Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295

00:00:00.000 | Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets.

00:00:03.660 | Serfs produce a surplus which the Lord gets.

00:00:06.840 | Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets.

00:00:11.640 | It's very simple.

00:00:14.040 | These are exploitative class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated,

00:00:24.760 | appropriated by another group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility,

00:00:32.120 | enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading

00:00:39.560 | class struggle.

00:00:43.880 | The following is a conversation with Richard Wolff, one of the top Marxist economists and

00:00:49.520 | philosophers in the world.

00:00:51.700 | This is a heavy topic.

00:00:54.360 | In general and for me personally, given my family history in the Soviet Union, in Russia,

00:01:00.180 | and in Ukraine.

00:01:02.180 | Today the words Marxism, Socialism, and Communism are used to attack and to divide, much more

00:01:10.060 | than to understand and to learn.

00:01:13.340 | With this podcast, I seek the latter.

00:01:16.780 | I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx, as well as their various implementations

00:01:22.300 | throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries.

00:01:25.820 | And in general, we need to both steel man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize,

00:01:32.260 | and to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant

00:01:38.780 | and at times dangerous.

00:01:42.200 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:43.940 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:47.780 | And now, dear friends, here's Richard Wolff.

00:01:52.260 | Let's start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all.

00:01:55.980 | What is Marxism?

00:01:56.980 | What are the defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology?

00:02:04.540 | Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition that takes

00:02:10.620 | its founding inspiration from the works of Karl Marx.

00:02:18.100 | But because these ideas that he put forward spread as fast as they did, and as globally

00:02:27.400 | as they did, literally it's 140 years since Marx died, and in that time his ideas have

00:02:37.420 | become major types of thinking in every country on the earth.

00:02:44.820 | If you know much about the great ideas of human history, that's an extraordinary spread

00:02:52.260 | in an extraordinarily short period of historical time.

00:02:57.700 | And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity, is that the

00:03:04.420 | Marxian ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories,

00:03:12.420 | and economic conditions, so the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently

00:03:19.220 | in different places at different times.

00:03:22.660 | And therefore Marxism, as a kind of first flush definition, is the totality of all of

00:03:29.820 | these very different ways of coming to terms with it.

00:03:36.140 | For the first roughly 40-50 years, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about

00:03:46.060 | capitalism.

00:03:47.220 | Marx himself, that's all he really did.

00:03:48.900 | He never wrote a book about communism.

00:03:50.660 | He never wrote a book really about socialism either.

00:03:54.980 | His comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed.

00:04:00.040 | What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism, and that's what Marxism

00:04:06.060 | was, more or less, in its first 40 or 50 years.

00:04:12.660 | The only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a

00:04:19.660 | few weeks.

00:04:21.220 | In 1871, there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to

00:04:28.660 | Bismarck's Germany, and in the result was something called the Paris Commune.

00:04:34.220 | The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian

00:04:41.780 | economy and the Parisian society.

00:04:44.820 | And Marx's people, people influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune, in the leadership

00:04:51.320 | of the commune.

00:04:52.820 | And Marx wasn't that far away.

00:04:54.060 | He was in London.

00:04:56.540 | These things were happening in Paris.

00:04:58.300 | That's an easy transport even then.

00:05:01.700 | And for a short time, very short, Marxism had a different quality.

00:05:09.320 | In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize society

00:05:17.860 | differently.

00:05:19.420 | Before that had only been implicit.

00:05:21.500 | Now it became explicit.

00:05:23.960 | What is the leadership of the Paris Commune going to do, and why, and in what order?

00:05:29.900 | In other words, governing, organizing a society.

00:05:34.660 | But since it only lasted a few weeks, the French army regrouped, and under the leadership

00:05:40.860 | of people who were very opposed to Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed

00:05:47.740 | a large number of the communards, as they were called, and deported them to islands

00:05:54.540 | in the Pacific that were part of the French Empire at the time.

00:05:59.660 | The really big change happens in Russia in 1917.

00:06:03.140 | Now you have a group of Marxists, Lenin, Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position

00:06:13.220 | to seize a moment.

00:06:15.660 | Once again, a war, like in France, disorganizes the government, throws the government into

00:06:23.180 | a very bad reputation, because it is the government that loses World War I, has to withdraw, as

00:06:30.860 | you know, Brest-Litovsk and all of that, and the government collapses, and the army revolts.

00:06:37.980 | And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers'

00:06:45.780 | Party, splits under the pressures of all of this, into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions.

00:06:56.380 | Lenin, Trotsky, and the others are in the Bolshevik division.

00:06:59.620 | And to make a long story short, he's in exile.

00:07:03.820 | Lenin's position gets him deported, because he says Russian workers should not be killing

00:07:11.660 | German workers.

00:07:12.660 | This is a war of capitalists who are dividing the world up into colonies, and Russian working

00:07:18.540 | people should not kill and should not die for such a thing.

00:07:23.920 | As you can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out.

00:07:28.340 | Interestingly, in the United States, the comparable leader at that time of the Socialist Party

00:07:33.980 | here, as you know, there was no Communist Party at this point, that comes later, the

00:07:39.700 | head of the Socialist Party, a very important American figure named Eugene Victor Debs,

00:07:46.260 | makes exactly the same argument that Americans should not fight in the war.

00:07:51.940 | He's in the past, he has nothing to do with Lenin, I don't even know if they knew of each

00:07:55.380 | other, but he does it on his own.

00:07:57.820 | He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States.

00:08:01.860 | By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well, really very well, remarkable.

00:08:08.540 | And he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you see the link.

00:08:14.060 | Although he had much more courage politically than Bernie has.

00:08:18.460 | That's really interesting, I'd love to return to that link maybe later.

00:08:21.780 | History rhymes.

00:08:23.420 | Yes, the complicated story.

00:08:25.660 | Anyway, the importance in terms of Marxism is that now this seizure of power by a group

00:08:33.500 | of Marxists, that is a group of people inspired by Marx, developing what you might call a

00:08:40.220 | Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians too, but a Russian interpretation.

00:08:47.580 | This now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism into a plan, at least, what

00:08:55.300 | are you going to do in the Soviet Union?

00:08:58.620 | And a lot of this was then trial and error.

00:09:02.380 | Marx never laid any of this out.

00:09:05.340 | Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if he had, because it was 50 years earlier

00:09:09.580 | in another country, etc.

00:09:12.260 | So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens then more later in China

00:09:17.620 | and Cuba and Vietnam and Korea and so on, is that you have kind of a bifurcation.

00:09:24.980 | Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism, but another part of it becomes

00:09:33.940 | a set, and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative post-capitalist

00:09:41.420 | society ought to look like, how it ought to work.

00:09:45.420 | And there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion, and I would say that that's

00:09:52.380 | still where it is.

00:09:53.660 | You have a tradition now that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism, notion

00:10:00.420 | of the alternative, and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework

00:10:06.220 | in which I would answer that's what Marxism is about.

00:10:10.420 | Its basic idea, if you had to have one, is that human society can do better than capitalism,

00:10:17.940 | and it ought to try.

00:10:19.820 | And then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism.

00:10:24.140 | Fine.

00:10:25.540 | So we'll look at the critique of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back, what

00:10:31.220 | do you think Marx would say if he just looked at the different implementations of the ideas

00:10:37.380 | of Marxism throughout the 20th century, where his ideas that were implicit were made explicit?

00:10:45.580 | Would he shake his head?

00:10:48.380 | Would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations?

00:10:52.620 | How do you think he would analyze it?

00:10:53.940 | Well, he had a great sense of humor.

00:10:55.420 | I don't know if you've had a chance to take a look at his writing, but he had an extraordinary

00:11:00.120 | sense of humor.

00:11:01.120 | So my guess is he would deploy his humor in answering this question, too.

00:11:05.420 | He would say some of them are inspiring, some of the interpretations of his work, and he's

00:11:10.460 | very pleased with those.

00:11:12.420 | Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could erase the connection between those

00:11:18.320 | things and the lineage they claim from him, which he would.

00:11:23.620 | There's a German word—I don't know if you speak the other languages—there's a wonderful

00:11:29.540 | German word called "verzichte," and it's stronger than the word "refuse."

00:11:35.660 | If you want to refuse something but with real strong emphasis, "ich verzichte darauf"

00:11:41.460 | is a German way of saying, "I don't want anything to do with that."

00:11:46.380 | And he would talk then in philosophical terms, because remember, he was a student of philosophy.

00:11:51.860 | He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest.

00:11:57.020 | He would wax philosophical and say that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having

00:12:03.500 | a child.

00:12:04.860 | You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person and will find

00:12:10.380 | his or her own way, and these ideas, once they're out there, go their own way.

00:12:16.700 | - And as you said, there's a particular way that this idea spread.

00:12:20.020 | The speed at which it spread throughout the world made it even less able to be sort of

00:12:24.740 | stabilized and connected back to the origins of where the idea came from.

00:12:30.620 | - The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians after the revolution, because

00:12:36.020 | they occupied a position for a while, not very long, but they occupied a position for

00:12:41.300 | a while in which, I mean, it was exalted, right?

00:12:44.500 | There had been all these people criticizing capitalism for a long time, even the Marxists

00:12:49.740 | ever since mid-century, and these were the first guys who pulled it off.

00:12:55.700 | They made it, and so that there was a kind of presumption around the world, their interpretation

00:13:01.620 | must be kind of the right one, because look, they did it.

00:13:07.540 | And so for a while, they could enunciate their interpretation, and it came to be widely grasped

00:13:17.500 | as something which, by the way, gets called in the literature "official Marxism."

00:13:22.820 | The very idea that you would put that adjective in front of Marxism or Soviet Marxism or Russian

00:13:29.220 | Marx, there were these words where the adjective was meant to somehow say kind of this is the

00:13:35.900 | canon.

00:13:37.220 | You can depart from it, but this is the canon.

00:13:40.580 | Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing, and by the 1960s, it was already

00:13:47.820 | displayed, it was gone.

00:13:49.540 | But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of, and the irony is, particularly

00:13:57.420 | here in the United States, where the taboo against Marxism kicks in right after World

00:14:02.860 | War II, is so total in this country that I, for example, through most of my adult life,

00:14:11.580 | have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time simply explaining to American audiences

00:14:20.300 | that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism, which wasn't the

00:14:28.420 | canon before 1917 and hasn't been since at least the 1960s.

00:14:34.500 | But they don't know.

00:14:36.420 | It's not that they're stupid, and it's not that they're ignorant.

00:14:39.340 | It's that, well, the ignorance may be, but I mean, it's not a mental problem.

00:14:43.460 | It's the taboo.

00:14:45.220 | Cut it down, and so all of the reopening that in a way recaptures what went before

00:14:52.820 | and develops it in new direction, they just don't know.

00:14:56.260 | Nevertheless, it's a serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit.

00:15:02.620 | The Russians, the Soviets at the beginning of the 20th century made a serious attempt

00:15:08.380 | at saying, "Okay, beyond the critique of capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this?"

00:15:13.740 | And so in that sense, not at a high level, but at a detailed level, it's interesting

00:15:19.820 | to look at those particular schools.

00:15:23.060 | Maybe-

00:15:24.060 | Right, because for example, let me just take your point one step further.

00:15:27.520 | You really cannot understand the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese, and the

00:15:34.300 | others, because each of them is a kind of response, let's call it, to the way the Soviets

00:15:42.700 | did it.

00:15:43.780 | Are you going to do it that way?

00:15:45.580 | Well, yes and no is the answer.

00:15:48.740 | This we will do that way, but that we're not going to do.

00:15:52.740 | And the differences are huge, but you could find a thread, I can do that for you if you

00:15:57.700 | want, in which all of them are in a way reacting.

00:16:03.180 | They are-

00:16:04.180 | To the originals.

00:16:05.180 | Yes, very much so.

00:16:07.300 | Maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones.

00:16:10.260 | Something like that.

00:16:13.100 | Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools of that Soviet Marxism?

00:16:17.780 | So we got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even, let's expand out to Maoism.

00:16:25.420 | So maybe I could speak to Leninism, and then please tell me if I'm saying dumb things.

00:16:35.100 | I think for Lenin, there was an idea that there could be a small, sort of vanguard party,

00:16:42.060 | like a small controlling entity that's wise and is able to do the central planning decisions.

00:16:49.340 | Then for Stalinism, one interesting, Stalin's implementation of all of this, one interesting

00:16:56.420 | characteristic is to move away from the international aspect of the ideal of Marxism to make it

00:17:04.540 | all about nation, nationalism, the strength of nation.

00:17:08.780 | And then, so Maoism is, it's different in that it's focused on agriculture, on rural.

00:17:18.100 | And then Trotskyism, I don't know, except that it's anti-Stalin.

00:17:22.060 | I mean, I don't even know if there's unique sort of philosophical elements there.

00:17:27.420 | Anyway, can you maybe from those or something else speak to different unique elements that

00:17:32.100 | are interesting to think about, about implementation of Marxism in the real world?

00:17:38.420 | - Probably the best way to get into this is to describe something that happened in Marxism

00:17:46.180 | that then shapes the answer to your question.

00:17:51.140 | In the early days of Marx's writings, and you know, his life spans the 19th century.

00:17:57.540 | Born in 1818, dies in 1883, so literally he lives the 19th century.

00:18:04.460 | And you might, I mean, to make things simple, you might look at the first half of the first

00:18:09.100 | two thirds of his life as overwhelmingly gathering together the precursors to his own work.

00:18:18.100 | Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that partly because he didn't work a regular

00:18:23.820 | job and partly because he was an exile in London most of his adult life, he worked in

00:18:29.340 | the library.

00:18:30.340 | I mean, he had a lot of time.

00:18:31.980 | He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were manufacturers.

00:18:38.060 | And you might say the first half to two thirds of his life are about the critique of capitalism.

00:18:47.220 | And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work, Western Europe more or less,

00:18:54.860 | was interested in.

00:18:55.860 | That's what they wanted.

00:18:57.740 | And he gave that to them.

00:18:58.900 | He wasn't the only one, but he was very, very effective at it.

00:19:04.860 | By the last third of his life, he and the other producers of an anti-capitalist movement,

00:19:15.460 | like the Chartists in England, that's a whole other movement, the anarchists of various

00:19:22.460 | kinds like Proudhon in France or Kropotkin or Bakunin in Russia, and so on.

00:19:30.660 | You put all these together and there was a shift in what the audience, let's call it

00:19:37.220 | a mixture of militant working class people on the one hand and critical or radical intelligentsia

00:19:45.620 | on the other.

00:19:46.940 | They now wanted a different question.

00:19:49.280 | They were persuaded by the analysis.

00:19:51.380 | They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would like to do better than.

00:19:59.140 | And the question became, how do we do this?

00:20:02.260 | Not anymore, should we, why should we, could we maybe fix capitalism?

00:20:07.100 | No, they had gotten to the point the system has to be fundamentally changed.

00:20:12.620 | But they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say, well, what will that new

00:20:16.880 | system look like?

00:20:18.720 | They didn't go that way.

00:20:19.820 | What they did was ask the question, how could we get beyond capitalism?

00:20:26.040 | It seems so powerful.

00:20:27.700 | It seems to have captured people's minds, people's daily lives, and so on.

00:20:34.660 | And the focus of the conversation became, this was already by the last third of the

00:20:40.620 | 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism whereby we would get beyond.

00:20:48.240 | And again, make a long story short, the conversation focused on seizing the government.

00:20:56.140 | See, before that, it wasn't that the government was not a major interest.

00:21:00.820 | If you read Marx's Capital, the great work of his maturity, three volumes, there's almost

00:21:07.080 | nothing in the state.

00:21:08.500 | I mean, he mentions it, but he's interested in the details of how capitalism works, factory

00:21:14.840 | by factory, store by store, office.

00:21:18.020 | What's the structure?

00:21:19.620 | The government's secondary for him.

00:21:21.460 | But there's also humans within that capitalist system of, there's the working class.

00:21:26.620 | It's about the class struggle.

00:21:28.540 | That's what he's interested in.

00:21:30.860 | Think of it almost mechanically like the workplace.

00:21:33.700 | In the workplace there, some people who do this and other people who do that, and they

00:21:38.020 | accept this division of authority, and they accept this division of what's going on here,

00:21:45.140 | particularly because he believed that the core economic objective of capitalism was

00:21:50.140 | to maximize something called profit, which his analysis located right there in the workings

00:21:57.140 | of the enterprise.

00:21:58.940 | The government was not the key factor here.

00:22:01.860 | And he was looking at ideas of value.

00:22:04.900 | How much value does the labor of the individual workers provide?

00:22:11.500 | And that means how do we reward the workers in an ethical way?

00:22:16.060 | So those are the questions of-

00:22:17.660 | Right.

00:22:18.660 | We'll get to that.

00:22:19.660 | Yeah, okay.

00:22:20.660 | But the government is not part of that picture.

00:22:23.420 | So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive

00:22:28.600 | when this begins, but it really gets going after he dies, is this debate among Marxists

00:22:36.740 | about the role of the state.

00:22:39.580 | They all agree, nearly all of them agree, that you have to get the state.

00:22:44.620 | The working class has to get the state because they see the state as the ultimate guarantor

00:22:53.500 | of capitalism.

00:22:54.820 | When things get really out of hand, the capitalist calls the police, or he calls the army, or

00:23:01.180 | both of them.

00:23:02.180 | And so the government is in a sense this key institution captured in Marxist language by

00:23:11.340 | the bourgeoisie, by the other side, the capitalists, and yet vulnerable because of suffrage.

00:23:19.500 | If suffrage is universal, or nearly so, if everybody gets a vote, which in a way capitalism

00:23:26.780 | brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism in the French-American revolution is to create

00:23:33.860 | a place where elected representatives-

00:23:37.060 | So the government being subject to suffrage creates the notion, "Aha, here's how we're

00:23:45.100 | going to- we have to seize the state."

00:23:48.020 | And then that gets agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how to do it.

00:23:53.660 | One side says, "You go with the election.

00:23:57.120 | You mobilize the voter."

00:23:59.220 | That gets to be called reformism within Marxism.

00:24:03.260 | And the other side is revolution.

00:24:06.780 | Don't do that.

00:24:07.980 | This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged.

00:24:12.140 | You can't get there.

00:24:13.980 | They've long ago learned how to manipulate parliaments.

00:24:18.480 | They buy the politicians and all that, and therefore revolution is going to be the way

00:24:23.940 | to do it.

00:24:25.780 | Revolution gets a very big boost because the Russians.

00:24:29.540 | They did it that way.

00:24:31.300 | They didn't do- I mean, they fought in the Duma, in the parliament, but they didn't.

00:24:36.940 | And this focus on the state, I would argue, goes way beyond what the debaters at the time-

00:24:46.300 | and if you're interested in the great names, there was a great theorist of the role of

00:24:52.140 | the state in a reformist strategy to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein.

