Marx Explains: Why do Workers Get Suckered by Capitalism?

A better question would be why the humans get suckered by greedy people because you can probably find those anywhere

Hello! I used to watch your old anarchist content, but I haven't checked you out in a while. It seems like you've gone more ML since then. I'd love to see a video where you explain how your philosophy has changed over time. Thanks!

"Bourgeoisified" proletariat...?

Working class Libertarians’ is a more modern American English way of putting it;
It’s the domestic color revolution that’s going to crush our every hope

Middle management is petty bourgeois

You are MASSSIVE HYPOCRITES

I've been very suspicious of the concept of PMC for a long time, but this is the first time I've heard anyone break down the definition from the actual source, instead of trying to shoe horn it into a materialist fame work... which is confusing, doesn't work, but ironically indicates that material analysis is what people inherently try to think in terms, given no other interests trying to direct their thought.

Boeing engineers did not respect the machinists who went on strike nearly every contract until 2000 when engineers rejected their contract. Machinists set up burn barrels for striking engineers and worked to rule slowing production and emphasizing the need for engineers. The solidarity created a bond between workers and is the reason Boeing moved production to a “right to work” state and lobbied to change airplane certification rules.

It blows my mind that seemingly intelligent human being still thinks communism is a great idea. 😂

Tge working class who side with capitalism is more pathetic than the bourgeoisie okd money.

I'm learning a great deal from Luna's book. Well explained and laid out. Thank you both.

Honestly the conversation isn't easy. Like Lenin described the aristocracy as "semi petit bourgeois" which is kind of like having your cake and eating it to. Either they are petit bourgeois or they are proles who behave like petite bourgeois. Not cause of any ideological construct but cause the material pressures on them and other workers are distinct because of the concessions they are able to achieve thanks to both imperialism and their status as skilled workers allowing them more coercive potential to co-determine to a small degree what is to happen to the MoP and the surplus value. The consequence ends up the same in that either the contradiction between skilled and unskilled needs to be abolished or that the petite bourgeoisie needs to be abolished and also in that their somewhat more privileged position makes them unreliable allies and that we ought to focus on the more downtrodden workers. Being honest I am saying this as someone currently a beneficiary of the "skilled labor shortage" going on in Europe.

Class traitors

Thank you so much for this one. I'm sick of arguing with armchair leftists who think there is no proletariat in the imperial core simply by virtue of it being the imperial core. Their "communism" is rooted more in a culture-war hatred of Americans than it is in worker solidarity or material relations.

If you must sell your physical and/or mental labor to live, you are proletariat , no ifs ands or buts.

Isn't the Teamsters Union taking the role of the Wobblies ONLY INSOFAR AS they have been bringing non-transport-related shops under their aegis? In 1998 when UW graduate teaching associates organized, we became Teamsters. Costco employees are Teamsters. I'm sure there are many more sectors organizing as Teamsters.

Interesting, but you got it wrong regarding the human consciousness. Human consciousness is not a cultural bi-product or a superstructure. Human consciousness is however being suppressed in a society with no room for human consciousness, a materialistic and consuming society that by alienation only remove the individual further from his or her true nature. It may come as a surprise, but the true nature of a human being is not to be a worker!

A good first step is to get the proletariat to distrust the billionaire capitalist owned media. Capitalist propaganda won't succeed as easily if people distrust the media's narrative.

Holy cannoli, this channel is so underrated!

Petty Bourgeoisie are your HVAC and small engine repair store owners.

@Noncompete fyi the link on banyan house to the $20 print book goes to a 404 page not found.

Comrade Confucius explained the exact the same thing in his videos and people still don't listen or try and learn about class analysis. E.g. A bunch of reactionaries swarmed his accounts and responded with nasty insults.

I live in a deeply red state. This video describes so many people I know here!

some of the phrasing towards the beginning seems a bit off to me, not sure if i disagree or it was just poor phrasing but i'd generally regard a crafts person who owns their own means of production(tools) as a liberated proletariat to a degree though not perfectly so. but lots of good points here.

I never thought of trade unions as a tool of capitalism to prevent a single worker's union, but that's clarifying. Great video.

Lumpenproletariat: a formerly problematic term that used to mean lowest classes of nonworkers "not interested in revolution" that meant unemployed, unhoused/nomadic, prisoners, and people who work in underground economies. The idea of their "lack of" revolutionary potential continues to be challenged though, especially in the prisons

this was cool- but here's what stresses me out about Communist Discourse-
I think I got a good grasp on some of the flaws of the liberal ideological/metaphysial definitions of what the PMC is. You spent 2nd half of the video kind of attacking those characteristics, but I never get a solid grasp or some real-life examples in plain language that help me understand what Marxist dialectical "material"/"objective" relationships look like. How does the relationship between bougeois proletariat and capital actually look? How might it differ from everyone else, or does it? Are there any material differences in relationships between a middle management class and non-managers? Even the concept of owning production and investing can be flushed out.... Where does this leave independent contractors? etc etc

It's always stressful to overly rely on the old texts of Communist writers bc you have to realize that just saying Dialectical Materialism over and over doesn't help people understand it within their everyday context. Thanks for the video, though!

