certain sort of sardonic

412
00:43:02.020 --> 00:43:03.020
aspect to it.

413
00:43:03.020 --> 00:43:07.500
And we'll see, I think, why it is true, because I don't think anybody would have bought it.

414
00:43:07.500 --> 00:43:11.180
Not too many communists or proletarians would have bought the whole package if they knew

415
00:43:11.180 --> 00:43:13.100
about it.

416
00:43:13.100 --> 00:43:20.420
After the humanist stuff came out in the 1930s, and Marxists began to look at it, then it

417
00:43:20.420 --> 00:43:25.060
It became sort of a conflict between the so-called humanist Marxists.

418
00:43:25.060 --> 00:43:27.460
By that time, the labor theory of value was becoming discredited.

419
00:43:27.460 --> 00:43:29.820
Very few Marxists now believe in labor theory of value.

420
00:43:29.820 --> 00:43:33.140
Even John Robinson and people like that have abandoned it.

421
00:43:33.140 --> 00:43:37.780
Then they started lashing out at the alleged humanist early Marx, alienation, all this

422
00:43:37.780 --> 00:43:41.460
sounds very trendy, et cetera, not quite realizing that.

423
00:43:41.460 --> 00:43:46.580
Even more totalitarian than the so-called scientific economist Marx, or maybe realizing

424
00:43:46.580 --> 00:43:47.580
it at any rate.

425
00:43:47.580 --> 00:43:54.580
I think there was a split that Althusser and Sweezy and these people said, no, no, the early stuff was irrelevant. He wasn't really a humanist.

426
00:43:54.580 --> 00:43:58.580
Basically, it was only one Marx, and the one Marx was pretty monstrous.

427
00:43:58.580 --> 00:44:10.580
And it's a combination of the communist vision, the humanist vision, plus the later stuff, the economic stuff, which is essentially trying to find a route to the inevitable communist books on all this.

428
00:44:10.580 --> 00:44:17.580
I'm going to start even earlier with Karl Marx. I think it's just as important. It's just been neglected even by Karl Marx.

429
00:44:17.580 --> 00:44:23.580
He deals with the communist part and how Marx arrived at it and the Hegel, Hegelianism, and so forth and so on.

430
00:44:23.580 --> 00:44:29.580
That's some other pretty good stuff. Bruce Maslach, of all people, who was sort of a Freudian cycle Bible historian,

431
00:44:29.580 --> 00:44:33.580
has a very good book on the meaning of Karl Marx. It came out a year or two ago.

432
00:44:33.580 --> 00:44:42.580
But I'm going to start even earlier with Karl Marx. I think it's just as important, which has been neglected, even by Tucker, did some of this.

433
00:44:42.580 --> 00:44:56.580
It's not realized that early, early Marx, before the humanist, before the economic philosophical manuscript, before even the official communism in 1843-44, Marx begins life as a messianic Christian.

434
00:44:56.580 --> 00:45:11.580
This has been totally overlooked. We all know that Marx was of Jewish descent and his father converted to Lutheranism, a sort of very modest form of Lutheranism, a sort of compulsory conversion shortly before Marx was born.

435
00:45:11.580 --> 00:45:24.580
But it has not been realized that Marx in high school was a Christian, a dedicated Christian of some sort, and also his school graduation essay in high school in 1835 was on a side topic that he was quite ardent about.

436
00:45:24.580 --> 00:45:26.420
The Union of the Faithful with Christ

437
00:45:26.420 --> 00:45:32.420
And in this union, and he talks about, I think, certain hints of the Hegelian messianic stuff,

438
00:45:32.420 --> 00:45:37.860
of the unity of the blob, he talks about the mystical necessity for a union with Christ

439
00:45:37.860 --> 00:45:42.260
to end God's rejection of man, this is already not really orthodox Christian, as far as I'm concerned,

440
00:45:42.260 --> 00:45:46.500
it's really the beginning of this whole alienation reunion stuff, very early,

441
00:45:46.500 --> 00:45:49.460
in other words, he was 17 years old at that point.

442
00:45:49.460 --> 00:45:54.100
He also wrote in the late 30s and early 40s while he was a student at the University of Berlin,

443
00:45:54.100 --> 00:45:57.860
I'm learning about Hegel. He also wrote some poems, which I think is very revealing.

444
00:45:57.860 --> 00:46:02.140
I really think that they sort of foreshadow Marx's broad system.

445
00:46:02.140 --> 00:46:04.980
Poems have not been stressed by historians.

446
00:46:04.980 --> 00:46:08.980
Majlis talks about it, and Robert Payne in his book, The Young Call of Marx, talks about them.

447
00:46:08.980 --> 00:46:12.580
I'm going to read you a couple of standards from the poems, and I think they're very significant.

448
00:46:12.580 --> 00:46:15.620
The basic emphasis on these poems was,

449
00:46:15.620 --> 00:46:19.220
I mean, usually it's been dismissed by historians as, wow, just romantic

450
00:46:19.220 --> 00:46:22.380
trash or whatever. I don't think it's so trash. I think it's really pretty revealing.

451
00:46:22.380 --> 00:46:27.700
The basic themes of these early Marxian poems were one, megalomania, the desire of Marx

452
00:46:27.700 --> 00:46:33.660
for total omnipotence, and two, hatred of God for being greater than he is, basically.

