Hello my name is Peter Joseph and the
following is an analysis and critique
of Jordan Peterson's opening arguments
during the Slavo Žižek debate
from April 19th, 2019.
I was planning on doing a full
analysis of the entire debate
but once I began dissecting
Peterson's statements
I realized there was no way I would
have time to do the full event.
The title of this debate is
'Happiness: Capitalism versus Marxism,'
an unfortunate decision
because it sets up a binary
position between assumed ideologies
while throwing in the word "happiness,"
muddying the issue even more since what
defines happiness is sociologically vague
when it comes to causality.
I point this out because
it's time for seriousness.
Human society is faced with a
lot of complicated challenges.
Between rising social destabilization
due to socioeconomic inequality
coupled with vast ecological decline,
it's really critical high level
debate occurs regarding
how human society can solve its problems
ensuring sustainability both
environmentally and socially.
Sadly this debate
accomplished none of that,
instead trapping the conversation
inside of this old duality of
capitalism versus Marxism or socialism.
Anyone seriously involved in considering
environmental social science,
public health science,
and what kind of social system
can create the best Public
Health and sustainable practices,
would gawk at this kind
of duality proposed.
It's not a serious framing and
again it's very disappointing.
And yet people are gonna watch
this, especially young people,
and this is gonna be their limit of
debate, this is gonna be how they're gonna
frame their sense of possibility
in terms of future social organization.
That said, again my focus here
will be Jordan Peterson's comments
which are conservative and on the
side of capitalism if you will.
And the first thing I think I should point
out is that he's given great advantage here
because what he does is
create a massive straw man,
addressing and criticizing the Communist
Manifesto written almost 200 years ago
by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
His attacks on this book,
which as I will explain are
extremely poorly thought
out and just wrong,
become a proxy for attacks on
contemporary activists and thinkers
looking to alter the capitalist
structure or remove it.
His perspective is consistently
libertarian in the modern sense of the word
and his pathological fetish with
taking a psychological position
rather than any kind of synergetic
sociological relationship
in terms of causality or social structure
is to me what makes him one of the most
regressive intellectuals out there today,
especially considering
how popular he's become.
And since I'm about to be
thrown into defending Marx
and progressive thoughts in general,
let me make one thing extremely clear.
I am not a Marxist or a communist
or a socialist or whatever.
I don't identify with any of that.
And I see Marx's writings as
equivalent to other philosophers
from Thomas Hobbes to Hegel,
to Thorstein Veblen,
and many others: it's all information -
and some of it's good, some of it's bad
and you weigh it all out.
And the faster all of you people
see all of this is as information
rather than ideological dualities
or symbols of something,
the faster we can
progress the conversation.
Likewise let me clarify one
other very important thing.
Those that invoke disapproval of
historical communism, and rightly so,
almost universally say it was a
consequence of the writings of Karl Marx.
And I would argue that it's a
consequence of the writings of Karl Marx
in the same way the Columbine massacre
was a consequence of the
music of Marilyn Manson.
Any respected historian and theorist
recognizes that the Soviet Union was
actually state capitalism in the extreme.
It never achieved any level of theoretical
socialism, and certainly not communism.
And if you look at the writings of
Vladimir Lenin, he admits to this fact!
And again that's not defending anything;
I'm being intellectually accurate.
All that said, let's begin.
[Peterson] So I'm going to outline
ten of the fundamental axioms
of the Communist Manifesto.
And so these are truths that are basically
held as self-evident by the authors.
They're truths that are presented
in some sense as unquestioned
and I'm going to question them.
"History is to be viewed primarily
as an economic class struggle."
Alright, so let's think
about that for a minute.
First of all, the proposition there
is that history is primarily to be
viewed through an economic lens.
And I think that's a
debatable proposition because
there are many other motivations that
drive human beings than economics.
[PJ] He goes on a brief explanation
here about how there are
other important observable things occurring
in history that relate to human society
as if that's a revelation,
as if that's a rebuttal.
The text he's talking about
is explicitly organized
around the observation of
economic stratification
and the problems therein,
as a result of that organization.
But rather than simply acquiesce to the
simple thesis of the book itself
he goes off on this quick non sequitur
that just muddies the waters,
implying that the thesis itself
overstates its relevance.
It is true that-...
[JP] ...there are many other motivations
that drive human beings than economics but-
[PJ] Economics is literally
the foundation of survival!
Without viable economic integrity, you die.
It is the starting point
of human well-being.
And to quickly muddy it up with this
subjective nuance garbage is just silly.
[JP] The idea that one of the
driving forces between history is
hierarchical struggle, is absolutely true.
But the idea that that's
actually history is not true
because it's deeper than history;
it's biology itself because
organisms of all sorts organize
themselves into hierarchies.
And one of the problems with
hierarchies is that they tend to
arrange themselves into a
winner-take-all situation.
[PJ] And here we have the cliché
biological determinism of hierarchy,
something that has been long criticized by
behavioral biologists and anthropologists
as an over-generalization.
But before I address this,
Peterson then goes on to
say that the problem is hence
"deeper" than social organization
because hierarchy is inevitable
and will prevail regardless.
And the truly startling thing about
this is that he's completely ignoring
everything structural put
forward by Marx and others.
The criticism of hierarchy is not
the criticism of hierarchy in and of
itself, in whatever form it may take.
It is the criticism of hierarchy
that is mechanistically output
by the very structure of market capitalism.