Excellent video!! The discourse around the notion of a PMC is something I have heard in the broad online left space. So it is great to hear a Marxist approach to analyzing the idea, which is something I would like to improve in my own analysis of various topics.

The concepts of a bourgeois proletariat and labor aristocracy seem very similar. I wonder whether they refer to the same idea of a stratum of the working class that experiences greater privileges, including receiving higher wages, and therefore has a greater tenancy to accept the status quo.

Also, living in the USA, I wonder whether under settler-colonialism, the material interests of settlers vs colonized nations are diametrically opposed. Many people, particularly indigenous and black, consider settler-colonialism as the principal contradiction, which would be resolved through decolonization and the dismantling of the USA, along with the other settler-colonies on the continent and around the world. This is because establishing a socialist USA wouldn't resolve the colonial contradiction, and therefore, be a continuation of colonialism with a socialist economy. I wonder if the material interests of the settler proletariat to preserve the existence of the USA could be preventing them from uniting with indigenous and black nations to dismantle the USA to end colonialism on the continent.

I have been thinking about this for a while and I'm curious to hear if you have thoughts.

"The working class can kiss my ass, I've got the foreman's job!"

Marxists are genuinely some of the dumbest people alive 😂

"Professional managerial class" is its own class, but its merely a subdivision of the proletariat. If small business owners are "petit bourgeois", then these "professionals" are "grand proletariat". Their mistake is that in adopting some of the (snobbish) attitudes and cultural affects of the bourgeoisie, that they are somehow elevated to that class... that's false consciousness; they are still proletarian (if they have to work for a living), just proletarians with a chip on their shoulders and a snobbish disdain for their "blue collar" class-mates. The bottom line is that the bourgeoisie has given them enough privileges to convince them to betray their class and service their masters with glee. There's an historical precedent for this — in the Roman empire, there were teachers, philosophers, scribes, etc., ... who were slaves, and just as much slaves as manual labourers.

Shouldn't you be talking about the lumpen proletariat? America is ranked 29th in literacy, behind Bolivia. And that's deliberate public policy.

This is a great video. Thank you for resurfacing this concept!

Well I like to think of the Bourgeois as the "Greek Pantheon of Gods",
and the Intellectual class as heros like Odysseus of Ithaca, or Hercules. Yes they get into fights with the Gods, but ultimately they are able to carve out their own slice of the pie without disrupting the system.
Then the Petty Bourgeois class are the people who actually own the marketing and distribution rights to Odysseus and Hercules. The Bourgeois Proletariat class are the actual marketers and distributors of Greek Mythos stories and the consumers who dream of growing up to be said heroes.
And the Proletariat class are the actual underpaid factory workers who mass produce these books and don't even know who Odysseus is, let alone can read it.

If we become communists, do we have to use laptops as old as Luna's

I'm gonna tell my Grangran that this is a video of JD Vance explaining communism and send it to her.

Also, apropos of nothing I haven't read any books on hypermodern syndicalism. Like at all, I don't believe they exist and I don't believe books on techno-syndicalism exist. I think the only books on syndicalism are the anarcho-syndicalism ones, no democratic-syndicalism, no communo-syndicalism, no social syndicalism.

To answer the title of this video: Simply because of ignorance and propaganda that has existed since the feudalism and serfdom ended. The illusion that they will be able to be as wealthy and powerful as oligarchs someday without being able to recognize that the oligarchs have always rigged institutions to block upward momentum while simultaneously profiting off of the ignorant masses that, mostly through no fault of their own, do not know the totality of the policies of these institutions that often covertly work against the interests of those on the lower classes of society. The oligarchs also amass political power through their wealth to propagandize and gaslight the public to turn their ire against lower classes and/or minority demographics blaming them for the reason why the middle and upper classes can’t become oligarchs themselves.

Divide and conquer. I’m no communist but without a doubt if Marx was correct about anything, it’s this particular dynamic and there is plenty of evidence to back that up throughout history and through human nature: human instinct is to hoard resources for the survival of oneself even at the cost of another. For oligarchs to maintain their position and to hoard more wealth, they need to divide lower classes against each other through various social and ideological divisions.

You are stupid

Hey! Draftsmen exist, in fact I'm sitting down and drafting right now! It's digital in the form of CAD now, but we are still called Drafters!

Here in Brazil we are full of those individuals that think that are part of the upper class. It's sad but very real. 😢

130k subs and only 17k views in 2 months - glad to see the wOrKeRs are still thriving in their own delusional headspace. Why do Asian women always end up with the most weak and mediocre white men anyway lol, internalised colonialism perhaps?

High ah hell rn but you lowkey spittin unc