slaves produces surplus which the master gets, serfs produces surplus which the lord gets,

employees produces surplus which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative

class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another

group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger,

resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle.

The following is a conversation with Richard Wolff. One of the top Marxist economists and

philosophers in the world. This is a heavy topic, in general and for me personally, given my family

history in the Soviet Union, in Russia, and in Ukraine. Today, the words Marxism, Socialism,

and Communism are used to attack and to divide, much more than to understand and to learn.

With this podcast, I seek the latter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx,

as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries.

And in general, we need to both steal man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize,

and to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant

and at times dangerous. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,

please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Richard Wolff.

Let's start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all. What is Marxism?

What are the defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology?

Richard Wolff Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition

that takes its founding inspiration from the works of Karl Marx. But because

these ideas that he put forward spread as fast as they did and as globally as they did,

literally, it's 140 years since Marx died. And in that time, his ideas have become major types

of thinking in every country on the earth. If you know much about the great ideas of human history,

that's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time.

Richard Wolff And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity,

is that the Marxian ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories

and economic conditions. So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently

in different places at different times. And therefore, Marxism as a kind of first flush definition

is the totality of all of these very different ways of coming to terms with it. For the first

roughly 40, 50 years, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism.

Marks himself, that's all he really did. He never wrote a book about communism. He never wrote

a book really about socialism. Either his comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed.

What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism. And that's what Marxism

was more or less in its first 40 or 50 years. The only qualification of what I just said

was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks. In 1871, there was a collapse of the

French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany. And then the result was

something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the

function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian society. And Marx's people, people

influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune and the leadership of the commune.

And Marx wasn't that far away. He was in London. These things were happening in Paris. That's

an easy transport even then. And for a short time, very short, Marxism had a different

quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize

society differently. Before that had only been implicit. Now it became explicit. What is the

leadership of the Paris Commune going to do? And why? And in what order? In other words,

governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted a few weeks, the French army regrouped.

And under the leadership of people who were very opposed to Marx, they marched back into Paris,

took over, killed a large number of the communards, as they were called, and deported them to

islands in the Pacific that were part of the French empire at the time.

The really big change happens in Russia in 1917. Now you have a group of Marxists,

Lenin Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again,

a war, like in France, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation

because it is the government that loses World War I, has to withdraw, as you know,

Brest Litovsk and all of that, and the government collapses and the army revolts. And in that

situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, splits under

the pressures of all of this into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions. Lenin Trotsky and the

others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story short, he's in exile.

Lenin's position gets him deported because he says Russian workers should not be

killing German workers. I mean, this is a war of capitalists who are dividing the world up into

colonies, and Russian working people should not kill and should not die for such a thing.

As you can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out. Interestingly, in the United States,

the comparable leader at that time of the Socialist Party here, as you know, there was no Communist

Party at this point. That comes later. The head of the Socialist Party, a very important American

figure named Eugene Victor Debs, makes exactly the same argument to the Americans should not

fight in the war. He has nothing to do with Lenin. I don't even know if they knew of each other,

but he does it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States.

By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well. Really, very well. Remarkable.

And he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you see the link, although he had much more courage

politically than Bernie has. That's really interesting. I'd love to return to that link maybe

later. History rhymes. Yes, the complicated story. Anyway, the importance in terms of Marxism is that

now this seizure of power by a group of Marxists, that is a group of people inspired by Marx,

developing what you might call a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians

too, but a Russian interpretation, this now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism

into a plan at least of what you're going to do in the Soviet Union. And a lot of this was then

trial and error. Marx never laid any of this out. Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if

he had because it was 50 years earlier in another country, etc. So what begins to happen, and you

can see how this happens then more later in China and Cuba and Vietnam and Korea and so on, is that

you have kind of a bifurcation. Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism,

but another part of it becomes a set, and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions

of what an alternative post capitalist society ought to look like, how it ought to work,

and there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion, and I would say that that's still

where it is. You have a tradition now that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism,

notion of the alternative, and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework in

which I would answer, that's what Marxism is about. Its basic idea, if you had to have one,

is that human society can do better than capitalism, and it ought to try.

And then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism. Fine. So we'll look at

the critique of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back, what do you think Marx would say

if he just looked at the different implementations of the ideas of Marxism throughout the 20th

century, where his ideas that were implicit were made explicit? Would he shake his head?

Would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations? How do you think he would analyze it?

Well, he had a great sense of humor. I don't know if he had a chance to take a look at his writing,

but he had an extraordinary sense of humor. So my guess is he would deploy his humor in

answering this question, too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of the interpretations

of his work, and he's very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he

could erase the connection between those things and the lineage they claim from him, which he would.

There's a German word. I don't know if you speak the other languages. There's a wonderful German

word called verzichte, and it's stronger than the word refuse. It's if you want to refuse something,

but with real strong emphasis. It's a German way of saying, I don't want to do that. And he would

talk then in philosophical terms, because remember, he was a student of philosophy.

He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest. He would wax

philosophical and say that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having a child. You have a

lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person and will find his or her own way.

And these ideas, once they're out there, go their own way.

And as you said, there's a particular way that this idea spread, the speed at which it spread

throughout the world, made it even less able to be stabilized and connected back to the origins

of where the idea came from. The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians,

after the revolution, because they occupied a position for a while, not very long, but they

occupied a position for a while in which, I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these

people criticizing capitalism for a long time, even the Marxists ever since mid century. And these

were the first guys who pulled it off. They made it. And so that there was a kind of presumption

around the world. Their interpretation must be kind of the right one, because look, they did it.

And so for a while, they could enunciate their interpretation, and it came to be widely grasped

as something which, by the way, gets called in the literature, official Marxism. The very idea

that you would put that adjective in front of Marxism, or Soviet Marxism, or Russian Marxism,

there were these words that where the adjective was meant to somehow say, kind of, this is the

canon. You can depart from it, but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no

such thing. And by the 1960s, it was already, it was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years,

it was a kind of, and the irony is, particularly here in the United States, where the taboo against

Marxism kicks in right after World War II, is so total in this country that I, for example,

through most of my adult life, have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time simply explaining

to American audiences that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism,

which wasn't the canon before 1917 and hasn't been since at least the 1960s, but they don't know.

It's not that they're stupid and it's not that they're ignorant. It's that, well, the ignorance

may be, but I mean, it's not a mental problem. It's the taboo shut it down. And so all of the

reopening that in a way recaptures what went before and develops it in new direction, they just

don't know. Nevertheless, it's the serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit. The

Russians, the Soviets at the beginning of the 20th century, made a serious attempt at saying,

okay, beyond the critique of capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this? And so in

that sense, not at a high level, but at a detailed level, it's interesting to look at those particular

schools maybe. Right, because for example, let me just take your point one step further,

you really cannot understand the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution, Vietnamese and the others,

because each of them is a kind of response, let's call it, to the way the Soviets did it.

Are you going to do it that way? Well, yes and no is the answer. This we will do that way,

but that we're not going to do. And the differences are huge, but you could find a thread, I can do

that for you if you want, in which all of them are in a way reacting to the originals. Yes, very

much so. Like maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones. That's something

like that. Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools of that Soviet Marxism? So

we've got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even let's expand out to Maoism. So maybe I could

speak to sort of Leninism and then please tell me if I'm saying dumb things. I think for Lenin,

there was an idea that there could be a small, so the Vanguard party, like a small controlling

entity that's wise and is able to do the central planning decisions. Then for Stalinism, one

interesting, so Stalin's implementation of all of this, one interesting characteristic is to

move away from the international aspect of the ideal of Marxism to make it all about

nationalism, the strength of nation. So Maoism is different in that it's focused on agriculture

and rural. Then Trotskyism, I don't know except that it's anti Stalin. I mean, I don't even know

if there's unique philosophical elements there. Anyway, can you maybe from those or something

else speak to different unique elements that are interesting to think about implementation

of Marxism in the real world? Probably the best way to get into this is to describe something that

happened in Marxism that then shapes the answer to your question. In the early days of Marxist

writings, and you know, his life spans the 19th century. He was born in 1818, dies in 1883,

so literally he lives the 19th century. To make things simple, you might look at the first half

of the first two thirds of his life as overwhelmingly gathering together the precursors to his own

work. Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that partly because he didn't work a regular job

and partly because he was an exile in London, most of his adult life, he worked in the library.

I mean, he had a lot of time. He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were

manufacturers. And you might say the first half to two thirds of his life are about

the critique of capitalism. And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work,

Western Europe more or less, was interested in. That's what they wanted. And he gave that to them.

He wasn't the only one, but he was very, very effective at it. By the last third of his life,

he and the other producers of a anti capitalist movement, people like the Chartists in England,

that's a whole other movement, the anarchists of various kinds, like Proudhon in France or

Kropotkin or Bakunin in Russia, and so on. You put all these together and there was a shift

in what the audience, let's call it a mixture of militant working class people on the one hand

and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other. They now wanted a different question.

