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Vejas Liulevicius

lines on the record: 198
first: 2024-09-20
most recent: 2024-09-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Worldwide notoriety for marks and attention to those works. And they're very different in form. Das Capital is intended to be the origin of species of its realm, of economic thought, and represents years and years of work of Marx laboring in the British Museum Library working through statistics, working on little bits and pieces of a larger answer to big historical questions that he believes that he's arrived at. Its tone is different from that of the Communist Manifesto, which is a call to arms. It announces with great confidence what the scheme of history will be, but rather than urging that the answer might be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it's also a clarion call to make the revolution happen.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The work is contrary to what people often believe that pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national or liberal demands. The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard over the din of other far more prominent actors. It is, however, in the aftermath.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing to note obviously is that those two works are very different. Duskital is an enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out because Engels begged him to stop revising. Please just finally get it into press. And then the rest, Engels had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Mark's passed away. It's a huge work. By contrast, the Communist Manifesto is a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide in spite of its comparative brevity. The Communist Manifesto, moreover, is also something of the nature of having a delayed fuse, you could say, because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last stages of the Soviet Union. Keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society, there are discontents and demands that are going to clash especially when someone like Gorbachev is proposing reforms and things are suddenly thrown open for discussion. The very notion that you have the celebration of revolutionaries and the Bolshevik legacy at a time when the state wants to enforce stability and an order that's been received from the prior generation. Think of Brezhnev's time, for instance. All of that is especially volatile mix and unlikely to work out very durably in the long run.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In history, that's right. That's right. I think that that last one is especially significant because it's deeply paradoxical. I mean, trying to outline these contradictions, by the way, is like subjecting Marx to the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out internal contradictions, things that are likely to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in what's supposed to be a completely set and durable and effective framework. The one about tradition Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions that have hemmed people in. This earlier earlier ways of thinking, earlier social structures, and to constantly renovate. And what happens instead is a tradition of radical rupture emerges. And that's really tough because imagine”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We hear nature abhorring a vacuum, and I think that there are places in human character that long for transcendental explanations, it's not all meaningless. In fact, there's a larger purpose. And I think it's not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes has in part come from, on the one hand, religious believers and on the other hand from disillusioned true believers in communism who find themselves undergoing an internal experience of just a revulsion, finding that their ideals have not been followed through on.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, I think speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility, reverence for relics of great figures, almost saintly figures, so that even what got proclaimed as atheism turned out to be a very demanding faith as well. And I think that's a contradiction that other scholars have pointed out as well.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Art from the countryside showing bygone beliefs. There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors. And that was pretty much it. But as a child, I remember being reproved in that museum for not wearing my windbreaker, but instead carrying it on my arm, which was a very disrespectful thing to do in an official museum of atheism. When I was able to visit the Soviet Union later for a language course in the summer of 1989, one of the obligatory tours that we took was to file reverently past the body of Lenin outside the Kremlin in the mausoleum at Red Square. And communist mummies, like those of Lenin earlier Stalin had been there as well, communist mummies like Mao or Holland.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hidden component, one that's not officially recognized. I mean, I think that, you know, I had a chance to witness this, actually, when I was a child, my family, I grew up in Chicago. My father, who was a mathematician, got a very rare invitation to travel to Soviet Lithuania to the University of Vilnius to meet with colleagues. And at this point, journeys of more than a few days or a week were very rare to the Soviet Union for Americans. And the result was that I had unforgettable experiences visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's day. And among the things I saw there was a museum of atheism that had been established in a church that had been ripped apart from inside and was meant to kind of embody the official stance of atheism. And I remember being baffled by the museum on the inside because you would expect exhibits. You would expect something dramatic, something that will be compelling. And instead there were some folk.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideologies that promised what an earlier age would have understood in religious terms. Fergund called this the escaton and said that these end times, the escaton was being promised in the here and now, being made imminent, and he warned against that, saying the results are likely to be disastrous.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Version of heaven. There's the working class playing the role of humanity in its struggle to be redeemed. And scholar after scholar has pointed this out. Reinhold Niebuhr back in the 1930s had an article in the Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union's communism as a religion. Eric Fugelin, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to Louisiana State University and wrote tomes about the new phenomenon of political religions in the modern period. And he saw fascism and Nazism and Soviet communism as bearing the stamp of political religions, meaning”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a leap, and it kind of points to a phenomenon that would have enraged Marx and would have been deeply alienating to others in the tradition who followed him, but that so many scholars have commented on. And that's that there is a religious element, not a avowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marxist vision, to the tradition that follows Marx. And just think of the correspondences, right? Marx himself as kind of a positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end times is