slaves produces surplus which the master gets, serfs produces surplus which the lord gets,
employees produces surplus which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative
class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another
group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger,
resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle.
The following is a conversation with Richard Wolff. One of the top Marxist economists and
philosophers in the world. This is a heavy topic, in general and for me personally, given my family
history in the Soviet Union, in Russia, and in Ukraine. Today, the words Marxism, Socialism,
and Communism are used to attack and to divide, much more than to understand and to learn.
With this podcast, I seek the latter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx,
as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries.
And in general, we need to both steal man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize,
and to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant
and at times dangerous. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Richard Wolff.
Let's start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all. What is Marxism?
What are the defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology?
Richard Wolff Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition
that takes its founding inspiration from the works of Karl Marx. But because
these ideas that he put forward spread as fast as they did and as globally as they did,
literally, it's 140 years since Marx died. And in that time, his ideas have become major types
of thinking in every country on the earth. If you know much about the great ideas of human history,
that's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time.
Richard Wolff And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity,
is that the Marxian ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories
and economic conditions. So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently
in different places at different times. And therefore, Marxism as a kind of first flush definition
is the totality of all of these very different ways of coming to terms with it. For the first
roughly 40, 50 years, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism.
Marks himself, that's all he really did. He never wrote a book about communism. He never wrote
a book really about socialism. Either his comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed.
What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism. And that's what Marxism
was more or less in its first 40 or 50 years. The only qualification of what I just said
was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks. In 1871, there was a collapse of the
French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany. And then the result was
something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the
function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian society. And Marx's people, people
influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune and the leadership of the commune.
And Marx wasn't that far away. He was in London. These things were happening in Paris. That's
an easy transport even then. And for a short time, very short, Marxism had a different
quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize
society differently. Before that had only been implicit. Now it became explicit. What is the
leadership of the Paris Commune going to do? And why? And in what order? In other words,
governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted a few weeks, the French army regrouped
and under the leadership of people who were very opposed to Marx, they marched back into Paris,
took over, killed a large number of the communards, as they were called, and deported them to
islands in the Pacific that were part of the French empire at the time.
The really big change happens in Russia in 1917. Now you have a group of Marxists,
Lenin Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again,
a war, like in France, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation
because it is the government that loses World War I, has to withdraw, as you know,
Brest-Litovsky and all of that, and the government collapses and the army revolts.
And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party,
splits under the pressures of all of this into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions.
Lenin Trotsky and the others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story
sure, he's in exile. Lenin's position gets him deported because he says
Russian workers should not be killing German workers. I mean, this is a war of capitalists
who are dividing the world up into colonies, and Russian working people should not kill and
should not die for such a thing. As you can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out.
Now, interestingly, in the United States, the comparable leader at that time of the Socialist
Party here, as you know, there was no Communist Party at this point. That comes later.
The head of the Socialist Party, a very important American figure named Eugene Victor Debs,
makes exactly the same argument to the Americans should not fight in the war.
He has nothing to do with Lenin. I don't even know if they knew of each other.
But he does it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States.
By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well. Really, very well. Remarkable.
And he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you see the link.
Although he had much more courage politically than Bernie has.
That's really interesting. I'd love to return to that link maybe later.
Yes. History rhymes. Yes. The complicated story. Anyway, the importance in terms of Marxism is that
now this seizure of power by a group of Marxists, that is a group of people inspired by Marx,
developing what you might call a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians
too, but a Russian interpretation, this now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism
into a plan at least. What are you going to do in the Soviet Union? And a lot of this was then
trial and error. Marx never laid any of this out. Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant
if he had, because it was 50 years earlier in another country, etc. So what begins to happen,
and you can see how this happens then more later in China and Cuba and Vietnam and Korea and so on,
is that you have kind of a bifurcation. Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism.
But another part of it becomes a set, and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions
of what an alternative post-capitalist society ought to look like, how it ought to work,
and there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion. And I would say that that's still
where it is. You have a tradition now that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism,
notion of the alternative, and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework in
which I would answer, that's what Marxism is about. Its basic idea, if you had to have one,
is that human society can do better than capitalism, and it ought to try.
And then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism. Fine. So we'll look at the critique
of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back, what do you think Marx would say if he just looked
at the different implementations of the ideas of Marxism throughout the 20th century, where his
ideas that were implicit were made explicit, would he shake his head? Would he enjoy some of the parts
of the implementations? Like, how do you think he would analyze it?
Well, he had a great sense of humor. I don't know if he had a chance to take a look at his writing,
but he had an extraordinary sense of humor. So my guess is he would deploy his humor in answering
this question, too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of the interpretations of his work,
and he's very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could
erase the connection between those things, and the lineage they claim from him, which he would.
There's a German word. I don't know if you speak the other languages. There's a wonderful German
word called Verzichter, and it's stronger than the word refuse. It's if you want to refuse
something but with real strong emphasis. Verzichter is a German way of saying, I don't want to do that.
And he would talk then in philosophical terms, because remember, he was a student of philosophy.
He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest. He would wax
philosophical and say that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having a child.
You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person and will find his or her
own way. And these ideas, once they're out there, go their own way. And as you said, there's a
particular way that this idea spread, the speed at which it spread throughout the world made it even
less able to be sort of stabilized and connected back to the origins of where the idea came from.
The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians after the revolution,
because they occupied a position for a while, not very long, but they occupied a position for a while
in which, I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these people criticizing capitalism
for a long time, even the Marxists ever since mid-century. And these were the first guys who
pulled it off. They made it. And so there was a kind of presumption around the world. Their
interpretation must be kind of the right one, because, look, they did it. And so for a while,
they could enunciate their interpretation, and it came to be widely grasped as something which,
by the way, gets called in the literature, official Marxism, the very idea that you would put that
adjective in front of Marxism or Soviet Marxism or Russian Marxism. There were these words that
where the adjective was meant to somehow say, kind of, this is the canon. You can depart from it,
but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing. And by the 1960s,
it was already, it was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of, and the irony is,
particularly here in the United States, where the taboo against Marxism kicks in right after
World War II is so total in this country that I, for example, through most of my adult life,
have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time simply explaining to American audiences
that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism, which wasn't the canon before
1917 and hasn't been since at least the 1960s, but they don't know. It's not that they're stupid
and it's not that they're ignorant. It's that, well, the ignorance may be, but I mean, it's not
a mental problem. It's the taboo shut it down. And so all of the reopening that in a way recaptures
what went before and develops it in new direction, they just don't know. Nevertheless, it's the
serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit. The Russians, the Soviets at the
beginning of the 20th century, made a serious attempt at saying, okay, beyond the critique of
capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this? And so in that sense, not at a high level,
but at a detailed level, it's interesting to look at those particular schools maybe.
Right. Because for example, let me just take your point one step further, you really cannot
understand the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution, Vietnamese and the others,
because each of them is a kind of response, let's call it, to the way the Soviets did it.
Are you going to do it that way? Well, yes and no is the answer. This we will do that way,
but that we're not going to do. And the differences are huge, but you could find a thread, I can do
that for you if you want, in which all of them are in a way reacting to the originals. Yes, very
much so. Like maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones. That's something
like that. Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools of that Soviet Marxism?
So we got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even let's expand out to Maoism. So maybe I could
speak to sort of Leninism and then please tell me if I'm saying dumb things. I think for Lenin,
there was an idea that there could be a small, so the Vanguard Party, like a small controlling
entity that's wise and is able to do the central planning decisions. Then for Stalinism, one
interesting, so Stalin's implementation of all of this, one interesting characteristic is to
move away from the international aspect of the ideal of Marxism to make it all about
nationalism, the strength of nation. So Maoism is different in that it's focused on agriculture
and rural. Then Trotskyism, I don't know except that it's anti-Stalin. I mean, I don't even know
if there's unique philosophical elements there. Anyway, can you maybe from those or something
else speak to different unique elements that are interesting to think about implementation
of Marxism in the real world? Probably the best way to get into this is to describe something that
happened in Marxism that then shapes the answer to your question. In the early days of Marxist
writings, and you know, his life spans the 19th century. He was born in 1818, dies in 1883,
so literally he lives the 19th century. To make things simple, you might look at the first half
of the first two-thirds of his life as overwhelmingly gathering together the precursors to his own
work. Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that partly because he didn't work a regular job
and partly because he was an exile in London, most of his adult life, he worked in the library.
I mean, he had a lot of time. He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were
manufacturers. And you might say the first half to two-thirds of his life are about
the critique of capitalism. And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work,
Western Europe more or less, was interested in. That's what they wanted. And he gave that to them.
He wasn't the only one, but he was very, very effective at it. By the last third of his life,
he and the other producers of an anti-capitalist movement, people like the Chartists in England,
that's a whole other movement, the anarchists of various kinds, like Proudhon in France,
or Kropotkin or Bakunin in Russia, and so on. You put all these together and there was a shift
in what the audience, let's call it a mixture of militant working-class people on the one hand
and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other. They now wanted a different question.
They were persuaded by the analysis. They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would
like to do better than. And the question became, how do we do this? Not anymore, should we? Why
should we? Could we maybe fix capitalism? No, they had gotten to the point the system has
to be fundamentally changed. But they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say,
well, what will that new system looks like? They didn't go that way. What they did was ask the
question, how could we get beyond capitalism? It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured
people's minds, people's daily lives, and so on. And the focus of the conversation became,
this was already by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism
whereby we would get beyond. And again, make a long story short, the conversation focused
on seizing the government. See, before that, it wasn't that the government was not a major
interest. If you read Marx's capital, the great work of his maturity, three volumes,
there's almost nothing in the state. I mean, he mentions it, but he's interested in the details
of how capitalism works, factory by factory, store by store, office. What's the structure?
The government's secondary for him. But there's also humans within that capitalist system of,
there's the working class. That's what he's interested in. Think of it almost mechanically
like the workplace. In the workplace, there are some people who do this and other people who do
that. And they accept this division of authority. And they accept this division of what's going on
here, particularly because he believed that the core economic objective of capitalism was to
maximize something called profit, which his analysis located right there in the workings
of the enterprise. And the government was not the key factor here.
And he was looking at ideas of value. How much is the, how much value does the labor of the
individual workers provide? And that means, how do we reward the workers in an ethical way?
So those are the questions of... Right, we'll get there.
But the government is not part of that picture.
So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when
this begins, but it really gets going after he dies, is this debate among Marxists about the
role of the state. They all agree, nearly all of them agree, that you have to get the state.
The working class has to get the state because they see the state as the
ultimate guarantor of capitalism. When things get really out of hand,
the capitalist calls the police or he calls the army or both of them. And so the government
is, in a sense, this key institution captured in Marxist language by the bourgeoisie,
by the other side, the capitalists, and yet vulnerable because of suffrage.
If suffrage is universal or nearly so, if everybody gets a vote, which in a way,
capitalism brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism in the French American Revolution,
is to create a place where elected represented. So the government being subject to suffrage
creates the notion, aha, here's how we're going to... We have to seize the state.
And then that gets agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how to do it.
One side says you go with the election. You mobilize the voter. That gets to be called
reformism within Marxism. And the other side is revolution. Don't do that. This system,
if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged. You can't get there. They've long ago learned how to
manipulate parliaments. They buy the politicians and all that, and therefore revolution is going
to be the way to do it. Revolution gets a very big boost because the Russians. They did it that way.