453
00:46:33.660 --> 00:46:36.580
In other words, for creating a world where he didn't.

454
00:46:36.580 --> 00:46:38.580
And again, therefore, for destruction of the universe.

455
00:46:38.580 --> 00:46:40.340
So I'll quote you a few things.

456
00:46:40.340 --> 00:46:41.340
This is from this poem, Feelings.

457
00:46:41.340 --> 00:46:42.340
The hatred of God of creation.

458
00:46:42.340 --> 00:46:45.340
For example, he said, I hate all the gods.

459
00:46:45.340 --> 00:46:49.380
Anyway, this poem, Feelings, has the following two stanzas.

460
00:46:49.380 --> 00:47:02.380
Worlds I would destroy forever, since I can create no world, since my core they notice never, Heaven I would comprehend, I would grow the world to me, loving, hating, I intend that my star shine brilliantly.

461
00:47:02.380 --> 00:47:11.380
And by the way, Bakunin, who was a communist anarchist at the time, I think it's important here to refer to Bakunin and Voltaire. Voltaire's famous phrase, Voltaire was a skeptical atheist, I guess.

462
00:47:11.380 --> 00:47:16.380
There's a difference between militant atheists and skeptical atheists, and Marx was a militant atheist, as was Bakunin.

463
00:47:16.380 --> 00:47:21.380
Moter's famous phrase was, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to create him.

464
00:47:21.380 --> 00:47:24.380
But Kuhn's retort to that is, I think, even more interesting and revelatory.

465
00:47:24.380 --> 00:47:28.380
Namely, if God did exist, it would be necessary to destroy him.

466
00:47:28.380 --> 00:47:32.380
I think you should ponder that for a minute. I think that's behind much of militant atheism.

467
00:47:32.380 --> 00:47:39.380
In any way, particularly interesting is poetic drama called Ulan M, which Marx wrote.

468
00:47:39.380 --> 00:47:46.380
The hero is Ulan M. And Ulan M. has a soliloquy in which he pours out his hatred for the universe.

469
00:47:46.380 --> 00:47:55.380
I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind, as it is, having no purpose safe to happen, to be ruined so that there should be something to ruin.

470
00:47:55.380 --> 00:48:01.380
If there is something which devours, I'll leap within it, then I'll bring the world to ruins.

471
00:48:01.380 --> 00:48:06.380
The world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.

472
00:48:06.380 --> 00:48:10.380
I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality. Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away.

473
00:48:10.380 --> 00:48:16.380
And then sink down to utter nothingness, perish with no existence. That would be really living.

474
00:48:16.380 --> 00:48:21.380
It's an interesting inner contradiction, as the Marxists would say. You really live and destroy the whole world.

475
00:48:21.380 --> 00:48:25.380
A rotten world holds us fast and we are chained, shattered, empty, frightened,

476
00:48:25.380 --> 00:48:30.380
eternally chained to this marble block of being, and we, we are the apes of a cold god.

477
00:48:30.380 --> 00:48:35.380
And finally, my final phrase here is a poem called The Fiddler.

478
00:48:35.380 --> 00:48:43.380
He says, with Satan I have struck my deal. He chokes the signs, beats time for me. I play the death march fast and free. I like the free part.

479
00:48:43.380 --> 00:48:55.380
I think it's very revelatory considering Marx's later doctrines and so forth, thirst for destruction with a new world somehow emerging, vaguely emerging afterwards.

480
00:48:55.380 --> 00:49:04.380
Just one other quote on communism before we leave it, on the idea of unity of all people, unity of God, as I mentioned Chesterton's critique of Annie Besant last night.

481
00:49:04.380 --> 00:49:11.340
and I found that Annie Boudin was a Fabian Socialist and a Theosophist, sort of a Neo-Buddhist.

482
00:49:11.340 --> 00:49:16.140
Chesson writes, according to the Missus of Byzantium, the universal church is simply the universal self.

483
00:49:16.140 --> 00:49:22.380
It is the doctrine that we are really all one person, that there are no real rules of individuality between man and man.

484
00:49:22.380 --> 00:49:26.140
She does not tell us to love our neighbors, she tells us to be our neighbors.

485
00:49:26.140 --> 00:49:32.380
The intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity is that for the Buddhist or Theosophist, personality,

486
00:49:32.380 --> 00:49:37.880
and these individual personalities are full of man, but the Christian is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.

487
00:49:37.880 --> 00:49:40.880
I think that sets it off very nicely.

488
00:49:40.880 --> 00:49:47.880
As I say, I think the, I believe the theory of value and all that stuff is all, this is all peripheral to Marx's basic thrust.

489
00:49:47.880 --> 00:49:56.880
The, his aim of the withering ray of the state, which is attractive to, I guess, some libertarians, what he did is he took that, he took the phrase even,

490
00:49:56.880 --> 00:50:08.880
The famous phrase of what was supposed to exist in communism of the government of men should be replaced by the administration of things is really a phrase coined by a French libertarian theorist called Lundweier.

491
00:50:08.880 --> 00:50:17.880
They were talking about the weathering of the way of the state into a laissez-faire world, a market world, in which there would be no government, just administration of things.

492
00:50:17.880 --> 00:50:19.880
There it makes sense. It makes no sense.

493
00:50:19.880 --> 00:50:25.880
One of the reasons it makes no sense in the communist version of it is because instead of having private ownership, you have communal ownership.

