Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295
slaves produce a surplus which the master gets surfs 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 the following is a conversation with Richard wolf 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 that 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 Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Richard wolf let's start with a basic question but maybe not so basic after all what is Marxism what are the defining characteristics of uh Marxism as an economic and political Theory and ideology 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 uh KL Marx um 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 um if you know much about the great ideas of human history um that's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time 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 these very different ways of Coming to Terms uh with it for the first roughly 40 50 years um Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism Marx 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 um the only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks uh in 1871 there was a collapse of the French government uh consequent upon losing a war to bismar Germany and in 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 uh in that commune in the leadership of the commune and Marx wasn't that far away he was in London uh these things were happening in Paris you know 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 uh 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 of the communards as they were called and deported them to islands in the Pacific that the 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 L in trosy all the rest who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment once again a war like in France uh disorganizes the government throws the government into a very bad reputation because it is the government that loses World War I to withdraw as you know uh breast Lov 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 um splits under the pressures of all of this into the Bolshevik and menic divisions lenon trosy and the others are in the Bolshevik division and to make a long story short he's an exile uh his position Lenin's position makes him 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 have no don't should not kill and should not die for such a thing as you can expect they arrest him and they throw him out interestingly in the United States the 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 um the head of the Socialist Party a very important American figure named Eugene Victor Debs makes exactly the same argument to the the Americans should not fight in the war uh he's independ he has nothing to do with Lon I don't even know if they knew of each other but uh he does it on his own he gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States by the way runs for president from jail and does very well really very well it's remarkable um and he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders if you if you see the the link um although he had much more courage politically than 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 what 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 uh 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 bation much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism ISM 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 um and I would say that that's still where it is that 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 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 um would uh would he shake his head would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations like what how do you think he would analyze it well he had a great sense of humor I don't know if you had a chance to take a look at his writing but yeah 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 uh there's a German word I don't know if these Lang if you speak the other languages there's a wonderful German word called f and it's stronger than the word refuse it's if if you want to refuse something but with real strong emphasis is a German way of saying I I don't want to have anything to do with that and he would talk then you know 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 you know that 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 he was exalted right they had been all these people criticizing capitalism for a long time even the marxists ever since midcentury and these were the first guys who pulled it off they made it and so that there was a kind of presumption around the world their interpretation must be kind of the right one because look they they did it and so for a while they could enunciate their interpretation and it came to be widly 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 more there were these words that who where the adjective was meant to somehow say kind of this is the cannon you can depart from it but this is the cannon before the Russian Revolution there was no such thing and by the 1960s it was already disp it was gone but for a short time know 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 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 they nevertheless it's a serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit the the Russians the 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 uh schools maybe right because for example let me just to take your point one step further you really cannot understand the Cuban Revolution the Chinese Revolution uh Vietnamese and 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 Beetles 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 trism stalinism maybe even let's expand out to uh maoism so um maybe I could speak to sort of leninism and then please tell me if I'm saying dumb things there's a I think for Lenin there was an idea that there could be a small so of Vanguard party like a small controlling entity that's like wise and is able to do the central planning decisions then for um stalinism one interesting so Stalin's implementation of all of this one interesting characteristic is to move away from International aspect of the ideal of Marxism to uh make it all about Nation nationalism the strength of nation and then um so maoism is it's it's different in that it's focused on uh Agriculture and Rural um and then trism I don't know except that it's anti- Stalin right I mean I don't even know if there's unique sort of philosophical elets there anyway can you maybe from those or something else speak to different unique elements that are interesting to think about about implementation of Marxism in the real world probably the best way to get in into this is to describe something that happened in Marxism that then shapes the answer to your question in the early days of Marx's writings and you know he his life spans the 19th centuries born in 1818 dies in 1883 so literally he lives the 19th century and you might I mean 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 Engles 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 uh 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 um by the last third of his life he and the other producers of a anti- capitalist movement people like the chartists in England that's a whole another movement um the anarchists of various kinds like prudon in France or katkin or bakunin in Russia and so on uh you you P 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 intelligencia on the other they now wanted a different question they were persuaded by the analysis they were agreeable that capitalism was uh 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 you could we maybe fix capitalism no they had gotten to the point the system has to be fundamentally changed but they got 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 um 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 there 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 right it's it's about struggle but he's interested in each in the work think of it almost mechanically like the workplace in the workplace there 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 not the government was not the the the key factor here and he was looking at ideas of value yes 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 uh right well we'll get that yeah okay okay but the government was not part of that picture okay so it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century Marx is still alive when this begins but it 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 police or he calls the army or both of them and so the government is in a sense this key institution captured in Marx's Lang Marxist Language by the Bourgeois by the by the other side the capitalist 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 it's rejection of feudalism in the French American Revolution is to create a place where elected represented so the the government being subject to suffrage creates the notion aha here's how we're gonna we have to seize the state and then the the 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 you 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 uh you can't get there they they've long ago learned how to manipulate uh 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 in the parliament but they didn't and that this focus on the state I would argue goes Way Beyond what The Debaters at the time uh and