It's about the dynamics that occur between
those with capital and those without,
labor and owners,
and hence the class relationships and
economic quality of life relationships
that result consequentially,
because of the structure.
As far as biologically determined
hierarchy in human society
it's an extremely broad idea
which could be talked
about later if need be,
but that's not what Marx was talking about.
Not to mention there's no vagueness here.
Just look around you at what
people are complaining about today.
Massive inequality between people with
immense amounts of growing capital
and then a working class
with stagnating wages
and all the general cost efficiency
oppressive forces that are inherent
to the logic of the system.
[JP] So there's accuracy in
the accusation that that is a
eternal form of motivation for struggle.
But it's an underestimation of
the seriousness of the problem
because it attributes it to the structure
of human societies rather than the
deeper reality of the existence
of hierarchical structures per se,
which as they also characterize the
animal kingdom to a large degree,
are clearly not only human construction.
[PJ] Just to reiterate, Marxist perspective
has to do with the structure of the system
and how it produces
socioeconomic stratification
as a consequential result of
the mechanics of the system,
not some type of vague biological drive.
And to give an analogy of what he's
actually saying because he's trivializing
the degrees of hierarchy that can exist
regardless of how caustic they are,
is that you could say there's
an equivalency between
a person in a cubicle working
that can go home at night
to a shackled slave centuries ago
just because humans have some type
of hierarchical need to oppress
and therefore it doesn't
matter which happens.
[JP] And the idea that there's hierarchical
competition among human beings,
there's evidence for that; it goes
back at least to the Paleolithic times.
[PJ] Woh woh woh, hold on there champ!
This is the most categorically
incorrect statement made thus far.
Human hierarchy going back to the
Paleolithic era 3 million years ago?
Stunningly passive
statement to conclude upon,
since it's been firmly established,
corroborated over and over again,
that before the Neolithic
Revolution 12,000 years ago
human society lived in hunter-gatherer
lifestyles with no social hierarchy:
primitive egalitarian groups.
I'm not observing some
sophistication of this early
period, the pre-Neolithic culture.
It is simply the recognition that they
did NOT have socioeconomic stratification.
No class hierarchy and this has been proven
by the numerous hunter-gatherer societies
that have remained over the past few
centuries that have been interviewed.
Many of them didn't have a
concept of economic hierarchy.
Why? Because their means of
production didn't produce it.
Now I'm not going to spend much
time giving examples of this
because it's so commonly
accepted and I'm stunned
Peterson actually goes out in
public and says these things.
But it wasn't until the introduction of
surplus upon the discovery of Agriculture,
that the tendency for social
stratification began forming
and increasingly so by the
structures that were being created
through labor specialization,
surplus hoarding and so on.
Likewise if he's gonna play this
bland evolutionary analog game
such he's done before with
his silly lobster shit,
the two closest primate species to the
human being are chimpanzees and bonobos.
Both of them have social hierarchy,
however they're very different.
Those organized hierarchies show
very different types of character
because of the environments
the two live in.
Chimpanzees have a very
rigid male-driven hierarchy.
Bonobos have a very loose
low-conflict female driven hierarchy.
Now I'm not arguing hierarchy doesn't
exist, but it's very malleable.
There's a great plasticity
in the primate species.
How hierarchies manifest ultimately
is contingent upon the environment
and how society organizes itself.
And there is no evidence
that humans have to persist
with the deeply imbalanced
capitalist-driven hierarchy
as some law of nature
since 90% of human history
has recorded no money markets or hierarchy.
It's not built-in to our genetics in
some deeply immutable impulsive way
where people just drive
towards hierarchy and status
regardless of the environment around them.
[JP] And so that's the next problem is that
this ancient problem of
hierarchical structure
is clearly not attributable
to capitalism because
it existed long in human history
before capitalism existed
and then it predated human history itself.
[PJ] And people wonder why I'm baffled
by how this guy has any audience
or following whatsoever.
[JP] So, the question then arises,
why would you necessarily
at least implicitly link
the class struggle with capitalism
given that it's a far deeper problem?
[PJ] Because it's definitely
not implicitly linked.
The structure of the system of market
economics produces mathematically
the result of the class structure;
it can be analyzed and formalized.
Has zero to do with biological
circumstances in the structure that exists.
So there's also very little
understanding in the Communist Manifesto
that any of the
hierarchical organizations that
human beings have put together
might have a positive element,
and that's an absolute catastrophe because
hierarchical structures are
actually necessary to solve
complicated social problems.
[PJ] Firstly as Peterson himself
will point out in a moment,
Marx acknowledges that capitalism is
extremely efficient in outputting goods
so there's acknowledgment that the system
works in its hierarchy on that level.
The main problem of the
hierarchy is the distribution.
That's why inequality is such a problem,
that's why global poverty
has existed for so long.
Distribution is the problem:
the way money is allocated,
the way profit is obtained,
the imbalance of it all.
No one's ever argued that the system
of hierarchy within capitalism
hasn't been beneficial.
Now that aside,
to say that hierarchy is the only form of
collaborative infrastructure
that can produce something
is deeply short-sighted,
and I would like to open that up
to the entire open source community
and all the people that work through
parallel lateral systems out there,
working to develop new models
which actually ARE more efficient
when they are implemented.
But obviously they're not
implemented that often
because of the dominance of the system.