They were persuaded by the analysis. They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would

like to do better than. And the question became, how do we do this? Not anymore, should we? Why

should we? Could we maybe fix capitalism? No, they had gotten to the point the system has to be

fundamentally changed. But they got, they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say,

well, what will that new system looks like? They didn't go that way. What they did was ask the

question, how could we get beyond capitalism? It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured

people's minds, people's daily lives and so on. And the focus of the conversation became,

this was already by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism

whereby we would get beyond. And again, make a long story short, the conversation focused

on seizing the government. See, before that, it wasn't that the government was not a major

interest. If you read Marx's capital, the great work of his maturity, three volumes,

there's almost nothing in the state. I mean, he mentions it, but he's interested in the details

of how capitalism works, factory by factory, store by store, office. What's the structure?

The government's secondary for him. But there's also humans within that capitalist system of,

there's the working class. Right. That's what he's interested in. Think of it almost mechanically

like the workplace. In the workplace, there are some people who do this and other people who do

that. And they accept this division of authority and they accept this division of what's going on

here, particularly because he believed that the core economic objective of capitalism was to

maximize something called profit, which his analysis located right there in the workings

of the enterprise. And the government was not the key factor here. And he was looking at ideas of

value. Yes. How much is the, how much value does the labor of the individual workers provide? And

that means how do we reward the workers in an ethical way? And so those are the questions of...

Right. Well, we'll get there. Yeah. Okay. But the government is not part of that picture.

That's right. Okay. So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century,

Marx is still alive when this begins, but it really gets going after he dies, is this debate

among Marxists about the role of the state. They all agree, nearly all of them, agree

that you have to get the state. The working class has to get the state because they see the state

as the ultimate guarantor of capitalism. When things get really out of hand, the capitalist

calls the police or he calls the army or both of them. And so the government is, in a sense,

this key institution captured in Marxist language by the bourgeoisie, by the other side, the

capitalists, and yet vulnerable because of suffrage. If suffrage is universal or nearly so,

if everybody gets a vote, which in a way capitalism brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism

in the French American Revolution, is to create a place where elected represented. So the

government being subject to suffrage creates the notion, aha, here's how we're going to,

we have to seize the state. And then that gets agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how

to do it. One side says, you go with the election, you mobilize the voter. That gets to be called

reformism within Marxism. And the other side is revolution. Don't do that. This system,

if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged. You can't get there. They've long ago learned how to

manipulate parliaments. They buy the politicians and all that. And therefore, revolution is going

to be the way to do it. Revolution gets a very big boost because the Russians, they did it that way.

They didn't do, I mean, they fought in the Duma in the parliament, but they didn't. And this focus

on the state, I would argue, goes way beyond what the debaters at the time, and if you're

interested in the great names, there was a great theorist of the role of the state

in a reformist strategy to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important.

His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautzke and Rosa Luxemburg, two other huge figures in Marxism

at the time. And they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader

debate. And by the way, that debate still goes on.

So reformism versus revolution. And in terms of not all that different, I mean,

it's adjusted to history, but in terms of different.

Can you comment on where you lean in terms of the mechanism of progress,

reformation versus revolution? I'd rather tell you the historical story.

Over and over and over again, in most cases, the reformists have always won because revolution

is frightening, is scary, is dangerous. And so most of the time, when you get to the point

where it's even a relevant discussion, not an abstract thing for conferences, but a real

strategic issue, the reformists have won. I mean, and I'll give you an example from the

United States. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, you had an extraordinary shift to the

left in the United States, the greatest shift to the left in the country's history before or since.

Nothing like it. Suddenly, you created a vast left wing composed of the labor movement, which

went crazy in the 1930s. We organized more people into unions in the 1930s than at any time before

or any time since it is the explosion. And at the same time, the explosion of two socialist parties

and the Communist Party that became very powerful, and they all worked together, creating a very

powerful leftist presence in this country. They debated in a strategically real way reform or

revolution. The reformers were the union people by and large, and the communists were the revolutionaries

by and large because they were affiliated with the communist international, with Russia and all

of that. And in between, you might say that the two socialist parties, one that was Trotskyist

and Inspiration and the other one, more moderate Western European kind of socialism, and they had

this intense debate. And they ended up, the reformists won that debate. There was no revolution in

the 1930s here, but there was a reform that achieved unspeakably great successes, which is

why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does because it achieved in a few years in the 1930s,

starting around 1932, three social security in this country. We had never had that before.

That's the same one we have now. Unemployment insurance never existed before, which I have till

today. Minimum wage for the first time, still have that today. And a federal program of employment

that hired 15 million people. I mean, these were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working

class. That's the 30s and the 40s. 30s, not much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s. And here's

the best part. It was paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. So when people today

say, well, you can tax the government, the joke is I have to teach American history to Americans

because it has been erased from consciousness.

We'll return to that. But first, let's take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th century

with the Russians. Right, with the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this.

Everybody was right. The state is crucial. We were right. We were the revolutionaries.

We seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state and socialism is when the working class

captures the state, either by reform or revolution, and then uses its power over the state

to make the transition from capitalism to the better thing we're going toward.

And again, make a long story short in the interest of time. What happens, which is not

unusual in human history, is that the means becomes the end. In other words, Lenin, who's

crystal clear before he, you know, he doesn't live very long. He dies in 23. So he's only in power

from 17 to 22. By that time, he has his brain trouble and not 1923, by the way, not at age

23. 1923. Yeah, it's only there for four or five years. He's very clear, even says that I've done

work on, I've published, so I know this stuff. He says in a famous speech, let's not fool ourselves.

We have captured the state, but we don't have socialism. We have to create that. We have to

move towards that. With Stalin, you know, Lenin dies and there's a fight between Stalin and

Trotsky. Trotsky loses the fight. He's exiled. He goes to Mexico. Stalin is now alone in power,

does all the things he's famous or infamous for. And by the end of the 20s, Stalin makes a decision.

I mean, not that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that they do the following.

They declare that they are socialism. In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the

state, not when the state capture has enabled you to do X, Y, Z, other things. No, no, the state

itself, once you have it, is socialism. So when a socialist captures the state, that's socialism.

Exactly. And that's exactly right. I feel like that's definitionally confusing.

Well, it shouldn't be, because I'll give you an example. If you go to many parts of the United

States today and you ask people, what's socialism? They'll tell you, they'll look you right in the

face and they'll say, the post office. And you know, when I first heard this as a young man,

you know what? The post office. It took me a while to understand the post office, Amtrak,

the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government runs something.

This is socialism. See, capitalism is if the government doesn't run it. If a private

individual who's not a government official runs it, well, then it's capitalism. If the government

takes it, then it's socialism. So what is wrong with that reasoning? So the idea, I think...

There's nothing wrong with it. It's a way of looking at the world. It's just got nothing

to do with Marx. Well, there's Marx. There's Marxism. Let's try to pull this apart. So what role

does central planning have in Marxism? So Marxism is concerned with this class struggle,

with respecting the working class. Right. What is the connection between that struggle and

central planning that is often... Central planning is often associated with Marxism.

Right. So a centralized power doing... Russia did that.

Allocation. So that has to do with a very specific set of implementations initiated

by the Soviet Union. It has nothing to do with Marx. How else can you do... I don't think you can

find anywhere in Marxist writing anything about central planning or any other kind of planning.

Again, fundamentally, then, Marx's work has to do with factories, with workers, with the bourgeoisie,

and the exploitation of the working class. Exactly.

But you still have to take that leap. What is beyond capitalism?

Right. So maybe we should turn to that, focus on that.

Okay. Yes. We've already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism.

How else can we go beyond capitalism? Right. Let me push it a little further.

They didn't succeed in my judgment as a Marxist, and I'm now going to tell you why they didn't

succeed because they didn't understand as well as they could have or should have

what Marxism was trying to do. I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time

under their circumstances. This is not a critique of them, but it's a different way of understanding

what's going on. All right. So give you an example. Most of my adult life, I have taught

Marxian economics. I'm a professor of economics. I've been that all my life.

I'm a graduate of American universities. As it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country

passes for its best universities. It's another conversation you and I can have. So I went to

Harvard, then I went to Stanford, and I finished the Yale. I'm like a poster boy for elite education.

They tried very hard. By the way, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League.

20 semesters, one after the other, no break. In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned

a word about Marxism. That is, no critique of capitalism was offered to me ever with one

except one professor in Stanford in the one semester I studied with him. He gave me plenty

to read, but nobody else. So that's really interesting. You've mentioned that in the past,

and that's very true, which makes you a very interesting figure to hold your ground intellectually

through this idea space where just people don't really even talk about it.

Perhaps we can discuss historically why that is, but nevertheless, that's the case. So

Marxian economics, did Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of dismissal?

The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal. For giving an example,

the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many years,

the canonical book, it isn't quite anymore, was a book authored by a professor of economics at MIT,

named Paul Samuelson, and people who kind of, you know, a whole generation or two were trained

on his textbook. If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree, and the tree is Adam

Smith and David Ricardo at the root, and then the different branches of it. He's trying to give

you an idea as a student of how the thing developed, and it's a tree, and everybody on it is a bourgeois.

And then there's this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of starts heading back down.

That's Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete because he's not a complete faker,

but beyond that, no, there was no. Nothing in the book gives you two paragraphs of an approach.