if you're interested in the great names there was a great theorist of the the role of the state in a reformist strategy to get power uh in Germany named Edward Bernstein very important his opponents in Germany were Carl kowsky and Rosa Luxembourg the two other huge figures in Marxism at the time and they wrote the articles that everybody reads but it was a much broader uh debate by the way that debate still goes on reformism versus Revolution and in in terms not all that different I mean it's adjusted to history but in terms that AR different can you comment uh 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 um and so most of the time when you get to the point where it's even a relevant discussion not a abstract thing for conferences but a real strategic issue the reformists have won I mean and I 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 wi composed of the labor movement which went crazy in 1930 we we organized more people into unions in the 1930 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 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 trist 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 19 30s here uh 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 in a few years in the 1930s starting around 19323 Social Security in this country we had never had that before it's the same one we have now unemployment insurance never existed before that you have till today minimum wage for the first time 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 so 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 Corp the the joke is I have to teach American history to Americans uh because it has been erased from Consciousness we'll return to that but first let's let's take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th century with the Russians 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 a 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 you know he doesn't live very long he dies in 23 so he's only in power from 17 say at 22 but that time he has his brain trouble 1923 by the way not at age 23 just people who are listening 1923 yeah he's only there for four or five years uh he's very clear he even says and I've done work on I've published so I mean 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 um with Stalin you know Lenin dies and there's a fight between Stalin and trosky trosky 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 um and by the end of the 20s Stalin makes a decision I mean not him it's 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 XYZ other things no no the state itself once you have it is socialism so when a socialist cap the state that's socialism exactly and H that's exactly right and I feel like that's definitionally confusing well it shouldn't be because I give get an example yeah 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 you you know when I first heard this as a young man 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 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's a way of looking at the world it's just got nothing to do with marks well there's Marx there's Marxism let's try to pull this apart so what role uh does central planning have in Marxism so Marxism is concerned with the class struggle with respecting the working class right what is the connection between that struggle and Central planning that is often Central planning is often associated with Marxism right so centralized power doing Russia did that allocation so that's a that's that has to do with a very specific set of implementations initiated by the Soviet Union has nothing to do with Marx how else can you do I don't think you can find yes anywhere in Marx's writing anything about Central planning or any other kind of planning again fundamentally then uh Marx Marx's work it has to do with um with factories with workers with with the Bourgeois with and and the uh the exploitation of of the working class exact you still have to take that leap what is beyond capitalism right so maybe we should turn to that exp focus on that okay yes what okay we've already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism how else can we go beyond capitalism let me push 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 Marxist was trying to do I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circum 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 that's another conversation you and I can have so I went to Harvard then I went to Stanford and I finished at Yale I'm like a poster boy for Elite Education they tried very hard by the way I had I I spent 10 years of my life in the ivy league 20 semesters one after the other no break mhm 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 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 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 no um perhaps we can discuss historically why that is but never Le that's the case so moxian economics did KL Marx come up in conversation as a kind of dismissal the best example yeah he came up only as an object of dismissal for give you an example the major textbook in economics that I was taught with and that be was for many years the canonical book it isn't quite anymore um was a a book authored by a professor of Economics at MIT named Paul Samuelson and people 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 you know and the tree is Adam Smith and David Ricardo at the at the root and then the 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 the Bourgeois and then there's this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of starts heading back down that's Carl Marx in other words he had to have it complete cuz 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 that's really that's really neither here that that's the craziness yeah that's the Cold War in this country my professors were afraid anyway let me get to the 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 such 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 in every human Community marks 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 does have to be low could be medium can be high but they always produce more than they themselves consume that more by the way ger Marx when he writes this uses the German word me mehr which is the English equivalent of more it's the more that more got badly translated into the word Surplus shouldn't have been but it was by by the way by German and English people doing the translations what's the difference between more and surplus is there a nuan yeah because Surplus has a notion of its discretionary it's sort of extra he's not taking a he's not making a judgment that it's extra it's a simple math equation yes very simple oneus the other yes xus X is the total output Y is the consumption by the producer therefore x - y equals s the Surplus exactly exactly now markx argues the qu 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 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 um and I don't charge much um the workers themselves could get it less than lawyers right that's right uh the workers themselves could get it yes that's the closest marks comes to a definition of communism communism would 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 the lot this the logic of the word sequence it's produced it's Marx uses the word approp prated in other words whose property who 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 for right and that's the by the way it's not just clean the only one so what's uh can we just Linger on the definition of exploitation in that context easy becomes very easy there 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 surfs 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 dis 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 of those men with a ice cream truck comes by Dingle Ling lingling 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 howl 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 yourself sister or your brother or whatever it is and that 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 so you understand all of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic political cultural these are all giving the ice cream comb back to the kid you should you should never do this in the first place there a reallocation of resources creates bitterness in the populace look at AR 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 redivision the redistribution of wealth having so badly distributed in the F but that's all in marks 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 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 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 V Vis A another one that produces it if you do that you will destroy the whole project you will not only will you not achieve what you set out to get but you'll so misunderstand it that you the Germans again have a phrase is get Chief it goes crooked it it doesn't go right the project gets off the rails because it can't uh 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 mean there's a lot lot of fascinating questions here so one one is to what degree so there's human nature to what degree does communism uh 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 100 people and a thousand people it seems that humans form hierarchy uh naturally so the the clever the charismatic uh the sexy the the muscular the powerful what however you define that uh starts start