00:24:59.140 | Very important.

00:25:00.560 | His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, two other huge figures

00:25:07.940 | in Marxism at the time.

00:25:10.020 | And they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate.

00:25:15.620 | By the way, that debate still goes on.

00:25:18.500 | Reformism versus revolution?

00:25:20.860 | In terms not all that different.

00:25:22.420 | I mean, it's adjusted to history, but in terms of different.

00:25:26.420 | Can you comment on where you lean in terms of the mechanism of progress, reformation

00:25:34.300 | versus revolution?

00:25:35.300 | I'd rather tell you the historical story.

00:25:38.100 | Over and over and over again, in most cases, the reformists have always won because revolution

00:25:44.180 | is frightening, is scary, is dangerous.

00:25:48.940 | And so most of the time, when you get to the point where it's even a relevant discussion,

00:25:53.540 | not an abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have

00:26:00.020 | won.

00:26:01.020 | I mean, and I'll give you an example from the United States.

00:26:05.300 | In the Great Depression of the 1930s, you had an extraordinary shift to the left in

00:26:11.860 | the United States, the greatest shift to the left in the country's history before or since.

00:26:17.400 | Nothing like it.

00:26:19.140 | Suddenly you created a vast left wing composed of the labor movement, which went crazy in

00:26:28.220 | the 1930s.

00:26:29.220 | We organized more people into unions in the 1930s than at any time before or any time

00:26:34.420 | since.

00:26:35.420 | It is the explosion.

00:26:36.900 | And at the same time, the explosion of two socialist parties and the Communist Party

00:26:42.740 | that became very powerful, and they all worked together, creating a very powerful leftist

00:26:49.660 | presence in this country.

00:26:51.900 | They debated in a strategically real way, reform or revolution.

00:26:57.260 | The reformers were the union people, by and large, and the communists were the revolutionaries,

00:27:04.020 | by and large, because they were affiliated with the Communist International, with Russia

00:27:08.980 | and all of that.

00:27:10.100 | And in between, you might say, the two socialist parties, one that was Trotskyist in inspiration

00:27:15.940 | and the other one more moderate Western European kind of socialism.

00:27:21.460 | And they had this intense debate.

00:27:23.780 | And they ended up, the reformists won that debate.

00:27:26.460 | There was no revolution in the 1930s here, but there was a reform that achieved unspeakably

00:27:34.760 | great successes, which is why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does, because

00:27:40.700 | it achieved in a few years in the 1930s, starting around 1932-33, social security in this country.

00:27:48.060 | We had never had that before.

00:27:49.900 | It's the same one we have now.

00:27:52.500 | Unemployment insurance never existed before, but you have it still today.

00:27:57.020 | Minimum wage for the first time, still have that today.

00:28:00.540 | And a federal program of employment that hired 15 million people.

00:28:05.620 | These were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working class.

00:28:09.380 | So that's the '30s and the '40s.

00:28:11.380 | '30s, not much in the '40s anymore, but in the '30s.

00:28:14.980 | And here's the best part.

00:28:17.260 | It was paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich.

00:28:20.940 | So when people today say, "Well, you can tax the corporate."

00:28:24.380 | The joke is I have to teach American history to Americans, because it has been erased from

00:28:32.140 | consciousness.

00:28:33.140 | We'll return to that, but first let's take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th

00:28:38.300 | century with the Russians.

00:28:39.300 | Right, with the Russians.

00:28:40.580 | So their interpretation goes like this.

00:28:47.520 | Everybody was right.

00:28:48.520 | The state is crucial.

00:28:50.420 | We were right.

00:28:51.420 | We were the revolutionaries.

00:28:52.820 | We seized the state here in Russia.

00:28:56.260 | Now we have the state, and socialism is when the working class captures the state, either

00:29:03.740 | by reform or revolution, and then uses its power over the state to make the transition

00:29:10.040 | from capitalism to the better thing we're going toward.

00:29:16.060 | And again, make a long story short in the interest of time.

00:29:19.500 | What happens, which is not unusual in human history, is that the means becomes the end.

00:29:27.380 | In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear before he died.

00:29:30.700 | He doesn't live very long.

00:29:31.700 | He dies at 23, so he's only in power from 17, he's dated 22.

00:29:37.500 | By that time he has his brain trouble.

00:29:39.500 | 1923, by the way, not at age 23.

00:29:42.100 | Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:29:43.100 | People are listening.

00:29:44.100 | 1923.

00:29:45.100 | Yeah, he's only there for four or five years.

00:29:47.100 | He's very clear.

00:29:48.100 | He even says, I've done work on that.

00:29:50.580 | I've published, so I know this stuff.

00:29:53.060 | He says in a famous speech, "Let's not fool ourselves.

00:29:57.220 | We have captured the state, but we don't have socialism.

00:30:01.220 | We have to create that.

00:30:02.340 | We have to move towards that."

00:30:07.180 | With Stalin, Lenin dies, and there's a fight between Stalin and Trotsky.

00:30:11.940 | Trotsky loses the fight.

00:30:13.300 | He's exiled.

00:30:14.300 | He goes to Mexico.

00:30:15.780 | Stalin is now alone in power.

00:30:17.620 | He does all the things he's famous or infamous for.

00:30:22.900 | By the end of the '20s, Stalin makes a decision.

00:30:27.700 | I mean, not that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that they do the

00:30:33.100 | following.

00:30:34.260 | They declare that they are socialism.

00:30:38.780 | In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the state, not when the state capture

00:30:47.100 | has enabled you to do X, Y, Z, other things.

00:30:50.220 | No, no.

00:30:51.220 | The state itself, once you have it, is socialism.

00:30:56.900 | When a socialist captures the state, that's socialism.

00:31:00.300 | Exactly.

00:31:01.300 | That's exactly right.

00:31:03.300 | I feel like that's definitionally confusing.

00:31:06.300 | Well, it shouldn't be because I gave you an example.

00:31:10.220 | If you go to many parts of the United States today and you ask people, "What's socialism?"

00:31:16.460 | They'll tell you.

00:31:17.460 | They'll look you right in the face and they'll say, "The post office."

00:31:22.580 | When I first heard this as a young man, "What?

00:31:25.940 | The post office?"

00:31:27.440 | It took me a while to understand.

00:31:29.700 | The post office, Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the

00:31:36.500 | government runs something.

00:31:39.540 | This is socialism.

00:31:42.180 | Only capitalism is if the government doesn't run it.

00:31:46.060 | If a private individual who's not a government official runs it, well, then it's capitalism.

00:31:52.740 | If the government takes it, then it's socialism.

00:31:56.620 | What is wrong with that reasoning?

00:31:59.420 | The idea, I think-

00:32:00.780 | There's nothing wrong with it's a way of looking at the world.

00:32:04.580 | It's just got nothing to do with Marx.

00:32:06.220 | Well, there's Marx.

00:32:07.220 | There's Marxism.

00:32:08.220 | Let's try to pull this apart.

00:32:11.860 | What role does central planning have in Marxism?

00:32:20.820 | Marxism is concerned with this class struggle, with respecting the working class.

00:32:29.700 | What is the connection between that struggle and central planning that is often ... Central

00:32:35.820 | planning is often associated with Marxism.

00:32:38.860 | So a centralized power doing-

00:32:41.140 | Russia did that.

00:32:42.140 | Allocation.

00:32:43.140 | So that has to do with a very specific set of implementations initiated by the Soviet

00:32:49.340 | Union.

00:32:50.340 | Has nothing to do with Marx.

00:32:51.340 | How else can you do-

00:32:52.340 | I don't think you can find anywhere in Marx's writing anything about central planning or

00:32:58.940 | any other kind of planning.

00:33:00.820 | Again, fundamentally then, Marx's work has to do with factories, with workers, with the

00:33:10.900 | bourgeoisie, and the exploitation of the working class.

00:33:17.540 | You still have to take that leap.

00:33:19.820 | What is beyond capitalism?

00:33:21.860 | Right.

00:33:22.860 | Maybe we should turn to that, focus on that.

00:33:26.260 | Okay.

00:33:27.260 | Yes.

00:33:28.260 | Okay, we've already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism.

00:33:33.260 | How else can we go beyond capitalism?

00:33:35.900 | Let me push it a little further.

00:33:37.500 | They didn't succeed, in my judgment, as a Marxist.

00:33:41.860 | And I'm now going to tell you why they didn't succeed, because they didn't understand as

00:33:47.060 | well as they could have or should have, what Marxists was trying to do.

00:33:51.620 | I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circumstances.

00:33:54.940 | This is not a critique of them, but it's a different way of understanding what's going

00:34:00.220 | on.

00:34:01.220 | All right.

00:34:02.220 | So I'll give you an example.

00:34:04.020 | Most of my adult life, I have taught Marxian economics.

00:34:09.100 | I'm a professor of economics.

00:34:10.780 | I've been that all my life.

00:34:13.020 | I'm a graduate of American universities.

00:34:16.780 | As it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities.

00:34:22.980 | That's another conversation you and I can have.

00:34:27.140 | So I went to Harvard, then I went to Stanford, and I finished at Yale.

00:34:31.740 | I'm like a poster boy for elite education.

00:34:35.180 | They tried very hard.

00:34:37.020 | By the way, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League.

00:34:40.820 | 20 semesters, one after the other, no break.

00:34:45.140 | In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned a word about Marxism.

00:34:52.620 | That is, no critique of capitalism was offered to me, ever, with one except.

00:34:58.140 | One professor in Stanford, in the one semester I studied with him, he gave me plenty to read,

00:35:04.820 | but nobody else.

00:35:06.300 | So that's really interesting.

00:35:08.060 | You've mentioned that in the past, and that's very true, which makes you a very interesting

00:35:12.280 | figure to hold your ground intellectually through this idea space where just people

00:35:22.180 | don't really even talk about it.

00:35:24.740 | Perhaps we can discuss historically why that is, but nevertheless, that's the case.

00:35:28.620 | So Marxian economics, did Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of--

00:35:36.260 | - Dismissal.

00:35:37.700 | The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal.

00:35:41.940 | For you to give an example, the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that

00:35:47.580 | was for many years the canonical book, it isn't quite anymore, was a book authored by

00:35:53.580 | a professor of economics at MIT named Paul Samuelson, and people, a whole generation

00:36:00.340 | or two were trained on his textbook.

00:36:03.380 | If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree, and the tree is Adam Smith and

00:36:10.540 | David Ricardo at the root, and then the different branches of it.

00:36:15.340 | He's trying to give you an idea as a student of how the thing developed.

00:36:20.140 | It's a tree, and everybody on it is a bourgeois.

00:36:23.820 | And then there's this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of starts heading

00:36:28.380 | back down, that's Karl Marx.

00:36:30.460 | In other words, he had to have it complete, 'cause he's not a complete faker, but beyond

00:36:35.820 | that, no, there was no.

00:36:38.100 | Nothing in the book gives you two paragraphs of an approach.

00:36:44.180 | But that's Cold War.

00:36:45.180 | I mean, that's really neither here nor there.

00:36:48.460 | That's the craziness.

00:36:49.460 | Yeah, that's the Cold War in this country.

00:36:51.580 | My professors were afraid.

00:36:52.820 | Anyway, let me get to the core of it, what I think will help.

00:36:58.300 | Marx was interested in the relationship of people in the process of production.

00:37:04.660 | He's interested in the factory, the office, the store.

00:37:07.420 | What goes on, and by that he means, what are the relationships among the people that come

00:37:14.500 | together in a workplace?

00:37:18.580 | And what he analyzes is that there is something going on there that has not been adequately

00:37:27.700 | understood, and that has not been adequately addressed as an object needing transformation.

00:37:36.940 | What does he mean?

00:37:38.300 | The answer is exploitation, which he defines mathematically in the following way.

00:37:46.140 | Whenever in a society, any society, you organize people, adults, not the children, not the

00:37:53.220 | sick, but healthy adults, in the following way.

00:37:58.740 | A big block of them, a clear majority, work.

00:38:02.300 | That is, they use their brains and their muscles to transform nature.

00:38:06.340 | A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, whatever.

00:38:12.020 | In every human community, Marx argues, there are the people who do that work, but they

00:38:17.740 | always produce more chairs, more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume.

00:38:25.980 | Whatever their standard of living.

00:38:26.980 | Doesn't have to be low, could be medium, could be high, but they always produce more than

00:38:33.060 | they themselves consume.

00:38:35.660 | That more, by the way, Marx, when he writes this, uses the German word mehr, M-E-H-R,

00:38:41.940 | which is the English equivalent of more.

00:38:44.740 | It's the more.

00:38:46.580 | That more got badly translated into the word surplus.

00:38:50.300 | Shouldn't have been, but it was.

00:38:54.660 | By the way, by German and English people doing the translations.

00:38:58.780 | What's the difference between more and surplus?

00:39:00.460 | Is there a nuanced...

00:39:01.820 | Yeah, because surplus has a notion of it's discretionary, it's sort of extra.

00:39:08.500 | He's not making a judgment that it's extra.

00:39:11.100 | It's a simple math equation.

00:39:12.580 | Yes, very simple.

00:39:14.020 | One minus the other.

00:39:15.020 | Literally.

00:39:16.020 | Yes.

00:39:17.020 | X minus Y.

00:39:18.020 | Reduce versus...

00:39:19.020 | That's right.

00:39:20.020 | X is the total output, Y is the consumption by the producer, therefore X minus Y equals

00:39:25.380 | S, the surplus.

00:39:27.500 | Exactly.

00:39:28.820 | Now Marx argues, the minute you understand this, you will ask the following question,

00:39:37.180 | who gets the surplus?

00:39:39.940 | Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it?

00:39:46.700 | And Marx's answer is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society.

00:39:52.820 | How is that organized?

00:39:54.220 | For example, who gets it?

00:39:57.340 | What are they asked, if anything, to do with it in exchange for getting it?

00:40:03.460 | What's their social role?

00:40:05.300 | For example, here we go now.

00:40:06.940 | If you get this and you get the core of it anyway, and I don't charge much, the workers

00:40:14.660 | themselves could get it.

00:40:15.660 | At least less than lawyers.

00:40:17.220 | That's right.

00:40:19.220 | The workers themselves could get it.

00:40:21.580 | That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism.

00:40:26.300 | Communism would be if the workers who produce the surplus together decide what to do with

00:40:34.420 | it.

00:40:35.420 | So this has to do not just with who gets it, but more importantly, who gets to decide who

00:40:40.620 | gets it.

00:40:41.620 | Well, who gets it and who gets to decide what to do with it.

00:40:46.340 | Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it.

00:40:49.660 | So that's the logic of the word sequence.

00:40:54.060 | It's produced, Marx uses the word appropriated, in other words, who's property, who gets to

00:41:01.100 | decide, if you like, what happens.

00:41:03.540 | All that property ever meant is who gets to decide and who's excluded.

00:41:08.340 | That's a clean definition of communism for him.

00:41:10.620 | Right.

00:41:11.620 | And that's the, by the way, it's not just clean.

00:41:13.460 | It's the only one.

00:41:15.060 | So what's, can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context?

00:41:20.060 | Yes.

00:41:21.060 | Easy.

00:41:22.060 | It becomes very easy now.

00:41:23.060 | Exploitation exists if and when the surplus that's produced is taken and distributed by

00:41:29.860 | people other than those who produced it.

00:41:33.500 | Slaves produce a surplus, which the master gets.

00:41:36.900 | Serfs produce a surplus, which the Lord gets.

00:41:40.660 | Employees produce a surplus, which the employer gets.

00:41:44.580 | It's very simple.

00:41:46.980 | These are exploitative class structures because one class produces a surplus, appropriated,

00:41:57.740 | distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility,

00:42:04.980 | enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading

00:42:12.460 | class struggle.

00:42:14.580 | I use a metaphor, simple metaphorical story.

00:42:18.460 | You have two children, let's assume, and you take them to Central Park a few blocks from

00:42:22.900 | here.

00:42:23.900 | It's a nice day, and the children are playing, and in comes one of those men with an ice

00:42:28.340 | cream truck comes by.

00:42:30.260 | Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling, your children see the ice cream.

00:42:33.420 | "Daddy, get me an ice cream."

00:42:35.500 | So you walk over, you take some money, and you get two ice cream cones, and you give

00:42:40.180 | them to one of the children.

00:42:43.580 | The other one begins to scream and yell, "And how?"

00:42:46.860 | "Obviously, what's the issue?"

00:42:48.940 | And you realize you've just made a terrible mistake, so you order the one you gave the

00:42:54.500 | two ice cream cones to give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it

00:42:58.500 | is, and that's how you solve the problem, until a psychologist comes along and says,

00:43:06.180 | "You know, you didn't fix it by what you just did.

00:43:10.580 | You should never have done that in the first place."

00:43:14.660 | My response, though, you understand, all of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic,

00:43:22.820 | political, cultural, these are all giving the ice cream cone back to the kid, "You

00:43:28.540 | should never do this in the first place."

00:43:30.780 | The reallocation of resources creates bitterness in the populace.

00:43:34.500 | Look at our ... This country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen

00:43:39.740 | in my life, and I've lived here all my life, and I've worked here all my life.

00:43:44.660 | It's tearing itself apart, and it's tearing itself apart basically over the re-division,

00:43:50.860 | the redistribution of wealth, having so badly distributed in the first ... But that's all

00:43:57.140 | in marks, and notice as I explain to you what is going on in this tension-filled production

00:44:04.180 | scene in the office, the factory, the store, I don't have to say a word about the government.

00:44:09.260 | I'm not interested in the government.

00:44:10.900 | The government's really a very secondary matter to this core question, and here comes the

00:44:16.740 | big point.

00:44:18.660 | If you make a revolution, and all you do is remove the private exploiter and substitute

00:44:27.340 | a government official without changing the relationship, you can call yourself a Marxist

00:44:34.220 | all day long, but you're not getting the point of the Marxism.

00:44:37.960 | The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation per se.

00:44:43.580 | You've got to change the organization of the workplace so there isn't a group that makes

00:44:48.900 | all the decisions and gets the surplus vis-a-vis another one that produces it.

00:44:54.220 | If you do that, you will destroy the whole project.

00:44:59.100 | Not only will you not achieve what you set out to get, but you'll so misunderstand it

00:45:04.540 | that you, the Germans again have a phrase, "Es geht schief."

00:45:08.420 | It goes crooked.

00:45:09.460 | It doesn't go right.

00:45:10.500 | The project gets off the rails because it can't understand either what its objective

00:45:17.820 | should have been, and therefore it doesn't understand how and why it's missing its objective.

00:45:22.920 | It just knows that this is not what it had hoped for.

00:45:26.100 | I mean, there's a lot of fascinating questions here.

00:45:28.420 | So one is, to what degree, so there's human nature, to what degree does communism, a lack

00:45:40.620 | of exploitation of the working class naturally emerge?