And you can even look at the
efficiency of collectives,
corporate collectives where
there is a so-called socialist
Board of Directors and everyone
shares the profits equally
or almost equally throughout
the entire company.
And they are also deeply efficient
without the same kind of hierarchy.
And in the end no one's arguing that
hierarchy itself is somehow just awful.
There are different kinds of hierarchy
with different kinds of outcomes.
So Jordan's generalizations
don't help anything,
they just become
establishment-preserving once again.
[JP] It is the case that hierarchies dispossess
people, and that's a big problem.
That's the fundamental problem of
inequality, but it's also the case that
hierarchies happen to be a very
efficient way of distributing resources.
[PJ] Again, distributing resources amongst
the business class and the wealthy, yes.
Distributing resources to
the people that are in need,
but don't have the money
to GET those resources, no.
[JP] And it's finally the
case that human hierarchies
are not fundamentally predicated on power.
[PJ] OK, everybody strap in!
you ready for this?
[JP] And I would say that
biological anthropological
data on that are crystal clear.
You don't rise to a position of authority
that's reliable in a human society
primarily by exploiting other people.
It's a very unstable means
of obtaining power.
[PJ] I had to listen to that statement
quite a few times to really absorb
the detachment one has to have
from reality to actually state it.
"You don't rise to a position of authority
that's reliable in human society
primarily by exploiting other people.
It's a very unstable means
of obtaining power."
There are two kinds of positions of
authority we recognize in society today
which fits the context of
this whole conversation.
First of all the economic power,
hence the head of a corporation,
or by extension political power
which generally involves economics
as most recognized, as Marx did -
presidents and congressmen
and people like that.
Well, if you know what exploitation
means in a Marxist distinction,
it's not a negative act against somebody;
exploitation is a system function.
It's related to surplus value
which means that when an
owner employs a laborer,
the laborer produces something,
works a number of hours,
there's a value to those hours,
and then the owner sells
it at a larger profit,
and he takes the difference,
hence the term "profit."
Profit is the manifest surplus
value of the exploited laborer,
meaning the laborer that isn't
recorded in the wages of the person.
So firstly I can only assume that
he doesn't even understand what
Marxist exploitation even is
and he instead sees it as some type of
greedy kind of behavior
which he clearly doesn't see profit
that way as he talks about later.
So by very definition,
CEOs and all of these people
work up the ranks of their value.
They get more and more money,
they have more capital,
they invest more and more,
they buy more companies,
and they do that invariably
by exploiting labor to
some degree or another.
And just for fun we'll extend
this to the political context,
I'll restate his proposition:
"You don't rise to a position of authority
that's reliable in human society
primarily by exploiting other people.
It's a very unstable means
of obtaining power."
Well I'm just gonna show the picture of
this individual for a couple of seconds.
Not only is he a poster
child of the capitalist class
with outrageous degrees of criminal
corruption through literal exploitation
to advance his bottom line,
his political process to get
elected was fantastically
exploitative on so many cultural
levels I don't even know what to say.
Unfortunately the complete
stupidity of this statement
did not go unrecognized by the audience.
[JP] ... society,
primarily by exploiting other people.
It's a very unstable means
of obtaining power.
[Audience laughter]
So that's a problem.
Marx also assumes that you can think
about history as a binary class struggle
with clear divisions between say the
proletariat, and the bourgeoisie.
[PJ] And then he proceeds to set up
effectively a straw man saying that
the Communist Manifesto doesn't
differentiate clear enough
between the proletariat or the bourgeoisie
and they are somehow defined
as categorical groups
and that's that,
almost like they're different races.
That might sound really extreme
but if you listen to what he says
this is how he pitches it.
He even goes on later to say that
one group is considered evil
and the other is considered good.
Once again he's avoiding
the structural relationship
and he's reducing it all down
to a psychological relationship
or the assumption of such, as if
you are a psychological
being as the bourgeoisie
and a psychological
being as the proletariat
but that's not how this works.
The psychology is determined from the system,
from the structure that people inhabit.
If you're a capitalist you have
a certain incentive structure
and you are going to gravitate
towards certain behaviors
because of that incentive and power.
Same goes for the laborers
or the proletariat.
They experience their oppression,
they have a general outrage,
they have certain patterns of incentives
that create a different kind
of psychological atmosphere.
[JP] And that's actually a problem
because it's not so easy to make a
firm division between who's exploiter
and who's exploitee let's say.
[PJ] Again he must not understand what
exploitation means in the Marxist context.
Yes, you absolutely can understand
who's exploiting and who isn't,
who's the owner, who's the laborer,
who's the submissive force,
and who's the dominant force.
[JP] Because it's not obvious
like in the case of small
shareholders let's say,
whether or not they happen to be part of
the oppressed or part of the oppressor.
[PJ] Very bizarre hair splitting here
and the reason he's doing it is
so we can set up a story about
the violence of the system or
claim the violence of the system,
based on the idea that there's
no way to differentiate between
who the "exploiters" and
who the "exploitees" are,
who the working class is effectively
isn't who the ownership class is,
and he goes on to tell this story.
[JP] This actually turned out to be a
big problem, in the Russian Revolution
and by big problem I mean
tremendously big problem.
Because it turned out that you could
fragment people into multiple identities
and that's a fairly easy thing to do.
And you could usually
find some axis along which
they were part of the oppressor class.
Anyways the listing of how it was
possible for you to be
bourgeois instead of proletariat
grew immensely, and that was one
of the reasons that the Red Terror
claimed all the victims that it claimed.
