Who Is Karl Marx? | 5 Minute Video
When writing The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx thought he was providing a road to utopia, but everywhere his ideas were tried, they resulted in catastrophe and mass murder. In this video, Paul Kengor, Professor of Political Science at Grove City College, illuminates the life of the mild-mannered 19th Century German whose ideas led to the rise of some of the most brutal dictators in world history.
Donate today to PragerU! http://l.prageru.com/2eB2p0h
Get PragerU bonus content for free! https://www.prageru.com/bonus-content
Download Pragerpedia on your iPhone or Android! Thousands of sources and facts at your fingertips.
iPhone: http://l.prageru.com/2dlsnbG
Android: http://l.prageru.com/2dlsS5e
Join Prager United to get new swag every quarter, exclusive early access to our videos, and an annual TownHall phone call with Dennis Prager! http://l.prageru.com/2c9n6ys
Join PragerU’s text list to have these videos, free merchandise giveaways and breaking announcements sent directly to your phone! https://optin.mobiniti.com/prageru
Do you shop on Amazon? Click https://smile.amazon.com and a percentage of every Amazon purchase will be donated to PragerU. Same great products. Same low price. Shopping made meaningful.
VISIT PragerU! https://www.prageru.com
FOLLOW us!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prageru
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prageru
Instagram: https://instagram.com/prageru/
PragerU is on Snapchat!
JOIN PragerFORCE!
For Students: http://l.prageru.com/2aozfkP
JOIN our Educators Network! http://l.prageru.com/2aoz2y9
Script:
Ideas have consequences.
Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.
And sometimes catastrophic – like the ideas of Karl Marx.
Born in Trier, Germany in 1818, Marx didn’t invent communism. But it was on his ideas that Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet Union, Mao built communist China, and innumerable other tyrants, from the Kims in North Korea to the Castros in Cuba, built their communist regimes. Ultimately, those regimes and movements calling themselves “Marxist” murdered about 100 million people and enslaved more than a billion.
Marx believed that workers, specifically those who did manual labor, were exploited by capitalists – the people who owned, as Marx put it, “the means of production” (specifically, factories) – but who did very little physical labor themselves.
Only a workers’ revolution, Marx wrote in Das Kapital, could correct this injustice.
What would that revolution look like?
Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, spelled it out point-by-point in The Communist Manifesto. It included the “abolition of property and inheritance” and the “centralization of credit, communication, and transport in the hands of the state.” And a lot more along the same lines.
In other words, the state owns and controls pretty much everything.
This notion was widely discussed and debated in European intellectual circles during Marx’s lifetime, but nothing much came of it until Vladimir Lenin took power in Russia in 1917.
This changed everything. Despite its repeated economic failures, Lenin’s Russia, which became known as the Soviet Union, became the model for dictators around the world.
Wherever Marx’s ideas were practiced, life got worse – not by a little; but by a lot. There is not a single exception to this rule. Not the Soviet Union, not Eastern Europe, not China, not North Korea, not Vietnam, not Cuba, not Venezuela, not Bolivia, not Zimbabwe. Wherever Marxism goes, economic collapse, terror and famine follow.
So, if cataclysmic failure – meaning terrible human suffering – is the inevitable legacy of Marxism, why do so many people – and now, especially, young people – defend it?
The most common answer Marxism’s advocates offer is that “they” – whoever “they” are: Lenin, Stalin, Chavez – never really practiced Marxism. They all somehow got it wrong.
Marxism, we are told, is, at its essence, about sharing what we have: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” as Marx put it.
Maybe that sounds good to you. But what does it mean? Who determines ability? Who determines need?
For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/who-karl-marx
source
Karl Marx is the Devil
1:57 Rhodesians never die!
🇺🇸🇳🇬🇮🇱❤️
My source is i made it the f*ck up
Free market capitalism didn't work out very well for the Chileans.
Communism doesn't work nor does capitalism. The trouble with this video is that if you have concentrated power in whatever political system is in power, you get the dictatorships similar to stalin and hitler.
The biggest communist movement is christianity. No-one ever complains about it though.