00:45:44.420 | If you leave two people together in a room and come back a year later, if you leave five

00:45:49.820 | people together in a room, if you leave 100 people and 1,000 people, it seems that humans

00:45:55.920 | form hierarchies naturally.

00:45:59.980 | So the clever, the charismatic, the sexy, the muscular, the powerful, however you define

00:46:06.620 | that, starts becoming a leader and start to do maybe exploitation in a non-negative sense,

00:46:16.180 | a more generic sense, starts to become an employer, not in a capitalist sense, but just

00:46:22.500 | as a human.

00:46:23.500 | So you go do this, and in exchange I will give you this.

00:46:26.720 | Just becomes the leadership role.

00:46:29.360 | So the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice, the idea sort of of communism would

00:46:35.000 | be nice to not steal from the world.

00:46:38.000 | - It's nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice 'cause of human nature.

00:46:42.000 | - Because of human nature.

00:46:43.000 | That's, thank you.

00:46:45.080 | So what can we say about leveraging human nature to achieve some of these ends?

00:46:50.920 | There's so many ways of responding, in no particular order.

00:46:55.600 | Here are some of them.

00:46:58.040 | The history of the human race, as best I can tell, is a history in which a succession of

00:47:07.360 | social forms, forms of society, arise, and as they do, they rule out some kinds of human

00:47:19.200 | behavior on the grounds that they are socially disruptive and unacceptable.

00:47:25.720 | The argument isn't really then, is there a need or an instinct, is there some human nature

00:47:33.160 | that makes people want to do this?

00:47:35.520 | Well whatever that is, this has to be repressed or else we don't have a society.

00:47:40.840 | And Freud helps us to understand that that repression is going on all the time, and it

00:47:47.080 | has consequences.

00:47:48.720 | It's not a finished project, you repress it.

00:47:51.320 | It's gone.

00:47:52.320 | It doesn't work like that.

00:47:53.680 | So for example, when you get a bunch of people together at some point, they may develop animosities

00:48:00.200 | towards one another that lead them to want the other person or persons to disappear,

00:48:07.200 | to be dead, to be gone.

00:48:09.600 | But we don't permit you to do that.

00:48:12.520 | We just don't.

00:48:15.320 | Every economic system that has ever existed has included people who defend it on the grounds

00:48:23.720 | that it is the only system consistent with human nature, and that every effort to go

00:48:30.760 | beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature.

00:48:35.960 | I can show you endless documents of every tribal society I've ever studied, every anthropological

00:48:43.480 | community that has ever been studied, slavery, wherever it's existed.

00:48:47.880 | I can show you endless documents in which the defenders of those systems, not all of

00:48:53.000 | them of course, but many defenders used that argument.

00:48:57.880 | To naturalize a system is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going, to counter

00:49:05.120 | the argument that every system is born, every system evolves, and then every system dies.

00:49:12.520 | And therefore capitalism, since it was born, and since it's been developing, we all know

00:49:18.960 | what the next stage of capitalism is.

00:49:21.720 | - What can infer?

00:49:22.720 | If what you're saying- - The burden is on the people who think

00:49:26.120 | it isn't gonna die.

00:49:27.120 | - Okay, so it doesn't mean they're wrong, but what you're saying is if we look at history,

00:49:32.120 | you're deeply suspicious of the argument, this is going against human nature 'cause

00:49:36.480 | we keep using that for basically everything including toxic relationship, toxic systems,

00:49:41.760 | destructive systems.

00:49:43.640 | That said, well let me just ask a million different questions.

00:49:48.240 | So one, what about the argument that sort of the employer, the capitalist takes on risk?

00:49:58.320 | So the, yeah, versus the employee who's just there doing the labor.

00:50:03.720 | The capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk.

00:50:07.520 | Are they not, in sort of aggregating this organization and taking this giant effort,

00:50:13.560 | hiring a lot of people, aren't they taking on risk that this is going to be a giant failure?

00:50:19.120 | - So first of all, there's risk.

00:50:22.560 | Almost in everything you undertake, any project that begins now and ends in the future, it

00:50:28.240 | takes a risk that between now and that future, something's gonna happen that makes it not

00:50:33.200 | work out.

00:50:34.400 | I mean, I got into a cab before I came here today in order to do this with you.

00:50:40.480 | I took a risk.

00:50:41.480 | The cab could have been in an accident, the lightning could have hit us, a bear could

00:50:45.880 | have eaten my left foot.

00:50:47.200 | Who the hell knows?

00:50:48.200 | - But shouldn't I reward you for the risk you took?

00:50:50.520 | - No, hold it a second.

00:50:51.800 | Let's do this step by step.

00:50:53.720 | So everybody's taking a risk.

00:50:55.400 | I always found it wonderful you talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of

00:51:00.280 | us who take a risk.

00:51:02.720 | Let's go with the worker, with the capitalist.

00:51:05.680 | That worker, he moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to take that job.

00:51:15.000 | He made a decision to have children.

00:51:17.720 | They are teenagers, they're now in school at a time when their friendships are crucial

00:51:22.560 | to their development.

00:51:23.560 | You're gonna yank them out of the school because his job is gone?

00:51:27.940 | He took an enormous risk to do that job every day, to forestall all the other things he

00:51:36.640 | could have done.

00:51:38.140 | He was taking a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next month, next year.

00:51:44.120 | He bought a house, which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's now stuck.

00:51:49.680 | He has to make a monthly payment.

00:51:51.560 | If you make a mistake, you capitalist, he's the one who's gonna, you're a capitalist,

00:51:58.840 | you got a lot of money, otherwise you wouldn't be in that position.

00:52:02.640 | You've got a cushion, he doesn't.

00:52:05.640 | If you investigate, you'll see that in every business I've ever been in, and I've been

00:52:09.520 | involved in a lot of them.

00:52:10.520 | So you think it's possible to actually measure risk or is your basic argument is there's

00:52:14.040 | risk involved in a lot of both the working class and the bourgeoisie, the capitalists?

00:52:19.120 | That's right.

00:52:20.120 | The worker would never come and say, "Because he's been taught right.

00:52:27.040 | I want this payment, a wage, for the work I do.

00:52:32.800 | And I want this payment for the risk I take."

00:52:37.440 | But there's some level of communication like that.

00:52:40.400 | You have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs, but that's probably built into the salary,

00:52:44.840 | all those kinds of things.

00:52:46.620 | But you're not incorporating the full spectrum of risk.

00:52:50.880 | You don't believe that.

00:52:52.160 | This country is now being literally transformed from below by an army of workers who work

00:52:58.480 | at Amazon, fast food joints.

00:53:01.860 | You know what their complaint is?

00:53:03.760 | It's killing us.

00:53:05.960 | We get paid shit and it's killing us.

00:53:09.540 | There is no relationship, except in the minds of the defenders of capitalism, between the

00:53:15.400 | ugliness, the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one hand and the wage.

00:53:20.920 | Let me give you just a couple of examples.

00:53:23.240 | This is my job.

00:53:24.560 | This is my life, what I do.

00:53:27.120 | The median income of a childcare worker in the United States right now, as we speak,

00:53:34.400 | is $11.22 an hour, median.

00:53:38.600 | So 50% make less, 50% make more.

00:53:42.440 | The median income for a car park attendant is several dollars per hour higher than that.

00:53:51.120 | What does the car park attendant do?

00:53:53.320 | He stares at your car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it.

00:54:00.520 | Maybe he parks it and he moves it around to get it in and out.

00:54:05.680 | By any measure that I know of that makes any rational sense, being in charge of toddlers,

00:54:12.200 | two, three, four-year-olds who are at the key moment of mental formation the first five

00:54:18.040 | years, to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who watches your car.

00:54:25.280 | Come on.

00:54:26.280 | I know how to explain it.

00:54:28.720 | Gender explained, all kinds of issues.

00:54:31.200 | The car park people are males and the childcare people are females.

00:54:36.160 | That in our culture is a very big marker of what ... But the one who said, only the economics

00:54:42.400 | professor, nobody else, says this stuff.

00:54:47.120 | Because in economics, I don't know if you are familiar with our profession, but we have

00:54:50.600 | something which we call marginal product.

00:54:54.120 | This is a fantasy.

00:54:56.920 | I was a mathematician before I became an economist.

00:55:00.160 | I loved mathematics.

00:55:01.520 | I specialized in mathematics.

00:55:04.000 | I know mathematics pretty well.

00:55:06.680 | What economists do is silly, is childish, but they think it's mathematics.

00:55:11.520 | It's very sophisticated.

00:55:12.880 | It isn't.

00:55:14.120 | But think for a minute what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal product

00:55:24.000 | of a factor of production, like a worker.

00:55:27.000 | In the textbook, when it's taught, I've taught this stuff.

00:55:30.320 | I hold my nose, but I teach it.

00:55:32.120 | Then I explain to students, what I've just taught you is horse shit, but first I teach

00:55:36.800 | it.

00:55:37.800 | What is the marginal product, if it might be useful to say?

00:55:39.480 | The notion is, if you take away one worker right now from the pile, what will be the

00:55:45.360 | diminution of the output?

00:55:48.200 | That's the marginal product of that worker.

00:55:52.080 | Measured by ... The amount of the output that diminishes

00:55:56.800 | the output of the raw product, of the product.

00:56:00.520 | Usually in real terms, so physical, not the value.

00:56:03.120 | You could do a value, but it's really more the physical you're at.

00:56:06.920 | There is a transformation thing.

00:56:08.560 | I'd love to talk to you about value.

00:56:11.880 | It's so interesting, what is value.

00:56:13.240 | I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that, but I just want to

00:56:17.640 | get to the ... Hegel, who was Marx's teacher, has a famous line.

00:56:23.880 | You can't step in the same river twice.

00:56:27.160 | The argument is, you and the river have changed between the first and the second time.

00:56:32.920 | It's a different you and it's a different river.

00:56:34.760 | You can choose not to pay attention to that.

00:56:37.600 | You can't claim you're not doing that.

00:56:39.680 | You can't claim that you can actually do that, because you can't.

00:56:43.320 | There is no way to do that.

00:56:45.800 | The meaning that you can't just remove a worker and have a clean mathematical calculation

00:56:51.260 | of the effect that it has on the output.

00:56:52.760 | That's right.

00:56:53.760 | Too many other things are going on.

00:56:55.680 | Too many things are changing.

00:56:57.600 | You cannot assume, much as you want to, that the outcome on the output side is uniquely

00:57:05.520 | determined by the change you made on the input side.

00:57:09.240 | You can't do that.

00:57:10.480 | Even in the average, it's not going to work out.

00:57:14.240 | You can take ... Look, mathematics is full of abstractions.

00:57:17.240 | You can say, as we do in economics, "Ceteris paribus."

00:57:22.520 | Everything else held constant, but you have to know what you just did.

00:57:26.400 | You held everything ... You know why you do that?

00:57:28.360 | Because you can't do that in the real world.

00:57:30.440 | That's not possible.

00:57:31.560 | You better account for that.

00:57:33.320 | Otherwise, you're mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted from

00:57:39.560 | to get the abstraction.

00:57:42.160 | As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiment or an actual experiment

00:57:47.600 | of removing every single economist from the world, would we be better off or worse off?

00:57:52.360 | Much better off.

00:57:53.360 | Okay.

00:57:54.360 | Economics is ... And I'm one.

00:57:57.000 | I'm talking about myself.

00:57:59.000 | See economics ...

00:58:00.000 | We're going to ship all the economists to Mars and see how it all works out.

00:58:04.120 | But the serious part of this is that economics ... It's really about capitalism.

00:58:12.400 | Economics as a discipline is born with capital.

00:58:14.320 | There was no such thing.

00:58:16.160 | When I teach, I teach courses at the university, for example, called History of Economic Thought.

00:58:22.240 | And I begin the students with Aristotle and Plato.

00:58:25.720 | And I say, "You know, they talked about really interesting things, but they never called

00:58:29.840 | it economics."

00:58:30.840 | There was no ... It made no sense to people to abstract something as central to daily

00:58:38.360 | life as economics broadly defined.

00:58:41.400 | It made no sense.

00:58:43.580 | That's a creation much, much later.

00:58:45.560 | That's capitalism that did that, created the field.

00:58:48.640 | So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them particular passages.

00:58:54.440 | By the way, footnote, because your audience will like it.

00:58:57.880 | Plato and Aristotle talked about markets, because they lived at a time in ancient Greece

00:59:03.360 | when market relations were beginning to intrude upon these societies.

00:59:09.540 | So they were both interested in this phenomena, that we're not just producing goods and then

00:59:15.120 | distributing among us, we're doing it in a quid pro quo.

00:59:18.760 | I'll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange.

00:59:23.720 | And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason.

00:59:30.140 | They destroy social cohesion.

00:59:33.120 | They destroy community.

00:59:34.840 | They make some people rich and other people poor, and they set us against each other,

00:59:39.680 | and it's terrible.

00:59:40.960 | And here's what ... They agreed on that.

00:59:42.700 | Here's what they disagreed on.

00:59:44.560 | One of them said, "Okay, there can be no markets."

00:59:49.880 | That was Plato.

00:59:50.880 | Aristotle comes back and says, "No, no, no, no, no, no.

00:59:53.520 | Too late for that.

00:59:55.080 | The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in

01:00:00.840 | amongst us would be too devastating.

01:00:04.520 | So we can't do that.

01:00:06.080 | But what we can do is control it, regulate it.

01:00:10.760 | Get from the market what it does reasonably well, and prevent it from doing the destructive

01:00:16.800 | things it does so badly."

01:00:19.720 | So the fundamentally destructive thing of a market is it's the engine of capitalism,

01:00:25.000 | so it creates exploitation of the worker.

01:00:27.840 | It facilitates ... I wouldn't ... That's too ...

01:00:30.600 | Facilitates.

01:00:31.600 | It facilitates it, and it is an institution that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible

01:00:37.440 | danger to community.

01:00:39.320 | Is there ...

01:00:40.320 | Yeah.

01:00:41.320 | Is there a way?

01:00:42.320 | Is a way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world.

01:00:45.240 | Look, the medieval Catholic Church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury.

01:00:54.200 | This was that God said, "If there's a person who needs to borrow from you, then that's

01:01:00.480 | a person in need, and the good Christian thing to do is to help him, to demand an interest

01:01:08.640 | payment rather than to help your fellow man, is God hates you for that.

01:01:15.320 | That's a sin.

01:01:16.600 | Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes."

01:01:20.680 | But would Jesus be crying when you try to scale that system?

01:01:25.200 | So that has to do with the intimate human interaction.

01:01:29.840 | The idea of markets is you're able to create a system that involves thousands, millions

01:01:36.520 | of humans, and there'd be some level of safe, self-regulating fairness.

01:01:47.000 | There might be, but it's hard to imagine that charging interest would be the way to do that.

01:01:52.240 | I wonder what ...

01:01:53.240 | So, I guess ...

01:01:54.240 | Suppose you were interested in having ... Suppose you took us your problem.

01:02:00.240 | We have a set of funds that can be loaned out.

01:02:04.360 | People don't want to consume it.

01:02:05.920 | They're ready to lend it.

01:02:08.000 | Okay.

01:02:09.520 | To whom should they lend it?

01:02:11.480 | Well, we could say in our society, "We're going to run this the way professors in institutions

01:02:18.340 | like MIT work this.

01:02:21.400 | They write up a project.

01:02:23.440 | They send the project in to some government office where it is looked at against other

01:02:29.720 | governments, and this office in the government decides, 'We're going to fund this one and

01:02:35.840 | that one because they're more needed in our society.

01:02:40.120 | We're in greater need of solving this problem than that problem, and so we're going to lend

01:02:44.760 | money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here

01:02:50.400 | because we're going to ... " But instead, what we do is, who can pay the highest interest

01:02:55.200 | rate?

01:02:56.200 | Whoa.

01:02:57.200 | What are you doing?

01:02:59.000 | Why?

01:03:00.000 | What ethics would justify you doing ... It's like a market in general.

01:03:04.480 | Something is in shortage.

01:03:05.960 | All markets are about how to handle shortage.

01:03:08.920 | It's one basic way to understand it.

01:03:12.080 | And so if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word shortage means, has

01:03:17.440 | no other meaning, if the demand is greater than the supply, okay, now you've got a problem.

01:03:22.360 | You can't satisfy all the demanders because you don't have enough supply.

01:03:28.440 | You have a shortage.

01:03:29.440 | Okay, now how are you going to do it?

01:03:31.480 | In a market, you allow people who have a lot of money to bid up the price of whatever's

01:03:37.600 | short.

01:03:39.120 | That solves your problem because as the price goes up, the poor people can't ... They drop

01:03:44.000 | out.

01:03:45.000 | They can't buy the thing at the exalted price.

01:03:47.600 | So you've got a way of distributing the shortage.

01:03:50.280 | It goes to the people with the most money.

01:03:53.200 | At this point, most human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn

01:04:00.040 | against it because it contradicts their Christian, Judaic, Islamic, all of them would say, "What?"

01:04:08.040 | You know what that means?

01:04:09.040 | It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat while the poor

01:04:14.800 | person has no milk for their five children.

01:04:17.400 | There it is.

01:04:19.200 | You want a market?

01:04:20.200 | Why?

01:04:21.200 | Because the fundamental thing that seems unfair, there's the resulting inequality now.

01:04:27.200 | Or death.

01:04:28.480 | Or death.

01:04:29.480 | Well, that's the ultimate inequality.

01:04:30.480 | Yes, it is.

01:04:32.440 | What about ... And we're going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics

01:04:36.520 | to the debate type of thing.

01:04:42.280 | What about the lifting ties, raise all boats?

01:04:46.240 | If we look at the 20th century, a lot of people, maybe you disagree with this, but they attribute

01:04:54.680 | a lot of the innovation and the average improvement in the quality of life to capitalism.

01:05:02.960 | To inventions and innovation, to engineering and science developments that resulted from

01:05:11.280 | competition and all those kinds of forces.

01:05:14.520 | So not looking at the individual unfairness of exploitation as it's specifically defined,

01:05:22.760 | but just observing historically.

01:05:24.240 | Look at the 20th century.

01:05:26.500 | We came up with a lot of cool stuff that seemed to have made life easier and better on average.

01:05:33.320 | What do you say to that?

01:05:35.200 | I have several responses to that.

01:05:38.040 | I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's going on there.

01:05:44.680 | But let me give you the arguments so that you can hear them and then you can evaluate

01:05:49.000 | them, as can anybody who's listening or watching.

01:05:56.600 | Marx was a student of Hegel, and one of Hegel's central arguments was that everything that

01:06:01.600 | exists exists "in contradiction."

01:06:06.840 | In simple English, there's a good and bad side, if you like, to everything.

01:06:12.080 | And you won't understand it unless you accept that proposition and start looking for the

01:06:17.040 | good things that are the other side of the bad ones and the bad things that are the other

01:06:20.760 | side of the good ones, et cetera.

