Summary of Jordan Peterson Doesn’t Understand Marx

00:00:00 - 00:20:00

Jordan Peterson has been criticized for not understanding Karl Marx's work, and for presenting half-baked ideas to the public without doing the necessary research.

• 00:00:00 The video discusses how Jordan Peterson avoided reading Karl Marx's more mature work in his debate with Slavoj Zizek, and how this makes his argument against communism and Marxism less credible.
• 00:05:00 Jordan Peterson claims that Marx and Engels did not take their "whole arsenal to the critique" in their text, "The Communist Manifesto." Marx, in fact, is describing what Peterson is doing when he says one needs to use everything in one's arsenal to critique an idea.
• 00:10:00 Jordan Peterson criticizes the idea that all human history is the history of struggle in his YouTube video, "Jordan Peterson Doesn't Understand Marx." Marx himself notes that human beings struggle with themselves, with nature, and with each other before capitalism or any other economic system exists. Peterson accuses Marx of not taking into account the existence of nature, and Marx responds with text from his book, "Capital."
• 00:15:00 Jordan Peterson argues that there is an implicit and priori argument in Karl Marx's work that good is on the side of the workers and bad is on the side of the owners, which is not true. Marx was fairly consistent in his arguments against revolutionary violence, and in his work, the Communists support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
• 00:20:00 Jordan Peterson does not appear to understand Marx's work well, and his critiques of post-modern philosophers are half-baked. His ideas have a lot of influence, and it is irresponsible to present them to the public without doing the necessary research.