you know becoming a leader and start to do um 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 because comes the leadership role right uh so the question is yes okay it would be nice the idea sort of of Communism would be nice to to um nice in theory but it doesn't work in practice because of human nature because of human nature that's thank you so what C 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 here are some of them um 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 system 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 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 at the next stage of capitalism is what can infer you're if you're saying the burden is on the people who think it isn't going 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 uh well let me just ask a million different questions so so one what about the the argument that sort of the employer uh the capitalist takes on risk so the yeah versus the employee who's just there doing the labor the the capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk what's uh uh are they not in sort of 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 so first of all there's risk almost in everything you undertake any project that begins now and in the future that 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 yes I took a risk I could the cab could have been an accident lightning could have hit us a bear could have eaten my left foot who the hell knows 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 Wonder beautiful you talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk let's go with the worker in the with the capitalist that worker he moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to take that job he had 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 foro 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 pay if you make a mistake you capitalist he 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 got you've got a cushion he doesn't if you in investigate you'll see that in every business I've ever been in and I've been involved in a lot of them so you you think it's possible to actually measure risk or is your basic argument is there's risk involved in a in a lot of both the working class and the bouro the capitalist right and it's diff work the worker would never come and say cuz he's been taught right um I want this payment a wage for the work I do and I want this page this payment for the risk I take well there's some level of communication like that you you have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs but that's probably built into the salary all those kinds of things you you UND 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 uh 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 cuz this is my this my job this my life what I do right the median income of a child care worker in the United States right now as we speak is $111.22 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 mhm maybe he Parks it and he 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 of toddlers two three four year olds who are at the key moment of mental formation the first five years to do to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who watches your car come on I know how to explain it gender explained all kinds of issues the the car park people are are males and the they childcare people are females and that 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 economic I don't know if you were familiar with our profession but we have something which we call marginal product this is a this is a fantas I I was a mathematician before I became an economist I loved mathematics I I specialized in mathematics so I know mathematics pretty well what economists do is is silly is childish but they think it's mathematics it's very sophisticate it is 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 in the textbook when 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 horeshit but I first I teach it what is the marginal product if 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 output of the raw product of the product usually in real terms so physical not not the value you could do a value but it's really more the physical you're I mean I there is a transformation thing we'll I'd love to talk to you about about value it's so interesting what isue I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that but I just want to get to the 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 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 oh so the the 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 it's not going to work out you can take look mathematics is full of abstractions you can abstract you can say as as we do in economics kerus parbus 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 be better off or worse off much better off okay economics and I'm you know I'm talking about myself see economics got we're going to ship ship all the economist to Mars and see how well Works off no 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 call 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 NE it made no sense to people to abstract something as Central to daily life as economics broadly defin it made no sense that's a creation much much later that's capitalism that did that created the feel of so when I give them Plato and Aristotle I have to give them particular passages by the way footnote cuz you're audience will 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 phenoma that we're not just producing goods and then Distributing among us we're doing it in a quidd proquo 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's 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 it 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 the fundamentally the destructive thing of a market is it's the engine of capitalism and so it creates exploitation of the worker it facil I wouldn't create that's too facilitates it facilitates it and it is an institution that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible danger to community is there 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 you know and this was that God said M 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 uh to create a system that involves thousands millions of humans and there be some level of um safe self regulating fairness there might be but it's hard to imagine that charging interest would be the way to do that I wonder what so I guess suppose suppose you were interested in having uh uh 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 they're ready to lend it okay to whom should they lend it well we could say in our society um we're going to run this the way professors in institutions like MIT work this MH they write up a project they send the project in to some government off 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 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 what what do you do it why 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 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 and 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 contradicts their Christian judaic Islamic all of them would 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 you want to Market why the 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 uh debate type of thing what about sort of the lifting ties raise all boats meaning if we look at the 20th century right A lot of people maybe disagree with this but they attribute a lot of the innovation and the average Improvement in the quality of life uh to capitalism right to inventions and Innovation to engineering and science developments um that resulted from competition and all those kinds of forces um so not looking at the individual unfairness of exploitation as it's specifically defined but just observing historically looking at 20 Century we came up with a lot of cool stuff that seem to have made life easier uh and better on average what do you say to that I have several responses to that um but I do disagree pretty F fundamentally with what's going on there but but let me give you the arguments so you that you can hear them and then you can evaluate them uh as can anybody who's listening or watching um Marx was a student of Hegel and one of hegel's central arguments was that everything that exists exists quote in contradiction uh 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 ones Etc so the dialectic yes exactly marks 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 uh which Marx takes to be profound because you know he lived at the time when major breakthroughs in in textile technology and Mining uh and chemistry and so on were achieved um but as to the notion that that capitalism is therefore responsible for the Improvement in in the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people Marx now comes back and says oh way way 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 us to cheap China uh 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 uh 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 past 19 middle of the 1930s when it was proposed it was blocked by capitalists they got together they don't want 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 $725 an hour power which you cannot live on over the last 12 years or so whatever it is now 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 eight and a half% 