this final revolution that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finally, people will be freed from the distorting influence of hierarchies, traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities. So for them, anarchy, growing out of the liberation of the human being, is seen as a positive good and peaceful. Now, that's at odds with the prescription of someone like Bakuni for how to get there. He sees overthrow as being necessary on the route to that. As we point out, it's absolutely key to this entire dynamic that to be an anarchist means that your efforts are not going to be organized the way a disciplined and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that probably some anarchists would beg to differ, right? They would see communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put anarchist ideas into place. Bakunin flitted from one area of unrest to another, hoping to be in on finally the founding of the sort of free communes that he had in mind. Another key point in all of this is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term. And so when you point out quite correctly that we have an anarchic international situation, that's kind of the Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man. Generally, except if you're talking about nihilists in the Russian revolutionary tradition, anarchists see anarchy as a blessed state and one where”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely because of their skepticism about what turned out to be an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription for a successful revolution.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another rejected the state as a form of organized violence and rejected traditional religions? One of the things, though, that also makes Bakuna so significant is Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists where they try to make common cause. And you have to say that in every case it ends badly for the anarchists because the communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement. The anarchists who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days of the Russian Revolution or the Russian Civil War, or whether it was then in the Spanish Civil War, the anarchists found themselves targeted by the communists.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Bakunin, in some things, agreed with Marx and in many others disagreed. He was an anarchist rather than hewing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quotes suggest, that revolution and sheer confrontation and overthrow the existing state of things, not compromise, was going to be the way to get there, but his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser, that both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would grow out of the free association that anarchists thinking, the free association of individuals,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Form of government of the Soviet Union. That must be the point of origin. Before the Bolsheviks seized power, in order to really be a serious radical socialist, you needed to read German because you needed to read Marx and you needed to read Kautsky and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition. And it's only after the Soviet seizure of power that this all changes. So there's lots of marks of that phenomenon.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In awe in the late 19th century. And that's the building of a strong German workers' movement and a social democratic party. That social democratic party by 1912 is the largest party in German politics by vote. And there's the possibility they might even come to power without needing radical revolution, which again also goes against Marx's original vision of the necessity for a revolution. Workers around the world, or rather radical socialists, look with admiration and awe at what the Germans have achieved, and they see themselves as trying to do what the Germans have done. The final point is growing up during the Cold War, one thought that, well, if you want to represent somebody as being a communist, that person has to have a Russian accent because Russia, after all, the homeland of this”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why immediately after taking power, they're not sure they're going to last their hope, their promise of salvation is that a workers' revolution will erupt in Germany, defeated Germany, in order to link up with the one that has been launched in this unlikely Russian location and henceforth, great things will follow that do hew to Marx's historical vision. The last thing to mention about this is that this predominance of Germany in the thinking of Marx had two other reflections. One was that German socialists and later communists organize in order to fulfill Marx's vision, and they produced something that leaves other Westerners”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or France in industrialization give it the special role in Marx's worldview. And so it's a lasting irony or a central irony of this whole story that when a government establishes itself that claims to be following Marxist prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, a place that did not match the requirements of being industrialized, developed, well on its way in this historical process. And nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense that what they were doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble. It was a risk because in fact, the revolution to really take hold had to seize power in Germany.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a factor in the entire history that we're referencing. Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans. Many of their preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves, even as they were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class, they're clearly their entire formation had been affected by their German background. And it's very true, as you point out, that Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out. Also in Britain, also in France, also eventually in the United States. But it's Germany by virtue of its central location and then its rapid development later than Britain.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's a part of a great conversation, right? I think that in their works, they're reacting to one another. I mean, Dostoevsky's thought ranges across the condition of modernity. And he definitely has things to say about industrialization. I think that they react to one another in these oblique ways rather than always being at each other's throats in direct confrontations. And that's what makes the 19th century so compelling as a story just because of the sheer vitality of the arguments that are taking place in ways big and small.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engels essentially from his family fortune and then from his journalism afterwards supported both himself and the Marx family for decades. And so in a sense Engels made things happen in the mysterious way that friendships work, the very differences between these men made them formidable as a dynamic duo because they balanced off one another's idiosyncrasies and turned what might have been false into potential strengths. British historian A.J.P. Taylor always has a lovely turn of phrase, even when he's wrong about historical issue. In this case, he was right. He said that Engels had charm and brilliance. Marx was a genius. And Engels saw himself as definitely the junior partner in this relationship. But here's the paradox. Without Engels, pretty clearly Marx would have.