Stick with military history, TIK. Your dogma is showing.



Link to the video to which I am referring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go2OFpO8fyo

This critique is on TIK’s recent video, “Why they don’t tell you about Hitler’s “Shrinking Markets” problem” in which he makes several conspiracy theories about modern academia and espouses more of his own “political theory” which can only be described as complete gibberish.



TIK’s main goal in his video is to attempt to explain why his “shrinking markets” theory of why Hitler started WWII isn’t taught in schools. He poses the question to us, “Why is the shrinking markets concept that Hitler believed in […] not being taught in schools or mentioned in most of the books when discussing National Socialist Germany?”. Ignoring the possibility that his theory could be absolute rubbish and that’s why no historian takes it seriously, let’s look at what TIK has to say.

(22:25) “Since the Cold War era, if not much much earlier, socialists have invaded the universities and have been miseducating the youth.” (Hint: It’s another alt-right conspiracy theory!)

(1:05) TIK then paints for us a beautiful conspiracy chart. He first claims that Hitler got his “shrinking markets” theory from German economist/sociologist Werner Sombart. No source has been provided for this claim. He then provides some other names of people who have supposedly come up with the same shrinking markets theory, including Rosa Luxembourg, Nikolai Bukharin, and Karl Marx. TIK does not give any evidence to back up his claim that Bukharin believed in the theory, and his claim that Luxembourg talks about it in her “The Accumulation of Capital” simply isn’t true. The only point at which Luxembourg refers to shrinking markets is in reference to a now unknown social theorist by the name of “Nikolayon” (Luxemburg, 267). Even with this appearance of TIK’s supposedly widespread Marxist theory, Luxembourg in the chapter proceeds to criticize Nikolayon’s positions, denouncing them as “completely Utopian” (Ibid., 267). Okay, that’s fine though. Since Luxemburg and Bukharin were both Marxists, if we can prove that Marx had a shrinking markets theory, then we can possibly make the extrapolation that if these two were Marxists, then they must have held the same theory. Let’s see how TIK does.

(1:45) “Marx talks about this in Das Kapital Volume 3, with the “Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” fallacy. In a nutshell, capitalist profits will fall at the same time that population sizes increase, leading to starving people and thus the revolution.” How stupid can you get? First, the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) is not at all how TIK describes it. Let’s get to the source:

“If these labourers perform equal amounts of necessary and surplus-labour, if they work daily as many hours for themselves […] this rate of surplus-value would nonetheless express itself in very different rates of profit, depending on the different volumes of constant capital c and consequently of the total capital C, because the rate of profit = s/C.” (Marx, Capital III, 53)

Constant capital contrasts with variable capital in that variable capital is how much labour goes into the exchange-value of a product and constant capital includes materials, machinery, etc. (hence the modifier constant. Its exchange-value is constant because labour has already been done to produce it). The TRPF states that as the proportion of constant capital © to variable capital (v) increases – e.g. technological advances – the rate of profit (c/v) will decrease. This tendency exists due to continual technological progress which decreases dependence on human labour inputs.

The TRPF is not at all related to TIK’s caricature of the TRPF, that “capitalist profits will fall at the same time that population sizes increase.” In fact, you should expect the opposite to happen. If population sizes increase, competition between workers increase and drive down the price of labour-power, increasing the rate of exploitation and thus the rate of profit for the capitalist class. Nevertheless, let’s continue.

(2:45) TIK then goes off on his conspiracy theory. To answer his aforementioned question, he responds with the answer, “Oh! That’s why they don’t teach you about this. Because they don’t want you to know Hitler was a socialist.” In a word, he responds to his question with the answer that modern academia is in a plot to cover up the supposed fact that Hitler was a socialist. Of course, TIK doesn’t provide any evidence for this claim either (quelle surprise!).

He then makes a few jokes about Hitler and Marx, and proceeds to answer the question of “What is Socialism?” with this:

Wrong.