01:06:23.160 | So- The dialectic.

01:06:24.520 | Yes, exactly.

01:06:25.600 | And Marx, very attentive to that, explicitly agrees with this on many occasions and applies

01:06:32.800 | it, of course, to the central object of his research, capitalism.

01:06:38.520 | So this is not a simple-minded fellow who's telling you all the bad things about capitalism

01:06:44.160 | as if there were nothing that this system achieved or accomplished.

01:06:48.720 | And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological dynamism of the system,

01:06:56.400 | which Marx takes to be profound, because he lived at the time when major breakthroughs

01:07:03.000 | in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved.

01:07:11.080 | But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement in the quality

01:07:19.640 | or the standard of living of the mass of people, Marx now comes back and says, "Oh, wait a

01:07:25.560 | minute here.

01:07:27.640 | Number one, capitalism as a system has been mostly represented by capitalists," which

01:07:37.720 | makes a certain sense.

01:07:40.320 | And those capitalists, with very few exceptions, some, but very few, have fought against every

01:07:48.320 | effort to improve the lives of the mass of people.

01:07:53.240 | The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs.

01:07:57.180 | What that means is replace a worker with a machine, move the production from expensive

01:08:03.360 | U.S. to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants from other parts of the world because they

01:08:10.140 | will work for less money than the folks that you have here at home.

01:08:14.660 | Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for for

01:08:20.480 | decades over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning to right now.

01:08:27.860 | The reason we have a minimum wage, which was passed in the middle of the 1930s, when it

01:08:33.000 | was proposed it was blocked by capitalists.

01:08:36.080 | They got together.

01:08:37.080 | They don't want—and today, just a factoid for you.

01:08:42.160 | The last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States, federal minimum wage,

01:08:47.240 | was in 2009 when it was set at the lofty sum of $7.25 an hour, which you cannot live on.

01:08:58.880 | Over the last 12 years or so, whatever it is now, 11, 12, 13 years since then, we have

01:09:06.120 | had an increase in the price level in this country every year.

01:09:10.080 | And in the last year, 8.5%.

01:09:13.240 | During that time that the prices went up, the minimum wage was never raised.

01:09:19.840 | What?

01:09:21.220 | This is a time of stock market boom, of growing inequality.

01:09:25.520 | This is a—you know, the nerve of the defender of capitalists who wants now to get credit

01:09:37.440 | for the improvement in the standard of life of the workers that was fought by every generation.

01:09:43.520 | You know, it takes your breath away.

01:09:44.920 | It's an argument.

01:09:47.040 | Whoa.

01:09:48.240 | But I take my hat off if I had one, because that is one of the only ways to justify this

01:09:54.320 | system.

01:09:56.040 | Long ago—let me get to the heart of it.

01:09:59.320 | Long ago, capitalism could have overcome hunger, could have overcome disease, could have—I

01:10:08.760 | mean, way beyond what we have now.

01:10:11.880 | But it didn't.

01:10:13.360 | And that's the worst moral condemnation imaginable.

01:10:18.240 | How do you justify that when you could, you didn't?

01:10:24.600 | Look, let me get at it another way, because this may interest you anyway.

01:10:30.640 | The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically dynamic.

01:10:35.680 | It is.

01:10:36.680 | And along the way, it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better.

01:10:42.120 | No question.

01:10:43.440 | But the notion that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is somehow built

01:10:50.480 | into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous—and I can give you, because

01:10:59.520 | you do math, you'll understand it.

01:11:02.080 | Think of it this way.

01:11:04.280 | Imagine a production process in which you have $100 that the capitalist has to lay out

01:11:11.400 | for tools, equipment, and raw materials, and $100 that he has to lay out for workers, hire

01:11:17.600 | the workers, and he puts them all together, and he has an output.

01:11:22.280 | And let's say the output is 100 units of something, and what are the prices, and that's his revenue.

01:11:30.320 | And when he takes his product and sells it and gets the revenue, let's say the revenue

01:11:36.920 | is—it doesn't really matter, it's 120, for lack of a better word.

01:11:42.640 | 220, sorry.

01:11:43.640 | And he takes 100 of it and replaces the tools, equipment, and raw materials he used up, another

01:11:49.920 | 100 to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other 20 is his profit, and he puts

01:11:54.840 | that aside.

01:11:56.400 | Now along comes a technological breakthrough.

01:12:00.160 | A machine.

01:12:01.160 | A new machine.

01:12:02.880 | And the new machine is so effective, you can get the same number of units of output with

01:12:11.320 | half the workers.

01:12:12.320 | So you don't need to spend 100 on workers, you only need to spend 50.

01:12:17.800 | You can do it with half the workers.

01:12:20.200 | And so the capitalist goes to the workers—by the way, this happens every day—and he says

01:12:24.460 | to half of them, "You're fired.

01:12:27.120 | Don't come back Monday morning.

01:12:28.640 | I don't need you."

01:12:29.640 | It's nothing personal, it's just, "I got a machine."

01:12:33.920 | Why does he do that?

01:12:35.460 | Because the 50 he now no longer has to spend on labor, because he doesn't need half of

01:12:39.760 | them, he keeps.

01:12:41.860 | Everything else is the same.

01:12:42.860 | The machine, everything else is just to make the math easy.

01:12:46.640 | So he keeps as his own profit the 50 that before he paid for those workers.

01:12:54.560 | Because when he sells it for 220, that 50 he doesn't have to give to the next job because

01:12:59.000 | he has a new machine.

01:13:01.000 | So that's what he does.

01:13:02.480 | The technology leads.

01:13:05.120 | He's happy.

01:13:06.880 | He's become more profitable.

01:13:09.000 | He's got an extra 50, which is why he buys the machine.

01:13:12.680 | The workers are screwed.

01:13:15.840 | Half of them just lost their job, have to go home to their husband and wife, tell them

01:13:21.080 | I don't have a job anymore.

01:13:22.480 | I didn't do anything wrong.

01:13:24.360 | The guy was nice enough to say there was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn't need me.

01:13:28.880 | So I'm completely screwed here.

01:13:31.440 | I don't know what I'm going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage, my children's

01:13:35.840 | education or whatever else he's got going for himself.

01:13:39.360 | Now the point.

01:13:41.500 | There was of course an alternative path.

01:13:44.840 | The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same

01:13:49.360 | that you did before for half a day's work.

01:13:54.520 | You would have got the same output, same revenue, same profit as before.

01:14:01.240 | But the gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day of

01:14:06.800 | the lives of these workers.

01:14:09.400 | The majority of workers would have been really helped by this technology.

01:14:17.160 | But instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle

01:14:23.120 | of more money.

01:14:24.800 | You want to support a system like this?

01:14:26.840 | Well, to go back to Hegel.

01:14:29.640 | Yes.

01:14:30.640 | You listed the bad.

01:14:31.640 | Yes.

01:14:32.640 | So you just listed the bad and you also first listed the good, the technological innovation

01:14:37.480 | of this kind of system.

01:14:39.080 | The question is the alternative, whatever, as we try to sneak up to ideas of what the

01:14:44.880 | alternative might look like, what are the good and the bad of the alternative?

01:14:49.140 | So you just kind of as a opposite, by contrast, showed that, well, a nice alternative is you

01:14:56.480 | work less, get paid the same, you have more leisure time, opportunity to pursue other--

01:15:04.320 | Interests.

01:15:05.320 | Other interests, the creative interest, family, flourish as a human being, basically strengthen

01:15:14.160 | and embolden the basic humanity that's under all of us.

01:15:18.960 | Yes, but then what cost does that have on the deadline-fueled, competition-fueled machine

01:15:31.120 | of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism?

01:15:36.520 | Slows it down.

01:15:37.520 | It slows it down.

01:15:38.520 | And the question is which is more important for the flourishing of humanity?

01:15:44.840 | I agree with that.

01:15:45.840 | And I'd love there to be a democratic mechanism.

01:15:50.360 | So let's discuss it, let's debate it, and then let's decide what mixture, because it's

01:15:56.520 | not either or.

01:15:57.600 | The math problem I gave you is either or.

01:16:00.140 | We could mix it.

01:16:01.140 | You could have a third less of a working day instead of a half less, and then the other

01:16:05.800 | part would be extra profit for our employer, et cetera, et cetera.

01:16:09.080 | So let's have a democratic discussion of what is the mix between the positive and-- we have

01:16:16.400 | no such thing.

01:16:17.840 | All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only we know what they do,

01:16:23.340 | they always choose the one that maximizes their profit, because that's what they were

01:16:27.240 | told to do in business school where I've taught.

01:16:31.240 | So not only is it an undemocratic decision, but it's lopsided to boot.

01:16:36.320 | So we don't have the opportunity, but I would love for us to be good Hegelian Marxists and

01:16:42.240 | say let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision that we can.

01:16:48.560 | We'll make mistakes, but we'll all make them together.

01:16:51.680 | It won't be one of us making a dictatorial decision.

01:16:55.760 | You know, Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not as a

01:16:59.800 | notion of how government-- it's not, I'm sorry, not Marx, Lenin did that-- not as a notion

01:17:05.220 | of how the government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is.

01:17:10.800 | The dictatorship of these key decisions is not made by some sitting council, it's made

01:17:16.200 | by each little capitalist in his/her relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is

01:17:22.200 | why Marx focused his analysis on that point.

01:17:25.480 | And by the way, I can sketch for you right now so it doesn't lurk in the background what

01:17:30.000 | the alternative is.

01:17:31.560 | Let's go there.

01:17:32.560 | Okay.

01:17:33.560 | So let's go right back to what I said earlier.

01:17:35.640 | The workers themselves, the collection of employees together appropriate their own surplus

01:17:44.720 | and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of whether

01:17:52.200 | or not to buy a machine and whether or not to use the machine and the savings it might

01:18:00.700 | allow to be handled by more leisure for themselves or as a fund for new developments in technology

01:18:12.040 | or new products or whatever they want.

01:18:16.800 | And you know, this is an old idea in human-- Marx loved that.

01:18:21.160 | Toward the end of his life, he started reading extensively in anthropology.

01:18:27.520 | And one of the reasons he did that toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering

01:18:32.960 | that in this society and that one, including here in the United States, that there were

01:18:37.200 | examples of people who organized their production in precisely this way, as a collective democratic

01:18:47.920 | community in which everybody had an equal voice.

01:18:52.080 | So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to produce, where to produce,

01:18:58.400 | and what to do with the output we all help to produce.

01:19:02.080 | So let's do it in, you know, in this country where democracy is a value nearly everybody

01:19:11.880 | subscribes to.

01:19:14.320 | Think about it this way.

01:19:15.660 | The stunning contradiction that there is a place in our society where democracy has never

01:19:22.100 | been allowed to enter.

01:19:24.000 | The workplace.

01:19:26.080 | In the workplace, a tiny group of people, unaccountable to the rest of them, the employer,

01:19:33.160 | whether that's an individual, a family, a partnership, or a corporate board of directors,

01:19:38.520 | tiny group of people, controls economically a vast mass of employees.

01:19:45.240 | Those employees don't elect those people, have no, nothing, there is no accountability.

01:19:51.000 | It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable, and this society insists on calling itself

01:19:59.200 | democratic when it has organized the minor matter of producing everything in a way that

01:20:06.080 | is the direct, it's autocratic.

01:20:09.080 | - So to push back on a few things, so one is the idea of this society calling itself

01:20:15.600 | democratic is that the government is elected democratically, and the government is able

01:20:21.000 | to pressure the workplace through the process of regulation.

01:20:24.980 | You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know, minimum wage, all those kinds of things.

01:20:31.360 | That's the one idea.

01:20:33.000 | The other is there is a natural force within the capitalist when there's no monopolies

01:20:39.720 | of competition being the accountability.

01:20:42.520 | So if you're a shitty boss, the employee in the capitalist system has the freedom to move

01:20:49.440 | to another company, work for a better boss, so that creates pressure on the employers

01:20:54.680 | and the bosses, that's at least the idea that you, there's two boundaries of you not misbehaving.

01:21:02.320 | One is the law, so regulations passed by the government, democratic, and the second is

01:21:09.960 | because there's always alternatives in theory, then that puts pressure on everyone to behave

01:21:15.600 | well 'cause you can always leave.

01:21:19.440 | So I mean, that's kinds of accountability, but what you're saying is that does not result

01:21:25.080 | in a significant enough accountability where the employer, that avoids exploitation of

01:21:32.360 | the worker.

01:21:33.360 | Absolutely.

01:21:34.360 | I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms, and let me respond to that,

01:21:39.760 | and then I'll counter argument.

01:21:43.640 | First competition.

01:21:46.920 | Here again we have to be Hegelians just a little.

01:21:51.040 | Competition destroys itself.

01:21:54.120 | It doesn't need any, the whole point of competition is to beat the other guy.

01:21:59.000 | If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better quality or a lower price

01:22:04.520 | or maybe both, then I win because the customers will come to me 'cause my price is lower or

01:22:10.400 | my quality is better, and they'll leave the other guy, he'll go out of business.

01:22:14.360 | Now let's follow.

01:22:15.600 | When he goes out of business, 'cause I've won the competition, he fires his workers.

01:22:21.960 | I hire them because I'm now gonna be able to serve a market he can't serve anymore,

01:22:26.840 | so I'm gonna buy the used equipment, and thereby many become few.

01:22:35.120 | Monopoly is the product of competition.

01:22:38.160 | It's not the antithesis, it's the product.

01:22:41.760 | Well, let's see.

01:22:44.120 | That's where it comes from.

01:22:46.120 | There's another element to the system where there's always a new guy that comes in.

01:22:50.560 | There isn't, there isn't.

01:22:52.080 | - Well, that's the dream.

01:22:53.080 | The entrepreneurial spirit of a free, of the United States, for example, of a capitalist

01:23:00.080 | system is you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build up a business that

01:23:08.000 | takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car, Ford, GM, which is

01:23:15.360 | what, you look at Tesla, for example, right?

01:23:17.840 | That's the American dream.

01:23:19.720 | One of the many ideals of the American dream is you can move from dirt poor to being the

01:23:29.840 | richest person in the world.

01:23:33.240 | - It can happen.

01:23:34.240 | - It can happen.

01:23:35.240 | - You know, that's like you can win a lottery.

01:23:38.240 | - No, that's not quite.

01:23:39.400 | No, the lottery's complete luck.

01:23:42.200 | Here you can work your ass off if you have a good idea.

01:23:44.520 | - The odds are better in the lottery.

01:23:47.120 | - That's not true.

01:23:48.600 | There's a lot of new businesses.

01:23:50.440 | - How many Teslas do you notice?

01:23:51.960 | - Tesla's a really bad example, 'cause the car company, the automotive sector is so difficult

01:23:59.240 | to, they operate at such a thin margin of profit that they're probably a good example

01:24:05.760 | of like capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of lack of innovation.

01:24:14.320 | That's a very complicated industry because of the supply chain.

01:24:17.080 | - There's so much, come on.

01:24:19.440 | - They have their uniquenesses, you're quite right, but so does every other industry.

01:24:24.160 | The one thing that's common is that many become few.

01:24:27.940 | What you can also have is when you have a few, they jack up the price, they make an

01:24:32.840 | enormous profit, and in the irony of capitalism, Marx would love this, they begin to incentivize

01:24:39.840 | people to break into this industry 'cause the few remaining are making a wild amount

01:24:46.120 | of profit because they are a few and can jigger the market to make it work like that for them.

01:24:52.120 | The reason every small capitalist is trying to build market share, that's a polite way

01:25:00.360 | of saying they wanna become a monopolist, or to be more exact, an oligopolist, one of

01:25:05.800 | a handful of firms that dominates.

01:25:08.820 | That's what they're there for.

01:25:10.040 | - Yeah, to push back a little bit also, because that could be, this is a question also, do

01:25:16.400 | you think we're in danger of oversimplifying capitalism that completely removes the basic

01:25:23.000 | decency of human beings?

01:25:25.960 | So if you give me a choice to press a button to get rid of the competition, but that's

01:25:34.720 | going to lead to a lot of suffering, there's a lot of people at the heads of companies

01:25:38.180 | that won't press that button, that it's not in the calculation, it's not just money, it's

01:25:44.800 | human well-being too.

01:25:47.080 | So like-- - You think?

01:25:48.080 | - I, yes, I've-- - You and I don't live in the same place

01:25:53.360 | then.

01:25:54.360 | - So you're saying that the forces of capitalism take over the minds of the people at the top,

01:25:59.800 | and then they cease being human, essentially.

01:26:03.240 | - No.

01:26:04.240 | - The basic, okay.

01:26:05.240 | - I wouldn't, I mean, that's why-- - Depending on your model of humans, but

01:26:07.880 | they lose track of the better angels of their nature, and they just become cogs in the machine,

01:26:14.440 | but they're just happen to be the cog at the top.

01:26:15.680 | - I would put it differently, that the system is so set up, it's a little bit like natural

01:26:20.240 | selection.

01:26:21.320 | The guys who may, I could say the women too, it doesn't matter.

01:26:25.160 | The people who make it up through the layers of the bureaucracy and get to the top in these

01:26:30.000 | things have had to do things along the way that become selective.

01:26:34.660 | If they can't stand it because they have that human quality, and there are people like,

01:26:39.120 | I've known them, they're the ones running an Airbnb in Vermont.

01:26:45.060 | They went there and they said, "I'm not doing this anymore.

01:26:47.760 | I'm not gonna treat people like that.

01:26:49.480 | I'm gonna make a lovely place in Vermont with my husband or my wife or whatever, and I'm

01:26:54.660 | gonna be enjoying the people that come by and be a decent human."

01:26:58.720 | Of course, of course.

01:27:00.820 | But the system selects the firm.

01:27:04.360 | If you don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up, you're toast there anyway.

01:27:09.940 | The rest of the people who vote for you are gonna kick you out.

01:27:13.040 | You can tell them all day long what a lovely person you are.

01:27:16.200 | Then they're gonna look at you and wonder, "Well, what happened to you?

01:27:18.980 | How did you even get this far with the lovely person horseshit?"

01:27:22.160 | - Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

01:27:23.600 | It's not necessarily just lovely person.

01:27:25.680 | So maybe, I'll just say my bias is the people I know are, especially at the top of companies,

01:27:34.460 | are in the tech sector, where innovation is such a big part of it.

01:27:42.300 | So I think a lot of the things we're talking about is when there's not much innovation

01:27:47.940 | in the system.

01:27:52.260 | Innovation usually comes, in the history of capitalism, innovation comes in spurts.

01:27:56.820 | There's the electric period, the chemistry period, the nuclear period.

01:28:00.620 | There's now, whatever you wanna call it, the artificial intelligence or robotics or computer.

01:28:05.980 | It comes and then there's a flurry as everything is reorganized around whatever the newest

01:28:12.860 | technology is.