[PJ] He then goes to describe the
circumstance with the Kulacks which were
peasant farmers that owned
their own land, in Russia,
and eventually the state came in and
made them distribute it in a
socialist way amongst other people
and it resulted in their exile, which
had chain reactions which were negative.
[JP] And about 1.8 million
of them were exiled.
About 400,000 were killed,
and the net consequence of that,
removal of their private property
because of their bourgeois status, was
arguably the death of 6 million
Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s.
And so the binary class struggle
idea- that was a bad idea.
[PJ] Okay so you have a
group of private owners
that have their private property taken.
Obviously we don't agree with that today
but that's completely beside the point,
that's unfortunately what they did
in the government at that time.
How does that relate to this
binary exploiter-exploitee thing?
They were private property owners,
and that was the issue.
So the means of production
was taken from them,
sadly that's what happened,
but there's no gray area in that as if
the vagueness between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie
somehow created and manifested this?
It makes no sense at all what he's arguing;
I don't understand how
he came up with that.
And in regard to his climax point
with the death of millions of
Ukrainians as a result of all this,
assuming that it's systemically true
- I'm not even sure -
what we're really talking about
is state authoritarian power
abusing its power and killing people.
That doesn't necessarily imply
Marxism, socialism or communism.
And it's really unfortunate to hear
this constant nonsense that comes out.
There's a book that was written
called 'The Black Book of Communism,'
it claims 100 million people were
killed by communism in a century,
a very dubious number.
It also ignores so many other
atrocities and genocides that happened
because of power in general.
And it's just a kind of
manipulative strategy
to get people to hate
anything other than capitalism
by saying "well,
if you do anything other than capitalism
you're gonna be killed by Authority."
[JP] It's also bad in this way
and this is a real sleight of
hand that Marx pulls off is:
You have a binary class division,
proletariat and bourgeoisie,
and you have an implicit idea
that all of the good is on
the side of the proletariat
and all of the evil is on
the side of the bourgeoisie.
[PJ] Again, nowhere in
the writings of historical
or contemporary socialism as it were,
is their explicit value judgments made
where it's predetermined
that bad people make it to
the top of the hierarchy or the
top of a corporation and so on,
and good people are always
gonna be the underdogs.
There are transfers of
psychology that do happen
and that's been done through
various university studies
as people get more wealth and power
they do become a little bit more
corrupt, that's true,
but it's a structural relationship.
So the fact that he sets this up
too is just deeply frustrating
and he goes on and on
about this crap as well.
[JP] And that's classic
group identity thinking.
One of the reasons I don't
like politics is because
once you divide people into groups
and pit them against one another
it's very easy to assume that
all the evil in the world can
be attributed to one group,
the hypothetical oppressors,
and all the good to the other.
It's absolutely foolish
to make the presumption
that you can identify someone's moral worth
with their economic standing.
[PJ] Again Marx never
argued anything like that.
[JP] Marx also came up with this idea,
which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell,
(that's a technical term, crazy idea)
of the dictatorship of the proletariat!
[PJ] And then he goes off on the
"dictatorship of the proletariat"
loving that play on words,
which is exactly what it is.
When Marx heard this phrase he employed it
as an antithetical position to the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,
which was considered a kind of
transition stage in the evolution
of the socialist goal,
where basically the state apparatus
still needed to be utilized,
as they tried to work away from it.
Again you can argue the efficacy
of any of these approaches
but that's completely
beside the point because
Peterson is making it
seem like it's a parallel
exactly to the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie
when the dictatorship of the proletariat
was more of a play on words once again
that basically said we're
going to create a "Council,"
a Democratic Council of
the people in large form,
and have a democratic process rather than
a singular dictatorship of individual
people or just a few people.
That was the idea,
and you won't see that explained
by Peterson whatsoever.
[JP] And that's the next idea
that I really stumbled across-
it was like okay, so what's the problem?
The problem is the
capitalists own everything.
They own all the means of production
and they're oppressing everyone,
and that would be all the workers.
The fact that, that you assumed a priori
that all the evil can be attributed
to the capitalists (the bourgeoisie),
and all the good could be attributed
to the proletariat meant that
you could hypothesize that a
dictatorship of the proletariat
could come about and ...
the problem with that you see is that...
because all the evil isn't divided so
easily up into oppressor and oppressed that
all the proletariat aren't going to be good
and when you put people in the same
position as the evil capitalists,
especially if you believe
that social pressure is
one of the determining
factors of human character
which the Marxists certainly believed,
then why wouldn't you assume that the
proletariat would immediately become
as or more corrupt than the capitalist?
[PJ] Okay, first he's continuing this contrived
good-versus-evil framing
as if it has relevance.
Obviously, structures determine
incentives and behavior.
It's nothing new or profound,
it's a basic sociological observation.
Owners have different incentives than
workers, in fact they are at odds;
that's why unions exist.
Even though they might seek gain of
course, to maximize their gain,
that's shared, but they come from
completely different positions.
Second, he makes a completely
vague assumption about
the proletariat being put in
the position of the bourgeoisie
and they must become corrupted if they
make it to the top of that hierarchy
as if everything is equal.
Once again this completely
avoids the structural change
that underscores the entire socialist idea.
It would be different if the proletariat
simply wiped out the bourgeoisie
and took their position, yeah -
they would be absolutely
corrupted in exactly the same way
because they exist in the same structure.