494
00:50:25.880 --> 00:50:29.480
So if some kind of communist makes some decisions for allocation of resources, of course he

495
00:50:29.480 --> 00:50:33.920
assumes that communism will be in superabundance if you don't have to really worry about it.

496
00:50:33.920 --> 00:50:38.400
If there isn't superabundance, somebody's got to allocate, and the whole world then allocates

497
00:50:38.400 --> 00:50:42.840
some resources in some way, and of course what you inevitably have is a group of people

498
00:50:42.840 --> 00:50:46.040
calling themselves representatives of the proletariat or whatever, actually doing the

499
00:50:46.040 --> 00:50:49.960
allocating, you're back to exploitation of man by man, etc.

500
00:50:49.960 --> 00:50:54.800
So once you assume a one-world communal collective ownership, you don't really wither away the

501
00:50:54.800 --> 00:51:01.800
The State, although you can call it the People's Statistical Bureau, not a state. This is by the way what Colonel Gaddafi does in Libya.

502
00:51:01.800 --> 00:51:08.800
People don't really know it. According to Colonel Gaddafi, there is no government in Libya, and there's only a People's Statistical Bureau and People's Statistical Congress.

503
00:51:08.800 --> 00:51:13.800
You can call the thing anything you want, but the state under any other name will smell as lousily.

504
00:51:13.800 --> 00:51:21.800
Another key thing that marks the division of communism, I can't leave it at that, the key thing about communism is there is no division of labor. The division of labor is smashed.

505
00:51:21.800 --> 00:51:25.360
Alienation is the division of labor, it's a key part of alienation.

506
00:51:25.360 --> 00:51:28.680
The unity of man with man means everybody does everything.

507
00:51:28.680 --> 00:51:31.000
Everybody's sort of all around dilettante.

508
00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:33.800
Marx's famous phrase in the critique of the GoFundMe program,

509
00:51:33.800 --> 00:51:37.200
you know, you spend, everybody will spend two hours in the morning,

510
00:51:37.200 --> 00:51:39.960
I don't know, being an artist, another two hours working in the field,

511
00:51:39.960 --> 00:51:43.080
another two hours doing this and becoming a critic, another two hours.

512
00:51:43.080 --> 00:51:46.440
And so that's life is sort of one big dilettante, paradise.

513
00:51:46.440 --> 00:51:49.360
And he said the cattle will be reared for two hours in the evening,

514
00:51:49.360 --> 00:51:53.360
to which Alexander Greylor towards the capital might have to have some objection to that.

515
00:51:53.360 --> 00:51:56.360
Casual, a brilliant two hours in the evening.

516
00:51:56.360 --> 00:52:03.360
So division of labor has been the key to the concept of communism, the end of the division of labor.

517
00:52:03.360 --> 00:52:06.360
One of the reasons, I really can't leave this.

518
00:52:06.360 --> 00:52:11.360
One of the reasons why I think Marx did not publish any of this stuff, and Engels didn't either,

519
00:52:11.360 --> 00:52:15.360
is because Marx admitted, I think I found this very interesting and surprising,

520
00:52:15.360 --> 00:52:20.800
After the Marvellous Proletarian Revolution, Communism comes in two stages, not just the

521
00:52:20.800 --> 00:52:25.520
socialist and communist stage, which is the Stalinist vulgarizing of it.

522
00:52:25.520 --> 00:52:30.560
The first stage, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is what he calls Royal Communism.

523
00:52:30.560 --> 00:52:34.280
This is before you get the higher communism, the ultimate communism, where there's communal

524
00:52:34.280 --> 00:52:37.320
ownership and everybody's happy and so forth and so on.

525
00:52:37.320 --> 00:52:42.240
And in Royal Communism, the description of Royal Communism is pretty horrifying.

526
00:52:42.240 --> 00:52:46.240
In other words, it would be difficult, I think, to inspire the proletarian communist movement.

527
00:52:46.240 --> 00:52:49.240
The first stage is royal communism, which he says is inevitable.

528
00:52:49.240 --> 00:52:53.240
He says that royal communism will be the acme of human greed and envy.

529
00:52:53.240 --> 00:52:56.240
He says everything that anti-communists talk about when they talk about communism.

530
00:52:56.240 --> 00:53:01.240
Envy of unrampant theft, universal theft, universal destruction, and so forth and so on.

531
00:53:01.240 --> 00:53:06.240
And he says about royal communism, he's egalitarian, envy of unrampant.

532
00:53:06.240 --> 00:53:08.240
And again, he has communism women coming in.

533
00:53:08.240 --> 00:53:14.680
In the same way as women is to abandon marriage for general prostitution, universal prostitution,

534
00:53:14.680 --> 00:53:18.880
so the whole world of wealth, that is the objective being of man, is to abandon the

535
00:53:18.880 --> 00:53:22.160
relation of exclusive marriage with the private property owner for the relation of general

536
00:53:22.160 --> 00:53:23.160
prostitution with the community.

537
00:53:23.160 --> 00:53:28.000
And he says it's really a monstrous setup, the personality of man will be negated, as

538
00:53:28.000 --> 00:53:33.240
he says, general envy constituting itself as power, as the disguise in which greed reestablishes

539
00:53:33.240 --> 00:53:36.200
itself and satisfies itself, etc., etc.