Advocates of capitalism like pragerU, tend to defend capitalism by stating it has brought millions of people out of poverty. Quite the contrary, people have been brought out of poverty despite capitalism. Before unions and universal suffrage in Britain, the 300 hundred years of modern capitalim meant that the average citizen had zero ability to demand a fair wage for a fair day's work. Only legislation changed that.
First off he's a white guy. But liberals don't like it when you remind them of that.
Marx was the consummate freeloader and marxism is the freeloaders dream come true.
You know what they say, if you want to find satisfaction in your work, ask the German economist nutcase who never worked a day in his life.
Democracy has never been tried because blacks have never it's been allowed to enjoy it
White supremacy in the United States uses the same exact tactics
White supremacy right here in capitalist America has also enslaved and murdered Millions
dude literally have like 200millions kills just using 15books
Ok, Prager U, now let's see you confront the major ills of capitalism. Beat your opposition to those criticisms with more effective solutions than what they have, and prove how objective you really are. Truth is what you care about the most, right?
I would recommend READING Marx instead of watching a video from a far right organisation established and funded by a billionaire Capitalist (billionaire Capitalists dont like Communism)
Then form your own ideas
Regarding the point of "working condtions improved"
Yes they did,but not out of the mercy and empathy of the capitalist class,but because the workers head worked together to use the state to implement laws and penalties regarding the working day.
Capitalists were more than happy to overwork their workers until death,including children.
They became as stupid as they could be,lacking education and the fruits of life,they were instead stuck to performing the same manual tasks over and over again.
Only and i mean only through worker resistance could worker emancipation be achieved.
We need to go a step further and get rid of classes,social hierarchies and wage labor altogether
I’m Cuban-American and subscribe to this video 100%. The Communism is the Great Scam, such as the title of one famous book written by a former Communist who quit from this ideology. The Communism is as fundamentalist as Islamic fundamentalism.
Thanks for the video Doc
sounds like nazi and usa is communist,lol.
Plus here in America it is very close to impossible to make it to the top 1% but that still can happen even with out a college degree or coming from money. There also are so many people who start businesses and become their own boss even if theirs only making $50k a year salary getting to be your own boss and set your own hours and if you’re making at least $30k a year world wide that puts you in the top 1%. In communism only by being born into the rich and powerful are you in the top 1%. There are no businesses to start your own business.
Wankeeeers prageru
The Castros in Cuba AND Canada.
No more communist and socialism
would love to see one day PragerU sources (other than the BlackBook of Communism)
Every teenager needs to watch this video and to have case studies on Lenine, Pol Pot, & others.
Thanks.
What are you afraid of? You are still afraid of people two hundred years ago
With the US currently $35 trillion in debt and the homeless skyrocketing, it shows that hyper-captalism isn't any better. You've got a few people holding all the money in the hundred of billions, while the majority struggling to make ends meet. With its "war machine" economics model waging various wars, the US has caused the death of millions, killing over 4 million people alone post 9/11.
Communism is not the flaw in a Communist government. Putting the government in the hands of a dictator is the flaw of a Communist government.
I can testify to this. After the revolution in Cuba, the people took all of my grandpas slave plantations and forced him to do work. They also taught everyone how to read which made him very angry. Communism kills freedom.
Engels became communist when he visited his father's factory…
Economic colapse : soviet union was the 2nd biggest economy in the world
Capitalism is the uneven distribution of wealth.
Socialism is the even distribution of poverty.
-Churchill 🇬🇧💂🏻♀️
How about mixed economy?
Lucifer Satan was the first communist.
PragerU making a video about Karl Marx is like a communist making a video about Adam Smith.
I just want everyone to hear this right now: no country on earth is, nor ever has been, a communist country. They barely scratched socialism with every single thing that could’ve gone wrong, going wrong.
It's hilarious how Western people count Marxism victims and fail to mention much more people were killed due to capitalism
Great video, thank you very much , note to self(nts) watched all of it 5:14
"centralization of credit in the hands of the state" this was as a rule to the transition from capitalism to communism, cojtext guys
also in cuba, upper volta and the ussr there was an even more terrible government before, so it is completely stupid to put smiley faces there
Communism creates thieves
Champions of missinformation, dear PragerU, just look at a graph of life expectancy in all of these countries, even under in the USSR it went up by 30 years under Stalin's regime. Soo… People lived better under the thumb of the Tsar?