But that's Cold War. I mean, that's really, that's really neither here to that. That's the

craziness. Yeah, that's the Cold War in this country. My professors were afraid. Anyway,

let me get to the core of it, what I think will help. Marx was interested in the relationship

of people in the process of production, that he's interested in the factory, the office, the store.

What goes on, and by that he means what are the relationships among the people that come together

in a workplace? And what he analyzes is that there is something going on there that has not been

adequately understood and that has not been adequately addressed as an object needing

transformation. And what does he mean? The answer is exploitation, which he defines mathematically

in the following way. Whenever in a society, any society, you organize people, adults, not the

children, not the sick, but you know, healthy adults. In the following way, a big block of them,

a clear majority, work. That is, they use their brains and their muscles to transform nature.

A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, whatever. In every human community,

Marx argues, there are the people who do that work, but they always produce more chairs,

more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume, whatever their standard of living.

They don't have to be low, it could be medium, it could be high, but they always produce more

than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx, when he writes this, uses the German

word mehr, which is the English equivalent of more. It's the more. That more got badly translated

into the word surplus. Shouldn't it have been? But it was. By the way, by German and English

people doing the translations. What's the difference between more and surplus? Is there a nuanced?

Yeah, because surplus has a notion of its discretionary, its sort of extra. He's not

taking, he's not making a judgment that it's extra. It's a simple math equation. Yes, very simple.

One minus the other. Yes. X minus Y. X is the total output. Y is the consumption

by the producer. Therefore, X minus Y equals S, the surplus. Exactly. Exactly. Now, Marx argues,

the minute you understand this, you will ask the following question. Who gets the surplus?

Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it?

And Marx's answer is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society. How is that organized?

For example, who gets it? What are they asked, if anything, to do with it in exchange for getting

it? What's their social role? For example, here we go now. If you get this and you get the core of

it anyway. And I don't charge much. The workers themselves could get it. Weston lawyers. That's

right. The workers themselves could get it. That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism.

Communism would be if the workers who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it.

So this has to do not just with who gets it, but more importantly,

who gets to decide who gets it? Well, who gets it and who gets to decide what to do with it?

Right. Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it. So,

the logic of the word sequence, Marx uses the word appropriated. In other words,

whose property, who gets to decide, if you like, what happens? All that property ever meant

is who gets to decide and who's excluded. That's a clean definition of communism.

Right. And that's it. By the way, it's not just clean. It's the only one.

So what's, can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context?

Easy. It becomes very easy. Exploitation exists if and when the surplus that's produced

is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced it. Slaves produce a surplus

which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the Lord gets. Employees produce a surplus

which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one class

produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced

it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems

you can lump under the heading, class struggle. I use a metaphor, simple metaphorical story.

You have two children, let's assume, and you take them to Central Park a few blocks from here.

It's a nice day and the children are playing and in comes one of those men with an ice cream truck

comes by, ding a ling a ling a ling. Your children see the ice cream. Daddy, get me an ice cream.

So you walk over, you take some money and you get two ice cream cones and you give them to one of the

children. The other one begins to scream and yell and how? Obviously. What's the issue? And you

realize you've just made a terrible mistake. So you order the one you gave the two ice cream cones to

give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it is. And that's how you solve the

problem. Until a psychologist comes along and says, you know, you didn't fix it by what you

just did. You should never have done that in the first place. My response, though you understand,

all of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic, political, cultural, these are all

giving the ice cream cone back to the kid you should, you should never do this in the first

place. Reallocation of resources creates bitterness and populace. Look at our, we've,

this country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my life and I've lived

here all my life and I've worked here all my life. It's tearing itself apart and it's tearing itself

apart basically over the re division, the redistribution of wealth, having so badly

distributed in the first, but that's all in Marx. And notice, as I explained to you what is going

on in this tension filled production scene in the office, the factory, the store, I don't have to

say a word about the government. I'm not interested in the government. The government's really a very

secondary matter to this core question. And here comes the big point. If you make a revolution

and all you do is remove the private exploiter and substitute a government official without

changing the relationship, you know, you can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you're not

getting the point of the Marxism. The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation

per se. You got to change the organization of the workplace so there isn't a group that

makes all the decisions and gets the surplus vis a vis another one that produces it. If you do that,

you will destroy the whole project. Not only will you not achieve what you set out to get,

but you'll so misunderstand it that the Germans again have a phrase, it's get chief. It goes

crooked. It doesn't go right. The project gets off the rails because it can't understand

either what its objective should have been and therefore it doesn't understand how and why it's

missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped for. I mean, there's a

lot of fascinating questions here. So one is to what degree, so there's human nature, to what degree

this communism, a lack of exploitation of the working class naturally emerge. If you leave

two people together in a room and come back a year later, if you leave five people together in a

room, if you leave a hundred people and a thousand people, it seems that humans form hierarchies

naturally. So the clever, the charismatic, the sexy, the muscular, the powerful, however you

define that, start becoming a leader and start to do maybe exploitation in a non negative sense,

a more generic sense, starts to become an employer, not in a capitalist sense, but just as a human.

Here, you go do this and in exchange, I will give you this, just becomes the leadership role.

So the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice. The idea of communism would be nice

to not steal from the world. It's nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice

because of human nature. Because of human nature. That's, thank you. So what can we say about

leveraging human nature to achieve some of these ends? There's so many ways of responding in no

particular order. Here are some of them. The history of the human race, as best I can tell,

is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society, arise and as they do,

they rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they are socially disruptive

and unacceptable. The argument isn't really then, is there a need or an instinct? Is there some human

nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is, this has to be repressed or

else we don't have a society. You know, and Freud helps us to understand that that repression

is going on all the time and it has consequences. It's not a finished project. You repress it.

It's gone. It doesn't work like that. So for example, when you get a bunch of people together

at some point, they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to want the

other person or persons to disappear, to be dead, to be gone. But we don't permit you to do that.

We just don't. Every economic system that has ever existed has included people who defend it

on the grounds that it is the only system consistent with human nature and that every effort to go

beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you endless documents of every

tribal society I've ever studied, every anthropological community that has ever been studied, slavery

wherever it's existed, I can show you endless documents in which the defenders of those systems,

not all of them of course, but many defenders used that argument to naturalize a system is a way

to hold on to it, to prevent it from going, to counter the argument that every system is born,

every system evolves, and then every system dies. And therefore capitalism since it was born, and

since it's been developing, we all know what the next stage of capitalism is.

Looking in fur. The burden is on the people who think it isn't going to die.

Okay, so it doesn't mean they're wrong, but what you're saying is if we look at history,

you're deeply suspicious of the argument this is going against human nature because we keep using

that for basically everything including toxic relationship, toxic systems, destructive systems.

That said, well, let me just ask a million different questions. So one, what about the argument that

sort of the employer, the capitalist takes on risk? So versus the employee who's just there doing

the labor, the capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk. Are they not in sort of

aggregating this organization and taking this giant effort, hiring a lot of people? Aren't

they taking on risk that this is going to be a giant failure?

So first of all, there's risk almost in everything you undertake. Any project that begins now and

ends in the future takes a risk that between now and that future something's going to happen that

makes it not work out. I mean, I got into a cab before I came here today in order to do this

with you. I took a risk. The cab could have been in an accident. The lightning could have hit us.

A bear could have eaten my left foot. Who the hell knows?

But shouldn't I reward you for the risk you took?

No, hold it a second. Let's do this step by step. So everybody's taking a risk. I always

found it wonderful. You talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk.

Let's go with the worker with the capitalist. That worker, he moved his family from Michigan

to Pennsylvania to take that job. He made a decision to have children. They are teenagers.

They're now in school at a time when their friendships are crucial to their development.

You're going to yank them out of the school because his job is gone. He took an enormous risk

to do that job every day, to forestall all the other things he could have done.

He was taking a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next month, next year. He bought a house

which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's now stuck. He has to make a monthly

payment. If you make a mistake, you capitalist, he's the one who's going to... You're a capitalist.

You got a lot of money. Otherwise, you wouldn't be in that position. You've got a cushion. He

doesn't. If you investigate, you'll see that in every business I've ever been in. I've been

involved in a lot of them. So you think it's possible to actually measure risk or as your

basic argument is there's risk involved in a lot of both the working class in the bourgeoisie,

the capitalist, and it's very difficult. And the worker would never come and say,

because he's been taught right, I want this payment, a wage for the work I do,

and I want this payment for the risk I take. Well, there's some level of communication

like that. You have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs, but that's probably built into the salary,

all those kinds of things. But you're not incorporating the full spectrum of risk.

You don't believe that. This country is now being literally transformed from below by an

army of workers who work at Amazon, fast food joints. You know what their complaint is? It's

killing us. We get paid shit and it's killing us. There is no relationship except in the minds of

the defenders of capitalism, between the ugliness, the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one

hand and the wage. Let me give you just a couple of examples. This is my job. This is my life,

what I do. The median income of a childcare worker in the United States right now as we speak

is $11.22 an hour, median. So 50% make less, 50% make more. The median income for a car park

attendant is several dollars per hour higher than that. What does the car park attendant do?

He stares at your car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it.