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 inequal this is a you know 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 it 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 yeah and that's the worst moral condemnation imaginable how do you justify that when you could you didn't look I look let me get at it another way cuz this may 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 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 um $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 or whatever the price is and that's his revenue and when he 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 like of a better word and he t uh 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 out the same number of units of output with half the workers so you don't need to spend a 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 just I got a machine why does he do that because the 50 he now no longer has to spend on labor because don't need half of them he keeps everything else is the same the machine everything else is the just to make the math easy so he he keeps as his own profit the 50 that before he paid for those workers yeah right cuz when he sells it for 220 that 5050 don't have to give to the next J 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 and enough to say it was nothing wrong with me but he doesn't need it so I'm 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 all 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 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 uh to go back to hego yes the good and the bad yes 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 uh whatever as we try to sneak up to ideas of what the alternative might look like right what are the good and the bad of the alternative so you just kind of as a opposite the Contra by contrast showed that well a nice alternative is you work less get paid the same you have more Leisure Time right opportunity to to pursue other interests other interests the creative interest family right flourish as a human being uh basically uh strengthen and uh embolden the basic Humanity that's under all us yes but then what cost does that have on the um the deadline fueled competition fueled machine of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism slows it down it slows it down and the question is which is more important for the flourishing of humanity I'd love I agree with that and I'd love there to be a democratic mechanism so let's let's discuss it let's debate it and then let's uh side what mixture cuz 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 ET 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 cuz that's what they were told to do in business school where I've taught right um so we 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 heelan 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 proletarian not as a notion of how government is not I'm sorry not Marx lenon did that not as a notion of how the 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 her relationships with the workers in the workplace which is why Marx focused his analysis on that 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 yeah 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 this is an old idea in human Marx loved that toward the end of his life he he started re ing 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 help 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 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 have no nothing 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 in a way that is the direct it's autocratic so to push back on on 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 uh of competition being the accountability so if you're a shitty boss the EMP the employee in the capital system has the freedom to move to another company work for a better boss so that that creates pressure on the employer and the bosses that's at least the idea that you uh there's two boundaries of you not misbehaving one is the law so regulator 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 uh so I mean that's kinds of accountability but what you're saying is that does not result in any in a significant enough accountability where the employer uh 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 the counterargument um first competition here again we have to be hegelians just a little competition destroys itself it doesn't need any out 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 cuz 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 cuz I won the competition he fires his workers I hire them because I'm now going to be able to to serve a market he can't serve anymore so I'm going to I'm going to buy the used equipment I'm going 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 well there's another there's another element to the system where there's always a new guy that comes in uh there isn't there isn't well that's the that's the dream the entrepreneurial spirit of a free uh you know of of the of the United States for example of a capitalist system is uh you can be um broke and one day have a strong idea and build up a business that takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and uh all the different car Ford GM which is what you know you look at Tesla for example right that's the American dream uh one of the many ideals of the American dream is you can uh uh move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world right and um it can happen it can happen but you're you know what that's like that's like you can win a 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 odds are better in the lottery that's not that's not true there's a lot of new businesses how many Teslas do you do you notice Tesla is a really bad example cuz a car company the automotive sector is so difficult to uh they operate as such a thin margin of profit that they're probably a good example of like capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of lack of innovation BEC You know that's a very complicated industry because of the supply chain so much come on they have their uniquenesses you're quite right but so does every other industry the one 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 and 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 but the reason every every small capitalist is trying to build market share that's a polite way polite way of saying they want to become a monopolist or to be more exact an oligopolist one of a a handful of firms that dominates that's what they're there for but yeah to push back a little bit also because that's 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 so if you give me a choice to press the to press a button to get rid of the competition and that 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 that it's not in the calculation is not just money it's human well-being too so like the think I 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 you got and then they they seize Being Human ense the basic okay I wouldn't I would depending on your model of humans but they they they lose track of the better angels of their nature and they just become cogs in the machine but they're just happen to be the C I would put it differently that the system is so set up it's a little bit like natural selection the guys who may I could say the women too 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 becomes 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 an Airbnb in in Vermont they CH 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 you know enjoying the people that come by and be a decent human of course of course but the system selects The Firm you know if you don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up you're toast there anyway then 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 then they're going to look at you and wonder what happened to you how did you even get this far with the lovely person hor it's not okay okay it's not necessarily just lovely person so maybe my I'll just say my bias is the people I know are especially at the top of companies or in the tech sector where Innovation is such an a big part of it so I think a lot of the things we're talking about is when there's not much innovation in the system so uh 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 doesn't 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 it really is this is a recurring kind uh of debate and a recurring kind of issue for me how do I put this in a way that you I don't mean to offend please please no no no I don't 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 there 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 the corporate sector this year just to give you an idea CEOs uh are jacking up their their wage package they're already out of whack I mean the average CEO pay is now three 300 times what 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 aren't CEOs for whom this argument isn't very exciting uh so there are 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 onew 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 worker 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 quiet suffering amidst the working class that's growing taking out on that can turn to anger some little 18-year-old kid who has to go 3 hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket huh what it happens every day in this country every day so that that anger Rises up