They didn't do... I mean, they fought in the Duma in the parliament, but they didn't. And this
focus on the state, I would argue, goes way beyond what the debaters at the time. And if you're
interested in the great names, there was a great theorist of the role of the state
in a reformist strategy to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important. His
opponents in Germany were Karl Kautzke and Rosa Luxembourg, two other huge figures in Marxism
at the time. And they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate.
By the way, that debate still goes on. Reformism versus revolution.
And in terms of not all that different. I mean, it's adjusted to history, but in terms of different.
Can you comment on where you lean in terms of the mechanism of progress,
reformation versus... I'd rather tell you the historical story. Over and over and over again,
in most cases, the reformists have always won because revolution is frightening, is scary,
is dangerous. And so most of the time, when you get to the point where it's even a relevant
discussion, not an abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have
won. I mean, and I'll give you an example from the United States. In the Great Depression of the 1930s,
you had an extraordinary shift to the left in the United States. The greatest shift to the left
in the country's history before or since. Nothing like it. Suddenly, you created a vast left wing
composed of the labor movement, which went crazy in the 1930s. We organized more people into unions
in the 1930s than at any time before or any time since. It is the explosion. And at the same time,
the explosion of two socialist parties and the communist party that became very powerful,
and they all worked together, creating a very powerful leftist presence in this country.
They debated in a strategically real way reform or revolution. The reformers were the union people,
by and large, and the communists were the revolutionaries, by and large because they were
affiliated with the communist international, with Russia and all of that. And in between,
you might say, the two socialist parties. One that was Trotskyist and Inspiration,
and the other one, more moderate Western European kind of socialism. And they had this intense debate.
And they ended up, the reformists won that debate. There was no revolution in the 1930s here,
but there was a reform that achieved unspeakably great successes, which is why it was as strong
and remains as strong as it does because it achieved in a few years in the 1930s, starting
around 1932-3, social security in this country. We had never had that before. It's the same one
we have now. Unemployment insurance never existed before, which I have till today.
Minimum wage for the first time, still have that today. And a federal program of employment that
hired 15 million people. I mean, these were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working
class. That's the 30s and the 40s. 30s, not much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s. And here's
the best part. It was paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. So when people today
say, well, you can tax the government, the joke is I have to teach American history to Americans
because it has been erased from consciousness.
We'll return to that. But first, let's take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th century
with the Russians. Right, with the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this.
Everybody was right. The state is crucial. We were right. We were the revolutionaries.
We seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state and socialism is when the working class
captures the state, either by reform or revolution, and then uses its power over the state to make
the transition from capitalism to the better thing we're going toward. And again, make a
long story short in the interest of time. What happens, which is not unusual in human history,
is that the means becomes the end. In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear before he
doesn't, he doesn't live very long. He dies in 23. So he's only in power from 17 to 22.
By that time, he has his brain trouble. 1923, by the way, not at age 23.
1923. Yeah, he's only there for four or five years. He's very clear. Even says,
I've done work on, I've published, so I know this stuff. He says in a famous speech,
let's not fool ourselves. We have captured the state, but we don't have socialism.
We have to create that. We have to move towards that. With Stalin, Lenin dies, and there's
a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky loses the fight. He's exiled. He goes to Mexico.
Stalin is now alone in power and does all the things he's famous or infamous for.
And by the end of the 20s, Stalin makes a decision. I mean, not that he makes it alone, but
things have evolved in Russia so that they do the following. They declare that they are socialism.
In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the state, not when the state capture
has enabled you to do X, Y, Z other things. No, no, the state itself, once you have it,
is socialism. So when a socialist captures the state, that's socialism.
Exactly. And that's exactly right.
And I feel like that's definitionally confusing.
Well, it shouldn't be, because I'll give you an example. If you go to many parts of the United
States today and you ask people, what's socialism? They'll tell you, they'll look you right in the
face and they'll say, the post office. And when I first heard this as a young man,
you know what? The post office. It took me a while to understand the post office,
Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government runs something.
This is socialism. See, capitalism is if the government doesn't run it. If a private individual
who's not a government official runs it, well, then it's capitalism. If the government takes it,
then it's socialism. So what is wrong with that reasoning? So the idea, I think...
There's nothing wrong with it. It's a way of looking at the world. It's just got nothing to do with Marx.
Well, there's Marx. There's Marxism. Let's try to pull this apart. So what role
does central planning have in Marxism? So Marxism is concerned with this class struggle,
with respecting the working class. What is the connection between that struggle and central
planning that is often... Central planning is often associated with Marxism. So a centralized power
doing allocation. Russia did that. So that has to do with a very specific set of implementations
initiated by the Soviet Union. It has nothing to do with Marx. How else can you do...
I don't think you can find anywhere in Marxist writing anything about central planning or any
other kind of planning. Again, fundamentally, then Marx's work has to do with factories,
with workers, with the bourgeoisie, and the exploitation of the working class.
You still have to take that leap. What is beyond capitalism?
Right. So maybe we should turn to that. Focus on that.
Okay. We've already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism.
How else can we go beyond capitalism? Let me push it a little further.
They didn't succeed in my judgment as a Marxist. And I'm now going to tell you why they didn't
succeed because they didn't understand as well as they could have or should have what Marxism
was trying to do. I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time under
their circumstances. This is not a critique of them, but it's a different way of understanding
what's going on. All right. So give you an example. Most of my adult life, I have taught Marxian
economics. I'm a professor of economics. I've been that all my life. I'm a graduate of American
universities. As it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities.
It's another conversation you and I can have. So I went to Harvard,
then I went to Stanford, and I finished the Yale. I'm like a poster boy for elite education.
They tried very hard. By the way, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League,
20 semesters, one after the other, no break. In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned
a word about Marxism. That is, no critique of capitalism was offered to me ever with one
except one professor in Stanford. In the one semester I studied with him, he gave me plenty
to read, but nobody else. So that's really interesting. You've mentioned that in the past,
and that's very true, which makes you a very interesting figure to hold your ground intellectually
through this idea space where just people don't really even talk about it.
Perhaps we can discuss historically why that is, but nevertheless, that's the case. So
Marxian economics, did Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of dismissal?
The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal. For giving an example,
the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many years,
the canonical book, it isn't quite anymore, was a book authored by a professor of economics at MIT,
named Paul Samuelson, and people who kind of, you know, a whole generation or two were trained
on his textbook. If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree, and the tree is Adam
Smith and David Ricardo at the root, and then the different branches of it. He's trying to give
you an idea as a student of how the thing developed, and it's a tree, and everybody on it is a bourgeois.
And then there's this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of starts heading back down.
That's Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete because he's not a complete faker,
but beyond that, no, there was no. Nothing in the book gives you two paragraphs of an approach.
But that's Cold War. I mean, that's really, that's really neither here to that. That's the
craziness. Yeah, that's the Cold War in this country. My professors were afraid. Anyway,
let me get to the core of it, what I think will help. Marx was interested in the relationship
of people in the process of production, that he's interested in the factory, the office, the store.
What goes on, and by that he means what are the relationships among the people that come together
in a workplace? And what he analyzes is that there is something going on there that has not been
adequately understood and that has not been adequately addressed as an object needing
transformation. And what does he mean? The answer is exploitation, which he defines mathematically
in the following way. Whenever in a society, any society, you organize people, adults, not the
children, not the sick, but you know, healthy adults. In the following way, a big block of them,
a clear majority, work. That is, they use their brains and their muscles to transform nature.
A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, whatever. In every human community,
Marx argues, there are the people who do that work, but they always produce more chairs,
more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume, whatever their standard of living.
They don't have to be low, it could be medium, it could be high, but they always produce more
than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx, when he writes this, uses the German
word mehr, which is the English equivalent of more. It's the more. That more got badly translated
into the word surplus. Shouldn't it have been? But it was. By the way, by German and English
people doing the translations. What's the difference between more and surplus? Is there a nuanced?
Yeah, because surplus has a notion of its discretionary, its sort of extra. He's not
taking, he's not making a judgment that it's extra. It's a simple math equation.
Yes, very simple. One minus the other. Yes. x minus y. x is the total output.
y is the consumption by the producer. Therefore, x minus y equals s, the surplus. Exactly.
Exactly. Now, Marx argues, the minute you understand this, you will ask the following
question. Who gets the surplus? Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by
those who made it? And Marx's answer is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society.
How is that organized? For example, who gets it? What are they asked, if anything, to do with it
in exchange for getting it? What's their social role? For example, here we go now,
if you get this and you get the core of it anyway. And I don't charge much.
The workers themselves could get it. Or the Western lawyers. That's right.
The workers themselves could get it. That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism.
Communism would be if the workers who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it.
So, this has to do not just with who gets it, but more importantly,
who gets to decide who gets it. Well, who gets it and who gets to decide what to do with it?
Right. Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it. So,
the logic of the word sequence, Marx uses the word appropriated. In other words,
whose property, who gets to decide, if you like, what happens? All that property ever meant
is who gets to decide and who's excluded. That's a clean definition of communism, right?
And that's it. By the way, it's not just clean. It's the only one.
So, what's, can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context?
Easy. It becomes very easy. Exploitation exists if and when the surplus that's produced
is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced it. Slaves produce a surplus
which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the Lord gets. Employees produce a surplus
which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one class
produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced
it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems
you can lump under the heading, class struggle. I use a metaphor, simple metaphorical story.
You have two children, let's assume, and you take them to Central Park a few blocks from here.
It's a nice day and the children are playing and in comes one of those men with an ice cream truck
comes by, ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling. Your children see the ice cream. Daddy, get me an ice cream.
So you walk over, you take some money and you get two ice cream cones and you give them to one of
the children. The other one begins to scream and yell and how? Obviously. What's the issue?
And you realize you've just made a terrible mistake. So you order the one you gave the two ice cream
cones to, give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it is. And that's how
you solve the problem. Until a psychologist comes along and says, you know, you didn't fix it by
what you just did. You should never have done that in the first place. My response, though you
understand, all of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic, political, cultural,
these are all giving the ice cream cone back to the kid. You should never do this in the first
place. The reallocation of resources creates bitterness and populace. Look at Arthur. We've,
this country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my life and I've lived
here all my life and I've worked here all my life. It's tearing itself apart and it's tearing itself
apart basically over the re-division, the redistribution of wealth, having so badly
distributed in the first. But that's all in Marx. And notice, as I explained to you, what is going
on in this tension-filled production scene in the office, the factory, the store, I don't have to
say a word about the government. I'm not interested in the government. The government's really a very
secondary matter to this core question. And here comes the big point. If you make a revolution
and all you do is remove the private exploiter and substitute a government official without
changing the relationship, you know, you can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you're not
getting the point of the Marxism. The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation
per se. You got to change the organization of the workplace so there isn't a group that
makes all the decisions and gets the surplus vis-a-vis another one that produces it. If you do
that, you will destroy the whole project. Not only will you not achieve what you set out to get,
but you'll so misunderstand it that the Germans again have a phrase, it's get chief. It goes
crooked. It doesn't go right. The project gets off the rails because it can't understand
either what its objective should have been and therefore it doesn't understand how and why it's
missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped for. I mean, there's a
lot of fascinating questions here. So one is to what degree, so there's human nature,
to what degree does communism, a lack of exploitation of the working class naturally emerge
if you leave two people together in a room and come back a year later, if you leave five people
together in a room, if you leave a hundred people and a thousand people, it seems that humans form
hierarchies naturally. So the clever, the charismatic, the sexy, the muscular, the powerful,
however you define that, starts becoming a leader and start to do maybe exploitation in a
non-negative sense, a more generic sense, starts to become an employer, not in a capitalist sense,
but just as a human. Here, you go do this and in exchange, I will give you this, just becomes the
leadership role. So the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice. The idea of communism would
be nice to not steal from the world. It's nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice because
of human nature. Because of human nature. That's, thank you. So what can we say about
leveraging human nature to achieve some of these ends? There's so many ways of responding in no
particular order. Here are some of them. The history of the human race, as best I can tell,
is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society, arise and as they do,
they rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they are socially disruptive
and unacceptable. The argument isn't really then, is there a need or an instinct? Is there some human
nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is, this has to be repressed or
else we don't have a society. You know, and Freud helps us to understand that that repression
is going on all the time and it has consequences. It's not a finished project. You repress it.