Maybe he parks it and moves it around to get it in and out. By any measure that I know of that

makes any rational sense, being in charge of toddlers, two, three, four year olds who are at

the key moment of mental formation the first five years, to give that a lower salary than you give

the guy who watches your car. Come on, I know how to explain it. Gender explained, all kinds of

issues. The car park people are males and the childcare people are females and that in our

culture is a very big marker of what, but the one who said only the economics professor,

nobody else, says this stuff because in economics, I don't know if you were familiar with our

profession, but we have something which we call marginal product. This is a fantasy. I was a

mathematician. Before I became an economist, I loved mathematics. I specialized in mathematics.

So I know mathematics pretty well. What economists do is silly, is childish, but they think it's

mathematics. But think for a minute what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal

product of a factor of production, like a worker. In the textbook, when it's taught,

I've taught this stuff. I hold my nose, but I teach it. Then I explain to students,

what I've just taught you is horseshit, but first I teach it.

What is the marginal product if it might be useful to say? The notion is, if you take away

one worker right now from the pile, what will be the diminution of the output? That's the marginal

product of that worker. The amount of the output that diminishes the output of the raw product.

Usually in real terms, so physical, not the value. You could do a value,

but it's really more the physical you're at. I mean, there is a transformation thing. I'd love

to talk to you about value. It's so interesting. I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price

and all of that, but I just want to get to that. Hegel, who is Marx's teacher, has a famous line.

You can't step in this in the same river twice. The argument is, you and the river have changed

between the first and the second time, so it's a different you and it's a different river.

You can choose not to pay attention to that. You can't claim you're not doing that.

You can't claim that you can actually do that because you can't. There is no way to do that.

So the meaning that you can't just remove a worker and have a clean mathematical calculation of the

effect that it has on the output? That's right, because too many other things are going on,

too many things are changing and you cannot assume, much as you want to, that the outcome

on the output side is uniquely determined by the change you made on the input side.

You can't do that. Even in the average, it's not going to work out.

You can take, look, mathematics is full of abstractions. You can say, as we do in economics,

Keteris Paribus, everything else held constant, but you have to know what you just did.

You held everything. You know why you do that? Because you can't do that in the real world.

That's not possible. You better account for that. Otherwise, you're mistaking the abstraction

from the messy reality you abstracted from to get the abstraction.

As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiment or an actual experiment of

removing every single economist from the world, would we better off or worse off?

Much better off. Okay. Economics, and I'm one. I'm talking about myself.

See, economics got... We're going to ship all the

economists to Mars and see how the world works off.

No, but the serious part of this is that economics,

you know, it's really about capitalism. Economics as a discipline is born with

capital. There was no such thing. When I teach, I teach courses at the university,

for example, called History of Economic Thought, right? And I begin the students with Aristotle

and Plato. And I say, you know, they talked about really interesting things, but they never

called it economics. There was no... It made no sense to people to abstract something as

central to daily life as economics broadly defined. It made no sense. That's a creation

much, much later. That's capitalism that did that, created the feeling. So when I give them

Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them particular passages. By the way, footnote,

because your audience would like it. Plato and Aristotle talked about markets because they lived

at a time in ancient Greece when market relations were beginning to intrude upon these societies.

So they were both interested in this phenomena, that we're not just producing goods and then

distributing among us. We're doing it in a quid pro quo. You know, I'll give you three oranges,

you give me two shirts, a market exchange. And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets,

denounced them, and for the same reason, they destroy social cohesion. They destroy community.

They make some people rich and other people poor, and they set us against each other, and it's

terrible. And that's what they agreed on that. Here's what they disagreed on. One of them said,

okay, there can be no markets. That was Plato. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no,

no, too late for that. The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that

has crawled in amongst us would be too devastating. So we can't do that. But what we can do is

control it, regulate it, get from the market what it does reasonably well, and prevent it

from doing the destructive things it does so badly.

So the fundamentally, the destructive thing of a market is just the engine of capitalism. So

it creates exploitation of the worker. It facilitates it, and it is an institution

that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible danger to community. Which, by the way,

is a way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world. Look, the medieval Catholic

church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury. And this was that God said, if there's a person

who needs to borrow from you, then that's a person in need. And the good Christian thing to do

is to help him. To demand an interest payment rather than to help your fellow man is,

God hates you for that. That's a sin. Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes.

But would Jesus be crying when you try to scale that system? So that has to do with the

intimate human interaction. The idea of markets is you're able to create a system that involves

thousands, millions of humans. And there'd be some level of safe, self regulating fairness.

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

I wonder what, so I guess... Suppose you were interested in having,

suppose you took us your problem, we have a set of funds that can be loaned out.

People don't want to consume it, they're ready to lend it. Okay. To whom should they lend it?

Well, we could say in our society, we're going to run this the way professors,

in institutions like MIT, work this. They write up a project. They send the project

into some government office where it is looked at against other projects. And this office in

the government decides, we're going to fund this one and that one because they're more needed in

our society. We are in greater need of solving this problem than that problem. And so we're

going to lend money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend

over here because we're going to, but instead what we do is who can pay the highest interest rate.

Whoa, what, what, what do you do it? Why, what ethics would justify you do it? It's like a

market in general. Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage.

That's one basic way to understand it. And so if the demand is greater than the supply,

which is all the word shortage means, has no other meaning. If the demand is greater than the supply,

okay, now you've got a problem. You can't satisfy all the demanders because you don't have enough

supply. You have a shortage. Okay, now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people

who have a lot of money to bid up the price of whatever's short and that solves your problem

because as the price goes up, the poor people can't, they drop out. They can't buy the thing

at the exalted price. So you've got a way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people

with the most money. At this point, most human beings confronted with this explanation of a

market would turn against it because it contradicts their Christian, Judaic, Islamic, all of them

would say, what? You know what that means? It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk

and give it to their cat while the poor person has no milk for their five children.

There it is. Do you want to market? Why? Over the fundamental thing that seems unfair,

there's the resulting inequality now. Or death. Or death. Well, that's the ultimate inequality.

Yes, it is. What about, and we're going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics,

to the sort of debate type of thing. What about sort of the lifting ties raise all boats?

Meaning, if we look at the 20th century, a lot of people, maybe you disagree with this,

but they attribute a lot of the innovation and the average improvement in the quality of life

to capitalism, to inventions and innovation, to engineering and science developments

that resulted from competition and all those kinds of forces. So not looking at the individual

unfairness of exploitation as it's specifically defined, but just observing historically.

Looking at the 20th century, we came up with a lot of cool stuff that seemed to have made life easier

and better on average. What do you say to that? I have several responses to that,

but I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's going on there. But let me give you the

argument so that you can hear them and then you can evaluate them as can anybody who's listening

or watching. Marx was a student of Hegel and one of Hegel's central arguments was that everything

that exists, exists, quote, in the contradiction. In simple English, there's a good and bad side,

if you like, to everything. And you won't understand it unless you accept that proposition and start

looking for the good things that are the other side of the bad ones and the bad things that are

the other side of the good one, et cetera. The dialectic. Yes, exactly. And Marx, very attentive

to that, explicitly agrees with this on many occasions and applies it, of course, to the

central object of his research, capitalism. So this is not a simple minded fellow who's telling

you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this system achieved

or accomplished. And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological dynamism

of the system, which Marx takes to be profound because, you know, he lived at the time when

major breakthroughs in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved.

But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement

in the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people,

Marx now comes back and says, oh, wait a minute here. Number one, capitalism as a system

has been mostly represented by capitalists, which makes a certain sense. And those capitalists with

very few exceptions, some but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the

lives of the mass of people. The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What

that means is replace a worker with a machine, move the production from expensive U.S. to cheap

China, bring in desperate immigrants from other parts of the world because they will work for

less money than the folks that you have here at home. Every measure to help the standard of living

of American workers had to be fought for for decades over the opposition of capitalists

from the beginning to right now. The reason we have a minimum wage, which was past 19,

middle of the 1930s, when it was proposed, it was blocked by capitalists. They got together,

they don't want, and today, just a factoid for you. The last time the minimum wage was raised

in the United States, federal minimum wage, was in 2009 when it was set at the lofty sum

of $7.25 an hour, which you cannot live on. Over the last 12 years or so, whatever it is,

not 11, 12, 13 years since then, we have had an increase in the price level in this country

every year, and in the last year, 8.5%. During that time that the prices went up,

the minimum wage was never raised. What? This is a time of stock market boom, of growing inequality.

The nerve of the defender of capitalists who wants now to get credit for the improvement

in the standard of life of the workers that was fought by every generation,

you know, it takes your breath away. It's an argument, whoa. But I take my hat off if I had

one, because that is one of the only ways to justify this system. Long ago, let me get the

heart of it, long ago, capitalism could have overcome hunger, could have overcome disease,

could have, I mean, way beyond what we have now, but it didn't. And that's the worst

moral condemnation imaginable. How do you justify that when you could, you didn't?

Look, let me get at it another way, because this may interest you anyway.