in those little ways now and bigger big 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 uh accidents this last year the number was just released yesterday 49,000 Auto Moes are the single largest pollutant in the country they use up an enormous amount of energy they uh 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 Ro trolleys uh Vans it could easily be done in this Society in fact I once did a a project that I estimated cost $30 billion that's less than we're sending to Ukraine to do this to reconfigure it uh a public transit system where everywhere in this country all the major Metropol this country is overwhelmingly metropolitan area well it surely has to be more than 30 billion but but well it was a few years ago okay sure you're saying it's that's insane right it's not crazy stuff it's a reasonable number Hey listen but there's a and we 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 and with the use of the fossil fuel particularly for the automobile then the solution to the problem would be mass transit we don't we're doing nothing to make that happen nothing well there's you know on um you could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit because it's going to be reusable Vehicles it will end in theory um 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 the pie smaller so they have some for General Motors Toyota all of them are making electric cars though so what they've done is they've replaced the individual car with fossil fuel with another individual car yeah that's fucking nuts what are you doing one that's one of the things they're doing but automation is also another one but on the Elon side there's also hilariously named boring company which is working on tunnels which is is actually expanding the the 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 yes um there's pickup trucks there well there's this is an interesting so the the older 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 you have you been well you 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 so there's you know their technology also helps you out to do the public trans better it's almost like Boston's a little too old but yes I get your point uh but there is a the the Ford F-150 pick truck symbolizes something about America and 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 uh the working class there has to be a central planning component or there has to be a centralized component and America is very much u 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 a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people who have had that freedom eroded on of the capitalist that's a a motive for my Marxism it was for Marx 2 he loved the French Revolution he loved the liberal 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 uh promised so for me um it is the Fulfillment of of a but I again I'm a heelan 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 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 kick 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 there if you look at government cuz you said accountability and the capitalist system has no accountability there's some push back I give on the accountability I think there is some accountability we can discuss in a heelan way who there's more accountability uh 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 are the same media is somehow integrated into making the the the same two parties that are just wearing different colored shirts uh to seem like they're very opposed and are arguing and bitterly arguing calling each other's spouses n nasty names and all those kinds of things okay but that's government so uh who exactly is worse here government or or company well why are we asking that question well these are twins look what what you were what you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats just now with which I agree yeah I would say the same thing about corporations and the government this is the same people literally the let's go to church which one is the which one is worse let's go to Churchill like democracy is the worst form of government except all the other ones or whatever so this kind of same idea which one exactly is worse cuz to me it seems like which between what and what government and uh industry and companies it's because government is plagued by um I I would call it corruption because the corruption of bureaucratic paperwork and then because but they're not account 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 the private Corporation I have spent my life give you an example in American universities big ones famous not just as a student but as a professor I been a half a dozen school I teach now at a new school here it's another one right they all model themselves after businesses they model their you can attack the bureaucracy of universities good reason it's a mess but they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing their B bureaucracy in a businesslike manner uhhuh 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 this is the same people but there's a important differences that uh I don't know if they're fundamental or just consequence of history but if you have government they're account 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 the the government is accountable by votes and it seems like government unlike companies for most of company's history are is always too big to fail meaning it can always just print money it can always save itself and that creates a bureaucracy you never 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 uh 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 pay the they feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because they can go bankrupt they I mean there 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 I is do do you disagree with that I disagree with that everything in my history pushes me you may be living I may be living in a different uh who knows you know a planet or or taking a different sort of drug I won't I won't mention the name but I my personally had a lot to do with a very large company here in the United States here in the New York area and um 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 brothers 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 uh 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 were somewhere in this company doing a variety of whatever because and my experience with this and because I went to the schools I told you all my experiences with that group of people corporate EXA full of those stories you know they made mistake after mistake which they would tell you about didn't didn't undermine their 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 EV that's how I know yeah that's I mean that I understand that you want the outside world to look at it this way but it's not my experience interest but again what's that kind of thing thing uh at the risk of saying human nature again I wonder what kind of system allows for that more versus versus less this is the question of I would call that let's put that under the umbrella term of corruption okay um 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 yeah reconfiguring it what 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 a major shareholders or whoever it is that most companies are responsible to and now you 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 and on and on and on this is you know 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 hundred million doar while everybody else can't send their kid to college I mean he's not going to do that uh so just to return just to address this uh point about the particular implementation of Marxism that was the early days right in the Soviet Union why did stalinism for example lead to so much Bloodshed do you think and 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 to all that Stalin's regimes did and you know I spent 10 years of my life uh with another Economist writing a book uh about that to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union um you might 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 um in that uh in that work so let me start with you know playing a little bit with with Hegel um the biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the Soviet Union did but but what the rest of the world did I mean you had a really interesting move uh and I'll give you a parallel from from today the move was that the old Russian regime collapsed World War I just it fell apart the Zar and all of that it couldn't 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 Russia history which I assume you do um you'll know that there was a lot leading up to the collapse in in 197 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 you know earlier on with kensy the first government that tried it wasn't people were all that impressed by Mar ISM it was people were more skeptical and would not have been called Marxist probably in by history they couldn't they tried they couldn't lenon and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year um the rest of the world though was horrified the rest of the world saw Marxism having taken this immense sleep 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 uh if you know American history uh 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 s the 20s were a time of Palmer Raids in in Boston the sacko venetti uh trials I mean really Grim hostility and