It's gone. It doesn't work like that. So for example, when you get a bunch of people together
at some point, they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to want the
other person or persons to disappear, to be dead, to be gone. But we don't permit you to do that.
We just don't. Every economic system that has ever existed has included people who defend it
on the grounds that it is the only system consistent with human nature and that every effort to go
beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you endless documents of every
tribal society I've ever studied, every anthropological community that has ever been studied, slavery
wherever it's existed. I can show you endless documents in which the defenders of those systems,
not all of them of course, but many defenders used that argument to naturalize a system,
is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going, to counter the argument that every system
is born, every system evolves and then every system dies and therefore capitalism since it was born
and since it's been developing, we all know what the next stage of capitalism is.
Looking in for if what you're saying-
The burden is on the people who think it isn't going to die.
Okay, so it doesn't mean they're wrong, but what you're saying is if we look at history,
you're deeply suspicious of the argument this is going against human nature because we keep
using that for basically everything including toxic relationship, toxic systems, destructive
systems. That said, let me just ask a million different questions. What about the argument
that the capitalist takes on risk versus the employee who's just there doing the labor?
The capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk. Are they not in aggregating this
organization and taking this giant effort hiring a lot of people? Aren't they taking on risk that
this is going to be a giant failure? First of all, there's risk almost in everything you undertake.
Any project that begins now and ends in the future takes a risk that between now and that future
something's going to happen that makes it not work out. I mean, I got into a cab before I came
here today in order to do this with you. I took a risk. The cab could have been in an accident,
the lightning could have hit us, a bear could have eaten my left foot. Who the hell knows?
But shouldn't I reward you for the risk you took?
No, hold it a second. Let's do this step by step. So everybody's taking a risk. I always
found it wonderful. You talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk.
Let's go with the worker with the capitalist. That worker, he moved his family from Michigan
to Pennsylvania to take that job. He made a decision to have children. They are teenagers.
They're now in school at a time when their friendships are crucial to their development.
You're going to yank them out of the school because his job is gone. He took an enormous risk
to do that job every day, to forestall all the other things he could have done. He was taking
a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next month, next year. He bought a house which
Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's now stuck. He has to make a monthly payment.
If you make a mistake, you capitalist. He's the one who's going to, you're a capitalist,
you got a lot of money. Otherwise, you wouldn't be in that position. You've got a cushion. He
doesn't. If you investigate, you'll see that in every business I've ever been in. I've been
involved in a lot of them. So you think it's possible to actually measure risk or is your
basic argument is there's risk involved in a lot of both the working class and the bourgeoisie,
the capitalist. That's right. And the worker would never come and say, because he's been taught,
right, I want this payment, a wage for the work I do, and I want this payment for the risk I take.
Well, there's some level of communication like that. You have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs,
but that's probably built into the salary, all those kinds of things. But you're not
incorporating the full spectrum of risk. You don't believe that. This country is now being
literally transformed from below by an army of workers who work at Amazon, fast food joints.
You know what their complaint is? It's killing us. We get paid shit. And it's killing us.
There is no relationship except in the minds of the defenders of capitalism, between the ugliness,
the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one hand and the wage. Let me give you just a couple
of examples. This is my job. This is my life, what I do, right? The median income of a child care
worker in the United States right now, as we speak, is $11.22 an hour median. So 50% make less,
50% make more. The median income for car park attendant is several dollars per hour higher than
that. What does the car park attendant do? He stares at your car for many hours to make sure
that nobody comes and grabs it. Maybe he parks it and moves it around to get it in and out.
By any measure that I know of that makes any rational sense, being in charge of toddlers,
two, three, four-year-olds who are at the key moment of mental formation the first five years,
to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who watches your car. Come on,
I know how to explain it. Gender explains all kinds of issues. The car park people are males
and the child care people are females and that in our culture is a very big marker of what,
but the one who said, only the economics professor, nobody else, says this stuff because
in economics, I don't know if you are familiar with our profession, but we have something which we
call marginal product. This is a fantasy. I was a mathematician. Before I became an economist,
I loved mathematics. I specialized in mathematics. So I know mathematics pretty well. What economists
do is silly, is childish, but they think it's mathematics. But think for a minute,
what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal product of a factor of production,
like a worker. In the textbook, when it's taught, I've taught this stuff. I hold my nose, but I
teach it. Then I explain to students, what I've just taught you is horseshit, but first I teach it.
What is the marginal product? It might be useful to say.
The notion is, if you take away one worker right now from the pile, what will be the diminution
of the output? That's the marginal product of that worker measured by the amount of the output
that diminishes the output of the raw product of the product. Usually in real terms, so physical,
not the value. You could do a value, but it's really more the physical you're in.
I mean, there is a transformation thing. I'd love to talk to you about value. It's so interesting.
Yes. I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that. But I just want to get to
Hegel, who is Marx's teacher, has a famous line. You can't step in this in the same river twice.
And the argument is, you and the river have changed between the first and the second time.
So it's a different you and it's a different river. You can choose not to pay attention to that.
Just you can't claim you're not doing that. You can't claim that you can actually do that because
you can't. There is no way to do that. So the meaning that you can't just remove a worker and
have a clean mathematical calculation of the effect that it has on the output? That's right.
Because too many other things are going on. Too many things are changing. And you cannot assume
much as you want to that the outcome on the output side is uniquely determined by the change you
made on the input side. Can't do that. Even in the even in the average, it's not going to work out.
You can take, look, mathematics is full of abstractions. You can abstract. You can say,
as we do in economics, keteris paribus, you know, everything else held constant.
But you have to know what you just did. You held everything. You know why you do that?
Because you can't do that in the real world. That's not possible. You better account for that.
Otherwise, you're mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted from to get the
abstraction. As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiment or an actual
experiment of removing every single economist from the world, would we better off or worse off?
Much better off. Okay. Economics. And I'm one. You know, I'm talking about myself. See, economics
got going to ship all the economy to Mars and see how it works off. But the serious part of this
is that economics, you know, it's really about capitalism. Economics as a discipline is born
with capital. There was no such thing. When I teach, I teach courses at the university, for
example, called History of Economic Thought. Right? And I begin the students with Aristotle and
Plato. And I say, you know, they talked about really interesting things, but they never called
it economics. There was no, it made no sense to people to abstract something as central to daily
life as economics broadly defined. It made no sense. That's a creation much, much later. That's
capitalism that did that created the feeling. So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to
give them particular passages. By the way, footnote, because your audience would like it, Plato and
Aristotle talked about markets because they lived at a time in ancient Greece when market relations
were beginning to intrude upon these societies. So they were both interested in this phenomena
that we're not just producing goods and then distributing among us. We're doing it in a quid
pro quo. You know, I'll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange. And
both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason, they destroy
social cohesion. They destroy community. They make some people rich and other people poor,
and they set us against each other, and it's terrible. And here's what that they agreed on
that. Here's what they disagreed on. One of them said, okay, there can be no markets.
That was Plato. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no, no, too late for that.
The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in amongst us
would be too devastating. So we can't do that. But what we can do is control it, regulate it,
get from the market what it does reasonably well, and prevent it from doing the destructive things
it does so badly. So the fundamentally the destructive thing of a market is the engine
of capitalism. So it creates exploitation of the worker. It facilitates it. And it is an
institution that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible danger to community. Which, by the way,
is a way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world.
Look, the medieval Catholic church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury.
And this was that God said, if there's a person who needs to borrow from you, then that's a person
in need. And the good Christian thing to do is to help him. To demand an interest payment,
rather than to help your fellow man, is God hates you for that. That's a sin. Jesus is
crying all the way to wherever it is he goes. But would Jesus be crying when you try to scale that
system? So that has to do with the intimate human interaction. The idea of markets is you're able
to create a system that involves thousands, millions of humans. And there'd be some level of
safe self-regulating fairness. There might be, but it's hard to imagine that charging interest
would be the way to do that. Suppose you were interested in having,
suppose you took us your problem, we have a set of funds that can be loaned out.
People don't want to consume it. They're ready to lend it. Okay. To whom should they lend it?
Well, we could say in our society, we're going to run this the way professors
in institutions like MIT work this. They write up a project. They send the project
into some government office where it is looked at against other projects. And this office in the
government decides, we're going to fund this one and that one because they're more needed in our
society. We're in greater need of solving this problem than that problem. And so we're going
to lend money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here
because we're going to, but instead what we do is who can pay the highest interest rate.
Whoa, what do you do it? Why, what ethics would justify you do it? It's like a market in general.
Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage. That's one basic way to
understand it. And so if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word shortage
means has no other meaning. If the demand is greater than the supply, okay, now you got a problem.
You can't satisfy all the demanders because you don't have enough supply. You have a shortage.
Okay. Now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people who have a lot of money
to bid up the price of whatever's short. That solves your problem because as the price goes up,
the poor people can't, they drop out. They can't buy the thing at the exalted price. So you've got
a way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people with the most money. At this point,
most human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn against it because it's
contradicts their Christian, Judaic, Islamic, all of them would say, what? You know what that
means? It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat while the
poor person has no milk for their five children. There it is. Do you want to mark it? Why?
The fundamental thing that seems unfair, there's the resulting inequality now.
Or death.
Or death. Well, that's the ultimate inequality. Yes, it is.
What about, and we're going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics,
to the sort of debate type of thing. What about sort of the lifting ties raise all boats?
Meaning, if we look at the 20th century, a lot of people, maybe you disagree with this,
but they attribute a lot of the innovation and the average improvement in the quality of life
to capitalism, to inventions and innovation, to engineering and science developments
that resulted from competition and all those kinds of forces. Not looking at the individual
unfairness of exploitation as it's specifically defined, but just observing historically.
Looking at the 20th century, we came up with a lot of cool stuff that seemed to have made life
easier and better on average. What do you say to that?
I have several responses to that, but I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's
going on there. But let me give you the argument so that you can hear them and then you can evaluate
them as can anybody who's listening or watching. Marx was a student of Hegel, and one of Hegel's
central arguments was that everything that exists, exists, quote, in the contradiction.
In simple English, there's a good and bad side if you like to everything.
And you won't understand it unless you accept that proposition and start looking
for the good things that are the other side of the bad ones and the bad things that are the
other side of the good one, et cetera. So the dialectic. Yes, exactly. And Marx, very attentive
to that, explicitly agrees with this on many occasions and applies it, of course, to the
central object of his research, capitalism. So this is not a simple-minded fellow who's
telling you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this system achieved
or accomplished. And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological dynamism
of the system, which Marx takes to be profound because, you know, he lived at the time when
major breakthroughs in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved.