But that's not what the pitch is.
That's not what the entire point of
all of this energy that was spent
in the socialist development was about.
It's about changing the structure.
And again he seems to be misinterpreting
the full definition of the quote
"dictatorship of the proletariat" which
was a transition team if you will,
a large group of people
that were supposed to be
generated that made democratic
decisions about how to organize things,
using the state institution
as they worked to transition to
more efficient socialist means.
Now again I'm not sitting here
supporting these theories,
I'm simply telling you what the Communist
Manifesto and Marx actually meant.
Overall he seems to imply
that hierarchy and power
somehow will create a kind of
corruption regardless, due to biology.
That's what I draw from this.
So the proletariat makes it to a position
of power replacing the bourgeoisie,
they are going to corrupt regardless.
This seems to be
what he's saying; I could be wrong but
that's the only real logical
conclusion based on his argument.
[JP] The next problem is -
well, what makes you think that you
can take some system as complicated as
like capitalist free-market
society, and centralize that,
and put decision-making power
in the hands of a few people,
without specifying the mechanisms by
which you're going to choose them like,
what makes you think they're gonna
have the wisdom or the ability
to do what the capitalists were doing
unless you assume as Marx did that
all of the evil was with the capitalists
and all the good was with the proletariats
and that nothing that capitalists
did constituted valid labor?
[PJ] So he appears to be alluding
here to the complexity of an economy
and how it's very very difficult
for people to sit in a boardroom
and decide how to distribute things
while markets of course are extremely
dynamic with the price mechanism and so on,
something Ludwig von Mises and
economists put out years ago
in criticism of socialism:
that it was impossible
for man to sit back
and regulate this manually,
which was a fair criticism,
something that isn't applicable
today with technology and networking.
He merges this brief
notion with the idea that
capitalists being deemed worthless
in terms of labor is unfounded,
and of course that's obviously true
in terms of vision or innovation.
The ownership class - the ownership
individuals - do start things
and there's value to that at abstraction.
But he takes it too far once again.
[JP] ...Which is another
thing that Marx assumed:
which is palpably absurd,
because people who are-
like maybe if you're a dissolute
aristocrat from 1830, or earlier,
and you run a feudal estate and all
you do is spend your time gambling
and chasing prostitutes,
well then your labor value is zero but
if you're running a business,
and it's a successful business,
first of all you're a bloody fool
to exploit your workers because
- even if you're greedy as sin -
because you're not going to extract
the maximum amount of labor
out of them by doing that.
[PJ] Again he clearly has no idea
what Marxist exploitation even is.
And the argument against
the ownership class,
the leisure class as Thorstein
Veblen would call it,
is that yes: when the machine
is finally set in motion,
the capitalist individual, the
founder, he or she did work initially,
but they don't do really anything
after it's set in motion.
Look at Jeff Bezos.
Yeah sure, he's a visionary.
But the machine he's created, he doesn't
ever have to do anything ever again.
But yet he will make stupid
amounts of money every second
because of what he set in motion.
[JP] And the notion that you're
adding no productive value
as a manager rather than a capitalist,
it's absolutely absurd;
all it does is indicate that
you either know nothing whatsoever
about how an actu al business works
or you refuse to know anything
about how an actual business works.
[PJ] I hate to be the broken
record here but once again
he is completely ignoring the structural
relationships as observed by Marxism
and as are fundamentally
obvious sociologically
because of the structure of business.
Now if you want to talk about the
quaintness of a small mom-and-pop shop
and the fact that there is an owner,
and they do their best to manage things
and they want to improve things and take
care of their employees, that's fine.
That is not what happens when
it comes to massive institutions
and huge industries that have
boards of directors that
make stupid amounts of money.
They have been lucky to be a part of
the development of an institution.
If the institution becomes
popular and it works,
they benefit gravely disproportionately.
And that does have a moral ramification
that was correctly observed
by Marxist philosophy.
And the fact that Peterson
can't see any of that,
doing this hyper-reductionism
down to this idea
of the capitalist manager
again shows how utterly detached
from reality he really is.
[JP] Then the next problem
is the criticism of profit.
It's like, well- what's
wrong with profit exactly?
What's the problem with profit?
Well, the idea from the Marxist
perspective was that profit was theft.
[PJ] So did Peterson get
the Cliff Notes version
of the Communist Manifesto or something?
Because it's really bizarre
how he jumps to this sort of
moral argument about profit
and how, as he continues,
how obviously there's a contribution
of the capitalist or the innovator
and they deserve something.
He goes on to say that they
need more money to invest
in other things eventually,
equivocating effectively profit with
income in general as if they're different,
which in fact they are not
in the way he describes it,
because he's ignoring the fact that profit
is derived from surplus value of labor.
The Marxist concept of profit
is related to surplus value,
which I've already explained before.
Now it's absolutely fair to argue that
even though labor and
resources cost a certain amount
and the owner is going to
sell it at a higher amount
generating a margin of profit,
there is still a lingering sense
of contribution by the capitalist
through innovation or organization
or the purchase of capital
machinery and so on,
to make things happen.
And that is a completely valid argument.
However, that's not what he's doing.
He's detaching the reality from
the Marxist perspective and just
pontificating about the
role of profit in general,
which really doesn't
achieve any particular end.
[JP] If the capitalist is
adding value to the corporation
then there's some utility and
some fairness in him or her
extracting the value of
their abstract labor,
their thought, their abstract abilities,
their ability to manage the company...