540
00:53:36.200 --> 00:53:40.440
But then, so his description of a communist world, at least the first stage, is just as

541
00:53:40.440 --> 00:53:43.240
horrifying as any anti-communist description of it.

542
00:53:43.240 --> 00:53:46.440
But then you see what happens is with the Aufhebung, the magic dialectic, it's suddenly

543
00:53:46.440 --> 00:53:49.560
transcendent and bingo, you're going to have a world of pure communism and harmony and

544
00:53:49.560 --> 00:53:50.560
all that.

545
00:53:50.560 --> 00:53:51.560
I think it's really...

546
00:53:51.560 --> 00:53:55.200
I don't think anybody's going to sort of commit their lives to rural communism.

547
00:53:55.200 --> 00:53:58.360
And I think that's one of the reasons why he and Engel have never published it.

548
00:53:58.360 --> 00:54:02.680
Anyway, so there's no division of labor and with...in the world of Yolk and the Fiora

549
00:54:02.680 --> 00:54:05.380
and everybody's pure spirit, you can sort of see how it might work, because it would

550
00:54:05.380 --> 00:54:10.940
to not work in a world where bodies are around as an economic problem.

551
00:54:10.940 --> 00:54:15.300
By the way, Paul Craig Roberts, before he became a supply sider, wrote two very good

552
00:54:15.300 --> 00:54:20.620
books on this, Alienation and Marxism and something else, and he describes key to alienation

553
00:54:20.620 --> 00:54:23.140
being eradication and division of labor.

554
00:54:23.140 --> 00:54:26.260
That's the key to Marx's goals.

555
00:54:26.260 --> 00:54:30.940
And what happens is when communists took over in Russia, as Roberts points out, they try

556
00:54:30.940 --> 00:54:35.300
to establish war communism, eliminate money and so forth and so on, so-called war communism,

557
00:54:35.300 --> 00:54:45.300
The Theory of Value

558
00:55:05.300 --> 00:55:09.460
What is it? First of all, he says values are equal. The first mistake. Since the price

559
00:55:09.460 --> 00:55:14.940
of something is equal to something else, since the Wonder Bread costs $1.09 a loaf, this

560
00:55:14.940 --> 00:55:19.540
means that somehow the loaf and the bread are an equal value. Bread and the money are

561
00:55:19.540 --> 00:55:24.540
equal value, or something else is $1.09 a loaf, or $1.09 is equal value. So he immediately

562
00:55:24.540 --> 00:55:29.060
says there's an equality of value. That's the first mistake, since we know Austrian

563
00:55:29.060 --> 00:55:32.260
subjectivism is the fact that there's any exchange at all means there must be an inequality

564
00:55:32.260 --> 00:56:02.260
of Value. Both parties value the product unequally. In other words, if I buy a newspaper for a quarter, it's not that I value the quarter equally with a newspaper, since a newsstand dealer doesn't value it equally. Otherwise, why bother exchanging it all? What's the point of exchanging if it's both the same thing anyway? So the point is that both have a reverse inequality. I value the newspaper getting in the Washington Post or wherever higher than I do my quarter, and the newsstand dealer of course values the quarter higher than keeping the Washington Post. And we have a double reverse inequality

565
00:56:02.260 --> 00:56:08.260
This creates the condition for exchange, for profitable exchange for both parties, for both parties' benefit.

566
00:56:08.260 --> 00:56:11.260
So there's no equality of value. Quite the opposite, there's a double inequality.

567
00:56:11.260 --> 00:56:13.260
It's the first problem in Marx's formulation.

568
00:56:13.260 --> 00:56:18.260
Then he says, well, they have equality of value between these two things which are of the same price.

569
00:56:18.260 --> 00:56:21.260
So what is equal about them? What is there in these things which are equal?

570
00:56:21.260 --> 00:56:24.260
They're not of equal weight, that can't be it. Not of equal volume, that can't be it.

571
00:56:24.260 --> 00:56:30.260
And finally he works to the thing that must be equal quantity of labor after a certain next of Jesus.

572
00:56:30.260 --> 00:57:00.260
and at that point you really don't have to read the rest of it because you have about four or five fallacy gold pile on top of each other and then of course there's a problem how do you get you know how do you how do you arrive at different prices you have same quantity of labor and all the rest of it there's a whole bunch of problems with labor theory value which you need not go into von Boehm-Bawerk had a famous reputation with Marx's theory of value and theory of prices which is available in addition a separate edition it's called Karl Marx and the Clothes of the System unfortunately what happens is always when

573
00:57:00.260 --> 00:57:05.260
The Marxists refuted. The Marxists have a fallback position. It's very much like a religious cult.

574
00:57:05.260 --> 00:57:11.260
If Marx makes a whole bunch of predictions or a whole bunch of statements, which turn out to be wrong, he doesn't change the terms of the argument.

575
00:57:11.260 --> 00:57:17.260
He'd say, well, he didn't really mean that. And so Marx obviously meant, he meant to explain the price system by his labor theory of value.

576
00:57:17.260 --> 00:57:24.260
But it turns out he couldn't explain it. The Marxists say, well, he didn't really mean prices. He just meant value in some mystical, inherent sense.

577
00:57:24.260 --> 00:57:30.260
And that's one way to wash that out. You can't really refute it at all.