01:28:15.180 | You have a period where you can get excited about that.

01:28:18.260 | And the very rich people who come to the top can talk endlessly, as they always do, about

01:28:23.780 | innovation.

01:28:24.780 | But again, it really is, this is a recurring kind of debate and a recurring kind of issue.

01:28:34.380 | For me, how do I put this in a way that, no, I don't mean to offend.

01:28:41.740 | - Please, please.

01:28:42.740 | - No, no, no, I don't want to, but the problem with capitalism is, and maybe you'll

01:28:55.380 | like this, the problem with capitalism is not that it is the one thing that's consistent

01:29:01.380 | with human nature.

01:29:02.380 | That's what its defenders would like to have us believe.

01:29:06.060 | But if anything, I would argue the opposite, that it is such a contradiction to parts of

01:29:13.500 | our nature, not other parts, that it can never quite make it.

01:29:20.140 | There's always gonna be the people who don't go along with it, people you're talking about,

01:29:25.100 | who do quit along the way.

01:29:27.340 | Or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top by God knows what hook or what crook

01:29:34.100 | that they did it.

01:29:35.740 | But most of them go, and you know why?

01:29:38.860 | Because their humanity is contradicted by what it is they're being asked to do.

01:29:47.100 | I mean, the corporate sector this year, just to give you an idea, CEOs are jacking up their

01:29:56.980 | wage package.

01:29:57.980 | They're already out of whack.

01:30:00.100 | The average CEO pays now 300 times what the average worker pays.

01:30:05.520 | But they're jacking it up even more.

01:30:07.140 | Why?

01:30:08.140 | Because that's what's happening in their universe.

01:30:10.420 | They're all doing it, and they have to do ... Each one of them justifies it.

01:30:14.020 | I have to do that, otherwise I'd lose my guy to the next one, which of course is true,

01:30:18.580 | but is no comfort for the mass of people who aren't CEOs, for whom this argument is very

01:30:22.980 | exciting.

01:30:24.460 | So they're doing that at a time when the American people can't cope.

01:30:31.340 | They've just gone through the COVID disaster.

01:30:34.780 | They've gone through the second worst economic crash of capitalism in our history.

01:30:40.580 | After two years of this one-two punch, they got an inflation, a third punch, and we are

01:30:46.580 | now predicting rising interest rates and a recession at the end of the year or early

01:30:51.220 | next year.

01:30:52.220 | You can't do this to a working class.

01:30:55.060 | When this was done to the German working class in the 1920s, Hitler was the result.

01:31:00.580 | You keep doing that in this country, we're already watching it, you're going to get that

01:31:05.020 | too.

01:31:06.020 | You're already getting bits and pieces.

01:31:07.540 | You can't keep doing this.

01:31:08.540 | So there's a quiet suffering amidst the working class that's growing.

01:31:12.380 | Taking out on it.

01:31:13.380 | That can turn to anger.

01:31:14.380 | Some little 18-year-old kid who has to go three hours in his car and blow away people

01:31:20.260 | in a supermarket.

01:31:22.300 | What?

01:31:23.300 | And it happens every day in this country.

01:31:25.860 | Every day.

01:31:27.020 | So that anger rises up in those little ways now and bigger and bigger potentially.

01:31:33.380 | By the way, there's one more thing on the rationality, and this goes to Elon Musk.

01:31:42.940 | If you're interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year.

01:31:49.660 | The number was just released yesterday.

01:31:52.220 | 49,000.

01:31:54.180 | Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country.

01:31:57.220 | They use up an enormous amount of energy.

01:32:01.580 | They use up enormous amount of resources.

01:32:06.660 | There is a way to make transportation much more rational, and we've known it for decades.

01:32:12.980 | It's called mass transportation.

01:32:15.940 | It's a really beautifully maintained, crystal clear, clean, frequent system of buses, trains,

01:32:24.460 | street trolleys, vans.

01:32:28.780 | It could easily be done in this society.

01:32:31.060 | In fact, I once did a project that I estimated cost $30 billion.

01:32:37.340 | That's less than we're sending to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it.

01:32:42.300 | A public transit system where?

01:32:44.020 | Everywhere in this country.

01:32:45.620 | All the major metropolitan.

01:32:46.940 | This country's overwhelmingly metropolitan area.

01:32:49.140 | Well, it surely has to be more than 30 billion, but-

01:32:52.180 | Well, it was a few years ago.

01:32:54.020 | Sure, but you're saying it's a number that's insane.

01:32:57.340 | Right, it's not crazy stuff.

01:32:58.940 | It's a reasonable number.

01:32:59.940 | Right, right.

01:33:00.940 | Hey, listen, but there's a- Let me just finish the point.

01:33:04.220 | Sure, yes.

01:33:05.540 | So I'm trying to be rational here.

01:33:10.620 | If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do, if it's got a lot to do with

01:33:15.620 | fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use of the fossil

01:33:20.260 | fuel particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass

01:33:25.260 | transit.

01:33:26.820 | We're doing nothing to make that happen.

01:33:30.580 | Nothing.

01:33:31.580 | Well, you could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit because it's going

01:33:38.020 | to be reusable vehicles.

01:33:39.500 | It will end, in theory, car ownership.

01:33:43.380 | So you just have a more kind of distributed public transit system.

01:33:46.740 | If it happens, but you know that that's a side effect.

01:33:50.140 | His major goal and the major goal of the other companies that are busy squeezing to get his

01:33:56.500 | share by smaller, so they have some, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, all of them are making

01:34:02.020 | electric cars.

01:34:03.820 | So what they've done is they've replaced the individual car with fossil fuel with another

01:34:09.380 | individual car.

01:34:11.620 | That's fucking nuts.

01:34:12.620 | What are you doing?

01:34:14.180 | That's one of the things they're doing, but automation is also another one.

01:34:16.980 | But on the Elon side, there's also a hilariously named Boring Company, which is working on

01:34:22.580 | tunnels, which is actually expanding the flexibility you might have to start playing with ideas

01:34:30.420 | of public transit, I think.

01:34:32.220 | Listen, I'm now partially living in Austin, Texas, that I don't know if they know what

01:34:38.220 | a public transit system is, period.

01:34:40.420 | - Yes.

01:34:41.420 | - There's F-150 pickup trucks.

01:34:42.420 | - Most Americans.

01:34:43.420 | - Well, this is an interesting, so--

01:34:47.660 | - The older, by the way, footnote, the older the city, the more likely it has public transportation.

01:34:54.460 | - So you're saying--

01:34:55.460 | - Boston is the best example.

01:34:56.460 | - Yes.

01:34:57.460 | - Have you been, well, you--

01:34:58.460 | - Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, I have a place in Boston.

01:35:00.460 | - Boston, with the street railway, Boston is your case study of how to do this, 'cause

01:35:05.140 | they've been doing it all along.

01:35:06.820 | New York's pretty good, too.

01:35:07.820 | - There's a trade-off, yeah, New York, I would say, is better than Boston, because there's,

01:35:13.620 | their technology also helps you out to do the public transit better.

01:35:18.660 | It's almost like Boston's a little too old, but yes, I get your point.

01:35:21.980 | But there is a, the Ford F-150 pickup truck symbolizes something about America, and there

01:35:30.660 | is a practical nature to the fact that in order to do public transit, in order to do

01:35:36.980 | some of these things that you're talking about with the working class, there has to be a

01:35:43.140 | central planning component, or there has to be a centralized component, and America is

01:35:48.980 | very much based on the idea of, at least in recent times, well, I would say from the founding

01:35:56.540 | of individualism, of respecting individual freedom.

01:36:00.660 | Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas of Marxism to life, you would

01:36:08.500 | trample on individual freedoms?

01:36:10.940 | - No.

01:36:11.940 | - Can you respect both?

01:36:13.940 | - Sure, for me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people

01:36:21.140 | who have had that freedom eroded under the capitalist, that's a motive for my Marxism.

01:36:27.620 | It was for Marx, too, he loved the French Revolution.

01:36:31.160 | He loved the Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the great three, and then Democracy, the American

01:36:38.380 | contribution, if you like.

01:36:39.740 | He believed in all of that.

01:36:41.260 | His critique of capitalism was it promised it, and then never delivered it.

01:36:46.940 | The reason you have to go beyond it is because it didn't deliver what it had promised.

01:36:53.620 | For me, it is the fulfillment of a genuine, but again, I'm a Hegelian Marxist, so if you

01:37:02.900 | want, individualism, for me, is not the way it's set up in this society, some sort of

01:37:11.100 | antithesis to the government.

01:37:14.980 | I think an immense con has been pulled on the American people, and the con works like

01:37:21.700 | this.

01:37:23.380 | You know what's bad and what's dangerous and threatens you?

01:37:26.500 | It's the government.

01:37:27.820 | The government's gonna come in and tell you what to do, the government's gonna run your

01:37:31.300 | life, the government's the problem.

01:37:33.460 | There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics.

01:37:39.340 | Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn, like the so-called Great Recession

01:37:44.580 | of 2008.

01:37:45.580 | Who do they blame?

01:37:48.020 | The government.

01:37:49.700 | Large numbers of people go unemployed, and what are the media all about?

01:37:53.580 | The government.

01:37:55.480 | If I were a capitalist, I'd love this.

01:37:58.220 | I'd kick the workers by throwing them out of their home, and they don't get angry at

01:38:02.540 | me, they get angry at the government.

01:38:05.060 | I fire large numbers of people, I have no responsibility for what happens to them as

01:38:09.180 | a result of having no job and no income, and they get angry at the senator.

01:38:15.260 | I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

01:38:17.260 | This is a genius stroke.

01:38:19.980 | In theory, but if you look at government, 'cause you said accountability in the capitalist

01:38:24.980 | system has no accountability.

01:38:26.340 | There's some pushback I give on the accountability.

01:38:28.620 | I think there is some accountability we can discuss in a Hegelian way.

01:38:33.780 | There's more accountability for, I would say, that in theory, government is perfectly accountable.

01:38:41.540 | That's the whole point of a democratic system, is you vote people in.

01:38:45.420 | In practice, there's a giant growing bureaucracy that is accountable only on the surface.

01:38:52.300 | There's two parties that seem to be- Are the same.

01:38:56.580 | Are the same.

01:38:57.740 | Media is somehow integrated into making the same two parties that are just wearing different

01:39:04.060 | colored shirts to seem like they're very opposed and are arguing and bitterly arguing and calling

01:39:10.760 | each other's- Nasty names.

01:39:12.260 | Spouses, nasty names, and all those kinds of things.

01:39:16.060 | But that's government.

01:39:17.780 | So what exactly is worse here?

01:39:22.140 | Government or companies?

01:39:23.140 | Well, why are we asking that question?

01:39:26.580 | These are twins.

01:39:27.580 | Look, what you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats just now, with which I agree,

01:39:33.660 | I would say the same thing about corporations and the government.

01:39:36.800 | This is the same people.

01:39:37.800 | Literally the same.

01:39:38.800 | But let's go to Churchill.

01:39:40.100 | Which one is worse?

01:39:42.260 | Let's go to Churchill, like democracy is the worst form of government except all the other

01:39:46.940 | ones or whatever.

01:39:48.140 | So this kind of same idea.

01:39:50.320 | Which one exactly is worse?

01:39:51.500 | Because to me it seems like- Which one between what and what?

01:39:55.180 | Government and industry and companies.

01:39:58.660 | It's because government is plagued by, I would call it corruption because the corruption

01:40:07.020 | of bureaucratic paperwork.

01:40:10.780 | And then because they're not accountable.

01:40:13.380 | There doesn't seem to be a serious accountability.

01:40:15.940 | Again, we're not living on the same planet.

01:40:19.820 | The greatest practitioners of central planning are corporations.

01:40:25.660 | Elon has an operation like General Motors, Ford, IBM, or any of the other megacorps.

01:40:33.940 | They have to plan.

01:40:35.540 | They buy up companies because they don't want to deal in the market.

01:40:41.340 | They don't want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs or sell their

01:40:47.740 | outputs to somebody they don't control.

01:40:51.460 | They want the professor to teach the genius of a market.

01:40:54.860 | They hate the market.

01:40:56.820 | And when they grow to be big, they keep buying whoever they were dealing with before so they

01:41:01.980 | could better control them, which requires them then to plan the production and distribution

01:41:08.020 | of goods inside rather than buying them in the market.

01:41:13.140 | The model of the government is the private corporation.

01:41:17.400 | I have spent my life, give you an example, in American universities, big ones, famous

01:41:23.980 | ones, not just as a student but as a professor.

01:41:25.980 | I've been to half a dozen schools.

01:41:27.460 | I teach there at the new school here.

01:41:29.460 | It's another one, right?

01:41:31.220 | They all model themselves after businesses.

01:41:34.340 | They model their ... You can attack the bureaucracy of universities, good reason, it's a mess,

01:41:41.540 | but they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing their bureaucracy in a business-like

01:41:49.600 | manner.

01:41:51.980 | So you're looking at a difference which isn't there.

01:41:55.280 | The government and the private sector are partners, and both of them wouldn't have it

01:42:00.860 | any other way.

01:42:02.340 | The corporations want that from the government, and the government now knows that to please

01:42:07.820 | the corporations is the number one objective they have because that's how they keep their

01:42:13.580 | jobs and keep their system going.

01:42:16.220 | And so for all practical purposes, this is the same people.

01:42:20.860 | But there's important differences that, I don't know if they're fundamental or just

01:42:26.900 | a consequence of history, but if you have government, they're accountable in a different

01:42:31.580 | way than companies.

01:42:33.340 | Companies are accountable by, especially if you have a consumer, they're accountable

01:42:38.420 | by sort of the consumer spending or not spending their money on whatever the heck the company

01:42:42.500 | is selling.

01:42:44.140 | The government is accountable by votes, and it seems like government, unlike companies

01:42:53.060 | for most of companies' history, is always too big to fail, meaning it can always just

01:42:59.380 | print money.

01:43:00.820 | It can always save itself, and that creates a bureaucracy.

01:43:06.260 | You rarely pay the cost of having made bad decisions if you're in government.

01:43:12.540 | You distribute the blame, and it's very unclear who's responsible for bad decisions, so bad

01:43:18.780 | decisions in government accumulate.

01:43:20.980 | So you become more and more and more inefficient, and more and more poor in your decision-making

01:43:26.980 | in terms of, you said public transit, should we build a public transit system in this city

01:43:32.180 | or not?

01:43:33.180 | That's a difficult decision, that's an interesting decision.

01:43:35.820 | I would say it's very often a very good decision, but whoever makes that decision should be

01:43:41.980 | accountable for a good or bad decision, and it seems like companies are more accountable.

01:43:49.380 | They feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because it can go bankrupt.

01:43:56.500 | There's much more day-to-day pressure to make good engineering decisions.

01:44:02.620 | Government doesn't seem to be under the same level of pressure.

01:44:07.100 | Do you disagree with that?

01:44:08.100 | - I disagree with that.

01:44:09.820 | Everything in my history pushes me.

01:44:12.660 | - You may be living, I may be living a different--

01:44:15.060 | - Who knows?

01:44:16.060 | - A planet.

01:44:17.060 | - Who knows?

01:44:18.060 | - Or taking a different sort of drug.

01:44:21.740 | I won't mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a very large company

01:44:28.300 | here in the United States, here in the New York area.

01:44:35.780 | It involved two brothers and a family who built it up into a huge corporation.

01:44:42.960 | One of the brothers was kind of the dynamo of the family, and he was more responsible

01:44:51.380 | than anybody else building it up.

01:44:54.620 | But he took care of his brothers.

01:44:55.620 | He had a nice feeling about his brothers.

01:44:58.420 | The one brother who could not, without help, tie his shoes, became a vice president.

01:45:06.700 | Got an enormous salary.

01:45:08.940 | Got a beautiful office in a skyscraper not that many blocks from where I'm sitting right

01:45:14.580 | now, and that was the way that family handled that company.

01:45:23.180 | And all of his relatives were somewhere in this company doing a variety of whatever,

01:45:29.940 | because in my experience with this, and because I went to the schools I told you, all my experiences

01:45:38.420 | with that group of people, corporate, full of those stories, they made mistake after

01:45:46.060 | mistake, which they would tell you about.

01:45:49.220 | Didn't undermine their ... They were always able to blame somebody else, something else

01:45:56.460 | that scraped them through.

01:45:58.140 | And had they not been able to, they would have been replaced by another person who did

01:46:02.300 | the same thing for as long as they could.

01:46:05.700 | And they knew it.

01:46:07.220 | They would talk about it at family events, that's how I know.

01:46:11.300 | Yeah, that's ... I mean that ...

01:46:13.300 | I understand that you want the outside world to look at it this way, but it's not my experience.

01:46:19.820 | But again, that kind of thing, at the risk of saying human nature again, I wonder what

01:46:27.660 | kind of system allows for that more versus less.

01:46:33.100 | This is the question of ... I would call that, let's put that under the umbrella term of

01:46:37.180 | corruption.

01:46:39.620 | Which system allows for more corruption?

01:46:41.420 | But remember that the way I defined a different system is not more or less government.

01:46:45.900 | It's more or less allowing a democratic workplace.

01:46:49.740 | Reconfiguring it.

01:46:51.060 | What happens when everybody has a vote?

01:46:55.740 | When you have to explain what the strategies are, what the alternatives are to a larger

01:47:01.340 | number of people than a board of directors or a major shareholders or whoever it is that

01:47:07.020 | most companies are responsible to.

01:47:09.860 | And now you've got a whole different universe.

01:47:12.180 | It's not a small group of people.

01:47:14.060 | Can't be hidden the way it's normally hidden.

01:47:16.860 | Most of it, and on and on and on.

01:47:18.900 | This is ... worker co-ops is what this is called in many parts of the world.

01:47:23.640 | So it's not that I'm advocating something that's never been seen before.

01:47:27.260 | Not at all.

01:47:28.640 | The Marxism I understand is to pick from historical precedents the things that we think will work

01:47:37.420 | better.

01:47:38.940 | And I think if all the people in an enterprise, just to drive the point home, democratically

01:47:43.900 | decided they would never give two or three individuals $100 million while everybody else

01:47:49.860 | can't send their kid to college.

01:47:51.340 | I mean, they're not going to do that.

01:47:54.380 | - So just to return, just to address this point about the particular implementation

01:48:00.600 | of Marxism that was the early days in the Soviet Union.

01:48:05.180 | Why did Stalinism, for example, lead to so much bloodshed, do you think, and human suffering?

01:48:11.640 | Is there any elements within the ideas of Marxism that catalyzed the kind of government,

01:48:22.000 | the kind of system that led to that bloodshed?

01:48:26.640 | - I don't think so.

01:48:27.640 | I think there were many things that led to the bloodshed, and so all that Stalin's regimes

01:48:32.600 | did.