you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution the US 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 this was Unthinkable this was there was a a great professor at Princeton um Meer I forget his first name who wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy since 1917 has been obsessed with Russia even now this this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia as if Russia still was the Soviet as if people haven't figured out that was a big change back in 1989 and 90 you know yelson and and Putin are not what what you had before or at least they're not lenon um they may not be so different from some of the other but in any case um so you had one factor was the utter isolation the utter condemnation the global I mean Rosa Luxembourg is I mean I assume you know the Rosa Luxenberg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin she's a Critic of Lenin by the way but she's a leftist hunted down and hacked into bits killed so you're attributing some he's surround some of the Bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world turned away turned against turned against sort of you turn against is the better way very yeah I mean not in order of importance but it's 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 a Marx was against capitalism everywhere it was you know uh workers of the World Unite not workers of Russia unite were workers of the he 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 fa and he's left s the French would say toot s right yeah all alone um 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 it's we're do we're going to do it again we're going to do it again we we have to do we we have the world is different and the sanctions don't work but they're going to try them they're going to try them because it's the history but that culture was it's 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 um but or turkey Brazil yeah sorry to say human nature may change at a slower Pace that that that does that has occurred to me as well I I get that point I get so is there a 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 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 uh of giving voice to the workers so that they get to choose and then that naturally leads to a dictator and there's naturally in human 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 huge amount of trouble you you've ped things together there that I would I think if you if give ped as a good word yeah uh it's German um the uh if you remember I told you my mother was born in Germany and and then your dad is French yeah but he was born in Mets if you know European it's a city on the border of France in Germany if you come from the AL Alan Al alas in German so they're German speaking fren to do 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 uh it took French for four years in high school but I forgotten all of it I I remember the romance and the spirit of the language but not the details I'm sure I can remember um 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 were Zeus and Diana and all the others and they were very humanlike but instead we have one who is the absolute beginning and yeah 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 the landlord he has unspeakable power over everything that goes on and you do this for thousands of years yeah 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 the originator of his situation he wasn't he didn't 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 tal so it's not uh it's not the you're the product of history no no no it's it was the systems feudalism the the church it was the structure and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its own Rhythm and doesn't take doesn't follow the calendar of a political revolution that's the fundamental question is there something about communism that creates a mentality that enables somebody like Stalin or ma no I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what they find femin amiliar 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 incomes 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 of Economics that we've had for DEC nobody says anything the Republicans cave and the Democrats largely too they cave he can he can 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 that's not what a tariff is it's not how a tariff Works he he would flunk a a freshman course in economics which everybody knows everybody who teaches these courses no 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 less aair and all of the individualism for and suddenly the Republican party is G and now they're going to make 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 so and he took advantage to which degree did would you say Marx Marx's ideas led to the creation of the uh 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 uh Hitler which I just recently learned he was uh employee number seven of the party or whatever this seventh person to have joined the party and have created one of the most uh consequential and Powerful political parties in the history of the 20th century what degree did Marx ideas Marxism ideas have to play it is the National Socialist Party of German Workers right workers not the German worker party worker party National Socialist German worker party so but here's the history and 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 it 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 uh which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history the work that I did um 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 fand lassal and other his daughters um by the end of the century it was the second most important party in Germany nobody understood it it was overwhel 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 uh that's my family is involved in this so I mean I really do know the story it meant that starting around 19678 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 call themselves Catholic that uh Germany is divided the upper two 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 um you could be in the Catholic party that was the South uh or you could be in various conservative Prussian and other but if you wanted to have a presence in the working class which was growing every I mean Germany very powerful capitalist country expanding like crazy at this time you know Germany was the major competitor to Britain for the Empire the United States was 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 uh anything to do with the Soviet Union or anything to do with Marxism so they put the word naal Nazi is the first four letters of national naal in German n a zi is how you spell National in the German national socialism but definitely not Communists that's right they killed they they fought Communists in the street they they had pitched battles they literally threatened each other's existence and their life and the first people had 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 the number one and socialists right behind IND him 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 the German uh manufacturers the German capitalist and he said the Communist and socialists are going to win you want and you you're just the capitalist you have too few people you need a mass base and I'm the only one that can do that it was just a populist message that he used that's right but it was explicitly done as a deal the the the ruling group said to Hindenberg 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 he had called Hitler nasty names before the Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler as an a little funny man with a mustache who who was Austria wasn't even German you know for them that mattered so he 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 you know 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 the way to govern the Republic because to say you're a republic doesn't imply what kind of government you you have to go through that with people so they kind of get it and and certain words have power beyond their actual meaning they're used in in communication whether it's negative like racist or positive like freedom of speech or democrat or Dem with a d yeah and then you use that to mean something who knows or negative uh what stop Donnie stop being a socialist or some whatever what whatever that means that's not even used as any kind of philosophical economic sense so let's fast forward to today you mentioned Bernie Sanders right uh there's another popular figure that represents some of 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 uh these parts yes Queens uh so maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or ALC um are they open to some ideas and and Marx M are they representing those ideas well in both the economic and the political sense okay um where do I begin yeah the social the Socialist movement predates Marx was always larger than Marx and has gone on to develop separately after Marx's death so can we pause on that actually can you is there a nice way to to delineate draw a line between marxis and Socialism or or if if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism can can you speak to like maybe def 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 uh Figures it's there so that people who aren't marxists are nonetheless aware of Marxism uh like it more or less study it more or less uh 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 