578
00:57:30.260 --> 00:57:34.260
A second thing, Marx's famous prediction of why it is we're going to have an inevitable

579
00:57:34.260 --> 00:57:38.260
proletarian revolution, is that the workers get worse and worse off, the impoverishment

580
00:57:38.260 --> 00:57:42.260
of the working class, and they finally rise up in desperation. So it's obvious through

581
00:57:42.260 --> 00:57:46.260
history, in the 19th century and 20th century, the workers are getting better and better

582
00:57:46.260 --> 00:57:50.260
off, so it doesn't just refute Marx's key prediction about why the proletarian revolution

583
00:57:50.260 --> 00:57:54.740
Revolution is inevitable, so Marx's fullback position was he didn't mean absolute impoverishment,

584
00:57:54.740 --> 00:57:58.340
he meant relative impoverishment. He meant that workers, even though they might be much

585
00:57:58.340 --> 00:58:02.940
better off than they were 50 years ago, were still less well off than Rockefeller or Bunker

586
00:58:02.940 --> 00:58:08.740
Hunt. So you change the terms. I can't see anybody really engaging in bloody revolution,

587
00:58:08.740 --> 00:58:12.060
committing a life of bloody revolution because you only have one swimming pool instead of

588
00:58:12.060 --> 00:58:18.300
five. Somehow that's the so-called relative deprivation. This is, by the way, the gimmick

589
00:58:18.300 --> 00:58:21.900
by which everybody's always, you know, always have a huge number of people under the poverty line,

590
00:58:21.900 --> 00:58:27.900
keep redefining the poverty line. Poverty doesn't mean subsistence, it means whatever, TV sets,

591
00:58:27.900 --> 00:58:30.860
if you don't have a TV set, they're not called impoverished, you know, under the poverty line.

592
00:58:31.420 --> 00:58:35.340
And so you keep pushing the so-called poverty line up, so you always have at least a third

593
00:58:35.340 --> 00:58:40.540
of the population impoverished. You can never eliminate poverty because there's always some

594
00:58:40.540 --> 00:58:45.980
guy with five yachts instead of one. So by the way, somebody asked me about Tom Sowell's book

595
00:58:45.980 --> 00:58:50.780
on Marxism. I think it's a highly inflated work. Not only does he talk about communism,

596
00:58:50.780 --> 00:58:56.620
which is the key, he also criticizes von Bawerk and absolute deprivation from the same Marxist

597
00:58:56.620 --> 00:59:01.980
position. He takes the Marxian line that he didn't really mean it, and he really means

598
00:59:01.980 --> 00:59:06.220
relative deprivation. He wrote the book when he was still in Marxist. If you look at Searle's

599
00:59:06.220 --> 00:59:11.180
footnotes, there's nothing after about 1965, which is a key to the composition of the book.

600
00:59:11.180 --> 00:59:38.500
In the early 19th century, the 19th century, 1820s approximately, the pietist movement

601
01:00:08.500 --> 01:00:16.500
The others were all sort of deists, which means that God is a great clockmaker, so to speak.

602
01:00:16.500 --> 01:00:21.500
God created the world, created the national law, and then left, and then everything runs by itself, sort of.

603
01:00:21.500 --> 01:00:25.500
Christianity then is revived in the early 20th century United States and also in Europe,

604
01:00:25.500 --> 01:00:28.500
but I'm not going to make a dramatic analysis about Europe.

605
01:00:28.500 --> 01:00:33.500
By pietism, which is a new form of Christianity, I mean brand new, through the revival movements,

606
01:00:33.500 --> 01:00:36.500
which we're now fairly familiar with, those days was a big new thing,

607
01:00:36.500 --> 01:00:47.500
Where you arrive at Christianity through a mystical experience, emotional, mystical conversion with revival meetings and rolling on the floor, speaking in tongues and so forth and so on.

608
01:00:47.500 --> 01:00:54.500
You're born again. We need not just a regular baptism, but another baptism, a baptism of the Holy Spirit, a second baptism become necessary.

609
01:00:54.500 --> 01:01:03.500
With this new form of post-millennial pietism, swept Protestantism, almost taking over almost completely, especially in the North, especially in Yankee country.

610
01:01:03.500 --> 01:01:08.400
I find Yankees as being a cultural group who originated in rural New England, not so much

611
01:01:08.400 --> 01:01:11.900
Boston or the city, but rural New England, rural Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc., and

612
01:01:11.900 --> 01:01:16.900
then emigrating, they were big migrants, emigrating westward into upstate New York, western New

613
01:01:16.900 --> 01:01:22.100
York, northern Ohio, the famous eastern reserve area, northern Indiana, northern Illinois,

614
01:01:22.100 --> 01:01:24.100
okay, this is a Yankee country.

615
01:01:24.100 --> 01:01:30.500
And the Yankees were always compulsory conformists, one historian called Yankee imperialists,

616
01:01:30.500 --> 01:01:44.900
The Yankees took this like a duck takes the water, this new form of priatism.

617
01:01:44.900 --> 01:01:49.380
Essentially the new form of priatism was as follows, creeds are not important, whether

618
01:01:49.380 --> 01:01:51.900
you're a Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, it doesn't make any difference, as long as

619
01:01:51.900 --> 01:01:52.900
you're a Christian.

620
01:01:52.900 --> 01:01:57.620
Law is unimportant, the Bible is unimportant, the key thing is the sort of personal relation

621
01:01:57.620 --> 01:01:58.620
with God.