The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically dynamic, it is. And along the way,

it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better, no question. But the notion

that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is somehow built into capitalism

is factually nuts and is such an outrageous, and I can give you a, because you do math,

you'll understand it. Think of it this way. Imagine a production process in which you have

$100 that the capitalist has to lay out for tools, equipment, and raw materials,

and $100 that he has to lay out for workers, hire the workers, and he puts them all together,

and he has an output. And let's say the output is 100 units of something at one of the prices,

and that's his revenue. And when he takes his product and sells it and gets the revenue,

let's say the revenue is, it doesn't really matter, it's 120, for lack of a better word,

220, sorry. And he takes 100 of it and replaces the tools, equipment, and raw materials he used up,

another 100 to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other 20 is his profit,

and he puts that aside. Now along comes a technological breakthrough, a machine, a new

machine. And the new machine is so effective, you can get the same number of units of output

with half the workers. So you don't need to spend 100 on workers, you only need to spend 50.

You can do it with half the workers. And so the capitalist goes to the workers,

by the way, this happens every day, and he says to half of them, you're fired.

Don't come back Monday morning, I don't need you. It's nothing personal, I got a machine.

Why does he do that? Because the 50 he now no longer has to spend on labor because it doesn't

need half of them, he keeps. Everything else is the same, the machine, everything else is just

to make the math easy. So he keeps, as his own profit, the 50 that before he paid for those

workers. Because when he sells it for 220, that 50 they'll have to give to the next

generation, because he has a new machine. So that's what he does. The technology leads,

he's happy, he's become more profitable, he's got an extra 50, which is why he buys the machine.

The workers are screwed. Half of them just lost their job, have to go home to their husband and

wife, tell them I don't have a job anymore, I didn't do anything wrong. The guy was nice enough

to say it was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn't need them. So I'm completely screwed here,

I don't know what I'm going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage,

my children's education or whatever else he's got going for himself.

All right, now, now the point. There was, of course, an alternative path. The alternative

path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same that you did before,

for half a day's work. You would have got the same output, same revenue, same profit as before.

But the gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day of the lives

of these workers. The majority of workers would have been really helped by this technology,

but instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle of more

money. You want to support a system like this? Well, to go back to Hegel, the good and the bad.

So you just listed the bad and you also first listed the good, the technological innovation

of this kind of system. The question is the alternative, whatever, as we try to sneak up

to ideas of what the alternative might look like, what are the good and the bad of the alternative?

So you just kind of, as a opposite, by contrast, showed that, well, a nice alternative is you

work less, get paid the same, you have more leisure time, opportunity to pursue other

interests, other interests, the creative interests, family, flourish as a human being,

basically strengthen and embolden the basic humanity that's under all of us. Yes. But then

what cost does that have on the deadline fueled, competition fueled machine

of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism?

It slows it down.

It slows it down. And the question is, which is more important for the flourishing of humanity?

I agree with that. And I'd love there to be a democratic mechanism. So let's discuss it,

let's debate it, and then let's decide what mixture, because it's not either or,

the math problem I gave you is either or, we could mix it, you could have

a third less of a working day instead of a half less, and then the other part would be extra

profit for our employer, et cetera, et cetera. So let's have a democratic discussion of what

is the mix between the positive and we have no such thing. All of this is decided by one side

in this debate, which not only we know what they do, they always choose the one that maximizes

their profit, because that's what they were told to do in business school where I've taught.

So not only is it an undemocratic decision, but it's lopsided to boot. So we don't have

the opportunity, but I would love for us to be good Hegelian Marxists and say,

let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision that we can.

We'll make mistakes, but we'll all make them together. It won't be one of us making a dictatorial

decision. You know, Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not as a

notion of how government is not, I'm sorry, not Marx, Lenin did that, not as a notion of how the

government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is. The dictatorship of these

key decisions is not made by some sitting council. It's made by each little capitalist in his or

relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is why Marx focused his analysis on that

point. And by the way, I can sketch for you right now so it doesn't lurk in the background

what the alternative is. Let's go there. Okay. It goes right back to what I said earlier.

The workers of themselves, the collection of employees together appropriate their own surplus

and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of whether or not

to buy a machine and whether or not to use the machine and the savings it might allow

to be handled by more leisure for themselves or as a fund for new developments in technology

or new products or whatever they want. And you know, this is an old idea in humans. Marx loved

that. Toward the end of his life, he started reading extensively in anthropology. And one

of the reasons he did that toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering

that in this society and that, including here in the United States, that there were examples

of people who organized their production in precisely this way as a collective democratic

community in which everybody had an equal voice. So we all together decide democratically

what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output we all helped to

produce. So let's do it in, you know, in this country where democracy is a value nearly everybody

subscribes to. Think about it this way, the stunning contradiction that there is a place in our

society where democracy has never been allowed to enter. The workplace, in the workplace a tiny

group of people, unaccountable to the rest of them, the employer, whether that's an individual,

a family, a partnership, or a corporate board of directors. A tiny group of people controls

economically a vast mass of employees. Those employees don't elect those people, have no

nothing, there is no accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable.

And this society insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor

matter of producing everything in a way that is the direct, it's autocratic.

So to push back on a few things. So one is the idea of this society calling itself democratic

is that the government is elected democratically and the government is able to pressure the

workplace through the process of regulation. You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know,

minimum wage, all those kinds of things. That's the one idea. The other is there is a natural

force within the capitalist when there's no monopolies of competition being the accountability.

So if you're a shitty boss, the employee in the capitalist system has the freedom

to move to another company work for a better boss. So that that creates pressure on the

employers and the bosses. That's at least the idea that you there's two boundaries of

you not misbehaving. One is the law. So regulatory regulations by passed by the government,

democratic. And the second is because there's always alternatives in theory, then that puts

pressure on everyone to behave well, because you can always leave. So I mean, that's kinds of

accountability. But what you're saying is that does not result in a significant enough accountability

where the employer that avoids exploitation of the worker.

Absolutely. I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms. And let me respond to

that. And then I'll counter argument. First, competition. Here again, we have to be Hegelians

just a little competition destroys itself. It doesn't need any out. The whole point of competition

is to beat the other guy. If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better

quality or a lower price or maybe both, then I win because the customers will come to me

because my price is lower or my quality is better. And they'll leave the other guy,

he'll go out of business. Now let's follow. When he goes out of business, because I won the

competition, he fires his workers. I hire them because I'm now going to be able to serve a

market he can't serve anymore. So I'm going to I'm going to buy the used equipment. I'm going

to, and thereby many become few. Monopoly is the product of competition. It's not the antithesis.

It's the product. Well, let's see. That's where it comes from. There's another element to the

system where there's always a new guy that comes in. There isn't. There isn't. That's the dream.

The entrepreneurial spirit of a free of the United States, for example, of a capitalist system is

you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build up a business that takes on Google

and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car for GM, which is what you look at Tesla,

for example. That's the American dream. One of the many ideals of the American dream is you can

move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world. It can happen.

It can happen, but you know what that's like. That's like you can win a lottery.

No, that's not quite. No, the lottery is complete luck. Here you can work your ass off if you have

a good idea. The odds are better in the lottery. That's not true. There's a lot of new businesses.

How many Teslas do you know? Tesla's a really bad example because the car company, the automotive

sector is so difficult to operate as such a thin margin of profit. They're probably a good example

of capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of lack of innovation.

You know, that's a very complicated industry because of the supply chain.

Come on. They have their uniqueness as you're quite right, but so does every other industry.

The one thing that's common is that many become few. What you can also have is when you have a few,

they jack up the price. They make an enormous profit. In the irony of capitalism, Marx would

love this, they begin to incentivize people to break into this industry because the few remaining

are making a wild amount of profit because they are a few and can jigger the market to make it work

like that for them. But the reason every small capitalist is trying to build market share,

that's a polite way of saying they want to become a monopolist or to be more exact,

an oligopolist, one of a handful of firms that dominates. That's what they're there for.

But yeah, to push back a little bit also, because that could be, this is a question also,

do you think we're in danger of oversimplifying capitalism that completely removes the basic

decency of human beings? So if you give me a choice to press a button to get rid of the

competition, but that's going to lead to a lot of suffering, there's a lot of people at the heads

of companies that won't press that button. That it's not in the calculation, it's not just money,

it's human well being too. So like, yes, you and I don't live in the same place then.

So you're saying that the forces of capitalism take over the minds of the people at the top.

You're good. And then they seize being human, essentially.

The basic, okay. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I mean, that's fine.

Depending on your model of humans, but they lose track of the better angels of their nature,

and they just become cogs in the machine, but they just happen to be the cogs at the top.

I would put it differently, that the system is so set up, it's a little bit like natural selection.

The guys who may, I could say the women too, it doesn't matter, the people who make it up through

the layers of the bureaucracy and get to the top in these things have had to do things along the way

that becomes selective. If they can't stand it, because they have that human quality,

and there are people like, I've known them. They're the ones running an Airbnb in Vermont.

They went there and they said, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to treat people like that.

I'm going to make a lovely place in Vermont with my husband or my wife or whatever, and I'm going to

be enjoying the people that come by and be a decent human. Of course, of course, but the system

selects the firm. If you don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up, you're toast

there anyway. The rest of the people who vote for you are going to kick you out. You can tell them

all day long what a lovely person you are. They're going to look at you and wonder,

what happened to you? How did you even get this far with the lovely person horseshoe?