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other [socialism]. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Marx, Critique, 20)



Sidenote: Marx doesn’t mean dictatorship as per the modern definition. Back then dictatorship meant which class held the monopoly over the use of force (e.g. capitalist society is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).

The point is that socialism is not “state control” of the economy. Total state control in a capitalist mode of production is still capitalism. Total state control in a feudal mode of production is still feudalism. What matters is which class holds political power, not the fact that power is being held. Socialism is the period between capitalism and communism in which the proletariat hold political power.

(5:10) TIK then goes to make a straw man, claiming that “They will say that socialism is when two guys share a hammer. Socialism. Or when two girls share one cup.” That’s not true either. Both Marx and Engels spent their entire lives fighting against utopian socialists who professed the abstract beliefs of “equality” and “sharing” (Paden, 67). In fact, Marx’s entire Critique of the Gotha Programme is filled with scathing critiques of abstract notions of “equality” and such.

(5:30) Now TIK gives us a nice little thought experiment. His line of thinking goes as such:

“Here’s a factory with a bunch of workers and the governor [pay attention to this] of the factory. This is a private factory - since the individual is in control of his means of production, the factory.”

After the workers revolt and overthrow the governor, TIK says that “the workers thus become the “government” (plural) of the factory.” and since a government implies a state, this has now become state control of the factory. Let’s backtrack a bit. If a singular ruler does not imply the existence of a state, but a group of rulers does, then by TIK’s own definitions, neither a dictatorship nor a monarchy are states. You can see now that his political theory is a little bit… lackluster. Let’s expand the analogy to something more realistic (due to the modern existence of worker co-operatives). Let’s say that the owner of the factory was an absolute tyrant, enslaving the workers. The workers then rise up, overthrow the factory, and establish a worker co-operative in which the workers vote on management decisions. By TIK’s line of thinking, the latter example (the worker co-operative) would be an “evil state”, whereas the former example (the dictatorial slaveowner) would be all fine on TIK’s moral compass.

(7:56) Moving on, let’s go onto his attempt to blur the lines between Nazism and Marxism. If “Marxist-Socialism” is “class group in common control of the means of production”, then capitalism is Marxist-Socialism, since the bourgeoisie – a class group – is in common control of the means of production. Feudalism is also Marxist-Socialism, since the feudal lords – a class group – is in common control of the means of production. Slavery is also Marxist-Socialism, since the slaveowners – a class group – is in common control of the means of production. Ironically, communism would not be Marxist-Socialism, since no class group is in control of the means of production. This is why TIK’s definitions are absolute shit. (They’re also wrong).

(8:20) Here he makes several logical leaps to “prove” that feminism, Nazism, and socialism are all identical. He says that a social group is non-private, and therefore public. He makes two logical fallacies here. He equivocates between the uses of the term private in terms of economics and the term private in terms of society. Private in terms of economics is a business not owned by the government. Private in terms of society relates to individuals. He uses the two separate concepts interchangeably, thus committing the fallacy of equivocation. The second logical fallacy he makes in this first logical leap is the false dichotomy. Particularly in Marxian economics, non-private does not necessarily mean public. In fact, the terms private and public are rarely referred to, as class is instead used (since public ownership may still be used for capitalist ends rather than social ends e.g. state capitalism).

The second logical leap is from “public” to “state”. His line of thinking is “publicly-owned necessarily means state-owned” because “public comes from the Latin word “publicum”, meaning state”. I’ll let you yourself figure out why his logic is absurd here.

This is as far as I’ll go in critiquing TIK’s abomination of a video essay, since all of the premises of the video have been thoroughly disproven, and all of his points after this beginning of the video follow from what he has said previous. I also don’t have time for hopeless ideologues like this guy.

References

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. 1913. https://libcom.org/files/luxemburg%20the%20accumulation%20of%20capital.pdf.

Marx, Karl. Capital Volume III. 1894. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf.

Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme. 1875. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Critque_of_the_Gotha_Programme.pdf.

Paden, Roger. “Marx’s Critique of the Utopian Socialists.” 2002. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718467.