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he was most definitely not a member of the proletariat that he and Marx were celebrating as so significant in their future historical role. There were also huge differences in character between these men. Marx, when people met him, they were astonished by his energy and his dynamism. They also saw him as a man who felt determined to dominate arguments. He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits. We might mention, among other things, that he impregnated the family made and didn't accept responsibility for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to support his growing family. That's where Engels came in.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the new religious ideas, religious revivals, as well as demands for secularization. And stepping into all of this are Marx and Engels together in what has been called, I think with justice, one of the most important and influential intellectual partnerships of history. They were very different men. They were both German by origin. Marx had trained as an academic. He had married the daughter of a baron because of his radical ideas. He had foreclosed or found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went the route of radical journalism. Engels was very different. Engels was the son of an industrialist, and the family owned factories in Germany and in England.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Well, to describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt because Europe is being racked and being put through the ringer of nationalism, demands for self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule, demands to redraw the map. tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution meant that in the course of about a generation, you would have seen the world around you change in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar. You'd be able to travel across the landscape at speeds that have been unthinkable when you were a child. So it's enormous change and demands for yet more change. And so it's a great mix of ideas, ideologies, the old.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers labored might be ameliorated. Moreover, the middle class, rather than dwindling and dwindling, seemed to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers or the appearance of new kinds of people like white-collar workers or technical experts. So already in Marx's own lifetime, and then especially in what follows Marx's lifetime, this becomes a real problem because it puts a stick into the spokes of this particular historical prediction.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Misery. When this gets translated into English, the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory. The words that get used are immiserization or pauperization, meaning more and more people are being turned into pauper's. But for Marx, that prediction is really key. And even in his own lifetime, there were already hints that in fact, if you looked sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he had expected. In fact, although there have been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic sort of Wild West stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out rules.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As things did not stay the same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting worse, and hence their revolutionary potential was growing, and at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie were also facing diminishing returns as they competed against one another with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more elements of what had been the middle class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down into the working class. For Marx, this is really a key part. I mean, it's the key part of this whole ratchet effect that's going to produce this final historical explosion. And in German, the word given to that process was Fer Eleng, which is very evocative. Eland means misery. So it's the growing”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dispossession, dispossession of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is never standing still, right? So he'd probably argue in this dynamic vision of how history unfolds that there's always conflict and it's always moving, propelling history forward towards its predestined ending. The way he saw this climax was that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Property in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents everybody rather than representing particular He would consider it an authentic freedom without necessity, without poverty as a result of this blessed state that's been arrived at.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where things become a good deal less detailed in his and Engel's accounts that they proposed in part was this is for the future to determine. So all of the details will be settled later. I think there was allied to this was a tremendous confidence in some very 19th century ideas about how society could be administered and what made for orderly society in a way where if the right infrastructure was in place, you might expect society to kind of run itself without the need for micromanagement from above and hence we arrive at Marx's tantalizing promise that there will be a period where it will be necessary to have centralized control and there might have to be as he puts it despotic inroads against”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This in particular for Marx, I think, is a really key moment, which is what makes that such a good question. In his vision, the epic narrative that he's presenting to us, revolution Is key. It's not enough to have evolutionary change. It's not a question of compromises. It's not a case of bargaining or balancing interests. Revolution is necessary as part of the process of a subjugated class coming to awareness of its own historical role. And when we get to the proletariat, this working class in its entirety to whom Marx assigns this epic Promethean role of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity, a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role in salvation history that they'll be playing in this secular framework, they need revolution and the experience of revolution in order to come into their own. Because without it, you'll only have half-hearted compromise and something less than the consciousness that they then need in order to rule, to administer.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're also competing against one another. And members who don't survive that competition get pressed down into the subordinate working class, which grows and grows and grows to the point where at some future moment the inevitable explosion will come and a swift revolution will overturn this penultimate stage of human history and usher in instead the dictatorship of the working class and then the abolition of all classes because with only one class remaining everyone is finally unified and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feudalism in the Middle Ages. And then here's where Marx is able to deliver a pronouncement about his own times, seeing that the present day is the penultimate, the next to last stage of this historical development, because the feudal system of the Middle Ages and the dominance of the aristocracy has been overcome, has been displaced by the often heroic achievements, astonishing achievements in commerce and in world building of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, who have taken the world into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the class below them, which is the working class or the proletariat. And so this sort of conflict also, by the way, obtains within classes. So the bourgeoisie are going to be grave diggers, Marx announces, of their own supremacy.