01:48:33.600 | And I spent 10 years of my life with another economist writing a book about that to try

01:48:43.880 | to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

01:48:50.080 | You might want to take a look at it sometime.

01:48:52.800 | But there, I'm going to say a few things now, but all of those things are spelled out in

01:48:58.160 | great detail with loads of empirical evidence, et cetera, in that work.

01:49:06.440 | Let me start with playing a little bit with Hegel.

01:49:12.640 | The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the

01:49:20.560 | Soviet Union did, but what the rest of the world did.

01:49:24.960 | You had a really interesting move, and I'll give you a parallel from today.

01:49:32.200 | The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed.

01:49:38.560 | World War I, it just fell apart.

01:49:41.080 | The Czar and all of that, it couldn't survive.

01:49:45.600 | It had already been in trouble.

01:49:46.840 | There was a revolution in 1905.

01:49:49.400 | There was the loss of the war to Japan.

01:49:52.040 | If you know Russian history, which I assume you do, you'll know that there was a lot leading

01:49:57.720 | up to the collapse in 1917.

01:50:02.880 | And in some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small, that could seize

01:50:09.920 | the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists.

01:50:16.080 | Earlier on, with Kerensky, the first government that tried, it wasn't people all that impressed

01:50:22.200 | by Marxism.

01:50:23.200 | It was people more skeptical and would not have been called Marxist probably by history.

01:50:29.880 | They tried.

01:50:31.160 | They couldn't.

01:50:32.160 | Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year.

01:50:39.120 | The rest of the world, though, was horrified.

01:50:41.800 | The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken this immense leap from being a political party,

01:50:50.440 | a movement, critical of capitalism, yes, but still not challenging the power.

01:50:57.960 | Now it had the power, and in a big country.

01:51:01.400 | And they freaked out.

01:51:03.880 | If you know American history, the leadership of this country went completely berserk.

01:51:10.600 | We had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before.

01:51:16.360 | The '20s were a time of palmer raids in Boston, the Sacco-Vanzetti trials, really grim hostility.

01:51:27.740 | And you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the

01:51:32.520 | revolution.

01:51:33.520 | The US, Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops.

01:51:40.520 | What you had right away was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable.

01:51:49.040 | There was a great professor at Princeton, Meyer, forget his first name, who wrote this

01:51:55.240 | wonderful book about all American foreign policy since 1917, has been obsessed with

01:52:03.200 | Russia.

01:52:04.200 | Even now, this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia as if Russia still was the Soviet

01:52:10.680 | Union, as if people haven't figured out.

01:52:13.160 | That was a big change back in 1989 and '90.

01:52:17.120 | You know, Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before, or at least they're not Lenin.

01:52:24.160 | They may not be so different from some of the others, but in any case.

01:52:29.760 | So you had one factor was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation, the global.

01:52:37.880 | I mean, Rosa Luxemburg, I assume you know, Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets

01:52:45.940 | of Berlin.

01:52:46.940 | She's a critic of Lenin's, by the way, but she's a leftist, hunted down and hacked into

01:52:52.000 | bits, killed.

01:52:53.000 | So you're attributing some of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the

01:53:00.640 | world turned away.

01:53:02.480 | Turned against.

01:53:03.480 | Turned against.

01:53:04.480 | So if you turn against it, the better.

01:53:06.480 | Yeah, I mean, not in order of importance, but it's a very important part of the psychology

01:53:12.880 | of being, you know, it's what you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence

01:53:19.160 | that indeed there was a lot to be afraid of at that time.

01:53:22.800 | Nobody had ever done it.

01:53:23.800 | Look, you could see the effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at

01:53:30.000 | first that you could have socialism in one country.

01:53:33.540 | That was thought to be ridiculous.

01:53:35.800 | That socialism was internationalism.

01:53:39.040 | Marx was against capitalism everywhere.

01:53:42.220 | It was, you know, workers of the world unite, not workers of Russia unite, workers of the

01:53:48.360 | world, he had to go through a procedure of kind of coming to terms with the fact that

01:53:55.600 | the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried in Berlin, was tried in Munich, was

01:54:01.720 | tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here, they all failed.

01:54:06.560 | They all failed.

01:54:07.560 | And he's left.

01:54:09.120 | So the French would say, tout seul, right?

01:54:12.800 | All alone.

01:54:14.640 | That's one.

01:54:16.000 | The second thing is economic isolation.

01:54:19.360 | Russia's a poor country, and it needed what it got before the war, which were heavy investments

01:54:25.560 | from the French and the Germans particularly, but others too.

01:54:29.320 | Now this was all cut off.

01:54:31.280 | And you can see the replay with the sanctions program.

01:54:34.600 | It's, we're gonna do it again, we're gonna do it again.

01:54:38.520 | We have to do, we have, the world is different and the sanctions don't work, but they're

01:54:43.000 | gonna try them.

01:54:44.000 | They're gonna try them.

01:54:45.000 | 'Cause it's the history.

01:54:46.600 | But that culture was, today is completely different.

01:54:50.600 | Russia's a different place today, but Russia has China, and that changes everything.

01:54:55.800 | And they don't get that here yet, but they will.

01:54:58.440 | - Yeah, there's a very complicated dynamic with China, even with India.

01:55:03.600 | But-- - Or Turkey, Brazil.

01:55:06.080 | - Sorry to say, human nature may change at a slower pace than does geopolitical trends.

01:55:12.120 | - That has occurred to me as well.

01:55:14.120 | I get that point.

01:55:15.280 | - So is there, can you steel man the case, or consider the case that there's something

01:55:21.200 | about the implementation of Marxism, maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing

01:55:27.840 | on the working class and the workers unite, that naturally leads to formation of a dictatorial

01:55:35.320 | force, a dictator that says, let us temporarily give power to this person to manage some of

01:55:45.520 | the details of how to run the democracy, of giving voice to the workers so that they get

01:55:51.760 | to choose.

01:55:52.800 | And then that naturally leads to a dictator, and there's naturally, in human nature, power,

01:55:58.800 | and absolute power, as the old adage goes, corrupts absolutely.

01:56:03.560 | Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marx's ideals, you're going to end up with

01:56:08.760 | a dictator, and often, when you give too much power to any one human, a small number of

01:56:14.280 | people, you're gonna get into a huge amount of trouble?

01:56:18.280 | - You've putched things together there that I would--

01:56:20.440 | - That's what this-- - I think if you give--

01:56:23.080 | - Putched is a good word.

01:56:25.080 | - Yeah, it's German.

01:56:28.720 | If you, remember, I told you, my mother was born in Germany.

01:56:32.440 | - And then your dad is French.

01:56:34.040 | - Yeah, but he was born in Metz, if you know, European.

01:56:38.200 | It's a city on the border of France and Germany.

01:56:40.680 | If you come from, Alsatian, Alsace, in German.

01:56:45.800 | - So they're German-speaking, French-speaking?

01:56:46.800 | - Yeah, they do both.

01:56:48.440 | It's bilingual because it's been back and forth so many times in medieval days already

01:56:53.960 | that it, literally, you go from one store to another, the proprietor here is French

01:56:59.040 | and the proprietor there is German, but they all speak both languages because, you don't

01:57:05.200 | speak either of them?

01:57:06.200 | - I speak Russian.

01:57:07.200 | - Russian, but not German or French?

01:57:09.200 | - A bit of Ukrainian, no.

01:57:10.640 | It took French for four years in high school, but I've forgotten all of it.

01:57:14.560 | I remember the romance and the spirit of the language, but not the details.

01:57:18.640 | I'm sure I can remember.

01:57:20.640 | If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long period of time,

01:57:31.520 | and you do it on many levels of ideology, it is not surprising that it sticks and it

01:57:39.160 | stays, and you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution, and you will

01:57:44.840 | discover it has a life of its own, and it's gonna take a long time before people don't.

01:57:51.940 | If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism and that

01:58:00.040 | it doesn't wanna have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was Zeus

01:58:04.400 | and Diana and all the others, and they were very human-like, but instead, we have one

01:58:10.240 | who is the absolute beginning.

01:58:14.000 | What are you doing?

01:58:15.000 | You're teaching people an authority line that comes from the individual.

01:58:21.160 | If you have a sequence of kings, if in your feudal manner, the lord sits, called the landlord,

01:58:28.040 | he has unspeakable power over everything that goes on, and you do this for thousands of

01:58:34.000 | years, you can make a Russian revolution in 1917, but if you imagine you've gotten away

01:58:41.000 | from all that people assume without ever thinking about it, you're gonna have trouble.

01:58:48.760 | Stalin is figured here as the originator of his situation.

01:58:54.320 | He wasn't.

01:58:55.320 | He didn't never have that power.

01:58:57.140 | He may have thought that, but I don't.

01:59:00.200 | He's the product.

01:59:01.200 | Look, the Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn't that kind of guy.

01:59:06.720 | You know, he's a baseball-playing lawyer.

01:59:08.640 | That's what he was.

01:59:09.640 | But they made him into Tadha.

01:59:12.000 | - So it's not the system, it's the people.

01:59:15.000 | - You're the product of history.

01:59:16.000 | No, no, no.

01:59:17.440 | It was the systems, feudalism, the church.

01:59:21.060 | It was the structures and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has

01:59:27.560 | its own rhythm and doesn't follow the calendar of a political revolution.

01:59:33.560 | - That's the fundamental question.

01:59:34.680 | Is there something about communism that creates a mentality that enables somebody like Stalin

01:59:43.760 | or Mao?

01:59:44.760 | - No, I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to

01:59:50.920 | what they find familiar, to what seems to make sense, and he's the guy.

01:59:55.480 | Look, let me give you an example from American history.

01:59:58.920 | The Republican Party has traditionally, in this country, been the party of private enterprise

02:00:04.200 | and minimum government.

02:00:06.600 | In comes Trump, runs for office in 2016, is elected.

02:00:12.880 | What does he do?

02:00:13.880 | He commences the most massive tax increase and the most massive government intervention

02:00:21.640 | in the worlds of economics that we've had for decades.

02:00:26.240 | Nobody says anything.

02:00:28.560 | The Republicans cave, and the Democrats largely too.

02:00:34.080 | They cave.

02:00:35.080 | He can throw a tariff on anything.

02:00:39.560 | He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff.

02:00:44.720 | That's not what a tariff is.

02:00:45.880 | It's not how a tariff works.

02:00:48.200 | He would flunk a freshman course in economics, which everybody knows, everybody who teaches

02:00:53.680 | these courses.

02:00:54.680 | No, it doesn't matter.

02:00:57.120 | He's still calling the shots.

02:00:59.160 | What is going on here is that a society has come to a point where it can't solve its problems,

02:01:06.800 | and it begins what?

02:01:08.980 | To tap into older forms and all of the laissez-faire and all of the individualism for Lynn.

02:01:18.600 | And suddenly, the Republican Party is gung-ho, and now they're going to make abortion illegal.

02:01:24.960 | The government is telling you what you can do with your uterus.

02:01:29.280 | What?

02:01:30.760 | What?

02:01:32.240 | The government is being given more and more and more and more power.

02:01:35.800 | They're hoping, what?

02:01:36.800 | Do they like the government?

02:01:38.800 | No.

02:01:39.800 | They're desperate.

02:01:41.520 | This is not a pro-government, and it wasn't in Russia either.

02:01:45.960 | They were in a desperate fix, and so, and he took advantage.

02:01:52.760 | To which degree would you say Marx's ideas led to the creation of the National Socialism

02:02:05.960 | Party of German Workers, hence the Nazi Party, the fascist party in the '30s and the '40s,

02:02:12.840 | at the head of whom was Hitler, which I just recently learned he was employee number seven

02:02:19.880 | of the party, or whatever.

02:02:21.760 | The seventh person to have joined the party, and have created one of the most consequential

02:02:27.800 | and powerful political parties in the history of the 20th century.

02:02:31.880 | What degree did Marx's ideas, Marxism ideas have to play?

02:02:37.160 | It is the National Socialist Party of German Workers.

02:02:42.120 | Workers.

02:02:43.120 | National Socialist, the National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, German Worker Party.

02:02:51.960 | Worker Party.

02:02:52.960 | National Socialist German Worker Party.

02:02:55.760 | So-

02:02:56.760 | Well, here's the history.

02:02:57.760 | Did he care about the workers, or did he just use the workers as a populist message?

02:03:03.480 | The only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler was provide him with his stepping stone to

02:03:10.320 | power, but had nothing, no other, he didn't know anything about it, didn't care anything

02:03:14.040 | about it, nor did the people around him.

02:03:16.640 | Here's the story of what happened there, which I know largely through my own family, and

02:03:21.560 | plus my own history, the work that I did.

02:03:25.560 | The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German Party.

02:03:30.240 | It started around 1870, Marx was still alive.

02:03:34.040 | Some of his own family were leaders, Ferdinand Lassalle and other, his daughters.

02:03:41.120 | By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany.

02:03:45.740 | Nobody understood it.

02:03:47.980 | It was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution in 1917.

02:03:55.560 | Here was a political party that was now in every German city, in every German town, powerful

02:04:02.800 | and enjoying its rise up.

02:04:07.040 | That's my family is involved in this, so I really do know the story.

02:04:11.240 | It meant that starting around 1967, '8, if you wanted to have any kind of presence in

02:04:23.640 | the German working class, you had to use the word socialist.

02:04:27.360 | You had to, otherwise they wouldn't pay attention.

02:04:31.280 | The other parties called themselves Catholic.

02:04:35.360 | Germany is divided.

02:04:36.360 | The northern two-thirds is Protestant, the southern third is Catholic.

02:04:40.720 | Munich and Bavaria is Catholic, and every other part of Germany basically is Protestant.

02:04:47.040 | You could be in the Catholic Party, that was the South, or you could be in various conservative

02:04:52.680 | Prussian, and other.

02:04:55.320 | If you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing, I mean, Germany

02:04:59.960 | a very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time.

02:05:05.720 | Germany was the major competitor to Britain for the empire.

02:05:09.080 | The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and US taking over from Britain's

02:05:15.080 | empire.

02:05:16.080 | So, the German working class was it.

02:05:19.400 | So, anybody who wanted to approach the working class in whatever way had to come to terms

02:05:27.560 | and be friendly to socialism.

02:05:31.480 | Other parties did this too, just like Hitler.

02:05:34.800 | They put the word socialist in their party, but they wanted to make it clear that they

02:05:39.720 | weren't anything to do with the Soviet Union or anything to do with Marxism, so they put

02:05:45.840 | the word national.

02:05:48.240 | Nazi is the first four letters of national, national in German, and Azi is how you spell

02:05:55.040 | national in the German.

02:05:56.920 | National socialism, but definitely not communists.

02:05:59.200 | That's right.

02:06:00.200 | They killed communists.

02:06:01.200 | They fought communists in the street.

02:06:03.720 | They had pitched battles.

02:06:05.800 | They literally threatened each other's existence and their lives.

02:06:09.840 | And the first people that he arrested and put in jail were not Jews and gypsies and

02:06:15.160 | all the other people he eventually killed.

02:06:17.120 | It was communists.

02:06:18.720 | They were the number one, and socialists right behind them.

02:06:22.480 | Why?

02:06:23.480 | Because until he takes power, January of 1933, that's when Hitler takes power.

02:06:28.840 | The last elections, two of them, in 1932, the socialists and communists, they vote together,

02:06:34.800 | 50% of the vote in Germany.

02:06:36.880 | So he appealed to the German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said, "The

02:06:45.360 | communists and socialists are going to win.

02:06:48.480 | And you're just the capitalists.

02:06:50.480 | You have too few people.

02:06:52.580 | You need a mass base, and I'm the only one that can do that."

02:06:56.360 | And it was just a populist message that he used.

02:06:59.800 | That's right.

02:07:00.800 | But it was explicitly done as a deal.

02:07:04.640 | The ruling group said to Hindenburg, the old Prussian man who was in charge of the German

02:07:10.520 | government at the time, "You have to invite Hitler to form a new government."

02:07:15.120 | Otherwise, he would never have done it.

02:07:16.760 | He had called Hitler nasty names before.

02:07:19.720 | The Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler as a little funny man with a mustache who

02:07:25.640 | was Austrian, wasn't even German.

02:07:28.480 | For them, that mattered.

02:07:29.820 | So he comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism, which he immediately

02:07:38.120 | does.

02:07:40.940 | Only people who don't know or care about the history pick up on the word.

02:07:48.440 | It's like there are people here in the United States who like to say, "We are not a democracy.

02:07:55.260 | We are a republic," which is like saying, "I'm not a banana.

02:08:00.200 | I'm a fruit."

02:08:01.200 | You have to explain to these people, "A banana is a kind of fruit."

02:08:05.800 | So you have to explain to people, "Yes, we're a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy

02:08:11.960 | as a way to govern the republic."

02:08:14.360 | Because to say you're a republic doesn't imply what kind of government you have.

02:08:17.960 | You have to go through that with people so they get it.

02:08:20.360 | And certain words have power beyond their actual meaning.

02:08:24.560 | They're used in communication, whether it's negative, like racist, or positive, like freedom

02:08:31.400 | of speech.

02:08:32.400 | Or Democrat, with a D.

02:08:33.800 | Yeah, and then you use that to mean something-

02:08:36.760 | Who knows?

02:08:37.760 | Or negative, "Donny, stop being a socialist," or whatever that means that's not even used

02:08:44.960 | in any kind of philosophical or economic sense.

02:08:48.560 | So let's fast forward to today.

02:08:50.800 | You mentioned Bernie Sanders.

02:08:53.440 | There's another popular figure that represents some ideas of maybe let's call it democratic

02:08:59.000 | socialism and maybe let's try to start, sneak up on a definition of what that could possibly

02:09:04.320 | mean, but AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

02:09:08.720 | She's from these parts.

02:09:10.640 | Yes, Queens.

02:09:13.040 | So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC.

02:09:18.440 | Are they open to some ideas in Marxism?

02:09:22.320 | Are they representing those ideas well in both the economic and the political sense?

02:09:27.600 | Okay.

02:09:28.600 | Where do I begin?

02:09:33.720 | The socialist movement predates Marx, was always larger than Marx, and has gone on to

02:09:40.560 | develop separately after Marx's death.

02:09:44.320 | So-

02:09:45.320 | Can we pause on that actually?

02:09:46.320 | Yeah.

02:09:47.320 | Is there a nice way to delineate, draw a line between Marxism and socialism?

02:09:52.920 | Or if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism-

02:09:56.120 | That's better.

02:09:58.040 | Can you speak to like, maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism

02:10:04.320 | is?

02:10:05.320 | Right.

02:10:06.600 | Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics, and as I said earlier, devoted

02:10:18.200 | to mostly a critique of capitalism, and that's its strength.

02:10:28.280 | How it does that, how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works,

02:10:35.760 | that is really the forte of the Marxist tradition.

02:10:41.280 | Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism figures.