622
01:01:58.620 --> 01:02:06.620
and this is by the way the origin of the YMCA movement, all the inter-denominational movements because the divisions between Protestant churches are unimportant.

623
01:02:06.620 --> 01:02:13.620
Each individual then is sort of naked to his creator, in other words his personal relationship with God and man, and the church is unimportant too.

624
01:02:13.620 --> 01:02:17.620
Whether you're a church member is really unimportant or which church you belong to is unimportant.

625
01:02:17.620 --> 01:02:24.620
In the Yankee wing which is called evangelical pietism, different from the southern pietists became sort of quietist types.

626
01:02:24.620 --> 01:02:28.620
In order to achieve your born-again conversion, you don't bother anybody, no political implications.

627
01:02:28.620 --> 01:02:36.620
Evangelical scientists believe, as part of the scientism, that you can't be saved unless you maximize the salvation of everybody else.

628
01:02:36.620 --> 01:02:41.620
Key, in other words, it's not just you like to have a missionary thing and bring everybody else to the Word.

629
01:02:41.620 --> 01:02:46.620
More than that, it's your divine duty, otherwise you won't be saved, to try to maximize everybody else's salvation.

630
01:02:46.620 --> 01:02:50.620
In order to do that, in order to maximize everybody's salvation, you have to eliminate

631
01:02:50.620 --> 01:02:54.620
sin, temptations versus occasions for sin, and so forth and so on.

632
01:02:54.620 --> 01:02:58.620
And so very quickly, of course, they became big status, because they used the government

633
01:02:58.620 --> 01:03:03.620
as sort of a shortcut to stamping out sin, and try to create the conditions of this,

634
01:03:03.620 --> 01:03:07.620
to save these individuals' souls by hoping that they're stamping out sin.

635
01:03:07.620 --> 01:03:13.620
And so what you have from the very beginning of fiatism, from 1830s until 1920s, really,

636
01:03:13.620 --> 01:03:25.620
The whole 19th century had a situation where all these guys were constantly spending their time trying to outlaw sin on a local and state level in the United States, meaning anything which interferes with your theological free will.

637
01:03:25.620 --> 01:03:31.620
These were theological free willers, so that anything which clouds your mind, so to speak, and interferes with your free will should be outlawed.

638
01:03:31.620 --> 01:03:41.620
This meant, in practice, demon rum, number one, liquor. Liquor is evil. They broadened the definition of sin. One Catholic opponent of this said they made sin what God did not.

639
01:03:41.620 --> 01:03:46.620
So anything liquor is simple, because liquor clouds your mind into future theological free will.

640
01:03:46.620 --> 01:03:50.620
Liquor is evil. Anything on Sunday except going to church is evil. It must be stamped out.

641
01:03:50.620 --> 01:03:54.620
So drinking liquor on Sunday is how the ultimate evil is, like a double whammy.

642
01:03:54.620 --> 01:03:57.620
There's nothing more simple than drinking liquor on Sunday.

643
01:03:57.620 --> 01:04:02.620
And the third thing, of course, is the Roman Catholic Church, where everybody's enslaved,

644
01:04:02.620 --> 01:04:04.620
the agents of the Vatican, and the Pope is the Antichrist.

645
01:04:04.620 --> 01:04:08.620
So the idea is to stamp out liquor, stamp out Sunday activities, and stamp out Catholicism.

646
01:04:08.620 --> 01:04:09.620
Catholicism.

647
01:04:09.620 --> 01:04:13.580
They couldn't stamp out Catholicism exactly, directly, constitutionally.

648
01:04:13.580 --> 01:04:14.580
They tried their best.

649
01:04:14.580 --> 01:04:17.740
They had to restrict Catholic immigration in various ways.

650
01:04:17.740 --> 01:04:20.700
And once the adults, they said, well, the adult Catholics are doomed, but you get the

651
01:04:20.700 --> 01:04:21.700
kids.

652
01:04:21.700 --> 01:04:23.700
There's a famous cry of the pietists, well, it's, Christianize the Catholics.

653
01:04:23.700 --> 01:04:28.060
And the way you do it is get the kids into the public school system, prevent parochial

654
01:04:28.060 --> 01:04:31.700
schools, outlaw parochial schools, get the kids into the public school system, then Protestantize

655
01:04:31.700 --> 01:04:32.700
them, or pietize them.

656
01:04:32.700 --> 01:04:36.300
And so the whole public school system, the real thrust of the public school system was

657
01:04:36.300 --> 01:04:38.300
pietists, was Protestant pietists.

658
01:04:38.300 --> 01:04:42.300
All these guys I've hated for years, like Horace Mann, the whole public school movement,

659
01:04:42.300 --> 01:04:47.000
their real motivation was pietists. They wanted to get these guys, they wanted to crush the Catholics and Lutherans,

660
01:04:47.000 --> 01:04:52.600
who were the German Lutherans in particular, who were formalists, the liturgical Christians.

661
01:04:52.600 --> 01:04:55.100
And you get them by getting the kids into public schools and Protestantizing them.

662
01:04:55.100 --> 01:05:00.900
In many cases, in many jurisdictions in the United States, for example, you could not be a public school teacher unless you were a Protestant church member.

663
01:05:00.900 --> 01:05:04.000
This is going on on the local and state level for a hundred years.