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was the motive force that Karl Marx and Engel saw driving the historical process forward. And it's important to keep in mind that class conflict doesn't just mean revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings. It's sort of the totality of frictions and of clashes, conflicts of interest that appear in any society. And so Marx was able in this spirit that he avowed was very scientific to demarcate stages of historical transformation, primitive communism in the prehistoric period, then moving towards what was called state slavery, that's to say the early civilizations deploying human resources and ordering them by all powerful monarchs, then private slavery in the ancient period, and then moving to”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So Engels, when he gives the gradeside eulogy for his beloved friend Marx, claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history, the Darwin of history that he had done for the world of politics and of human history what Darwin had done with his theory of evolution, understanding the hidden mechanism, understanding the laws that are at work and that make that whole process meaningful rather than just one damn thing after another.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What remained, though, was the confidence of being on the right side of history. And there are few things that are as intoxicating as being convinced that your actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also destined to be successful.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our own times. What Marx did was to take this characteristic insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards the realization of an idea and flipped it on its head. Marx insisted that Hegel had so much that was right in his thinking, but what he had neglected to keep in mind was that in fact history is based on matter. Hence dialectical materialism. The dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea. And so Marx adapts a lot of ideas of Hegel. You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to that earlier training, but now taken in a very different direction.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“German context, he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state because he thought that governments are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws and on the ideal of a state of the rule of law in German Reichstadt. That was a noble”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marx had been a student of Hegel, and Hegel is a German idealist philosopher, had announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History is not a collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that the true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history history with a capital H, something that's transcendent and meaningful, was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of historical development, and that idea was the idea of human freedom. So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone making history and having an impact. It was the idea itself striving to come to fruition, striving to come to an ever more perfect realization. In the case of Hegel in this very Prussian and”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extent that they were based on inequalities and on man's exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about the history of communism, you have to include the fact that this often tragic and dramatic history produced a lot of jokes, jokes that were in part reactions sometimes to the ideological claims made by people like Marx. And one of the famous jokes was that what's the difference between capitalism and communism? And the joke's answer was capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and communism is the exact opposite.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A route towards that outcome that presented itself as cutting edge science and moreover having the full credibility that science commanded so much, especially in the 19th and early 20th century.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The notion of what things will look like after the revolution has resolved all problems there vagueness sets in. It's clear that it's a blessed state that's being talked about. People no longer exploiting one another. People no longer subject to necessity or poverty, but instead enjoying all of the productivity of industrialization that hitherto had been put to private profit, now collectively owned and deployed. The notion that one will be able to work at one job in the morning and then engage in leisure activity or another, yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon, all of these free of any contradictions, free of necessity, free of the sort of ordinary irritations that we experience in our ordinary lives. That's deeply utopian. The difference was that Marx charted”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress Marx would have gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you're not scientific. You're not rational. You are not laying out the iron laws of history. You're merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic. That said, hidden among Marx's insistence that there are laws and structures, as history moves through class conflict, modes of production towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown and people finally being freed from necessity in smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements. And they come especially at the end in which Marx sketches.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A science of revolution that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and meaningful, rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts, a total liberation of the human person, and that moreover that was inevitable, that that was pre-programmed and destined in the order of things. When you add to that the notion that there's also room for heroism and the individual role, this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination. Earlier thinkers who were socialists had already dreamt of or projected futures where all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve some sort of perfection. Marx added these other elements that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions that he decried as merely utopian socialism.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact. And in some ways they were actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose, that history is not just random events, but that rather it's history, we might say, with a capital H, history moving in a deliberate direction, history having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in. At the same time, in the communist manifesto, Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might, even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might give it an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process. And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source