And then the other issue with profit
and you know this if
you've ever run a business,
it's really useful constraint.
Like, it's not enough to have a good idea.
It's not a good enough to have a good
idea and a sales and marketing plan,
and then to implement it.
It provides a good constraint
on wasted labor.
And so most of the things that I've
done in my life, even psychologically,
that were designed to help
people's psychological health,
I tried to run on a for-profit basis.
And the reason for what that was,
apart from the fact that I'm
not adverse to making a profit
partly so my enterprises can grow,
it was also so that the reforms of
stupidity that I couldn't engage in
because I would be punished by the market
enough to eradicate the enterprise.
[PJ] What a bizarre man!
Okay. He's saying that
profit, if you don't make it,
if it's not profitable
and there isn't someone
willing to pay you a profit,
then it's not worth doing.
And that might be true on his
therapeutic business level.
But let's think about all the
things that don't generate a profit.
Such as, oh I don't know-
solving homelessness,
or all of the things
that don't have a return
because either the people don't have money
or what needs to be solved
doesn't generate revenue
by the process of solving it.
This is an aside to the
Marxist revelation of the
exploitation of profit which
is a perfectly viable concept.
But Peterson is off in
his own weird fantasyland
as usual with all of this stuff.
[JP] So, Marx and Engels
also assume that this
dictatorship of the proletariat
which involves absurd centralization,
the overwhelming probability of
corruption and impossible computation
as the proletariat now try to
rationally compute the manner in which
an entire market economy could run,
which cannot be done
because it's far too complicated
for anybody to think through...
[PJ] And the ultimate summation argument
where you pretend that
everything you've talked about
has already been proven so
you can summarize it all
as if it's all official and declaratory.
So you have the "dictatorship
of the proletariat,"
a concept he clearly
doesn't even understand,
which will lead to "absurd centralization,"
will inevitably lead to corruption,
and he clearly doesn't recognize
once again the structural differences
in what's being proposed, in theory,
to change the structure; he
sees a one-to-one equivocation,
where the proletariat are just going
to take the role of the bourgeoisie
and hence perform the same
"evils" as they always would.
And then he goes on to talk about
the economic calculation problem.
Now no one can possibly comprehend
the complexity of market dynamics
in a roundtable group.
Now that's probably true, but if you
listen carefully to his disposition
he would argue even today
that nobody would be able to create
economic calculation like the market
because it's impossible,
which is completely preposterous.
With modern technology sensor systems, and AI,
and all the networking
capacities we have today,
we could actually create a new market
if you will without any money whatsoever
and it would be 10 times more efficient.
[JP] The next theory is that
somehow the proletariat dictatorship
would become magically hyperproductive.
And there's actually no theory at all
about how that's going to happen.
And so I had to infer the theory
and the theory seems to be that
once you eradicate the
bourgeoisie, because they're evil,
and you get rid of their
private property and
you eradicate the profit motive,
then all of a sudden magically
the small percentage of the
proletariat who now run the society
determine how they can make their
productive enterprises productive
enough so they become hyperproductive.
And they need to become hyperproductive
for the last error to be logically coherent
in relationship to the
Marxist theory which is that
at some point the proletariat,
the dictatorship of the proletariat,
will become so hyperproductive that
there'll be enough material goods
for everyone across all dimensions.
[PJ] And this brings me back to my
commentary at the very beginning.
The vagueness of the Communist Manifesto
lends itself for appropriate criticism
and inappropriate criticism in the sense
of drawing conclusions that seem to
overshadow its basic principled theories,
its observations and so on.
It's not explained how any
of this is supposed to occur.
And rather than acknowledge the
fact that it's not explained
and that the text is fundamentally vague,
Peterson takes it upon
himself to jump on it
as if it's indicative of some
kind of larger ambiguity,
a larger ambiguity that represents
a general confusion of anyone today
that attempts to criticize
market capitalism.
That's the implication;
it might not be explicit
but if you understand his work and his
establishment-preserving tendencies,
that is precisely what he is going for.
And the fact that the Communist
Manifesto is necessarily vague
and was speculative in many ways
gives him a jumping-off point
to falsely validate his conclusions.
[JP] The utopia that is
going to suit everyone,
because there are great
differences between people.
When some people are going to
find what they want in love
and some are going to
find it in social being
and some are going to find it
in conflict and competition,
and some are going to find it in
creativity as Marx pointed out.
But the notion that that will necessarily
be the end goal for the utopian state
is preposterous!
[PJ] Okay. The fundamental premise
of giving support to human beings
is extremely rational in the same way
that you create an infrastructure in
society for people to travel around,
for people to not go too
far to purchase food,
for people to have piping
water into their homes,
for people to have energy
connected, heat, and so on.
It might be romantic to walk a mile
living in Africa just to get clean water
and spend half your day doing that,
[but] we prefer to have an
infrastructure that supports us.
The entire basic simple idea
of socialism or frankly just any kind of
design-oriented public health approach
is that you allow people to
have support on many levels
so they don't have to worry about
their most fundamental needs,
allowing them to pursue other things.
That's all the Bernie
Sanders things wants to do,
that's all historical Europe has ever done
in the attempt to create
universal health care and so on.
It's about giving an actual safety net
to people to make them feel secure
and allow them to actually be free
in stark contrast to the propaganda
that any kind of socialist
organization or any kind of
design organization,
any kind of planning - ooh! imagine that -
will somehow result in
totalitarianism or inefficiency.