It's not necessarily just lovely person. Maybe I'll just say my bias is the people I know are

especially at the top of companies that are in the tech sector where innovation is such a big

part of it. I think a lot of the things we're talking about is when there's not much innovation

in the system. Innovation usually comes in the history of capitalism. Innovation comes in spurts.

There's the electric period, the chemistry period, the nuclear period. There's now whatever you want

to call it, the artificial intelligence or robotics or computer. It comes and then there's a flurry

as everything is reorganized around whatever the newest technology is, and then you have a period

where you can get excited about that. The very rich people who come to the top can talk endlessly

as they always do about innovation. Again, this is a recurring kind of debate and a recurring

kind of issue. For me, how do I put this in a way that I don't mean to offend.

So please, please. No, no, no. I don't want to. But

the problem with capitalism is, and maybe you'll like this, the problem with capitalism is

not that it is the one thing that's consistent with human nature. That's what its defenders

would like to have us believe. But if anything, I would argue the opposite,

that it is such a contradiction to parts of our nature, not other parts, that it can never quite

make it. There's always going to be the people who don't go along with it, people you're talking

about, who do quit along the way, or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top. By God knows

what hook or what crook that they did it. But most of them go, and you know why? Because their

humanity is contradicted by what it is they're being asked to do. I mean, the corporate sector

this year, just to give you an idea, CEOs are jacking up their wage package. They're already

out of whack. I mean, the average CEO pay is now 300 times what the average worker pays,

but they're jacking it up even more. Why? Because that's what's happening in their

universe. That's what they're all doing it, and they have to do. Each one of them justifies that

I have to do that, otherwise I'd lose my guy to the next one, which of course is true,

but is no comfort for the mass of people who want CEOs for whom this argument isn't very exciting.

So, they're doing that at a time when the American people can't cope. They've just gone

through the COVID disaster. They've gone through the worst, second worst economic crash of capitalism

in our history. After two years of this one, two punch, they got an inflation, a third punch,

and we are now predicting rising interest rates and a recession at the end of the year

or early next year. You can't do this to a working class. When this was done to the

German working class in the 1920s, Hitler was the result. You keep doing that in this country.

We're already watching it. You're going to get that too. You're already getting bits and pieces.

You can't keep doing this. So, there's a quiet suffering amidst the working class that's growing.

Hard. Taking out on it. That can turn to anger. Some little 18 year old kid who has to go

three hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket. And it happens every day in this

country, every day. So, that anger rises up in those little ways now and bigger, bigger,

bigger potentially. By the way, there's one more thing on the rationality and this goes to Elon Musk.

If you're interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year. The number

was just released yesterday. 49,000. Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country.

They use up an enormous amount of energy. They use up enormous and our resources.

There is a way to make transportation much more rational. And we've known it for decades. It's

called mass transportation. It's a really beautifully maintained, crystal clear, clean,

frequent system of buses, trains, street trolleys, vans. It could easily be done in this society.

In fact, I once did a project that I estimated cost $30 billion. That's less than we're sending to

Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it.

A public transit system where?

Everywhere in this country. All the major metropolitan. This country's overwhelmingly

metropolitan area. Well, it surely has to be more than $30 billion.

Well, it was a few years ago. Sure. But you're saying it's not.

But I'm using a lot of it. That's insane.

Right. It's not crazy stuff.

It's a reasonable number. Right.

But there's a... Let me just finish the point.

Sure. Yes.

Okay. So I'm trying to be rational here.

If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do, if it's got a lot to do with

fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use of the fossil fuel,

particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass transit.

But we don't... We're doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing.

Well, there's... On... You could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit

because it's going to be reasonable vehicles. It will end, in theory, car ownership. So you

just have a more kind of distributed public transit system.

If it happens, but you know that that's a side effect. His major goal and the major

goal of the other companies that are busy squeezing to get his share of the pie smaller,

so they have some for General Motors to tell you, all of them are making electric cars.

So what they've done is they've replaced the individual car with fossil fuel

with another individual car. Yeah.

That's fucking nuts. What are you doing?

It's one of the things they're doing, but automation is also another one.

But on the Elon side, there's also a hilariously named boring company.

Yes. Which is working on tunnels, which is actually expanding the flexibility you might have

to start playing with ideas of public transit, I think. Listen, I'm now partially living in

Austin, Texas, that I don't know if they know what a public transit system is, period.

Yes.

There's... Most American cities.

Pickup trucks. Well, this is an interesting... So...

The older... By the way, footnote, the older this city, the more likely it has public transportation.

So you're saying...

Boston is the best example. Yes.

Have you been... Well, you...

Yeah, yeah. Of course. Yeah, I have a place in Boston.

Boston with the street railway. Boston is your case study of how to do this,

because they've been doing it all along. New York's pretty good, too.

There's a trade out. Yeah, New York, I would say, is better than Boston because there's...

You know, their technology also helps you out to do the public transit better.

It's almost like Boston is a little too old, but yes, I get your point.

But there is a... The Ford F150 pickup truck symbolizes something about America, and there

is a practical nature to the fact that in order to do public transit, in order to do some of these

things that you're talking about with the working class, there has to be a central planning component,

or there has to be a centralized component. And America is very much based on the idea of,

at least in recent times, well, I would say from the founding of individualism,

of respecting individual freedom. Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas of

Marxism to life, you would trample on individual freedoms? No. Can you respect both?

Sure. For me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people who

have had that freedom eroded under the capitalism. That's a motive for my Marxism. It was for Marx,

too. He loved the French Revolution. He loved the liberté, égalité, fraternité, the great

three, and then democracy, the American contribution, if you like. He believed in all of that. His

critique of capitalism was, it promised it and then never delivered it. And the reason you have

to go beyond it is because it didn't deliver what it had promised. So, for me, it is the fulfillment

of agenda. But again, I'm a Hegelian Marxist, so if you want. Individualism, for me, is not

the way it's set up in this society. Some sort of antithesis to the government. I think an immense

con has been pulled on the American people. And the con works like this. You know what's

bad and what's dangerous and threatens you? It's the government. The government's going to come in

and tell you what to do. The government's going to run your life. The government's the problem.

There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics.

Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn, like the so called Great Recession

of 2008. Who do they blame? The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed. And what

are the media all about? The government. If I were a capitalist, I'd love this. I kicked the

workers by throwing them out of their home. And they don't get angry with me. They get angry with

the government. I fire large numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them

as a result of having no job and no income. And they get angry at the senator. I'm laughing all

the way to the bank. This is a genius stroke. In theory. But if you look at government, because

you said accountability in the capitalist system has no accountability. There's some pushback

I give on the accountability. I think there is some accountability work we can discuss in a

Galilean way. There's more accountability for, I would say, that in theory, government is

perfectly accountable. That's the whole point of a democratic system, is you vote people in.

In practice, there's a giant growing bureaucracy that is accountable only on the surface. There's

two parties that seem to be, are the same media somehow integrated into making the same two

parties that are just wearing different colored shirts to seem like they're very opposed and

are arguing and bitterly arguing and calling each other's names and nasty names and all those

kinds of things. But that's government. Who exactly is worse here? Government or companies?

Why are we asking that question? These are twins. Look, what you were able to say about

Republicans and Democrats just now, with which I agree, I would say the same thing about

corporations and the government. This is the same people, literally the same.

Let's go to Churchill. Which one is worse? Let's go to Churchill. Democracy is the

worst formal government except all the other ones or whatever. This same idea, which one

exactly is worse? Because to me, it seems like... Which one between what and what?

Government and industry and companies. It's because government is plagued by...

I will call it corruption because the corruption of bureaucratic paperwork and then because

they're not accountable. There doesn't seem to be a serious accountability.

Again, we're not living on the same planet. The greatest practitioners of central planning

are corporations. Elon has an operation like General Motors, Ford, IBM, or any of the other

megacorps. They have to plan. They buy up companies because they don't want to deal in the market.

They don't want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs or sell their outputs

to somebody they don't control. They want the professor to teach the genius of a market.

They hate the market and when they grow to be big, they keep buying whoever they were dealing with

before so they could better control them, which requires them then to plan the production and

distribution of goods inside rather than buying them in the market. The model of the government

is the private corporation. I have spent my life, give you an example, in American universities,

big ones, famous ones, not just as a student but as a professor. I teach there at the new school

here. It's another one. They all model themselves after businesses. You can attack the bureaucracy

of universities. Good reason. It's a mess. But they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing

their bureaucracy in a businesslike manner. You're looking at a difference which isn't there.

The government and the private sector are partners and both of them wouldn't have it any other way.

The corporations want that from the government and the government now knows that to please the

corporations is the number one objective they have because that's how they keep their jobs and

keep their system going. For all practical purposes, this is the same people.

But there's important differences that I don't know if they're fundamental or just a consequence

of history. But if you have government, they're accountable in a different way than companies.

Companies are accountable by, especially if you have a consumer, they're accountable by

sort of the consumer spending or not spending their money on whatever the heck the company is

selling. The government is accountable by votes. It seems like government, unlike companies,

for most of companies, history is always too big to fail, meaning it can always just print money.