But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement in
the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people, Marx now comes back and says,
oh, wait a minute here. Number one, capitalism as a system has been mostly represented by
capitalists, which makes a certain sense. And those capitalists, with very few exceptions,
some but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the lives of the mass of people.
The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What that means is replace a worker with a
machine, move the production from expensive U.S. to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants
from other parts of the world because they will work for less money than the folks that you have
here at home. Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for
for decades over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning to right now. The reason we
have a minimum wage, which was passed mid-1930s, when it was proposed it was blocked by capitalists.
They got together and today just a factoid for you. The last time the minimum wage was raised
in the United States, federal minimum wage, was in 2009 when it was set at the lofty sum
of $7.25 an hour, which you cannot live on. Over the last 12 years or so, whatever it is,
not 11, 12, 13 years since then, we have had an increase in the price level in this country
every year and in the last year, 8.5%. During that time that the prices went up,
the minimum wage was never raised. What? This is a time of stock market boom, of growing inequality.
This is the nerve of the defender of capitalists who wants now to get credit for the improvement
in the standard of life of the workers that was fought by every generation. You know,
it takes your breath away. It's an argument, whoa. But I take my hat off if I had one because that
is one of the only ways to justify this system. Long ago, let me get the heart of it, long ago
capitalism could have overcome hunger, could have overcome disease, could have, I mean,
way beyond what we have now, but it didn't. And that's the worst moral condemnation
imaginable. How do you justify that when you could, you didn't? Look, let me get at it another way
because this may interest you anyway. The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically
dynamic. It is. And along the way, it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better.
No question. But the notion that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living
is somehow built into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous, and I can give
you a, because you do math, you'll understand it. Think of it this way. Imagine a production
process in which you have $100 that the capitalist has to lay out for tools, equipment, and raw
materials, and $100 that he has to lay out for workers, hire the workers, and he puts them
all together, and he has an output. And let's say the output is 100 units of something at one of
the prices, and that's his revenue. And when he takes his product and sells it and gets the revenue,
let's say the revenue is, it doesn't really matter. It's 120, for lack of a better word,
and he takes, 220, sorry, and he takes 100 of it and replaces the tools, equipment, and raw
materials he used up, another 100 to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other 20 is
his profit, and he puts that aside. Now along comes a technological breakthrough, a machine,
a new machine. And the new machine is so effective,
you can get the same number of units of output with half the workers. So you don't need to spend
100 on workers, you only need to spend 50. You can do it with half the workers. And so the capitalist
goes to the workers, by the way, this happens every day, and he says to half of them, you're fired.
Don't come back Monday morning, I don't need you. It's nothing personal, I got a machine.
Why does he do that? Because the 50 he now no longer has to spend on labor because it doesn't
need to have for them, he keeps. Everything else is the same, the machine, everything else is just
to make their math easy. So he keeps as his own profit the 50 that before he paid for those workers.
Because when he sells it for 220, that 50, they'll have to give it to the next job,
because he has a new machine. So that's what he does. The technology leads, he's happy,
he's become more profitable, he's got an extra 50, which is why he buys the machine.
The workers are screwed. Half of them just lost their job, have to go home to their husband and
wife, tell them I don't have a job anymore, I didn't do anything wrong, the guy was nice enough to
say it was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn't need them. So I'm completely screwed here,
I don't know what I'm going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage, my children's
education or whatever else he's got going for himself. Right now, now the point. There was of
course an alternative path. The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them
exactly the same that you did before for half a day's work. You would have got the same output,
the same revenue, same profit as before, but the gain of the technology would have been a half a
day of freedom every day of the lives of these workers. The majority of workers would have been
really helped by this technology, but instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer,
could make a big bundle of more money. You want to support a system like this?
Well, to go back to Hegel, the good and the bad, so you just listed the bad and you also
first listed the good, the technological innovation of this kind of system. The question is the
alternative, whatever, as we try to sneak up to ideas of what the alternative might look like,
what are the good and the bad of the alternative? So you just kind of as a opposite by contrast
showed that, well, a nice alternative is you work less, get paid the same, you have more leisure
time, opportunity to pursue other interests, the creative interest, family, flourish as a human
being, basically strengthen and embolden the basic humanity that's under all of us. Yes,
but then what cost does that have on the deadline fueled, competition fueled machine
of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism?
It slows it down. It slows it down. And the question is, which is more important for the
flourishing of humanity? I agree with that. And I'd love there to be a democratic mechanism.
So let's discuss it, let's debate it, and then let's decide what mixture, because it's not
either or, the math problem I gave you is either or, we could mix it, you could have
a third less of a working day instead of a half less, and then the other part would be extra profit
for our employer, etc. So let's have a democratic discussion of what is the mix between the positive
and we have no such thing. All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only we
know what they do, they always choose the one that maximizes their profit, because that's what
they were told to do in business school where I've taught. So not only is it an undemocratic
decision, but it's lopsided to boot. So we don't have the opportunity, but I would love for us
to be good Hegelian Marxists and say, let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make
the best decision that we can. We'll make mistakes, but we'll all make them together.
It won't be one of us making a dictatorial decision. You know, Marx developed the notion
of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not as a notion of how government is not, I'm sorry,
not Marx, Lenin did that, not as a notion of how a government works, but as a notion of what the
practical reality is. The dictatorship and these key decisions is not made by some sitting council,
it's made by each little capitalist in his or her relationships with the workers in the workplace,
which is why Marx focused his analysis on that point. And by the way, I can sketch for you
right now, so it doesn't lurk in the background what the alternative is.
Let's go there. Okay. It goes right back to what I said earlier. The workers themselves,
the collection of employees, together appropriate their own surplus and decide democratically
what to do with it, which includes the decision of whether or not to buy a machine
and whether or not to use the machine and the savings it might allow to be handled by more
leisure for themselves or as a fund for new developments in technology or new products or
whatever they want. And you know, this is an old idea in human. Marx loved that. Toward the end
of his life, he started reading extensively in anthropology. And one of the reasons he did that
toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering that in this society and that,
including here in the United States, that there were examples of people who organized their production
in precisely this way as a collective democratic community in which everybody had an equal voice.
So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to produce, where to produce,
and what to do with the output we all helped to produce. So let's do it in, you know, in this
country where democracy is a value nearly everybody subscribes to. Think about it this way,
the stunning contradiction that there is a place in our society where democracy has never been allowed
to enter. The workplace, in the workplace a tiny group of people, unaccountable to the rest of
them, the employer, whether that's an individual, a family, a partnership, or a corporate board of
directors, tiny group of people controls economically a vast mass of employees. Those employees don't
elect those people. There is no accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable
and this society insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor
matter of producing everything in a way that is the direct, it's autocratic.
So to push back on a few things. So one is the idea of this society calling itself democratic is
that the government is elected democratically and the government is able to pressure the workplace
through the process of regulation. You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know, minimum wage,
all those kinds of things. That's the one idea. The other is there is a natural force within the
capitalist when there's no monopolies of competition being the accountability. So if you're a shitty
boss, the employee in the capitalist system has the freedom to move to another company, work for
a better boss. So that creates pressure on the employers and the bosses. That's at least the
idea that you, there's two boundaries of you not misbehaving. One is the law, so regulations by
passed by the government, democratic. And the second is because there's always alternatives
in theory, then that puts pressure on everyone to behave well because you can always leave.
So, I mean, that's kinds of accountability, but what you're saying is that does not result in
significant enough accountability or the employer that avoids exploitation of the worker.
Absolutely. I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms and let me respond to that
and then I'll counter argument. First, competition. Here again, we have to be Hegelians just a little.
Competition destroys itself. It doesn't need any, the whole point of competition is to beat the other
guy. If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better quality or a lower price
or maybe both, then I win because the customers will come to me because my price is lower or my
quality is better and they'll leave the other guy, he'll go out of business. Now let's follow.
When he goes out of business, because I've won the competition, he fires his workers.
I hire them because I'm now going to be able to serve a market. He can't serve anymore,
so I'm going to buy the used equipment and thereby many become few. Monopoly is the product of
competition. It's not the antithesis, it's the product. Well, let's see. That's where it comes
from. There's another element to the system where there's always a new guy that comes in.
There isn't. That's the dream. The entrepreneurial spirit of the United States,
for example, of a capitalist system is you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build
up a business that takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car for GM,
which is what you look at Tesla, for example. That's the American dream. One of the many ideals
of the American dream is you can move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world.
It can happen. It can happen, but you can win the lottery.
No, that's not quite. No, the lottery is complete luck. Here, you can work your ass off if you
have a good idea. The odds are better in the lottery. That's not true. There's a lot of new
businesses. How many Teslas do you know? Tesla's a really bad example because the car company,
automotive sector is so difficult to operate as such a thin margin of profit. They're probably a
good example of capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of lack of innovation. That's
a very complicated industry because of the supply chain. Come on. They have their uniqueness as
you're quite right, but so does every other industry. The one thing that's common is that
many become few. What you can also have is when you have a few, they jack up the price. They make
an enormous profit. In the irony of capitalism, Marx would love this, they begin to incentivize
people to break into this industry because the few remaining are making a wild amount of profit
because they are a few and can jigger the market to make it work like that for them.
The reason every small capitalist is trying to build market share, that's a polite way of saying
they want to become a monopolist or to be more exact, an oligopolist, one of a handful of firms
that dominates. That's what they're there for.
But yeah, to push back a little bit also because that could be, this is a question also,
do you think we're in danger of oversimplifying capitalism that completely removes the basic
decency of human beings? If you give me a choice to press a button to get rid of the competition,
but that's going to lead to a lot of suffering, there's a lot of people at the heads of companies
that won't press that button. It's not in the calculation, it's not just money. It's human
well-being too. You think? Yes. You and I don't live in the same place then.
So you're saying that the forces of capitalism take over the minds of the people at the top,
and then they seize being human, essentially. No.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't. That's fine.
Depending on your model of humans, but they lose track of the better angels of their nature,
and they just become cogs in the machine, but they just happen to be the cogs at the top.
I would put it differently, that the system is so set up, it's a little bit like natural selection.
I could say the women too, it doesn't matter. The people who make it up through the layers
of the bureaucracy and get to the top in these things have had to do things along the way
that become selective. If they can't stand it because they have that human quality,
and there are people like I've known them, they're the ones running in Airbnb in Vermont.
They went there and they said, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to treat people
like that. I'm going to make a lovely place in Vermont with my husband or my wife or whatever,
and I'm going to be enjoying the people that come by and be a decent human. Of course, of course,
but the system selects the firm. If you don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up,
you're toast there anyway. The rest of the people who vote for you are going to kick you out.
You can tell them all day long what a lovely person you are. They're going to look at you
and wonder what happened to you. How did you even get this far with the lovely person horseshoes?
It's not necessarily just lovely person. I'll just say my bias is the people I
know are in the tech sector where innovation is such a big part of it. I think a lot of the
things we're talking about is when there's not much innovation in the system.
Innovation usually comes in the history of capitalism, innovation comes in spurts.