664
01:05:04.000 --> 01:05:09.500
What happens is that the Catholics, as they come to the United States, and the German Lutherans, as they come to the United States, are horrified.

665
01:05:09.500 --> 01:05:13.000
First of all, the Germans, both Lutheran and Catholic, have marvelous customs, charming customs.

666
01:05:13.000 --> 01:05:18.000
After going to church on Sunday, the whole family repairs to a beer garden with a brass band and so forth.

667
01:05:18.000 --> 01:05:25.000
And here they are sitting in a beer garden, minding their own business, and these are these wasp fanatics to send a bottle of sin, sin, double sin, crush, kill.

668
01:05:25.000 --> 01:05:31.500
So this is, this conflict is going on a local state level of a hundred years. I mean, these guys are hopped up.

669
01:05:31.500 --> 01:05:44.500
So what you have then is the party system that developed in the United States until 1896, from 1830 to 1896, the party system, the political party system, is a one-to-one correlation between fighters versus liturgicals.

670
01:05:44.500 --> 01:05:50.500
In other words, those who believe the church is important for salvation is the church, joining the church, obeying the law, the sacraments, or whatever.

671
01:05:50.500 --> 01:05:56.500
There's total conflict here. The liturgicalists consist of Catholics, German Lutherans, and old-style Calvinists, by the way.

672
01:05:56.500 --> 01:06:02.500
and the left, who hated the revival movement and the pietists, became allied with the Catholics.

673
01:06:02.500 --> 01:06:06.500
And so what you have, you have a political party system with a one-to-one correlation,

674
01:06:06.500 --> 01:06:09.500
the Whig Party and then the Republican Party with straight pietists.

675
01:06:09.500 --> 01:06:12.500
And the Democrat Party was liturgical and never the twain met.

676
01:06:12.500 --> 01:06:16.500
And so what you have is a total fantastic ideological conflict between Republicans and Democrats,

677
01:06:16.500 --> 01:06:18.500
everybody hating each other's guts.

678
01:06:18.500 --> 01:06:21.500
And there were no independent voters, no floating vote.

679
01:06:21.500 --> 01:06:23.500
Nobody ever, no Democrat would ever vote Republican, vice versa.

680
01:06:23.500 --> 01:06:28.500
What they do is, if your guy wasn't militant enough, he just didn't vote, he just stayed home.

681
01:06:28.500 --> 01:06:34.500
And usually elections are very close, and so the idea in the campaigns is not to sell out the field of the elections and the tenors,

682
01:06:34.500 --> 01:06:37.500
but the idea is to be as militant as possible and get your guys to vote.

683
01:06:37.500 --> 01:06:40.500
And so in the campaigns, the politicians were even more hard-core than they were the rest of the time.

684
01:06:40.500 --> 01:06:42.500
It must have been a wonderful world to live in.

685
01:06:42.500 --> 01:06:48.500
And the thing is, the way it works in economics is that these guys, the economic creed was sort of a generalized consciousness from the religious creed.

686
01:06:48.500 --> 01:07:18.500
In other words, the Republican leadership and the Whig leadership would tell their people look, just as you need big government on a local level to stamp out sin and liquor and dancing and things like that, in the same way you need government on an economic and national level to stamp out cheap foreign products and cheap foreign people and increase purchasing power by inflation, by printing more money and so on and so on, and high tariffs. In other words, there's a direct relationship between the big state on the national economic level and the local level. In the same way, the Democratic leadership will always say to their liberals,

687
01:07:18.500 --> 01:07:21.420
will tell their people, look, the same lost SOBs are trying to outlaw your

688
01:07:21.420 --> 01:07:25.720
liquor in your parochial schools are the people trying to prevent, keep out cheap

689
01:07:25.720 --> 01:07:30.460
foreign products and special privileges and decrease the value of your

690
01:07:30.460 --> 01:07:34.060
savings on inflation. And so this is how people got hopped up. This is why I have

691
01:07:34.060 --> 01:07:37.060
illiterates writing books and pamphlets on gold and silver and banking. I can't

692
01:07:37.060 --> 01:07:41.500
get my own students into this stuff. Those people writing pamphlets, they're all hopped

693
01:07:41.500 --> 01:07:44.500
up. The reason they're all hopped up is the original religious motivations. In this

694
01:07:44.500 --> 01:07:49.020
In this situation, unfortunately, one of the blank moments in American history came in

695
01:07:49.020 --> 01:07:54.180
the Democrat Convention of 1896, when the Democratic Party, the great liturgical, known

696
01:07:54.180 --> 01:07:57.020
as the Party of Personal Liberty, by the way, the Democrats were known as the Party of Personal

697
01:07:57.020 --> 01:08:00.060
Liberty, both of themselves and other people, and Republicans were known as the Party of

698
01:08:00.060 --> 01:08:01.060
Great Moral Ideas.

699
01:08:01.060 --> 01:08:06.740
And so the Democrats, in 1896, were taken over by the extreme pietists, one of the cataclysmic

700
01:08:06.740 --> 01:08:10.260
events, by various reasons, by that time the South, which was always the first Democrats

701
01:08:10.260 --> 01:08:13.980
since the Civil War, the South had become, southern pietism was transformed into prohibitionism

702
01:08:13.980 --> 01:08:17.980
and Evangelicalism, which it had not been before, and the mountain states were created.