It can always save itself and that creates a bureaucracy. You rarely pay the cost of

having made bad decisions if you're in government. You distribute the blame

and it's very unclear who's responsible for bad decisions, so bad decisions in government

accumulate. You become more and more and more inefficient and more and more poor in your

decision making in terms of, you said public transit, should we build a public transit system

in this city or not? That's a difficult decision. That's an interesting decision.

I would say it's very often a very good decision, but whoever makes that decision should be

accountable for a good or bad decision and it seems like companies are more accountable.

They feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because they can go bankrupt.

There's much more day to day pressure to make good engineering decisions. Government doesn't

seem to be under the same level of pressure. Do you disagree with that?

I disagree with that. Everything in my history pushes me.

You may be living, I may be living in a different, who knows, a planet or taking a

different sort of drug. I won't mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a

very large company here in the United States, here in the New York area. It involved two brothers

and a family who built it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was kind of the

dynamo of the family and he was more responsible than anybody else building it up.

But he took care of his brothers. He had a nice feeling about his brother. So

the one brother who could not, you know, without help tie his shoes became a vice president.

He got an enormous salary, got a beautiful office in a skyscraper, not that many blocks

from where I'm sitting right now. And that was the way that family handled that company.

And all of his relatives that were somewhere in this company, doing a variety of whatever,

because, and my experience with this, and because I went to the schools I told you,

all my experiences with that group of people, corporate executives, full of those stories,

you know, they made mistake after mistake, which they would tell you about, didn't undermine

there. They were always able to blame somebody else, something else that scraped them through.

And had they not been able to, they would have been replaced by another person who did the same

thing for as long as they could. And they knew it. They would talk about it at family events.

That's how I know. I understand that you want the outside world to look at it this way,

but it's not my experience. But again, what's that kind of thing at the risk of saying human

nature again, I wonder what kind of system allows for that more versus, versus less. This is the

question of the, I would call that, let's put that under the umbrella term of corruption.

Which system allows for more corruption? But remember that the way I defined the

different system is not more or less government. It's more or less allowing a democratic workplace.

Yeah. Reconfiguring it. What happens when everybody has a vote, when you have to explain

what the strategies are, what the alternatives are to a larger number of people than on board of

directors or major shareholders or whoever it is that most companies are responsible to.

And now you've got a whole different universe. It's not a small group of people. Can't be hidden

the way it's normally hidden, most of it on and on and on. This is, you know, worker coops is what

this is called in many parts of the world. So it's not that I'm advocating something that's

never been seen before, not at all. The Marxism, I understand, is to pick from historical precedents

the things that we think will work better. And I think if all the people in an enterprise,

just to drive the point home, democratically decided, they would never give two or three

individuals $100 million while everybody else can't send their kid to college. Have you ever

gone do that? So just to address this point about the particular implementation of Marxism

that was the early days in the Soviet Union, why did Stalinism, for example, lead to so much

bloodshed, do you think, in human suffering? Is there any elements within the ideas of Marxism

that catalyzed the kind of government, the kind of system that led to that bloodshed?

I don't think so. I think there were many things that led to the bloodshed and to all that Stalin's

regimes did. And I spent 10 years of my life with another economist writing a book

about that to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

You might want to take a look at it sometime. But there, I'm going to say a few things now,

but all of those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, etc.

in that work. Let me start with playing a little bit with Hegel.

The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the

Soviet Union did, but what the rest of the world did. You had a really interesting move,

and I'll give you a parallel from today. The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed.

World War I, it just fell apart. The Tsar and all of that, it couldn't survive. It had already

been in trouble. There was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war to Japan. I mean,

if you know Russian history, which I assume you do, you'll know that there was a lot leading up to

the collapse in 1917. And in some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small,

that could seize the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists. Early Iran, with Karensky,

the first government that tried, it wasn't people all that impressed by Marxism. It was people

more skeptical and would not have been called Marxists probably by history. They tried. They

couldn't. Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year. The

rest of the world, though, was horrified. The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken this

immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism, yes, but still

not challenging the power. Now it had the power and in a big country. And they freaked out.

If you know American history, this country, the leadership of this country went completely berserk.

I mean, we had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before. The

20s were a time of palmerades in Boston, the Sackle Vensetti trials, really grim hostility.

And you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution.

The U.S., Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops.

So what you had right away was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. There was a great

professor at Princeton, Meyer, forget his first name, who wrote this wonderful book about all

American foreign policy since 1917 has been obsessed with Russia. Even now, this fight with

Ukraine is half about Russia as if Russia still was the Soviet Union, as if people haven't figured

out. That was a big change back in 1989 and 1990. Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before,

or at least they're not Lenin. They may not be so different from some of the other, but in any case.

So you had one factor was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation, the global. I assume

you know that Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin. She's a critic of Lenins,

by the way, but she's a leftist, hunted down and hacked into bits, killed.

So you are attributing some of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world

turned away. Turned against.

Turned against. So if you turn against, is the better way.

Very, yeah. I mean, not in order of importance, but it's a very important part of the psychology

of being, you know. It's what you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence

that indeed there was a lot to be afraid of at that time. Nobody had ever done it. Look,

you could see the effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at first,

that you could have socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous, that socialism was

internationalism. Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, workers of the

world unite, not workers of Russia unite, workers of the... He had to go through a procedure of

kind of coming to terms with the fact that the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried

in Berlin, was tried in Munich, was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here, they all

failed. They all failed, and he's left. So the French would say. Tout ça, right? You know, all alone.

That's one. The second thing is economic isolation. Russia's a poor country, and it needed

what it got before the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans,

particularly, but others too. Now this was all cut off. And you can see the replay

with the sanctions program. We're going to do it again. We're going to do it again.

We have to do it. The world is different and the sanctions don't work, but they're going to try them.

Because it's the history. But that culture, today is completely different. Russia's a different

place today, but Russia has China, and that changes everything. And they don't get that here yet,

but they will. Yeah, there's a very complicated dynamic with China, even with India.

Yep. Or Turkey. Brazil.

Yeah. Sorry to say human nature may change at a slower pace.

Yes. That has occurred to me as well. I get that point.

So can you steel man the case, or consider the case, that there's something about the

implementation of Marxism, maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing on the working

class and workers unite that naturally leads to a formation of a dictatorial force, a dictator

that says, let us temporarily give power to this person to manage some of the details of how to

run the democracy of giving voice to the workers. So they get to choose. And then that naturally

leads to a dictator. And there's naturally inhuman nature, power and absolute power,

as the old adage goes, corrupts. Absolutely. Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marxist

ideals, you're going to end up with a dictator. And often, when you give too much power to anyone,

human, a small number of people, you're going to get into a huge amount of trouble.

You've put things together there that I would.

That's what... I think if you give... Putsch does a good word.

Yeah, German. Remember, I told you, my mother was born in Germany.

And then your dad is French.

Yeah, but he was born in Metz, if you know European. It's a city on the border of France

in Germany. If you come from... Alsaceans, Alsace in German.

So they're German speaking French.

You have to do both. It's bilingual because it's been back and forth so many times

in medieval days already that it literally, you go from one store to another. The proprietor here

is French and the proprietor there is German, but they all speak both languages because...

You don't speak either of them?

I speak Russian.

Russian, but not German or French.

Ukrainian, no. It took French for four years in high school, but I've forgotten all of it.

I remember the romance and the spirit of the language, but not the details. I'm sure I can

remember. If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long

period of time, and you do it on many levels of ideology, it is not surprising that it sticks

and it stays. You can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution and you will

discover it has a life of its own and it's going to take a long time before people don't.

If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism and that

it doesn't want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was Zeus and Diana

and all the others, and they were very human like, but instead we have one who is the absolute

beginning. What are you doing? You're teaching people an authority line that comes from the

individual. If you have a sequence of kings, if in your feudal manner the Lord sits,

called to the landlord, he has unspeakable power over everything that goes on, and you do this

for thousands of years. You can make a Russian revolution in 1917, but if you imagine you've

gotten away from all that people assume without ever thinking about it, you're going to have trouble.

Stalin is figured here as the originator of his situation. He wasn't. He never had that power.

He may have thought that, but I don't. He's the product. Look, the Cuban people made Fidel,

who really wasn't that kind of guy. He was a baseball playing lawyer. That's what he was,

but they made him into Tala. So it's not the system of the people?

No, no, no. It was the systems, feudalism, the literature. It was the structures and institutions

that cultivated in people a mentality that has its own rhythm and doesn't follow the calendar

of a political revolution. That's the fundamental question. Is there something about communism

that creates some mentality that enables somebody like Stalin or Mao?

No, I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what

they find familiar to what seems to make sense, and he's the guy. Look, let me give you an example

from American history. The Republican Party has traditionally in this country been the party of

private enterprise and minimum government. Income Trump runs for office in 2016, is elected.

What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most massive government

intervention in the worlds of economics that we've had for decades. Nobody says anything.

The Republicans cave, and the Democrats largely too. They cave. He can throw a tariff on anything.

He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff.

That's not what a tariff is. It's not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman

course in economics, which everybody knows. Everybody who teaches these courses knows.