so than capitalism that really there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the world uh think are adequate that 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 uh 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 forther further and are not held back by believing that capital Capal ism 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 to to with think the world is about to kill itself um uh physically and we want to take steps with other people to stop that to to to fix that etc etc so that that's for me uh a kind of difference is a little difficult to say because there's no other figure like Marx that has an equal um 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 another kind of conversation and whatever you say the influence of the great Anarchist thinkers uh katkin bakunin um sorell in Fran and others still doesn't amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far that could change but I mean up to to this point um that's the um I think that's a way of understanding the relationship yeah that's an interesting that the some of the ideas within anarchism and of course it's a one of the more varied um disciplines right because there's such Maybe by definition such Variety in their thinkers but they kind of stand for a u 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 uh that uses the phrase quote the withering away of the state that's a quotation from Lenin uh 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 will because you remember the the the Communists or whatever they weren'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 uh 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 Lennon's greatest books is called the economic history of Russia and he goes back centuries it's a huge book 3 or 4 inches thick uh and I'm one of the few people who've read it um and uh he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of fud 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 and is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can't go on and has to Marshall 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 lenon never died right A lot of people have asked that question over the years a lot of people there Stalin sliding in in the middle of the night erasing the withering away of the state part yes exactly uh 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 this particularly true about Bernie uh because AOC is much younger and Bernie is an older man um Bernie being roughly my age um has been around formatively as a student as an activist then coming up through the ranks in in Burlington Vermont as a mayor and all the rest um he lived through what for lack of a better term I would call Cold War America and the Taboo in Cold War America running from around 19456 to the present I mean really never stopped um was a Manan 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 um good here evil there it it was taken so far that even in among the ranks of academic individuals it was impossible to talk 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 um and I would ask a question that had something to do with Marxism because I was studying it on my own there there were no courses to teach this to me except by people who trash that you know that other than that and I didn't want that um so I would ask 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 I 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 and classroom I don't know that's just not cool MH 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 um well you know he's interested in this 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 you're we're in the office we can talk about it but I'm not that's how bad it was is it 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 Kan in economics neoclassical the government should stay out of the economy it work let's say fair or old liberalism and the Kian saying no you 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 uh to do so I had to learn it all on my why am I telling you this because this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism of the postor War II period the vast bulk of all of that is unknown not just 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 I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history they have no idea or saying there's this man lukach a Hungarian Marxist he really had interested or to explain that gromi 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 what you like grami as a literary critic but um uh were and 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 trosky and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet Union because he he obviously fell out of favor and so somehow all of his writings many of which are very interesting and complicated uh 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 the you see Bernie is an early sign of the Awakening absolutely from the Cold War to to accept the idea ber was always a social we all knew and everybody who paid attention he didn't hide it but 2016 he go 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 they're More Cows than people in Vermont etc etc uh 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 that 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 you know Janny enen 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 uh entering the race makes no difference is they get 1% of the vote right he was wrong he 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 and 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 they are not confrontational in my judgment oh in terms of the ideas of socialism I mean they're both very feisty they're feisty personally but not but not ideologically you know she is Bernie is also you know in in honest moments and they both really are pretty honest Folks at least in my experience um in honest moments Bernie will tell you that his what he Advocates is 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 that that's consistent that that's the soft 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 the shoots of it now you know AOC voted together with most of the others to support the money for Ukraine okay that a lot of people in the in the Socialist movement do not support uh and that's going to 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 interesting they don't the people in the so 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 I wonder what the I mean there are some people for whom that's the issue then there are people for whom this is you know it's guns and butter and what why are we why are we over there when we have such needs at home that are being neglected yeah and then there are people who well to go back to what we talked about at the beginning who are more like Lenin and Debs this is this is a fight between Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and and and want to be 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 ukra I mean everybody's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian is a little strange yeah what are you doing you're supposed to be in favor of Peace you know 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 you know I invade it's good and you invade it's terrible what you know what are you doing what why are you doing that what what what's what's going on here all of these questions are being active by the way not just by socialists by 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 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 it's and and Trump wble 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 uh Bernie should be I think evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War uh isolation from the whole you know when I explain to people the the the contribution made for example to Modern Marxism I'll give you an example by the the French philosopher Luis alus I don't know if the name means anything to you okay he was the Rector of the EOL normal Superior in Paris that's the equivalent imagine in this country if there were a university that combined Harvard Yale Princeton and MIT I mean it would be the university well the EOL normal 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 right so I aler as a philosopher tried to bring a version of postmodernism into Marxism with enormous impact all over the world where he traveled uh 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 SS e r Louis the Lou is spell l uis Luis alus look him up you'll see tons of stuff by the way MIT press is a a major publisher if I remember of his Works in English um 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 contending economic theories neoclassical Keynesian and marxian that's an MIT marxian yeah that's right uh and by the way when we think I don't know if there's an interesting distinction between marxian economics and Marxist is the I suppose Marxism is the umbrella yeah of everything that's I only use it because Marxist I use as a noun a person is a Marxist marxan I use as 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 fism in Europe to capitalism was a transition that took centuries and that occurred in fits and starts so for example uh a feudal Manor would start to disintegrate surfs would run away then' 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 out the people involved in the deal understanding what they were doing a merchant would say to one of these surfs 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 