There's the electric period, the chemistry period, the nuclear period. There's now,
whatever you want to call it, the artificial intelligence or robotics or computer. It comes
and then there's a flurry as everything is reorganized around whatever the newest
technology is, and then you have a period where you can get excited about that,
and the very rich people who come to the top can talk endlessly as they always do about innovation.
But again, you know, it really is, this is a recurring kind of debate and a recurring
kind of issue. For me, how do I put this in a way that, you know, I don't mean to offend.
So please, please. No, no, no, I don't want to. But the problem with capitalism is,
and maybe you'll like this, the problem with capitalism is not that it is the one thing
that's consistent with human nature. That's what its defenders would like to have us believe.
But if anything, I would argue the opposite, that it is such a contradiction to parts of our
nature, not other parts, that it can never quite make it. There's always going to be the people
who don't go along with it, people you're talking about, who do quit along the way,
or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top by God knows what hook or what crook
that they did it. But most of them go, and you know why? Because their humanity is contradicted
by what it is they're being asked to do. I mean, the corporate sector this year,
just to give you an idea, CEOs are jacking up their wage package. They're already out of whack.
I mean, the average CEO pay is now 300 times what the average worker pay is,
but they're jacking it up even more. Why? Because that's what's happening in their
universe. That's what they're all doing it, and they have to do. Each one of them justifies
that I have to do that, otherwise I'd lose my guy to the next one, which of course is true,
but is no comfort for the mass of people who want CEOs for whom this argument isn't very exciting.
So they're doing that at a time when the American people can't cope.
They've just gone through the COVID disaster. They've gone through the worst, second worst
economic crash of capitalism in our history. After two years of this one-two punch,
they got an inflation, a third punch, and we are now predicting rising interest rates
in a recession at the end of the year or early next year. You can't do this to a working class.
When this was done to the German working class in the 1920s, Hitler was the result.
You keep doing that in this country. We're already watching it. You're going to get that too.
You're already getting bits and pieces. You can't keep doing this.
So there's a quiet suffering amidst the working class that's growing.
Harbour. Taking out on it.
That can turn to anger.
Some little 18-year-old kid who has to go three hours in his car
and blow away people in a supermarket.
And it happens every day in this country, every day.
So that anger rises up in those little ways now and bigger, bigger, bigger potentially.
By the way, there's one more thing on the rationality, and this goes to Elon Musk.
If you're interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year.
The number was just released yesterday. 49,000.
Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country.
They use up an enormous amount of energy. They use up enormous amount of resources.
There is a way to make transportation much more rational, and we've known it for decades.
It's called mass transportation. It's a really beautifully maintained, crystal clear,
clean, frequent system of buses, trains, street trolleys, vans.
It could easily be done in this society.
In fact, I once did a project that I estimated cost $30 billion.
That's less than we're sending to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it.
A public transit system where?
Everywhere in this country, all the major metropolitan areas.
This country's overwhelmingly metropolitan area.
Well, it eerily has to be more than $30 billion.
Well, it was a few years ago, whatever it was.
You're saying it's not a number that's insane.
Right. It's not crazy stuff.
It's a reasonable number.
Right. Right.
Let me just finish the point.
Sure. Yes.
Okay. So I'm trying to be rational here.
If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do, if it's got a lot to do with
fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use of the fossil fuel,
particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass transit.
But we don't, we're doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing.
Well, there's, you know, on, you could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public
transit because it's going to be reasonable vehicles.
It will end in theory, car ownership.
So you just have a more kind of distributed public transit system.
If it happens, but you know that that's a side effect.
His major goal and the major goal of the other companies that are busy squeezing to
get his share by smaller, so they have some for General Motors to tell you all of them
are making electric cars. So what they've done is they've replaced the individual car
with fossil fuel with another individual car.
That's fucking nuts. What are you doing?
It's one of the things they're doing, but automation is also another one.
But on the Elon side, there's also a hilariously named boring company,
which is working on tunnels, which is actually expanding the, the flexibility you might have
to start playing with ideas of public transit. I think, listen, I'm now partially living in
Austin, Texas, that I don't know if they know what a public transit system is, period.
There's most American pickup trucks there. Well, there's, this is an interesting, so
the older that, by the way, footnote, the older this city, the more likely it has public
transportation. So you're saying Boston is the best example?
Yes. Have you been, you know, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I have a place in Boston.
Boston with the street railway. Boston is your case study of how to do this,
because they've been doing it all along. New York's pretty good too.
There's a trade out. Yeah. New York, I would say is better than Boston because
there's, there's, you know, their technology also helps you out to do the public transit
better. It's almost like Boston is a little too old, but yes, I get your point. But there is a,
the Ford F-150 pickup truck symbolizes something about America. And there is a practical nature
to the fact that in order to do public transit, in order to do some of these things that you're
talking about with the working class, there has to be a central planning component or there has
to be a centralized component. And America is very much based on the idea of, at least in recent
times, well, I would say from the founding of individualism, of respecting individual freedom.
Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas of Marxism to life,
you would trample on individual freedoms? No. Can you respect both? Sure. For me, Marxism is
a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people who have had that freedom eroded
under the capitalism. That's a motive for my Marxism. It was for Marx too. He loved the French
revolution. He loved the liberté, égalité, fraternité, the great three, and then democracy,
the American contribution, if you like. He believed in all of that. His critique of capitalism was,
it promised it and then never delivered it. And the reason you have to go beyond it is because
it didn't deliver what it had promised. So for me, it is the fulfillment of
a gender. But again, I'm a Hegelian Marxist, so if you want. Individualism, for me, is not the way
it's set up in this society. Some sort of antithesis to the government. I think an immense con has been
pulled on the American people. And the con works like this. You know what's bad and what's dangerous
and threatens you? It's the government. The government's going to come in and tell you
what to do. The government's going to run your life. The government's the problem. There really
is no other way to explain the following in American politics. Large numbers of people lose
their homes in a downturn, like the so-called Great Recession of 2008. Who do they blame?
The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed. And what are the media all about?
The government. If I were a capitalist, I'd love this. I kicked the workers by throwing them out
of their home. And they don't get angry with me. They get angry with the government. I fire large
numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them as a result of having no job
and no income. And they get angry at the senator. I'm laughing all the way to the bank. This is
a genius stroke in theory. But if you look at government, because you said accountability
in the capitalist system has no accountability. There's some pushback I give on the accountability.
I think there is some accountability we can discuss in a Galeon way. There's more accountability
for, I would say that in theory, government is perfectly accountable. That's the whole point
of a democratic system is you vote people in. In practice, there's a giant growing bureaucracy
that is accountable only on the surface. There's two parties that seem to be, are the same. Media
is somehow integrated into making the same two parties that are just wearing different colored
shirts to seem like they're very opposed and are arguing and bitterly arguing and calling each
other's spouses and nasty names and all those kinds of things. Okay. But that's government.
So who exactly is worse here? Government or companies?
Well, why are we asking that question? These are twins. Look, what you were able to say about
Republicans and Democrats just now, with which I agree, I would say the same thing about corporations
and the government. This is the same people, literally. Let's go to Churchill. Which one is the,
which one is worse? Let's go to Churchill, like democracy is the worst formal government,
except all the other ones or whatever. So this kind of same idea, which one exactly is worse?
Because to me, it seems like, which one between what government and industry and companies?
It's because government is plagued by, I will call it corruption because the corruption of
bureaucratic paperwork. And then because they're, but they're not accountable. There doesn't seem
to be a serious accountability. Again, we're not see, we're not living on the same planet.
Okay. The greatest practitioners of central planning are corporations. Elon has an, an
operation like General Motors, Ford, IBM, or any of the other mega-corps. They have to plan.
They buy up companies because they don't want to deal in the market. They don't want the insecurity,
the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs or sell their outputs to somebody they don't control.
They want the professor to teach the genius of a market. They hate the market. And when they grow
to be big, they keep buying whoever they were dealing with before, so they could better control
them, which requires them then to plan the production and distribution of goods inside,
rather than buying them in the market. The model of the government is a private corporation.
I have spent my life, give you an example, in American universities, big ones, famous ones,
not just as a student, but as a professor. I mean, I've been a half a dozen school,
I teach there at the new school here, it's another one, right? They will model themselves
after businesses. You can attack the bureaucracy of universities, good reason, it's a mess,
but they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing their bureaucracy in a business-like
manner. So you're looking at a difference which isn't there. The government and the private sector
are partners, and both of them wouldn't have it any other way. The corporations want that from
the government, and the government now knows that to please the corporations is the number one
objective they have, because that's how they keep their jobs and keep their system going.
And so for all practical purposes, this is the same people.
But there's important differences that I don't know if they're fundamental or just a consequence
of history, but if you have government, they're accountable in a different way than companies.
Companies are accountable by, especially if you have a consumer, they're accountable by sort of
the consumer spending or not spending their money on whatever the heck the company is selling.
Right. The government is accountable by votes, and it seems like government, unlike companies,
for most of companies, history is always too big to fail, meaning it can always just print money.
It can always save itself, and that creates a bureaucracy. You rarely pay the cost
of having made bad decisions if you're in government. You distribute the blame,
and it's very unclear who's responsible for bad decisions, so bad decisions in government
accumulate. So you become more and more and more inefficient and more and more poor in your decision
making in terms of, you said, public transit, should we build a public transit system in this
city or not? That's a difficult decision. That's an interesting decision. I would say it's very
often a very good decision, but whoever makes that decision should be accountable for a good
or bad decision, and it seems like companies are more accountable. They feel the pain of having
made a bad decision more because they can go bankrupt. I mean, there's much more day-to-day
pressure to make good engineering decisions. Government doesn't seem to be under the same
level of pressure. Do you disagree with that? I disagree with that. Everything in my history
pushes me. I may be living in a different... Who knows? A planet, or taking a different sort of
drug. I won't mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a very large company here
in the United States, here in the New York area. And it involved two brothers and a family who built
it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was kind of the dynamo of the family,
and he was more responsible than anybody else building it up. But he took care of his brothers.
He had a nice feeling about his brother. So the one brother who could not, you know, without
help tie his shoes became a vice president, got an enormous salary, got a beautiful office in a
skyscraper, not that many blocks from where I'm sitting right now. And that was the way that
family handled that company. And all of his relatives that were somewhere in this company,
doing a variety of whatever. Because in my experience with this, and because I went to the
schools I told you, all my experiences with that group of people, corporate executives,
they follow those stories, you know. They made mistake after mistake, which they would tell
you about. Didn't undermine there. They were always able to blame somebody else, something else
that scraped them through. And had they not been able to, they would have been replaced by another
person who did the same thing for as long as they could. And they knew it. They would talk about it
at family events. That's how I know. I understand that you want the outside world to look at it
this way, but it's not my experience. But again, what's that kind of thing at the risk of saying
human nature again, I wonder what kind of system allows for that more versus less. This is the
question of, I would call that, let's put that under the umbrella term of corruption,
which system allows for more corruption. But remember that the way I defined the different
system is not more or less government. It's more or less allowing a democratic workplace,
reconfiguring it. What happens when everybody has a vote, when you have to explain what the
strategies are, what the alternatives are to a larger number of people than a board of directors
or major shareholders or whoever it is that most companies are responsible to. And now you've got
a whole different universe. It's not a small group of people. Can't be hidden the way it's
normally hidden. Most of it on and on and on. Worker co-ops is what this is called in many
parts of the world. So it's not that I'm advocating something that's never been seen before. Not at
all. The Marxism, I understand, is to pick from historical precedents the things that we think
will work better. And I think if all the people in an enterprise, just to drive the point home,
democratically decided, they would never give two or three individuals $100 million while
everybody else can't send their kid to college. Have you ever gone do that?