02:10:46.400 | It's there so that people who aren't Marxists are nonetheless aware of Marxism, like it

02:10:53.000 | more or less, study it more or less.

02:10:56.320 | But it's a broader notion that I like to use this sentence to describe.

02:11:01.880 | It's a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism, that really there are all kinds

02:11:09.360 | of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the world think are

02:11:19.000 | adequate.

02:11:20.080 | We are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who thought they could do better

02:11:24.680 | than slavery, and all the people who thought they could do better than feudalism.

02:11:29.960 | We've made progress.

02:11:31.920 | Feudalism was a progress over slavery.

02:11:34.840 | Capitalism was a progress over both of them, and progress hasn't stopped.

02:11:39.080 | And we are the people who, in a variety of ways, want the progress to go further and

02:11:47.800 | are not held back by believing that capitalism is somehow the best beyond which we cannot

02:11:55.360 | go or even think, we find that to be, in the worst sense of the word, a reactionary way

02:12:02.240 | of thinking.

02:12:03.400 | And we're that large community.

02:12:06.600 | Many of us are not interested in economics all that much.

02:12:09.880 | We don't think that's the focal area.

02:12:13.520 | We are socialists, for example, because we want to do something to deal with climate

02:12:19.680 | change.

02:12:21.080 | We think the world is about to kill itself physically, and we want to take steps with

02:12:27.760 | other people to stop that, to fix that, et cetera, et cetera.

02:12:32.920 | So that's, for me, a kind of difference.

02:12:37.000 | It's a little difficult to say because there's no other figure like Marx that has an equal

02:12:44.160 | impact, an equal place within the broad socialist tradition.

02:12:50.820 | And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition.

02:12:57.360 | But that's very specialized, and that's a whole other kind of conversation.

02:13:03.520 | And whatever you say, the influence of the great anarchist thinkers, Kropotkin, Bakunin,

02:13:11.120 | Sorel and others, still doesn't amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had

02:13:18.480 | so far.

02:13:19.720 | That could change, but I mean, up to this point, I think that's a way of understanding

02:13:28.080 | the relationship.

02:13:29.080 | - Yeah, that's interesting that some of the ideas within anarchism, and of course it's

02:13:34.080 | one of the more varied disciplines, 'cause there's such, maybe by definition, such variety

02:13:41.880 | in their thinkers, but they kind of stand for a dismantling of a power center, and that,

02:13:52.840 | if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism.

02:13:56.800 | - Absolutely.

02:13:57.800 | - So where you have the, you know.

02:14:00.400 | - There's a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas that uses the phrase,

02:14:07.040 | quote, "The withering away of the state."

02:14:11.080 | That's a quotation from Lenin.

02:14:15.280 | People should understand, that's a quotation from Lenin.

02:14:19.340 | And it was made by Lenin, positive, in other words, Lenin was saying, "That's a good thing.

02:14:24.600 | That's something we stand for.

02:14:27.200 | We want to create the conditions under which there is a withering."

02:14:31.480 | Because you remember, the communists, or whatever, they weren't called that at first in Russia,

02:14:37.240 | before the revolution.

02:14:38.440 | They were just socialists.

02:14:40.340 | They were hunted down and persecuted by the government, left and right.

02:14:43.920 | They had no love for the government.

02:14:45.440 | The government was their literal, everyday enemy.

02:14:49.400 | And being critical of government didn't just mean this particular government, but of the

02:14:55.880 | whole, being a Marxist, you always ask the questions of the social constitution of whatever

02:15:02.140 | it is you're struggling against.

02:15:03.940 | So there was this interest, why is the state so important?

02:15:08.520 | Because if you understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism, it didn't have powerful states.

02:15:15.360 | One of Lenin's greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia, and he goes back

02:15:20.640 | centuries.

02:15:21.640 | It's a huge book, three or four inches thick, and I'm one of the few people who've read

02:15:26.720 | it.

02:15:28.320 | And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of

02:15:35.560 | feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe.

02:15:39.840 | The development of a powerful central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is

02:15:45.520 | desperate to hold on, which ought to be suggestive that maybe the turn to powerful governments

02:15:52.240 | here in the United States or in Europe is maybe also because this system is exhausted

02:16:00.080 | and can't go on and has to marshal every last bit of power it can not to be lost in history.

02:16:10.480 | It would be interesting to see what the Soviet Union would look like if Lenin never died.

02:16:15.480 | A lot of people have asked that question over the years, a lot of people.

02:16:20.800 | There's Stalin sliding in in the middle of the night, erasing the withering away of the

02:16:25.720 | state part.

02:16:26.720 | Yes, exactly.

02:16:27.720 | So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie Sanders, what are your thoughts about

02:16:33.280 | these modern political figures that represent some of these ideas?

02:16:36.720 | And they sometimes refer to those ideas as democratic socialism.

02:16:40.160 | Right.

02:16:41.160 | The crucial thing about Bernie and about AOC, and this is particularly true about Bernie,

02:16:47.200 | because AOC is much younger and Bernie is an older man.

02:16:51.760 | Bernie being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student, as an activist,

02:17:01.000 | then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont as a mayor and all the rest.

02:17:07.320 | He lived through what, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America.

02:17:12.980 | And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945, '46 to the present, I mean

02:17:19.280 | it really never stopped, was a Manichean worldview.

02:17:26.960 | The United States is good, it defines democracy, and the Soviet Union is awful, it defines

02:17:32.680 | whatever the opposite of democracy should be called.

02:17:37.180 | Good here, evil there.

02:17:38.920 | It was taken so far that even among the ranks of academic individuals, it was impossible

02:17:51.560 | to have a conversation.

02:17:53.000 | I mean, I can't tell, just to make it very personal, the number of times I would raise

02:17:57.840 | my hand in my classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale, and I would ask a question that had

02:18:06.880 | something to do with Marxism, because I was studying it on my own.

02:18:11.240 | There were no courses that teach this to me, except by people who trashed it, other than

02:18:16.920 | that, and I didn't want that.

02:18:20.400 | So I would ask a question, and I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I

02:18:26.440 | didn't much care for and those who were good teachers that I liked, fear.

02:18:30.520 | It was just fear.

02:18:32.520 | They didn't want to go there.

02:18:33.520 | They didn't want to answer my question.

02:18:35.960 | And after a while, I got to know some of them, and I found out why.

02:18:40.560 | Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to understand this.

02:18:44.280 | Either they would have to say, "I don't know," which would be the honest truth for many of

02:18:48.120 | them, but a professor does not want to say in a classroom, "I don't know.

02:18:52.000 | This is not cool."

02:18:54.240 | Or if they knew, they'd have to say something that indicated they didn't know really much,

02:19:00.840 | and they weren't going to do that.

02:19:02.760 | Or they would know something, and maybe that would be because they were interested.

02:19:09.080 | They did not want the rest of the students to begin to say, "Oh, you know, Professor

02:19:13.920 | Smith, you know, he's interested in—" "Mm-mm.

02:19:18.520 | This is not good for your career.

02:19:20.480 | You don't know how this is going to play out.

02:19:22.800 | Who's going to say what to whom?"

02:19:24.320 | And I could see in their faces what I later learned, because they told me, "Come to my

02:19:30.040 | office hours.

02:19:31.040 | We're in the office.

02:19:32.240 | We can talk about it."

02:19:33.680 | But that's how bad it was.

02:19:36.800 | Is it not still?

02:19:38.440 | Pretty much.

02:19:39.640 | In my field, the great so-called debate—I mean, I find it boring, but the great debate

02:19:45.120 | for my colleagues is between what's called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics.

02:19:52.160 | Neoclassical, the government should stay out of the economy, let's say fair or liberalism,

02:19:58.320 | and the Keynesians saying, "No, you crazy neoclassical.

02:20:01.840 | If you do that, you'll have Great Depressions, and the system will collapse.

02:20:05.760 | You need the government to come in to solve the problems, to fix the weaknesses."

02:20:11.520 | And they hate each other, and they throw each other out of their jobs.

02:20:14.920 | One of the very few things they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like

02:20:19.080 | me out.

02:20:21.560 | That they can find common ground to do.

02:20:24.960 | So I had to learn it all on my own.

02:20:27.920 | Why am I telling you this?

02:20:30.280 | Because this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism

02:20:42.320 | of the post-World War II period, the vast bulk of all of that is unknown, not just to

02:20:50.920 | the average American person, but to the average American academic, to the average American

02:20:56.280 | who thinks of himself or herself as an intellectual.

02:20:59.920 | I mean, I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history.

02:21:06.200 | They have no idea.

02:21:08.720 | Or saying, "There's this man Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist.

02:21:12.880 | He really had interest in..."

02:21:15.160 | Or to explain that Gramsci was not a great literary critic.

02:21:19.860 | He was head of the Communist Party of Italy for most of his adult life.

02:21:24.980 | What does that mean?

02:21:27.160 | You like Gramsci as a literary critic, but...

02:21:29.920 | And they didn't even know.

02:21:32.560 | They don't even know.

02:21:33.560 | It's been erased.

02:21:35.480 | It's a little bit like stories I've heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased

02:21:40.800 | in the Soviet Union because he obviously fell out of favor.

02:21:45.180 | And so somehow all of his writings, many of which are very interesting and complicated...

02:21:50.200 | Anyway, so what you're going to have in this country is a slow awakening of socialism from

02:21:59.120 | a long hibernation called the Cold War.

02:22:03.040 | I never expected, to be very honest with you, that I would live to see it.

02:22:07.160 | I knew it would come because these things always do, but I didn't expect to see it.

02:22:13.020 | So I have been surprised, as have a lot of us, that when it starts to happen, it happens

02:22:20.260 | fast.

02:22:21.260 | So you see Bernie as an early sign of the awakening...

02:22:25.820 | Absolutely.

02:22:26.820 | ...of the Cold War to accept the idea of socialism.

02:22:30.300 | Bernie was always a socialist.

02:22:32.020 | We all knew, and everybody who paid attention.

02:22:34.260 | He denied it.

02:22:35.940 | But 2016, he makes a decision, momentous, to run for president.

02:22:42.300 | He's just a senator from Vermont.

02:22:44.420 | Vermont is one of the smallest states in the Union.

02:22:48.300 | People who live in Vermont love to tell you that there are more cows than people in Vermont,

02:22:52.700 | et cetera, et cetera.

02:22:54.420 | So here from this little state, this elderly gentleman with a New York City accent runs

02:23:00.340 | for... and says, "I'm a socialist."

02:23:03.100 | And when they attack him, he doesn't run away.

02:23:04.860 | "I'm a socialist.

02:23:05.860 | I'm a socialist."

02:23:06.860 | Now, he had been.

02:23:09.140 | It wasn't a secret that suddenly got out.

02:23:12.060 | But the great question, and I don't mind telling you because I went to the right schools.

02:23:17.460 | I know a lot of people.

02:23:19.620 | Jani Ellen was my classmate at Yale and stuff like that.

02:23:23.140 | So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party, and I said, "Well, what

02:23:27.940 | do you think about Bernie entering the race?"

02:23:31.580 | Makes no difference.

02:23:32.580 | He's going to get 1% of the vote.

02:23:35.100 | He was wrong.

02:23:36.100 | He had no idea what was coming.

02:23:39.300 | But the truth is, I didn't either.

02:23:41.520 | It wasn't just that he didn't get it.

02:23:42.980 | I thought his 1% was probably right.

02:23:45.980 | So we were both wrong.

02:23:46.980 | Yeah, change can happen fast.

02:23:48.460 | Do you think AOC might be president one day?

02:23:51.980 | Yeah, possible.

02:23:53.620 | Possible.

02:23:54.780 | But two things.

02:23:56.580 | Number one, it's fast.

02:24:00.760 | Number two, it's going to go in the following direction, I would guess.

02:24:07.560 | You begin with the most moderate, calm, non-confrontational socialism you can imagine.

02:24:18.380 | So not AOC or Bernie.

02:24:20.020 | No, no.

02:24:21.020 | They are not confrontational in my judgment.

02:24:23.480 | In terms of the ideas of socialism.

02:24:24.840 | I mean, they're both very feisty.

02:24:27.240 | They're feisty personally.

02:24:28.520 | But not-

02:24:29.520 | But not ideologically.

02:24:30.520 | Got it.

02:24:31.520 | You know, she is, Bernie is also.

02:24:35.720 | You know, in honest moments, and they both really are pretty honest folks, at least in

02:24:41.160 | my experience.

02:24:44.340 | In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that what he advocates as democratic socialism

02:24:49.880 | is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s.

02:24:54.120 | It was a kind of popular government, tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide

02:25:01.280 | a lot more support for the working class than you do now.

02:25:05.800 | That's not a fundamental change.

02:25:08.120 | That's what he means by socialism.

02:25:10.600 | When he talks about it and he's asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot.

02:25:16.400 | Okay, that's consistent.

02:25:19.800 | That's the softest kind of socialism.

02:25:22.880 | And that's where we're going to start in a country coming out of hibernation.

02:25:26.960 | Pretty soon, it's already happening, there'll be people who need and want to go further

02:25:32.200 | in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are comfortable with.

02:25:36.860 | You can already see the shoots of it now.

02:25:39.880 | You know, AOC voted, together with most of the others, to support the money for Ukraine.

02:25:46.200 | Okay, that lot of people in the socialist movement do not support that.

02:25:51.880 | And that's going to happen.

02:25:52.880 | I don't know exactly how that's going to work out, but that should give people an idea.

02:25:57.720 | There are disagreements and they're going to fester and they're going to grow.

02:26:01.680 | It's interesting.

02:26:02.680 | People in the socialist sphere don't support money from the United States in the large

02:26:08.360 | amounts that it is being sent to Ukraine.

02:26:11.120 | Is it because it's a fundamentally, the military industrial complex is a capitalist institution

02:26:15.880 | kind of thing?

02:26:16.880 | No.

02:26:17.880 | I wonder what the-

02:26:18.880 | I mean, there are some people for whom that's the issue.

02:26:20.880 | Then there are people for whom this is, you know, it's guns and butter and why are we

02:26:27.120 | over there when we have such needs at home that are being neglected?

02:26:31.040 | And then there are people who, well, go back to what we talked about at the beginning,

02:26:35.760 | who are more like Lenin and Debs.

02:26:39.600 | This is a fight between Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs

02:26:47.380 | in Ukraine and what are we doing here?

02:26:50.120 | We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a settlement.

02:26:56.800 | Don't kill large numbers of Ukraine.

02:26:58.320 | I mean, everybody's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.

02:27:01.200 | It's a little strange here.

02:27:03.160 | What are you doing?

02:27:04.440 | You're supposed to be in favor of peace, you know, and for the United States, which just

02:27:08.320 | finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq to be against another country invading.

02:27:14.600 | I mean, who in the world is going to take this seriously?

02:27:17.600 | This is crazy.

02:27:18.600 | You know, I invade, it's good, and you invade, it's terrible.

02:27:23.120 | What?

02:27:24.120 | You know, what are you doing?

02:27:25.880 | Why are you doing that?

02:27:28.560 | What's going on here?

02:27:29.720 | All of these questions are being acted, by the way, not just by socialists, by lots of

02:27:34.120 | other people too, inside the Democratic Party and also inside the Republican Party.

02:27:40.360 | You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that, they are against the stuff in Ukraine.

02:27:45.880 | They don't want the money spent there.

02:27:47.800 | They don't want the weapons sent there.

02:27:49.720 | They don't like the whole policy.

02:27:52.560 | And Trump wobble.

02:27:53.800 | So Mr. Biden's policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right.

02:27:58.960 | And every day that this thing lasts, these criticisms get bigger.

02:28:03.760 | Anyway, the point is that AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots

02:28:13.760 | after a long winter of Cold War isolation from the whole, you know.

02:28:21.040 | When I explain to people the contribution made, for example, to modern Marxism, I'll

02:28:27.200 | give you an example, by the French philosopher Louis Althusser.

02:28:32.000 | I don't know if the name means anything to you.

02:28:34.720 | Okay.

02:28:35.720 | He was the rector of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.

02:28:41.080 | That's the equivalent.

02:28:42.680 | Imagine in this country if there were a university that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and

02:28:48.640 | MIT.

02:28:49.640 | I mean, it would be the university.

02:28:51.840 | Well, the Ecole Normale in France in Paris is the.

02:28:56.600 | He was a tenured professor who became the rector.

02:29:00.220 | The rector is like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist Party

02:29:05.600 | most of his adult life.

02:29:07.660 | That was possible in France during the Cold War.

02:29:10.240 | That was unthinkable in this country.

02:29:12.360 | You could not, in a million years, right?

02:29:15.880 | So Althusser, as a philosopher, tried to bring a version of postmodernism into Marxism with

02:29:26.760 | enormous impact all over the world where he traveled, not just in Europe, all over, right?

02:29:33.440 | So if you want to look him up, I'll spell it out for you.

02:29:37.240 | Sure.

02:29:38.240 | L-O-U-S-S-E-R.

02:29:39.240 | Luis, the Luis is spelled L-O-U-I-S.

02:29:44.680 | Luis Althusser.

02:29:46.640 | Look him up.

02:29:47.640 | You'll see tons of stuff.

02:29:48.640 | By the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember, of his works in English.

02:29:56.440 | By the way, the textbook I wrote in economics, in case you're ever interested, was also published

02:30:00.600 | by the MIT Press.

02:30:01.960 | And the title?

02:30:02.960 | Of the Contending Economic Theories.

02:30:05.640 | Ideoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian.

02:30:09.120 | That's at MIT.

02:30:10.120 | Marxian.

02:30:11.120 | Yeah, that's right.

02:30:12.120 | And by the way, when we think, I don't know if there's an interesting distinction between

02:30:16.800 | Marxian economics and Marxist, I suppose Marxism is the umbrella of everything that's-

02:30:25.080 | I only use it because Marxist, I use as a noun.

02:30:29.320 | A person is a Marxist.

02:30:32.000 | Marxian, I use as an adjective to qualify.

02:30:34.880 | I don't mean some great difference.

02:30:36.920 | There's a last point I would like to make about AOC and Bernie that's also general.

02:30:45.120 | I'm a historian, too, and I know that the transition out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism

02:30:52.760 | was a transition that took centuries, and that occurred in fits and starts.

02:30:57.600 | So for example, a feudal manor would start to disintegrate.

02:31:02.480 | Serfs would run away.

02:31:03.600 | They'd run into a town.

02:31:05.920 | How would they live in the town?

02:31:07.760 | They had no land anymore because they had run away from the feudal manor.

02:31:12.520 | A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal understanding what they were doing.

02:31:18.120 | A merchant would say to one of these serfs, "I'm in the business of buying and then reselling

02:31:24.480 | stuff and living off the difference, but you know, I could make more money if I produce

02:31:29.440 | some of this stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody else.

02:31:34.080 | So I'm going to make you a deal.

02:31:36.120 | I'm going to give you money.