703
01:08:17.980 --> 01:08:19.980
You know, can you imagine how many people there were in Idaho?

704
01:08:19.980 --> 01:08:22.980
There are no people in Idaho now. Can you imagine how many people there were in 1890?

705
01:08:22.980 --> 01:08:27.980
These states, these phony states were all created by Republicans. They knew they were pietists.

706
01:08:27.980 --> 01:08:30.980
Most of these people were pietists and they wrote Republicans.

707
01:08:30.980 --> 01:08:35.980
And within the Democratic Party, they were pietists, and so Brian, one of the most evil people in American history,

708
01:08:35.980 --> 01:08:40.980
William Jennings Brian, was able to form a coalition between the southern pietists and the mountain pietists

709
01:08:40.980 --> 01:08:51.220
The Democratic Party had been the political embodiment of laissez-faire and libertarianism,

710
01:08:51.220 --> 01:08:52.220
liberalism.

711
01:08:52.220 --> 01:08:54.900
There is now no longer any political party to reflect this.

712
01:08:54.900 --> 01:08:57.620
Both parties are now pietists, more or less.

713
01:08:57.620 --> 01:09:01.180
And so this was a power vacuum for experts, intellectuals, progressives, et cetera, to

714
01:09:01.180 --> 01:09:02.180
take over.

715
01:09:02.180 --> 01:09:03.180
Results we all know.

716
01:09:03.180 --> 01:09:07.580
This leads into a couple of these progressive intellectuals I can't ignore, both philosophers

717
01:09:07.580 --> 01:09:08.580
and economists.

718
01:09:08.580 --> 01:09:11.860
The progressive movement was a pure pietist movement.

719
01:09:11.860 --> 01:09:14.940
As a matter of fact, everybody who might be testers involved in this thing.

720
01:09:14.940 --> 01:09:19.940
The Progressive Party Convention, for example, in 1912, was not the only progressive movement.

721
01:09:19.940 --> 01:09:21.940
There were the extreme versions.

722
01:09:21.940 --> 01:09:26.060
Teddy Roosevelt, who was an old-time progressive, began his career as police commissioner in

723
01:09:26.060 --> 01:09:27.540
New York, smashing saloons.

724
01:09:27.540 --> 01:09:31.700
In this group consisted of the following people, the rest of the progressive convention.

725
01:09:31.700 --> 01:09:34.340
Morgan Partners, who was extremely important, I can't get into all that.

726
01:09:34.340 --> 01:09:45.840
Morgan-Portnus, JP Morgan-Portnus, pietists, ministers, social workers, intellectuals, economists, political scientists, social workers, shrinks, I mean, almost everybody can think I was involved in this thing.

727
01:09:45.840 --> 01:09:59.340
Roosevelt's acceptance speech was called the Confession of Faith, and in his speech was punctuated by hymns singing, pietist hymns, follow, follow, follow, Jesus, where they substitute the word Roosevelt for the word Jesus, amen, and finally,

728
01:09:59.340 --> 01:10:03.340
Elizabeth went up by famous preparation by saying, I'd be standard armageddon and we'd battle for the Lord.

729
01:10:03.340 --> 01:10:06.340
So there's fantastic religious and pietist imagery here.

730
01:10:06.340 --> 01:10:13.340
What you have is all these guys, all these progressive intellectuals, from John Dewey, Richard T. Ealy, all these people, every one of them, it's bing, bing, bing.

731
01:10:13.340 --> 01:10:20.340
They all grew up in pietist homes or rural New Englanders or rural New Yorkers, whatever, all Yankees.

732
01:10:20.340 --> 01:10:23.340
Usually their father was a preacher or their mother was a gold-over preacher.

733
01:10:23.340 --> 01:10:26.340
They usually kept a very strict, sabbatarian home.

734
01:10:26.340 --> 01:10:31.820
In Rome, nothing was done on Sunday except praying, et cetera, and they wind up, they

735
01:10:31.820 --> 01:10:35.860
have a social, post-millennial plight in the gradual sense, not the sense of killing everybody

736
01:10:35.860 --> 01:10:39.860
immediately, which we talked about before, but gradually, sort of evolutionary, where

737
01:10:39.860 --> 01:10:42.540
the government takes over and the government becomes God's major instrument.

738
01:10:42.540 --> 01:10:45.580
There's a great phrase which Ely repeats, and it was all these guys who repeat, Ely

739
01:10:45.580 --> 01:10:51.180
was the founder of the American Economic Association, by the way, a very progressive status intellectual.

740
01:10:51.180 --> 01:10:55.620
The phrase is, government is God's major instrument of redemption, through government, through

741
01:11:25.620 --> 01:11:29.700
They see, it's very easy for these guys to become secularists, for all they said was,

742
01:11:29.700 --> 01:11:31.980
we have the kingdom of God, and we'll establish some government.

743
01:11:31.980 --> 01:11:35.540
Pretty soon, God sort of drops out, and you've got the government, why worry about God?

744
01:11:35.540 --> 01:11:39.540
You have a sort of gradual secularization, but post-millennialists sort of die out.

745
01:11:39.540 --> 01:11:43.300
By 1920, the world died out, because the world becomes straight people who know and love,

746
01:11:43.300 --> 01:11:46.300
you know, social, gospel ministers and all the rest of it, I mean, people who are essentially

747
01:11:46.300 --> 01:11:47.300
non-theists.