So just to address this point about the particular implementation of Marxism,
that was the early days in the Soviet Union, why did Stalinism, for example, lead to so much
bloodshed, do you think, in human suffering? Is there any elements within the ideas of Marxism
that catalyzed the kind of government, the kind of system that led to that bloodshed?
I don't think so. I think there were many things that led to the bloodshed and so all that Stalin's
regimes did. And I spent 10 years of my life with another economist writing a book
about that to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
You might want to take a look at it sometime. But there, I'm going to say a few things now,
but all of those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, etc.
in that work. Let me start with playing a little bit with Hegel.
So the biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the
Soviet Union did, but what the rest of the world did. You had a really interesting move,
and I'll give you a parallel from today. The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed.
World War I just, it fell apart. The czar and all of that, it couldn't survive. It had already
been in trouble. There was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war to Japan. I mean,
if you know Russian history, which I assume you do, you'll know that there was a lot leading up to
the collapse in 1917. And in some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small,
that could seize the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists.
Earlier on with Kerensky, the first government that tried, it wasn't people all that impressed
by Marxism. They were people more skeptical and wouldn't not have been called Marxists probably by
history. They tried. They couldn't. Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later
in that same year. The rest of the world, though, was horrified. The rest of the world saw Marxism
having taken this immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism,
yes, but still not challenging the power. Now it had the power and in a big country. And they freaked
out. If you know American history, this country, the leadership of this country, went completely
berserk. I mean, we had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before.
The 20s were a time of palmerades in Boston, the Sackle-Venzetti trials, really grim hostility.
And you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution.
The U.S., Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops. So what you had right away
was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. There was a great professor at Princeton,
Meyer, if you get his first name, who wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy
since 1917 has been obsessed with Russia. Even now, this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia,
as if Russia still was the Soviet Union, as if people haven't figured out.
That was a big change back in 1989 and 1990. Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before,
or at least they're not learning. They may not be so different from some of the other,
but in any case. So you had one factor was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation,
the global. I assume you know that Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin.
She's a critic of Lenin's, by the way, but she's a leftist, hunted down and hacked into bits, killed.
So you are attributing some of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world
turned away. Turned against.
Turned against. So you turn against is the better way.
Very, yeah. I mean, not in order of importance, but it's a very important part of the psychology
of being, you know. It's what you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence
that indeed there was a lot to be afraid of at that time. Nobody had ever done it. Look,
you could see the effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at first,
that you could have socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous, that socialism was
internationalism. Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, workers of the
world unite, not workers of Russia unite, workers of the... He had to go through a procedure of
kind of coming to terms with the fact that the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried
in Berlin, was tried in Munich, was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here, they all
failed. They all failed. And he's left. So the French would say. Tout ça, right? You know, all alone.
That's one. The second thing is economic isolation. Russia's a poor country and it needed
what it got before the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans,
particularly, but others too. Now this was all cut off. And you can see the replay
with the sanctions program. We're going to do it again. We're going to do it again.
We have to do it. The world is different and the sanctions don't work, but they're going to try them.
Because it's the history. But that culture, today is completely different. Russia's a
different place today, but Russia has China and that changes everything. And they don't get that
here yet, but they will. Yeah, there's a very complicated dynamic with China, even with India.
Yep. Or Turkey. Brazil. Yeah. Sorry to say human nature may change at a slower pace.
Yes. That has occurred to me as well. I get that point. So can you steel man the case
or consider the case that there's something about the implementation of Marxism,
maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing on the working class and the workers unite,
that naturally leads to a formation of a dictatorial force, a dictator that says,
let us temporarily give power to this person to manage some of the details of how to run the
democracy of giving voice to the workers so that they get to choose. And then that naturally leads
to a dictator. And there's naturally inhuman nature, power and absolute power as the old adage
goes corrupts. Absolutely. Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marxist ideals,
you're going to end up with a dictator. And often when you give too much power to anyone, human,
a small number of people, you're going to get into a huge amount of trouble.
You've put things together there that I would. That's what I think if you, if you give.
Putsch does a good word. Yeah, German. If you, remember I told you,
my mother was born in Germany. And then your dad is French.
Yeah, but he was born in Metz, if you know, European. It's a city on the border of France
in Germany. If you come from, Alsatians, Alsace in Germany.
So they're German speaking. Yeah, absolutely both. It's a bilingual because it's been back
and forth so many times in medieval days already that it literally you go from one store to another.
The proprietor here is French and the proprietor there is German,
but they all speak both languages because you don't speak either of them.
I speak Russian. Russian, but not German.
Ukrainian. No, it took French for four years in high school, but I've forgotten all of it.
I remember the romance and the spirit of the language, but not the details. I'm sure I can
remember. If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long
period of time and you do it on many levels of ideology, it is not surprising that it sticks
and it stays and you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution
and you will discover it has a life of its own and it's going to take a long time before people
don't. If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism
and that it doesn't want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was Zeus
and Diana and all the others and they were very human-like, but instead we have one
who is the absolute beginning and what are you doing? You're teaching people
an authority line that comes from the individual. If you have a sequence of kings, if in your feudal
manner the Lord sits called to the landlord, he has unspeakable power over everything that goes on
and you do this for thousands of years, you can make a Russian revolution in 1917,
but if you imagine you've gotten away from all that people assume without ever thinking about it,
you're going to have trouble. Stalin is figured here as the originator of his situation. He
wasn't. He never had that power. He may have thought that, but I don't. He's the product.
Look, the Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn't that kind of guy. You know, he was a
baseball-playing lawyer. That's what he was, but they made him into Tala. So it's not the system of
history. No, no, no. It was the systems, feudalism, the literature. It was the structures and
institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its own rhythm and doesn't follow the
calendar of a political revolution. That's the fundamental question. Is there something about
communism that creates some mentality that enables somebody like Stalin or Mao?
No, I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what
they find familiar, to what seems to make sense, and he's the guy. Look, let me give you an example
from American history. The Republican Party has traditionally in this country been the party
of private enterprise and minimum government. Income Trump runs for office in 2016, is elected.
Okay? What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most massive government
intervention in the worlds of economics that we've had for decades. Nobody says anything.
Okay? The Republicans cave and the Democrats largely too. They cave. He can throw a tariff
on anything. He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff.
That's not what a tariff is. It's not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman
course in economics, which everybody knows. Everybody who teaches these courses knows.
It doesn't matter. He's still calling the shots. What is going on here is that a society has come
to a point where it can't solve its problems and it begins what? To tap into older forms and all
of the laissez-faire and all of the individualism. And suddenly the Republican Party is gone.
Now they're going to make an abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do
with your uterus. What? What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power.
They're hoping what? Do they like the government? No. They're desperate. This is not a pro-government
and it wasn't in Russia either. They were in a desperate fix and he took advantage.
To which degree would you say Marx's ideas led to the creation of the
national socialism party of German workers, hence the Nazi party, the fascist party in the 30s
and the 40s at the head of whom was Hitler, which I just recently learned he was
employing number seven of the party or whatever, the seventh person to have joined the party
and have created one of the most consequential and powerful political parties in the history of
the 20th century? What degree did Marx's ideas, Marxism ideas have to play? It is the national
socialist party of German workers, workers. National Socialist German Worker Party National
Socialist German Worker Party. Here's the history. Did he care about the workers or did he just use
the workers as a populist message? The only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler was
provide him with his stepping stone to power but had nothing, no other. He didn't know anything
about it, didn't care anything about it, nor did the people around him. Here's the story of what
happened there, which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history, the work that I did.
The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German party. It started around 1870.
Marx was still alive. Some of his own family were leaders, Fanon Lassalle and other his daughters.
By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany. Nobody understood
it. It was over. It was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution in
1917. Here was a political party that was now in every German city, in every German town, powerful
and enjoying its rise up. That's my family is involved in this. I mean, I really do know the
story. It meant that starting around 1968, if you wanted to have any kind of presence
in the German working class, you had to use the word socialist. You had to. Otherwise,
they wouldn't pay attention. The other parties called themselves Catholic.
Germany is divided. The northern two thirds is Protestant. The southern third is Catholic. Munich
and Bavaria is Catholic and every other part of Germany basically is Protestant. You could be in
the Catholic party. That was the south. Or you could be in various conservative Prussian and other.
If you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing in Germany,
a very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time, Germany was the major
competitor to Britain for the empire. The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and
US taking over from Britain's empire. So the German working class was it. So anybody who
wanted to approach the working class in whatever way had to come to terms and be friendly to
socialism. Other parties did this too, just like Hitler. They put the word socialist in their party,
but they wanted to make it clear that they weren't anything to do with the Soviet Union or anything
to do with Marxism. So they put the word national. Nazi is the first four letters of national,
national in German, NAZI is how you spell national in the German language.
National socialism, but definitely not communists.
That's right. They killed communists. They fought communist in the street. They had pitched battles.
They literally threatened each other's existence and their lives. And the first people that he
arrested and put in jail were not Jews and Gypsies and all the other people. He eventually killed.
It was communists. They were the number one and socialist right behind them. Why? Because up until
he takes power, January of 1933, that's when Hitler takes power. The last elections, two of them,
in 1932, the socialists and communists, the vote together, 50% of the vote in Germany.
So he appealed to the German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said,
the communists and socialists are going to win. And you're just the capitalists. You have too
few people. You need a mass base, and I'm the only one that can do that.
That was just the populist message that he used. That's right. But it was explicitly done
as a deal. The ruling group said to Hindenburg, the old Prussian man who was in charge of the
German government at the time, you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise,
he would never have done it. He had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked
down on Hitler as a little funny man with a mustache who was Austrian, wasn't even German,
for them that mattered. So he comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism,
which he immediately does. Only people who don't know or care about the history pick up on the
word. It's like there are people here in the United States who like to say,
we are not a democracy. We are a republic, which is like saying, I'm not a banana. I'm a fruit.
You have to explain to these people a banana is a kind of... So you have to explain to people,
yes, we're a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy as a way to govern the republic,
because to say you're a republic doesn't imply what kind of government you have. You have to go
through that with people so they kind of get it. And certain words have power beyond their
actual meaning that's used in communication, whether it's negative, like racist or positive,
like freedom of speech. Or Democrat. Or Democrat. With a D. Yeah. And then you use that to mean
something. Who knows? Or negative, what, stop Donnie, stop being a socialist or whatever that
means. That's not even used as any kind of philosophical or economic sense. So let's fast
forward to today. You mentioned Bernie Sanders. There's another popular figure that represents
some ideas of maybe let's call it democratic socialism. And maybe let's try to start
sneak up on a definition of what that could possibly mean. But AOC, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez,
she's from these parts. Yes, Queens. So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC,
are they open to some ideas in Marxism? Are they representing those ideas well in both
economic and the political sense? Okay. Where do I begin? The socialist movement predates Marx,
Marx was always larger than Marx and has gone on to develop separately after Marx's death.
So can we pause on that actually? Is there a nice way to delineate, draw a line between
Marxism and socialism? Or if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism, can you speak to like,
maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism is?