02:31:37.640 | Once a week I'll give you money, what we would later call a wage, and you come here and under

02:31:42.160 | my supervision you make this crap that I'm going to then sell, and this all works out."

02:31:47.880 | In other words, there were efforts, unconscious, not self-aware, to go out of feudalism to

02:31:56.840 | a new system.

02:31:59.320 | Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart.

02:32:03.040 | Some of them lasted weeks or months or years, but it took a long time before the conditions

02:32:11.080 | were ready for a kind of a general switch.

02:32:16.360 | And once that was done, it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system we

02:32:21.520 | have today.

02:32:22.520 | That's the only model we have.

02:32:25.020 | So for me, that's what I see when I look at socialism.

02:32:29.480 | I see the Paris Commune was an event, an attempt, lasted a few weeks.

02:32:36.320 | I see Russia.

02:32:37.820 | That was an attempt, lasted 70 years.

02:32:40.800 | Then I see, and you will fill in the blank, I see these are all early experiments.

02:32:46.120 | These are all, you learn things to do, learn things never to do again.

02:32:51.600 | The good, the bad.

02:32:53.260 | What do you build on?

02:32:54.840 | How do you learn?

02:32:56.240 | And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition, when it's serious, that's what

02:33:00.680 | it does.

02:33:01.680 | - So in your ideas, sort of capitalism was a significant improvement over the feudalism.

02:33:08.320 | And we are coming to an age in over slavery, and we're coming to an age where capitalism

02:33:13.800 | will die out and make, it's not that capitalism is somehow fundamentally broken.

02:33:20.460 | It's better than the things that came before it, but there's going to be things yet better

02:33:24.360 | and they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and socialism.

02:33:29.960 | Is there, just to linger briefly on the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter.

02:33:39.120 | There's something called, I'm sorry if I'm using the terms incorrectly, but cultural

02:33:44.400 | Marxism.

02:33:45.400 | - Right.

02:33:46.400 | - Criticisms of universities being infiltrated by cultural Marxists.

02:33:54.080 | I'm not exactly sure, I don't pay close enough attention.

02:33:57.440 | - No one is, no, no, no.

02:33:58.440 | I do.

02:33:59.440 | - But it's woke, there's a kind of woke ideology that I'm not exactly sure.

02:34:04.680 | - Right.

02:34:05.680 | That's not you.

02:34:06.840 | - What is the fundamental text?

02:34:08.360 | - Yeah.

02:34:09.360 | - Who's the Karl Marx of wokeness?

02:34:13.800 | All I do know is that there's certain characteristics of woke ideology, which is hard lines are

02:34:22.800 | drawn between the good guys and the bad guys.

02:34:27.640 | And basically everyone is a bad guy, except the people that are very loudly nonstop saying

02:34:35.520 | that they're the good guy.

02:34:36.880 | And that applies for racism, for sexism, for gender, gender politics, identity politics,

02:34:48.240 | all that kind of stuff.

02:34:50.840 | - Is there any parallels between Marxian economics and Marxist ideology and whatever is being

02:34:57.960 | called Marxism on Twitter?

02:35:00.600 | - No, not much.

02:35:02.800 | Mostly Marx, you have to, one of the consequences of the taboo after World War II is that Marxism,

02:35:09.520 | like socialism and communism, become swear words.

02:35:13.400 | It's like calling somebody, well I won't use bad language, but using a four letter word

02:35:19.800 | to describe somebody.

02:35:21.560 | So instead of calling them this or that, you call them a Marxist.

02:35:25.400 | In many circles, this is even worse than whatever other adjective you might have used.

02:35:31.960 | But it doesn't have a particular meaning that I can assess.

02:35:37.080 | The closest you get is your little list.

02:35:39.720 | It is somebody who is concerned about race and sex and sexual orientation, gender, all

02:35:49.760 | of those things, and wants there to be transgendered bathrooms and I don't like any of these people,

02:35:58.880 | so I slap the word Marxism or the phrase cultural Marxism.

02:36:04.280 | Because it isn't Marxism about getting more money or controlling the industry or all those

02:36:10.240 | things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned about.

02:36:15.260 | So this is odd, since they don't know much about Marxism.

02:36:17.920 | I've always been interested in culture.

02:36:20.480 | I mean, Lukács, the man I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that's what they're famous

02:36:25.320 | for, the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture.

02:36:31.600 | Gramsci writes at great length about the Catholic Church, about theater and painting in Italy

02:36:38.400 | and on and on.

02:36:39.400 | I mean, this is just ignorance talking.

02:36:42.160 | They don't know anything about that.

02:36:43.160 | They wouldn't know what the names are.

02:36:45.760 | It's a label that summarizes, kind of a shorthand, "I'm against all of this.

02:36:50.960 | I don't want to be told that there's ugly racism in this country, and it always has

02:36:55.520 | been, or sexism or phobia against gay people, whatever it is that's agitating them.

02:37:05.200 | Marxism or socialism."

02:37:08.640 | It's like socialism is the post office.

02:37:13.520 | But I don't blame them.

02:37:14.520 | I mean, it's childish.

02:37:17.160 | It's mean-spirited.

02:37:18.880 | But it comes out of the fact no one ever sat them down and said, "Here is this tradition.

02:37:24.840 | It's got these kinds of things that people kind of share, and these big differences."

02:37:30.160 | Look, an intelligent society, which this country is, could have and should have done that.

02:37:38.040 | It was fear and a kind of terror that made them behave in the way they did, and we're

02:37:43.520 | now seeing it.

02:37:44.800 | Having said that, there is such a thing as cultural Marxism.

02:37:49.600 | What that is, is simply those Marxists who devoted themselves to analyzing how it is

02:38:00.880 | that a particular culture is on the one hand shaped by capitalism, and on the other hand

02:38:07.760 | it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow.

02:38:12.080 | In other words, how do we analyze the interaction between the class struggle on the job and

02:38:20.560 | attitude towards sexuality, or movements in music, or whatever else culture?

02:38:27.960 | And there are Georg Lukács, this Hungarian, great name, isn't it?

02:38:32.640 | The greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci.

02:38:36.440 | And a modern name, just died a couple years ago, a British intellectual named Stuart Hall,

02:38:41.880 | H-A-L-L.

02:38:42.880 | If I were teaching, which I have done, a course in cultural Marxism, those would be three

02:38:50.960 | major blocks on the syllabus.

02:38:54.720 | I would give you articles and books to read of their stuff, because it has been so seminal

02:39:00.880 | in provoking many, many others.

02:39:03.320 | So there is something to be said and understood about the kind of culture that capitalism

02:39:07.640 | creates and the kind of culture that enables capitalism.

02:39:11.440 | Yes.

02:39:12.440 | And Marxists are particularly those who like to look at that interaction.

02:39:17.240 | In other words, they're interested in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture

02:39:21.520 | shapes capitalism.

02:39:23.240 | There's another name I forgot.

02:39:25.960 | Stuart Hall is British, Gramsci is Italian, Lukács is Hungarian.

02:39:32.680 | The German is Walter Benjamin, B-E-N-J-A-M-I-N.

02:39:38.360 | He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school of Marxism that developed

02:39:44.760 | in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people, many of whom were interested in

02:39:49.680 | cultural questions.

02:39:51.280 | It was a bit of a reaction against the narrow Marxism that was so focused on economics and

02:39:57.360 | politics.

02:39:58.440 | There were people who said, "You're leaving out very important parts of modern society

02:40:03.760 | that are shaping the economy as much as they are shaped by it."

02:40:07.800 | And it was that impetus to open Marxism to be more inclusive in what it deemed to be

02:40:13.920 | important to understand that this cult, and they call themselves cultural Marxists, but

02:40:19.680 | they had a completely different meaning from this.

02:40:22.000 | This is just bad mouthing.

02:40:26.840 | That's all it is.

02:40:27.840 | Let me ask a more personal question.

02:40:30.280 | Sure.

02:40:31.280 | So for most of the 20th century, no, not most, but a large, many decades in the United States

02:40:36.840 | as a consequence of the Cold War and before, being a Marxist is one of the worst things

02:40:41.880 | you could be.

02:40:44.280 | Have you had dark periods in your own life where you've gone to some dark places in your

02:40:50.240 | mind where it was difficult, like self-doubt, difficult to know, like, "What the hell am

02:40:57.360 | I doing?"

02:40:58.740 | When you're surrounded by colleagues and people, you said prestigious universities, both personal

02:41:04.440 | interest of career, but also as a human being, when everybody kind of looks at you funny

02:41:12.360 | because you're studying this thing.

02:41:15.440 | Did that ever get you real low?

02:41:17.560 | No.

02:41:18.560 | I know people who had exactly what you said.

02:41:21.080 | I mean, your question's perfectly reasonable.

02:41:23.080 | If I were you, I'd be asking me that question too.

02:41:27.800 | And what's wrong with you?

02:41:28.800 | No, nothing wrong with the question.

02:41:31.720 | And here's the honest truth, I don't know how anomalous I am.

02:41:35.560 | I really don't.

02:41:37.120 | But the truth is, no, I have, if my wife was sitting here, she'd tell you what she tells

02:41:43.960 | me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true.

02:41:49.760 | But then again, luck never is the only explanation for things.

02:41:53.780 | It's part of it.

02:41:59.080 | What can I say?

02:42:00.080 | I didn't choose the time of my birth.

02:42:01.720 | I didn't choose the communities in which I grew up or the schools I attended or anything

02:42:06.760 | else.

02:42:07.760 | No, but the fact that there was no courses or extensive courses on marketing and economics.

02:42:11.920 | But you know, again, I'm Hegel.

02:42:14.120 | On the one hand, I was denied good instruction.

02:42:18.000 | On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own.

02:42:21.560 | And the motivation when you do that is very different.

02:42:26.040 | I'm not the student who sits there with my notebook taking notes of what the great professor

02:42:30.960 | says and reading the text and getting ready for the exam.

02:42:35.280 | I don't have an exam.

02:42:38.200 | I'm doing something slightly risque, you know, kind of romantically different and oppositional.

02:42:48.200 | I was able to find always one or two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom

02:42:54.920 | situation, other students who felt enough similar to me that we could get together and

02:43:01.440 | read these books and talk about them.

02:43:03.720 | I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me of their time

02:43:10.840 | and their effort to teach me along the way.

02:43:15.920 | And I've had the benefit that because I went to all these fancy schools, I do know a lot

02:43:21.200 | of people who are in high places in this culture.

02:43:25.240 | And when I have been put in difficult positions, I often wave my pedigree and it works like

02:43:31.000 | garlic with the devil.

02:43:32.440 | They back away.

02:43:33.440 | They back away.

02:43:35.880 | Because Americans are very deferential to that kind of academic prestige.

02:43:40.760 | - But there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken

02:43:45.480 | by this.

02:43:46.560 | You're just naturally somebody who just has perseverance.

02:43:53.960 | - Well, I would put it, I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would put it a little

02:43:59.120 | differently.

02:44:00.120 | I think capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system.

02:44:07.400 | And nothing has happened to change my mind.

02:44:10.360 | In other words, the development just kept giving me more and more evidence that this

02:44:23.320 | is.

02:44:24.320 | And I must say over the last 10 years, what's really changed the last 10 years.

02:44:28.960 | I mean, I can't describe to you how big that change is.

02:44:33.480 | And that may be more important than anything else we've discussed.

02:44:37.360 | Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television or a radio

02:44:44.800 | thing or give a talk at some conference or something.

02:44:50.840 | Once every two or three months, I'd be invited and I would do it, like academics often do.

02:44:56.960 | I now do two to three to four interviews every day.

02:45:02.360 | So-

02:45:03.360 | - There's a hunger.

02:45:04.360 | - There's a hunger.

02:45:07.360 | - Wow, is there hunger.

02:45:08.360 | - It's fascinating.

02:45:09.360 | - And I wanna be honest with you.

02:45:10.720 | As I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause

02:45:16.280 | from the podium that I lean into the microphone and I say, with as much smile as I can get,

02:45:23.360 | I'm having the time of my life.

02:45:27.520 | And that's the truth.

02:45:28.520 | That's the truth.

02:45:30.660 | I never expected...

02:45:31.880 | Look, I'm used to teaching a classroom, a seminar for graduate students with eight or

02:45:36.560 | nine or 10 students or a regular undergraduate class with 30 or an occasional introductory

02:45:43.520 | course with a few hundred.

02:45:45.360 | I've done all of those things many times.

02:45:48.360 | But an audience that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that, no,

02:45:57.840 | that's new.

02:45:58.840 | That's new.

02:45:59.840 | - Is there advice you can give, given your bold and non-standard career and life, advice

02:46:07.480 | you can give to high school students, college students about how to have a career like that

02:46:13.480 | or maybe how to have a career or a life they can be proud of?

02:46:19.520 | - Yeah.

02:46:23.120 | First of all, my advice is go for it.

02:46:25.320 | The conditions for doing that now are infinitely better than they were when I had to do it.

02:46:33.040 | And I could do it and I'm happy I did it.

02:46:37.920 | Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made that I've never regretted.

02:46:45.920 | And I've never regretted being a critic of this society, never.

02:46:50.640 | I find it edifying.

02:46:53.080 | I find it, I mean the gratitude people express to me for helping them see kind of what's

02:46:59.960 | going on is unbelievably encouraging.

02:47:03.960 | What can I tell you?

02:47:04.960 | - So that fills you with joy, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes fills you,

02:47:10.880 | that's a life not just important, it's a joy.

02:47:13.720 | - Because most of the people who say something like that to me are people who, if they had

02:47:19.680 | the vocabulary and some of them do, would say, "You know, I thought I was seeing through

02:47:25.760 | that outfit that I was wearing.

02:47:28.440 | I thought it."

02:47:29.760 | And they did.

02:47:30.760 | And all they needed was a little extra, this information or that factoid or this logic,

02:47:37.080 | ah yeah.

02:47:38.720 | And they have that.

02:47:39.720 | And I remember having that too.

02:47:41.200 | When I had a teacher who made something clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude.

02:47:48.080 | And now I get that gratitude a good bit.

02:47:50.960 | And yes, it is enormously gratifying.

02:47:54.640 | And I'm not sure I could get it any other way.

02:47:58.320 | And I have learned, and I'm walking proof, that being a critic of society and doing it

02:48:07.600 | systematically and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life.

02:48:15.000 | Very good life.

02:48:17.960 | - Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes to an end.

02:48:25.240 | Do you think about your death?

02:48:26.640 | Are you afraid of it?

02:48:28.680 | - Afraid of it, no.

02:48:29.680 | Think about it, yes.

02:48:32.920 | I'm not afraid.

02:48:35.240 | I've always thought, you know, death is hard for the people that are left when you're dead.

02:48:40.480 | It doesn't bother you very much.

02:48:44.120 | I worry more about my wife.

02:48:46.040 | I'm very attached to my wife.

02:48:48.320 | I might mention to you I got married when I was 23 years old, and that's my wife to

02:48:52.840 | this day.

02:48:56.000 | So I'm lucky, because if you get married to anybody at age 23, it's either luck or it

02:49:02.640 | isn't.

02:49:03.640 | - What role has love played in your life?

02:49:09.760 | - Enormous.

02:49:11.680 | Because I came from a family, you know, if your family is political refugees, which mine

02:49:16.720 | were, who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another continent, learn another language,

02:49:24.720 | find another life income and job, the disruption goes real deep for any refugee.

02:49:34.520 | So my mother and father were both refugees.

02:49:38.020 | They met as refugees.

02:49:43.440 | So I had to, in a way, make it up to them.

02:49:47.800 | I had to be, I was the first child of their, I have a younger sister, but I was the first

02:49:53.360 | child.

02:49:54.360 | And, you know, there's a lot of psychological pressure on you if you're in that situation.

02:50:01.000 | Nobody means you harm, but you've got to do what they couldn't, what was shut off to them

02:50:07.840 | in a way they want you to do.

02:50:10.920 | It's the closest they're gonna get to what they had hoped.

02:50:15.440 | And my parents were both university students.

02:50:17.960 | My father was a lawyer.

02:50:20.200 | My mother had to leave the university to run for her life.

02:50:26.880 | So I had to perform, you know, I went to high school here in the United States.

02:50:31.840 | I had to get all As, I had to be on the football team, I had to play the violin in the orchestra,

02:50:36.920 | do all this because everything had to be achieved.

02:50:42.080 | So I'm an achievement crazy person that way.

02:50:45.800 | But that's functional in this dysfunctional society.

02:50:49.440 | - But on top of that, that's an achievement within the game of this particular society.

02:50:55.040 | But then love seems to be a thing that's greater than that game.

02:50:59.920 | Is that something that made you a better person?

02:51:02.560 | How has it made you a better Marxian and a better--

02:51:06.120 | - Everything, because my wife, my wife by profession is a psychotherapist.

02:51:12.480 | - Excellent, I love it.

02:51:14.400 | - And I needed it.

02:51:16.400 | And so I married it.

02:51:17.400 | I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I think as I look back on it, that was

02:51:24.120 | more than a little what was going on.

02:51:26.960 | And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family

02:51:33.720 | never talked about, never dealt with, never at least explicitly engaged in any of that.

02:51:43.320 | - Because it was all about survival.

02:51:44.880 | The immigrant challenge is survival.

02:51:47.080 | - Survive, survive.

02:51:48.400 | And you're so busy that you tell yourself you can't do that.

02:51:53.800 | Of course you can, and there are other reasons why you're not going to look at those problems.

02:51:58.520 | But the survival is so urgent that you can fool yourself this way, and my parents did

02:52:05.440 | that.

02:52:06.480 | - One last question.

02:52:08.560 | What's the meaning of life, Richard Wolff?

02:52:11.440 | Why are we here?

02:52:12.440 | - I will quote you, Mr. Marx.

02:52:15.120 | - Let's go.

02:52:17.800 | - Life is struggle.

02:52:19.160 | Now, for me, I have found that to be true, that the struggle, whether it is to build

02:52:29.400 | a relationship with your child, I have two children, whether it's to build one with your

02:52:34.800 | spouse, whether it's to understand a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share

02:52:43.280 | the pleasure of understanding this relationship to a student or to an audience.

02:52:50.360 | These are, it's a struggle to do all those things, but that network of struggles, that

02:52:57.600 | makes life interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.

02:53:04.720 | - And meaningful.

02:53:05.720 | - Very meaningful.

02:53:06.720 | - And that latter thing, I got to say, you do masterfully.

02:53:09.640 | You're one of the great communicators and educators out there today, and it's a huge

02:53:13.920 | honor that you will sit with me for so many hours.

02:53:17.000 | This is awesome.

02:53:18.000 | - Thank you.

02:53:19.000 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolff.

02:53:21.480 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:53:26.520 | And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.

02:53:30.520 | The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.

02:53:35.040 | The point, however, is to change it.

02:53:38.960 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:53:41.960 | -

02:53:47.960 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295

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