produce some of this stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody else so I'm going to I'm going to make you a deal I'm going to give you money once a week I'll give you a 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 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 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 uh and we are coming to an age in over slavery and we're coming to an age where capitalism will die out and make it's it's not that capitalism is somehow fundamentally broken it's it's better than the things that came before it but there's 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 um the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter uh there's something called I'm sorry if I'm using the terms incorrectly but uh cultural Marxism one the criticisms of universities uh being infiltrated by cultural marxists I'm not exactly sure I don't pay close enough attention no no no I do but it's woke it's there's a there's a kind of woke ideology that I'm not exactly sure right what it's not you that what is the fundamental text yeah who's the Carl marks of of wokeness uh all I do know is that there's certain characteristics of um what ideology which is hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys and uh and basically everyone is a bad guy except except the people that are very loudly non-stop saying that they're the good guy and that applies AC for for racism for sexism for uh gender um all gender politics identity politic all that kind of stuff is there it is there any parallels between marxian economics and Marxist ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter no not much mostly Marx 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 it doesn't have a particular meaning uh that I can assess the closest you get is your little list it is somebody who is concerned about uh 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 slap 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 Marx I've always been interested in culture I mean lukach the man I mentioned to you before grami that's what they're famous for the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture grami writes a great length about the Catholic church about theater and painting in 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 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 um uh phobia against gay people whatever it is that's agitating them and Marxism or socialism I mean it's just it's like socialism is the post office it it is it is a mental well but I don't blame them I mean it's childish it's mean-spirited but it comes out out of the fact no one ever sat them down and said You know 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 becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow in other words how do we analyze the interaction between uh the class struggle on the job job an attitude towards sexuality or movements in music or whatever else culture and there are gor lukach this Hungarian great name in there the greatest of all the names Antonio gromi and a modern name just died a couple years ago a British intellectual named Stuart Hall h you want to if you want if if I were teaching which I have done a 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 that capitalism creates and the kind of culture that enables capitalism yes and 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 um Stuart Hall is British grami is Italian lukach is Hungarian um the German is Walter Benjamin b 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 Marx but they had a completely different meaning from this this is just uh you know just bad mouthing that's all this let me ask a more personal question so 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 interest of career but also as a human being when everybody you know kind of looks at you funny cuz you're studying this thing um did that ever get you real low no I know people who had exactly what you said I mean your question's perfectly reasonable uh if I were you I'd be asking me that question too um and what's wrong with you no nothing wrong with the question uh yeah 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 was sitting here she'd tell you what she tells me which is I have been tremendously Lucky in my life which is true um but then again luck never is the only explanation for things it's part of it um 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 marks and economics but you know again it's I'm hegle 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 have and I I'm doing something slightly risque you know kind of romantically different and oppositional um I was able to mind 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 of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and and gave me of their time and their effort to teach me along the way um 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 cuz Americans are very differential to yes that kind of academic Prestige but there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken by this you have uh uh just naturally somebody um who just has perseverance well I would put it I mean I understand what you're saying but I would put it 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 uh just just kept giving me more and more evidence yeah 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 change is and that 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 uh give a talk at some conference or something once every two or 3 months I'd be invited and I would do it like academics often do I now do two to three to four interviews every day so uh there's a hunger wow is there hunger it's F and you know and I want to be honest with you as I say at the end of some of my talks I allow there to be kind of a pregnant pause from the podium you know that I lean into to the microphone and I say with as much Smile as I can get I'm having the 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 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 that's new 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 uh college students about how to have a career like that or maybe how to have a career or a life they can be proud of yeah um 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 um and I've never regretted being a Critic of this 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 what can I tell you so that feels you that feels you with joy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes feels you it's that's that's a life not just important is 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 Emperor was wearing I thought it and they did and all they needed was a little extra this information or that factoid or this logic I 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 that gratitude a good bit and yes it is enormously gratifying and I I'm not sure I could could get it any other way and it it I have learned and I'm walking proof that being a Critic of society and doing it systematically and sharing it with other people makes for very good life very good life speaking of which however one 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 it's not to bother you very much so it's I worry more about my wife I'm very attached to my wife my mentioned to you I got married when I was 23 years old and that's my wife to this day um so I'm lucky because that's if you get married to anybody in an age 23 it's either luck or it isn't um what has uh what role has love played in your life enormous because I came from a family you know if 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 it's the disruption goes real deep for any Refugee so so my mother and father were both refugees they met as refugees um 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 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 um so I had to perform you know I went to high school here in the United States I I had to get all A's I had to be on the football team I had to play the violin the orchestra I had to do all this because everything had to be achieved so I'm an achievement crazy person that way and but that's functional in this dysfunctional Sy 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 is it how is it 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 more than a little what was going on and she has tuted me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family never talked about never dealt with never um at least explicitly engaged in any of that cuz it was all about survival The Immigrant challenge is survival survive survive and so busy that you tell yourself you can't do that you 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 uh did that one last question what's the meaning of life Richard wolf why why are here I will quote you Mr Marks let's go life is struggle and uh 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 uh 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 these are it's a struggle to do all those things but that 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 good out there today and it's a huge honor that you would sit with me for so many hours thank you this is awesome thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard wolf to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from Carl Marx the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point however is to change it thank you for listening and hope to see you next time