Right. Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics. And as I said earlier,
devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism. And that's its strength, how it does that,
how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works. That is really the forte
of the Marxist tradition. Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism
figures it's there so that people who aren't Marxists are nonetheless aware of Marxism,
like it more or less, study it more or less. But it's a broader notion that I like to use
this sentence to describe. It's a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism, that really
there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the
world think are adequate. And we are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who thought they
could do better than slavery and all the people who thought they could do better than feudalism.
We've made progress. Feudalism was a progress over slavery. Capitalism was a progress over
both of them. And progress hasn't stopped. And we are the people who, in a variety of ways,
want the progress to go further and are not held back by believing that capitalism is somehow
the best beyond which we cannot go or even think. We find that to be, in the worst sense of the word,
a reactionary way of thinking. And we're that large community. Many of us are not interested
in economics all that much. We don't think that's the focal area. We are socialists, for example,
because we want to do something to deal with climate change. We think the world is about to
kill itself physically. And we want to take steps with other people to stop that, to fix that,
etc., etc. So that's, for me, a kind of difference. It's a little difficult to say because there's
no other figure like Marx that has an equal impact, an equal place within the broad socialist
tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition. But
that's very specialized and that's a whole nother kind of conversation. And whatever you say,
the influence of the great anarchist thinkers, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Sorrell, and others still
doesn't amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far. That could change,
but up to this point, I think that's a way of understanding the relationship.
Yeah, that's interesting that some of the ideas within anarchism, and of course,
it's one of the more varied disciplines, because there's such, maybe by definition,
such variety in their thinkers, but they kind of stand for a dismantling of a power center and that,
if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism.
Absolutely.
So where you have the, you know...
There's a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas that uses the phrase,
quote, the withering away of the state. That's a quotation from Lenin.
People should understand that's a quotation from Lenin, and it was made by Lenin positive.
In other words, Lenin was saying, that's a good thing. That's something we stand for.
We want to create the conditions under which there is a... Because you remember, the communists or
whatever, they wouldn't call that at first in Russia before the revolution. They were just
socialists. They were hunted down and persecuted by the government left and right. They had no
love for the government. The government was their literal everyday enemy. And being critical of
government didn't just mean this particular government, but of the whole being a Marxist,
you always ask the questions of the social constitution of whatever it is you're struggling
against. So there was this interest, why is the state so important? Especially because if you
understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism, it didn't have powerful states.
One of Lenin's greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia, and he goes back
centuries. It's a huge book, three or four inches thick, and I'm one of the few people who've read
it. And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of
feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe. The development of a powerful
central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate to hold on, which ought to be
suggestive that maybe the turn to powerful governments here in the United States or in Europe
is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can't go on and has to marshal every last
bit of power it can not to be lost in history. It would be interesting to see what the Soviet Union
would look like if Lenin never died. A lot of people have asked that question over the years.
A lot of people. The area is stalling, sliding in in the middle of the night, erasing the withering
away of the state part. Yes, exactly. So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie Sanders,
what are your thoughts about these modern political figures that represent some of these ideas? And
they sometimes refer to those ideas as democratic socialism. Right. The crucial thing about Bernie
and about AOC and it's particularly true about Bernie because AOC is much younger and Bernie is
an older man. Bernie, being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student, as an activist,
then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont as a mayor and all the rest. He lived
through, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America. And the taboo in Cold War America,
running from around 1945-6 to the present, I mean, really never stopped, was a Manichaean
worldview. The United States is good. It defines democracy and the Soviet Union is awful. It
defines whatever the opposite of democracy should be called. Good here, evil there. It was taken so
far that even among the ranks of academic individuals, it was impossible to have a conversation. I
mean, I can't tell. Just make it very personal. The number of times I would raise my hand in my
classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale and I would ask a question that had something to do with
Marxism because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses to teach this to me except
by people who trashed it, you know, other than that and I didn't want that. So I would ask a
question and I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I didn't much care for and
those who were good teachers that I liked, fear. It was just fear. They didn't want to go there.
They didn't want to answer my question. And after a while, I got to know some of them and I found
out why. Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to understand this. Either they
would have to say, I don't know, which would be the honest truth for many of them, but a professor
does not want to say in a classroom, I don't know, that it's not cool. Or they'd have to, if they knew,
they'd have to say something that indicated they didn't know really much and they weren't
even going to do that. Or they would know something. And maybe that would be because
they were interested. They did not want the rest of the students to begin to say, oh, you know,
Professor Smith, you know, he's interested. It is not good for your career. You don't know how
this is going to play out. Who's going to say what to whom. And I could see in their faces
what I later learned because they told me, don't come to my office hours. We're in the office.
We can talk about it. But I'm, that's how bad it was.
Is it not still?
Pretty much. In my field, the great so-called debate. I mean, I find it boring, but the great
debate for my colleagues is between what's called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics.
Neoclassical, the government should stay out of the economy, less a fair or liberalism.
And the Keynesian saying, no, you crazy neoclassical. If you do that, you'll have great depressions
and the system will collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems,
to fix the weaknesses. And they hate each other and they throw each other out of their jobs. One
of the very few things they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like me out.
That they can find common ground to do. So I had to learn it all on my own. Why am I telling you
this? Because this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within
socialism of the post-World War II period, the vast bulk of all of that, is unknown.
Not just to the average American person, but to the average American academic,
to the average American who thinks of himself or herself as an intellectual. I mean, I had
to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history. I have no idea. Or saying,
does this man Lukach, a Hungarian Marxist, he really had interest in or to explain that Gromschi
was not a great literary critic. He was head of the Communist Party of Italy for most of his adult
life. What does that mean? You like Gromschi as a literary critic, but they didn't even know.
They don't even know. It's been erased. It's a little bit like stories I've heard about Trotsky
and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet Union because he obviously fell out of favor.
And so somehow all of his writings, many of which are very interesting and complicated.
Anyway, so what you're going to have in this country is a slow awakening of socialism
from a long hibernation called the Cold War. I never expected, to be very honest with you,
that I would live to see. I knew it would come because these things always do,
but I didn't expect to see it. So I have been surprised, as have a lot of us,
that when it starts to happen, it happens fast.
So you see Bernie as an early sign of the awakening from the Cold War to accept the ideas.
Bernie was always a socialist. We all knew. And everybody who paid attention, he denied it.
But 2016, he makes a decision, momentous, to run for president. He's just a senator from Vermont.
Vermont is one of the smallest states in the Union. People who live in Vermont love to tell you
that there are more cows than people in Vermont, et cetera, et cetera. So here from this little
state, this elderly gentleman with a New York City accent runs for all and says, I'm a socialist.
And when they attack him, he doesn't run away. I'm a socialist. I'm a socialist.
Now, he had been. It wasn't a secret that suddenly got out.
But the great question, and I don't mind telling you, because I went to the right schools,
I know a lot of people, you know, Johnny Yellen was my classmate at Yale and stuff like that.
So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party, and I said, well, what do
you think about Bernie entering the race? Makes no difference. They get 1% of the vote.
Right? He was wrong. They had no idea what was coming. But the truth is, I didn't either.
It wasn't just that he didn't get it. I thought his 1% was probably right.
So we were both wrong.
Yeah, change can happen fast. Do you think AOC might be president one day?
Yeah. Possible. Possible. But two things. Number one, it's fast. Number two,
it's going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate,
calm, non-confrontational socialism you can imagine.
So not AOC or Bernie.
No, no, they are not confrontational in my judgment.
In terms of the ideas of socialism. I mean, they're both very feisty.
They're feisty personally.
But not ideologically. Bernie is also in honest moments, and they're both really are pretty
honest folks, at least in my experience. In honest moments, Bernie will tell you
that what he advocates as democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s.
It was a kind of popular government tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide a lot more
support for the working class than you do now. That's not a fundamental change.
That's what he means by socialism. When he talks about it and he's asked for examples,
he mentions Denmark a lot. Okay, that's consistent. That's the softest kind of socialism.
And that's where we're going to start in a country coming out of hibernation.
Pretty soon it's already happening. There'll be people who need and want to go further
in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are comfortable with.
You can already see the shoots of it now. AOC voted together with most of the others
to support the money for Ukraine. Okay, that lot of people in the socialist movement
do not support that. I don't know exactly how that's going to work out,
but that should give people an idea. There are disagreements and they're going to
fester and they're going to grow. People in the socialist sphere don't support
money from the United States in the large amounts that it is being sent to Ukraine.
Is it because of it's a fundamentally the military industrial complex is a capitalist
institution kind of thing? No, there are some people for whom that's the issue.
Then there are people for whom this is guns and butter and why are we over there when we have
such needs at home that are being neglected? And then there are people who, well, go back
to what we talked about at the beginning, who are more like Lenin and Debs. This is a fight between
Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs in Ukraine and what are we
doing here? We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate
a settlement. Don't kill large numbers of Ukraine. I mean, everybody's willing to fight
to the last Ukrainian is a little strange here. What are you doing? You're supposed to be in
favor of peace and for the United States which just finished invading and occupying Afghanistan
and Iraq to be against another country invading. I mean, who in the world is going to take this
seriously? This is crazy. I invade, it's good and you invade, it's terrible. What? What are you doing?
Why are you doing that? What's going on here? All of these questions are being
active. By the way, not just by socialists, but lots of other people too inside the Democratic
Party and also inside the Republican Party. You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that.
They are against the stuff in Ukraine. They don't want the money spent there. They don't want the
weapons sent there. They don't like the whole policy and Trump wobble. So Mr. Biden's policy
has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right and every day that this thing lasts,
these criticisms get bigger. Anyway, the point is that AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated
as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War isolation from the whole, you know,
when I explain to people the contribution made, for example, to modern Marxism, I'll give you an
example, by the French philosopher, Louis Althusser. I don't know if the name means anything to you.
Okay. He was the rector of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. That's the equivalent.
Imagine in this country if there were a university that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT.
It would be the university. Well, the École Normale in France in Paris is the. He was a
tenured professor who became the rector. The rector is like the president of the university,
an active member of the French Communist Party, most of his adult life. That was possible in
France during the Cold War. That was unthinkable in this country. You could not in a million years.
All right. So Althusser, as a philosopher, tried to bring a version of postmodernism
into Marxism with enormous impact all over the world, where he traveled,
not just in Europe, all over. All right. So if you want to look him up, I'll spell it out for you.
Sure. A-L-T-H-U-S-S-E-R. Luis. The Luis is spelled L-O-U-I-S. Luis Althusser.
Look him up. You'll see tons of stuff. By the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember,
of his works in English. By the way, the textbook I wrote in Economics in case you're ever interested
was also published by the MIT Press. And the title of the... Contending Economic Theories. Neoclassical,
Keynesian, and Marxian. That's an MIT... Marxian. Yeah. That's right. And by the way, when we think,
I don't know if there's an interesting distinction between Marxian economics and Marxist,
I suppose Marxism is the umbrella of everything that... I only use it because Marxist
uses a noun. A person is a Marxist. Marxian uses an adjective to qualify. But other... I don't mean
some great different. There's a last point I would like to make about AOC and Bernie. That's also
general. I'm a historian too. And I know that the transition out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism
was a transition that took centuries and that occurred in fits and starts. So for example,
a feudal manor would start to disintegrate. Serfs would run away. They'd run into a town. How would
they live in the town? They had no land anymore because they had run away from the feudal manor.
A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal understanding what they were doing.