This is mythology,
and this is where Peterson shines,
because he has bought
the line of privatization
and this neurotic individualism
hook line and sinker,
and he goes out as an evangelist to
promote the same bullshit libertarian stuff
that so many others have done,
and the pathetic thing is
people continue to buy it
at their own demise.
The same people that support Peterson are
the same people that look up to Trump,
the same people that look down at
any kind of organization of society
as some kind of failure or some kind
of denial of individualism and so on.
[JP] Then there's the Dostoevskyan
observation too which is
one not to be taken lightly which is:
What sort of shallow conception
of people do you have
that makes you think that
if you gave people enough bread and
cake in the Dostoevskyan terms and
nothing to do
except to busy themselves with
continuity of the species, that they
would also all of a sudden become
peaceful and heavenly?
Dostoevsky's idea was that,
we were built for trouble!
[PJ] I would have to counter that the
more shallow conception of humanity
is that they would need to be pressured
and coerced by the system they live in
to be forced into different
labor roles to do things.
Because if they don't have a
foundational basis of their existence,
they're just gonna be some
kind of meandering blob sloth?!
That is effectively what he's saying here
and I have no idea if
Dostoevsky ever said that.
But it's completely preposterous
to think that people don't have
a sense of personal
navigation and interest,
and that they have to be constantly
pressured by some external force
to do anything which is
effectively what he's implying.
Along with apparently the idea that if
people were given the necessities of life
they would disturb it somehow?
they'd fuck it up somehow?
[JP] And if we were ever handed
everything we needed on a silver platter,
the first thing we would do is engage
in some form of creative destruction
just so something unexpected could happen
just so we could have the
adventure of our lives!
[JP] I could assure everybody listening
that giving people the necessities of life
as a layer of support does not disqualify
total chaos, pain, suffering,
all the trauma and
excitement and journey and adventure
that people can experience in life.
What a miserable human perspective.
[JP] And then the last error let's
say, although by no means the last,
and this is one of the strangest
parts of the Communist Manifesto, is
Marx admits, and Engel admits
repeatedly in the Communist Manifesto
that there has never been a system of
production in the history of the world
that was as effective at producing material
commodities in excess than capitalism.
The logical thing needs just to let
the damn system play itself out?
Unless you're assuming that the evil
capitalists are just going to take
all of the flat-screen televisions,
and put them in one big room,
and not let anyone else have one.
[PJ] That's kind of funny
he uses that analogy
since that's exactly what's
happened in the world!
You have stupid amounts of
inequality, vast inequity,
property hoarded by a very small
number of people in the form of dollars
that by system function, restrict
other people from having that money,
billions of people in poverty.
I don't even know what the
statistic is anymore,
1% of the world owning half of the
wealth, it's probably even more than that.
I refuse to even look anymore
because it gets worse every single year.
But beyond that,
he jumps on this thing that I mentioned
before about productivity and capitalism
and he just simply assumes that,
"Well if we're producing a lot of stuff,
forget the ecological crisis,
forget the cultural consumer vanity crisis,
but let's just keep producing
lots of stuff regardless
because we have the machinery to do it
and the capitalist incentive
of profit to do it,
and that is going to somehow
alleviate the problems of the world,
and let's just keep doing that because
that seems to be the trajectory."
[JP] The first thing I'd like to say is
we do not know how to set up a human
system of economics without inequality.
No one has ever managed it.
[PJ] Definitively untrue;
human cultures spent
enormous swaths of time in
egalitarian organizations.
The correct question is: how do
we set up an egalitarian system
within a surplus-producing
society, post Neolithic Revolution?
Something that I've been
talking about for a long time,
and have written about, and it can be done.
Not to mention there are still
small pockets of civilization,
that still live in egalitarian ways
even though they're entrenched
in the capitalist social order.
And finally if you wish to
take a scientific perspective
of inequality and its attributes,
rather than just imply that
all inequality is equal
and it doesn't matter
the degree of extremes,
take a look at the Gini
coefficients across nations
and then consider the economic practices
of those nations with the lowest number.
It's very clear that those nations,
first world nations of course,
the developed nations,
that have well established social support
programs that are less privatized,
naturally lead to less inequality
and of course they are
also the happiest nations
when it comes to the Happiness Index.
All of this is to say that at a minimum
the happiest, most equal nations
are not poster childs for
neoliberal free-market economics.
They might still be market economies
but they move to the other end of the spectrum.
And my point here in rebuttal
to Peterson's generalization
is that it should be the interest of every
nation for the sake of its public health,
given how caustic socioeconomic
inequality is across the board -
from drug use to violence and so on,
things I've talked about
at great length before.
And hence it's axiomatic to say
"Well if these are the structural
reforms that are increasing equality
and effectively increasing
public health and happiness,
then why don't we continue moving in that
direction because it makes the most sense?"
[JP] And it's not obvious by
any stretch of imagination
that the free market economies of the West
have more inequality than the less free
economies in the rest of the world.
And the one thing you can
say about capitalism is that,
although it produces inequality
which it absolutely does,
it also produces wealth,
and all the other systems don't!
They just produce inequality!
[PJ] Let's listen to that
exuberant stupid shit again.
[JP] And the one thing you can
say about capitalism is that,
although it reduces inequality
which it absolutely does,
it also produces wealth,
and all the other systems don't!