A merchant would say to one of these serfs, I'm in the business of buying and then reselling stuff
and living off the difference. But you know, I could make more money if I produced some of this
stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody else. So I'm going to make you a deal. I'm going to
give you money once a week. I'll give you money what we would later call a wage. And you come here
and under my supervision, you make this crap that I'm going to then sell and this all works out.
In other words, there were efforts unconscious, not self-aware, to go out of feudalism to a new
system. Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. Some of them lasted weeks or months
or years. But it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general
switch. And once that was done, it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system
we have today. That's the only model we have. So for me, that's what I see when I look at socialism.
I see the Paris commune was an event, an attempt. It lasted a few weeks. I see Russia. That was an
attempt lasted 70 years. Then I see, and you will fill in the blank, I see these are all early
experiments. These are all you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good,
the bad. What do you build on? How do you learn? And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition
when it's serious, that's what it does. So in your ideas, sort of capitalism was a significant
improvement over the feudalism. Yes. And we are coming to an age in overslavery and we're coming
to an age where capitalism will die out and make, it's not that capitalism is how fundamentally
broken. It's better than the things that came before it, but there is going to be things yet
better and they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and socialism. Is there just, just to
linger briefly on the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter? There's something called,
I'm sorry if I'm using the terms incorrectly, but cultural Marxism or criticisms of universities
being infiltrated by cultural Marxists. I'm not exactly sure. I don't pay close enough attention.
No one is. No, no, no. I do. But it's woke. It's, there's a kind of woke ideology that I'm not
exactly sure. Right. That's not you. What is the fundamental text? Who's the Karl Marx of
wokeness? All I do know is that there's certain characteristics of woke ideology, which is
hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys. And basically everyone is a bad guy,
except, except the people that are very loudly nonstop saying that they're the good guy. And
that applies for, for, for racism, for sexism, for gender, gender politics, identity politics,
all that kind of stuff. Is there, is there any parallels between Marxian economics and Marxist
ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter? No, not much. Mostly Marxist. You have
to, one of the consequences of the taboo after World War II is that Marxism, like socialism
and communism, become swear words. It's like calling somebody, well, I won't use bad language,
but using a four letter word to describe somebody. So instead of calling them, you know, this or
that, you call them a Marxist in many circles. This is even worse than whatever other adjective
you might have used, but it doesn't have a particular meaning that I can assess. The closest
you get is your little list. It is somebody who is concerned about race and sex and sexual
orientation, gender and all of those things and wants there to be transgendered bathrooms and
that and I don't like any of these people. So I slapped the word Marxism or the phrase cultural
Marxism, because it isn't Marxism about getting more money or controlling the industry or all
those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned about. So this is odd since they
don't know much about Marxism. I've always been interested in culture. I mean, Lukacs, the man
I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that's what they're famous for, the analysis of what Marxism
particularly has to say about culture. Gramsci writes a great length about the Catholic Church
about theater and painting in Italy and on and on. I mean, this is just ignorance talking.
They don't know anything about that. They wouldn't know what the names are. It's a label
that summarizes kind of a shorthand. I'm against all of this. I don't want to be told that there's
ugly racism in this country and it always has been or sexism or phobia against gay people,
whatever it is that's agitating them, Marxism or socialism. I mean, it's just, it's like socialism
is the post office. It is a mentality. Well, but I don't blame them. I mean, it's childish. It's
me and spirit it, but it comes out of the fact no one ever sat them down and said, here is this
tradition. It's got these kinds of things that people kind of share and these big differences.
Look, an intelligent society, which this country is, could have and should have done that.
It was fear and a kind of terror that made them behave in the way they did and we're now seeing
it. Having said that, there is such a thing as cultural Marxism. What that is is simply those
Marxists who devoted themselves to analyzing how it is that a particular culture is on the one hand
shaped by capitalism and on the other hand, it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive
and grow. In other words, how do we analyze the interaction between the class struggle on the job
and attitude towards sexuality or movements in music or whatever else, culture. And there are
Georg Lukach, this Hungarian, great name indeed, the greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci
and a modern name just died a couple of years ago, a British intellectual named Stuart Hall,
H-A-L-L. If I were teaching, which I have done, of course in cultural Marxism,
those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you articles and books to read
of their stuff because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many others.
So there is something to be said and understood about the kind of culture the capitalism creates
and the kind of culture that enables capitalism.
Yes. And Marxists are particularly those who like to look at that interaction. In other words,
they're interested in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism.
There's another name, I forgot. Stuart Hall is British. Gramsci is Italian. Lukach is Hungarian.
The German is Walter Benjamin, B-E-N-J-A-M-I-N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School,
which is a huge school of Marxism that developed in Frankfurt, Germany. And that has a lot of people,
many of whom were interested in cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against
the narrow Marxism that was so focused on economics and politics. There were people who said,
you're leaving out very important parts of modern society that are shaping the economy
as much as they are shaped by it. And it was that impetus to open Marxism, to be more inclusive
in what it deemed to be important to understand that this cult, and they call themselves cultural
Marxists, but they had a completely different meaning from this. This is just bad malving.
Let me ask a more personal question. For most of the 20th century, no, not most, but a large,
many decades in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War and before being a Marxist is one
of the worst things you could be. Have you had dark periods in your own life where you've gone to
some dark places in your mind where it was difficult, like self-doubt, difficult to know,
like, what the hell am I doing? When you're surrounded by colleagues and people, you said
prestigious universities, both personal interests of career, but also as a human being when everybody,
you know, kind of looks at you funny because you're studying this thing. Did that ever get
you real low? No. I know people who had exactly what you said. I mean, your question's perfectly
reasonable. If I were you, I'd be asking me that question, too. And what's wrong with you?
Nothing wrong with the question. And here's the honest truth. I don't know how anomalous I am.
I really don't. But the truth is, no, I have, if my wife were sitting here, she'd tell you
what she tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true.
But then again, luck never is the only explanation for things that's part of it.
What can I say? I didn't choose the time of my birth. I didn't choose the communities in which I
grew up or the schools I attended or anything else. No, but the fact that there was no courses
or extensive courses on Marxian economics. But you know, again, I'm haggled. On the one hand,
I was denied good instruction. On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own.
And the motivation when you do that is very different. I'm not the student who sits there
with my notebook, taking notes of what the great professor says and reading the text
and getting ready for the exam. I don't have an exam. I'm doing something slightly risqué,
you know, kind of romantically different and oppositional. I was able to find always one or
two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation, other students who felt
enough similar to me that we could get together and read these books and talk about them.
I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me of their time and
their effort to teach me along the way. And I've had the benefit that because I went to all these
fancy schools, I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture. And when I have
been put in difficult positions, I often wave my pedigree and it works like garlic with the devil.
They back away. They back away. Because Americans are very differential to that kind of academic
prestige. But there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken
by this. You have just naturally somebody who just has perseverance. Well, I would put it,
I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would put it a little differently. I think
capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system. And nothing has happened to
change my mind. In other words, the development just kept giving me more and more evidence
that this and I must say over the last 10 years, what's really changed the last 10 years. I mean,
I can't describe to you how big that changes. And that may be more important than anything
else we've discussed. Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television
or a radio thing or give a talk at some conference or something. Once every two or three months,
I'd be invited and I would do like academics often do. I now do two to three to four
interviews every day. So there's a hunger. Wow. It's fascinating. And I want to be honest with you.
As I say, at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause
from the podium, you know, that I lean into the microphone and I say, with as much smile as I
can get, I'm having a time of my life. And that's the truth. Yeah. That's the truth. I never expected.
Look, I'm used to teaching a classroom, a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or 10
students or a or a regular undergraduate class with 30 or an occasional introductory course
with a few hundred. I've done all of those things many times, but an audience, you know, that I
can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that. No, that's new. Is there advice
you can give given your bold and nonstandard career and life advice you can give to high school
students, college students about how to have a career like that? Or maybe how do I have a career
or life they can be proud of? Yeah.
First of all, my advice is go for it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely
better than they were when I had to do it. And I could do it. And I can, I'm happy I did it.
Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made that I've never regretted.
And I've never regretted being a critic of the society. Never. I find it edifying. I find it,
I mean, the gratitude people expressed to me for helping them see kind of what's going on
is unbelievably encouraging. I mean, what can I tell you? So that feels you, that feels you
would enjoy. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. It feels you, that's a life not just
important. Because most of the people who say something like that to me are people who,
if they had the vocabulary and some of them do, would say, you know, I thought I was seeing
through that outfit that I was wearing. I thought it and they did. And all they needed was a little
extra this information or that factoid or this logic. And they have that. And I remember having
that too. When I had a teacher who made something clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude.
And now I get that gratitude a good bit. And yes, it is enormously gratifying. And I'm not sure I
could could get it any other way. And I had learned and I'm walking proof that being a critic of
society and doing it systematically and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life.
Very good life. Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes
to an end. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it? Afraid of it? No. Think about it? Yes.
Yes. I'm not afraid. I've always thought, you know, death is hard for the people that are left
when you're dead, you know. I worry more about my wife. I'm very attached to my wife.
I might mention to you, I got married when I was 23 years old. That's my wife to this day.
So I'm lucky because if you get married to anybody at age 23, it's either luck or it isn't.
What role has love played in your life? Enormous. Because I came from a family. You know, if your
family is political refugees, which mine were, who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another
continent, learn another language, find another life income and job and the disruption goes real
deep for any refugees. So my mother and father were both refugees. They met as refugees.
So I had to, in a way, make it up to them. I had to be, I was the first child of their,
I have a younger sister, but I was the first child. And, you know, there's a lot of psychological
pressure on you if you're in that situation. Nobody means you harm, but you've got to do
what they couldn't, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do. It's the closest
they're going to get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university students. My father
was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life. So I had to perform. You
know, I went to high school here in the United States. I had to get all A's. I had to be on
the football team. I had to play the violin in the orchestra. I had to do all these because
everything had to be achieved. So I'm an achievement crazy person that way. But that's functional in
this dysfunctional society. But on top of that, that's an achievement within the game of this
particular society. But then love seems to be a thing that's greater than that game. Is that
something that made you a better person? Oh, God. How was it? How was it made you a better
Marxian and a better? Everything. Because my wife, my wife by profession is a psychotherapist.
Excellent. I love it. And I needed it. Yeah. And so I married it. I didn't know what I was doing at
the time, but I think as I look back on it, that was more than a little what was going on.
And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family never
talked about, never dealt with, never at least explicitly engaged in any of that.
Because it was all about survival. The immigrant challenge is survival.
Yes. Survive. And you're so busy that you tell yourself you can't do that. Of course,
you can. And there are other reasons why you're not going to look at those problems.
But the survival is so urgent that you can fool yourself this way. And my parents did that.
One last question. What's the meaning of life, Richard Wolff? Why are we here?
I will quote you, Mr. Marx.
Let's go. Life is struggle. And for me, I have found that to be true, that the struggle,
whether it is to build a relationship with your child, I have two children,
whether it's to build one with your spouse, whether it's to understand a complicated argument
and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this relationship
to a student or to an audience. It's a struggle to do all those things.
But that network of struggles, that makes life interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.
And meaningful. And very meaningful. And that latter thing, I got to say, you do masterfully.
You're one of the great communicators and educators out there today. And it's a huge honor
that you will sit with me for so many hours. Thank you. This is awesome.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolff. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from
Karl Marx. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however,
is to change it. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.