They just produce inequality!
[PJ] First of all, all countries on the planet
are capitalist to one degree or another
because they use money and markets,
with extreme deviation in
countries like North Korea
and then a little less
for places like Cuba,
and then a little less for places like
Venezuela and then China and so on.
And as I've just talked about with the
Scandinavian countries such as Denmark,
which employ very strict
controls of the market economy
in terms of regulation
and unions I should say,
they're very free in many ways,
but they're still very strict and
they have massive social safety nets
and avoid extensive
neoliberal privatization,
the real argument here is "what is
the most successful of this spectrum?"
And it's clear that Peterson doesn't even
know what the word "wealth" even means.
Are Denmark, Sweden and Norway
and so on lacking wealth?
even though they are some of the
happiest countries on the planet,
and they do not have the
excess production of goods
in the same way the United
States does which by the way
is one of the most miserable
industrialized nations on the planet?
Wealth is an abstraction; it's a
perspective of affluency
that's socially relative.
So this whole quick little
emotional diatribe by Peterson
as some kind of punctuation
mark on his arguments in general
has zero value because he's arguing a
complete invention that he's made up
with respect to the way he sees the world
under the assumption that free market
capitalism in its highest extreme
is going to be the highest
production of wealth and hence
the highest production
of happiness and so on.
[JP] Here's a few stats,
here's a few free market stats, OK?
From 1800 to 2017, income
growth adjusted for inflation
grew by 40 times for production workers
and 16 times for unskilled labor.
So from 1AD in 1800AD
it was like nothing, flat.
And then all of a sudden
in the last 217 years
there's been this unbelievably
upward movement of wealth.
And it doesn't only characterize the
tiny percentage of people at the top
who, admittedly,
do have most of the wealth.
The question is, not only though,
"what's the inequality?" the question is
"well what's happening to the
absolutely poor at the bottom?"
And the answer to that is
"they're getting richer faster now
than they ever have in
the history of the world."
[PJ] Earlier in this program
Mr. Peterson said this:
[JP] Almost all ideas are wrong.
And it doesn't matter if they're
your ideas or someone else's ideas,
your job is to assume first of
all that they're probably wrong
and then to assault them with everything
you have and see if they can survive.
It was akin to something Jung
said about "typical thinking"
and this was the thinking of people
who weren't trained to think.
If a thought appears,
they just accept it as true.
They don't go the second step,
which is to think about the thinking.
[PJ] Very sage advice! very sage advice.
Too bad Jordan doesn't employ it because
what he does in this final conclusion,
which I'm not going to play,
is attribute the decrease of extreme
poverty to free-market capitalism
without any other level of investigation
as to why this has occurred.
This is a chart put forward by Gregory
Clark called the Malthusian Trap.
The Malthusian Trap points out
that up until the 19th century
incomes pretty much went nowhere.
Generally miserable existence, kings, monarchs,
regal authorities held great wealth
while the peasants toiled away.
And then you have this enormous divergence
that happened upon the 19th
century at the end of the chart,
the great divergence as
people have called it,
which vastly increased
incomes and hence wealth.
And do you think this had to
do with free market capitalism?
Free market capitalism is an abstraction
that we have coined in the modern era
as per the theories of Adam Smith.
But the framework of market economics
goes back thousands of years.
The concept of property and
specialization of labor,
ownership, means of production,
and all of the fundamental attributes
that are associated to
capitalism as we know it today
existed and molded and developed
during the post Neolithic Revolution time,
starting 12,000 years ago.
And over the course of that time
the characteristic of
society was deeply unequal,
miserable by today's standards.
And yet market trade,
ownership property, and all of that
still existed to a general degree.
That is what the Agricultural
Revolution produced.
You can argue the definition
of this or that social system
but there's a through line that starts from
the Agricultural Revolution up until today
and the general attributes
have remained the same.
And the massive move of increased
wealth upon the 19th century,
the Industrial Revolution,
has nothing to do with market
economics in and of itself
and everything to do with the
sudden discovery of advancement
in efficiency-improving technology.
The advancement of efficiency-improving
technology which was sparked
at that time in the 19th century:
the Industrial Revolution.
In other words the market got lucky.
That rise of advanced
technology was able to improve
upon the networking elements
of market economics,
setting forward levels of efficiency and
production that were once impossible,
making effectively the market look good.
And the fact that he doesn't recognize this
as the driving force of what is in truth
a very slow and arguably minor alleviation
of poverty in the world,
what he just talked about,
goes to show that he is one
confirmation-bias-seeking machine.
He's not willing to take
critical thought in anything,
he's looking for things that will confirm
what will sell his next book.
And for all those out there that will
continue to search for excuses to say
"Well the markets are still
the source of everything,"
"Oh, and markets had to
get technology out there!"
This singular fallacy
causality is a tremendous blight.
Human technological ingenuity and
problem-solving is built into us.
Long before the concept of trade
and profit and competition,
we invented lots of things from the
wheel to mechanisms of hunting and so on.
Necessity is the mother of invention,
not the pursuit of fucking profit.
And it's my hope people out there
will take all of this to heart
as what the true mechanisms of human
networking and development really mean,
what wealth really means,
what innovation really means,
what sustainability really means,
and advance our currently
arcane society to something
that will actually work
for future generations
and not continue the trajectory that's going
to lead towards complete destabilization.
That's all for me, thank you very much.