It doesn't matter. He's still calling the shots. What is going on here is that a society has come

to a point where it can't solve its problems and it begins what? To tap into older forms and all of

the laissez faire and all of the individualism. Suddenly, the Republican Party is gone. Now

they're going to make an abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do with

your uterus. What? What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power.

They're hoping what? Do they like the government? No. They're desperate. This is not a pro government

and it wasn't in Russia. They were in a desperate fix. He took advantage.

To which degree would you say Marx's ideas led to the creation of the

national socialism party of German workers, hence the Nazi party, the fascist party in the 30s

and the 40s, that the head of whom was Hitler, which had just recently learned he was

employee number seven of the party or whatever, the seventh person to have joined the party

and have created one of the most consequential and powerful political parties in the history

of the 20th century. What degree did Marx's ideas, Marxism ideas have to play? It is the

national socialist party of German workers. The national socialist German worker party.

Worker party. National socialist German worker party. Here's the history. Did he care about

the workers or did he just use the workers as a populist message? The only thing that Marxism

did for Mr. Hitler was provide him with his stepping stone to power, but had nothing no other.

He didn't know anything about it, didn't care anything about it, nor did the people around

him. Here's the story of what happened there, which I know largely through my own family and

plus my own history, the work that I did. The most successful socialist party in Europe was

the German party. It started around 1870. Marx was still alive. Some of his own family were

leaders, Ferdinand Lassalle and other his daughters. By the end of the century, it was the second

most important party in Germany. Nobody understood it. It was over. It was almost as big a shock

to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution in 1970. Here was a political party that was now

in every German city, in every German town, powerful and enjoying its rise up. That's my

family is involved in this. I mean, I really do know the story. It meant that starting

around 1968, if you wanted to have any kind of presence in the German working class,

you had to use the word socialist. You had to. Otherwise, they wouldn't pay attention.

The other parties called themselves Catholic. Germany is divided. The northern two thirds

is Protestant. The southern third is Catholic. Munich and Bavaria is Catholic and every other

part of Germany basically is Protestant. You could be in the Catholic party, that was the south,

or you could be in various conservative Prussian and other. If you wanted to have a presence in

the working class, which was growing in Germany, a very powerful capitalist country, expanding like

crazy at this time, Germany was the major competitor to Britain for the empire. The United States

was coming up too, but it was Germany and US taking over from Britain's empire. The German

working class was it. Anybody who wanted to approach the working class in whatever way

had to come to terms and be friendly to socialism. Other parties did this too, just like Hitler.

They put the word socialist in their party, but they wanted to make it clear that they weren't

anything to do with the Soviet Union or anything to do with Marxism, so they put the word national.

Nazi is the first four letters of national, national in German, and they ZI is how you

spell national in the German language. National socialism, but definitely not communists.

That's right. They killed communists. They fought communists in the street. They had pitched battles.

They literally threatened each other's existence and their lives. The first people that he arrested

and put in jail were not Jews and Gypsies and all the other people. He eventually killed. It was

communists. They were the number one and socialist right behind them. Why? Because up until he takes

power, January of 1933, that's when Hitler takes power. The last elections, two of them in 1932,

the socialist and communist, the vote together, 50% of the vote in Germany. He appealed to the

German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said, the communists and socialists are going

to win. You're just the capitalist. You have too few people. You need a mass base, and I'm the only

one that can do that. That was just the populist message that he used. That's right, but it was

explicitly done as a deal. The ruling group said to Hindenburg, the old Prussian man who was in charge

of the German government at the time, you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise,

he would never have done it. He had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked

down on Hitler as a little funny man with a mustache who was Austrian, wasn't even German.

For them, that mattered. He comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism,

which he immediately does. Only people who don't know or care about the history pick up on the

word. It's like there are people here in the United States who like to say,

we are not a democracy. We are a republic, which is like saying, I'm not a banana. I'm a fruit.

You have to explain to these people a banana. You have to explain to people, yes, we're a republic,

but we have a commitment to democracy as a way to govern the republic, because to say you're a

republic doesn't imply what kind of government. You have to go through that with people so they

kind of get it. Certain words have power beyond their actual meaning. They're used in communication,

whether it's negative, like racist, or positive, like freedom of speech.

Or Democrat. Or Democrat. With a D.

Yeah, and then you use that to mean something. Who knows.

Or negative, what, stop Donnie, stop being a socialist or whatever. Whatever that means,

that's not even used as any kind of philosophical economic sense. Let's fast forward to

today. You mentioned Bernie Sanders. There's another popular figure that represents

some ideas of maybe let's call it democratic socialism, and maybe let's try to start

sneak up on a definition of what that could possibly mean. But AOC, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez,

she's from these parts. Yes, Queens.

So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC, are they open to some ideas in Marxism?

Are they representing those ideas well in both the economic and the political sense?

Okay. Where do I begin?

The socialist movement predates Marx, was always larger than Marx, and has gone on

to develop separately after Marx's death. So.

Can we pause on that actually? Is there a nice way to delineate, draw a line between

Marxism and socialism? Or if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism.

That's better.

Can you speak to like maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism is?

Right. Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics. And as I said earlier,

devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism. And that's its strength, how it does that,

how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works. That is really the

forte of the Marxist tradition. Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism

figures it's there, so that people who aren't Marxist are nonetheless aware of Marxism,

like it more or less, study it more or less. But it's a broader notion that I like to use

this sentence to describe. It's a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism, that really

there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the

world think are adequate. And we are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who thought they

could do better than slavery and all the people who thought they could do better than feudalism.

We've made progress. Feudalism was a progress over slavery. Capitalism was a progress over

both of them. And progress hasn't stopped. And we are the people who in a variety of ways want

the progress to go further and are not held back by believing that capitalism is somehow the best

beyond which we cannot go or even think. We find that to be, in the worst sense of the word,

a reactionary way of thinking. And we're that large community. Many of us are not interested

in economics all that much. We don't think that's the focal area. We are socialists, for example,

because we want to do something to deal with climate change. We think the world is about to

kill itself physically. And we want to take steps with other people to stop that, to fix that,

et cetera, et cetera. So that's, for me, a kind of difference. It's a little difficult to say

because there's no other figure like Marx that has an equal impact, an equal place within the

broad socialist tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition,

but that's very specialized. And that's a whole nother kind of conversation. And whatever you

say, the influence of the great anarchist thinkers, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Sorel and others

still doesn't amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far. That could change,

but up to this point, I think that's a way of understanding the relationship.

Yeah, that's interesting that some of the ideas within anarchism, and of course,

it's one of the more varied disciplines, because there's such, maybe by definition,

such variety in their thinkers, but they kind of stand for a dismantling of a power center.

And that, if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism.

Absolutely.

So where you have the, you know...

There's a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas

that uses the phrase, quote, the withering away of the state. That's a quotation from Lenin.

People should understand that's a quotation from Lenin. And it was made by Lenin, positive.

In other words, Lenin was saying, that's a good thing. That's something we stand for.

We want to create the conditions under which there is a... Because you remember,

the communists or whatever, they wouldn't call that at first in Russia before the revolution.

They were just socialists. They were hunted down and persecuted by the government left and right.

They had no love for the government. The government was their literal everyday enemy.

And being critical of government didn't just mean this particular government,

but of the whole... Being a Marxist, you always ask the questions of the social

constitution of whatever it is you're struggling against.

So there was this interest, why is the state so important?

Especially because if you understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism,

it didn't have powerful states. One of Lenin's greatest books is called

The Economic History of Russia. And he goes back centuries.

It's a huge book, three or four inches thick. And I'm one of the few people who've read it.

And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts

of feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe.

The development of a powerful central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate

to hold on, which ought to be suggestive, that maybe the turn to powerful governments

here in the United States or in Europe is maybe also because this system is exhausted

and can't go on and has to marshal every last bit of power it can not to be lost in history.

It would be interesting to see what the Soviet Union would look like if Lenin never died.

A lot of people have asked that question over the years. A lot of people.

The area is stalling, sliding in in the middle of the night,

erasing the withering away of the state part. Yes, exactly.

So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie Sanders, what are your thoughts about these modern

political figures that represent some of these ideas? And they sometimes refer to those ideas

as democratic socialism. Right. The crucial thing about Bernie and about AOC, and it's

particularly true about Bernie because AOC is much younger and Bernie is an older man.

Bernie, being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student, as an activist,

then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont, as a mayor and all the rest.

He lived through, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America.

And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945,

six to the present, I mean, it really never stopped, was a Manichean worldview. The United

States is good, it defines democracy, and the Soviet Union is awful, it defines whatever the

opposite of democracy should be called. Good here, evil there. It was taken so far

that even among the ranks of academic individuals, it was impossible to have a conversation. I mean,

I can't tell, just make it very personal. The number of times I would raise my hand

in my classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale. And I would ask a question that had something

to do with Marxism, because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses to teach this to me,

except by people who trashed it, other than that. And I didn't want that.

So I would ask a question. And I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I didn't

much care for, and those who were good teachers that I liked, fear, which is just fear. They

didn't want to go there. They didn't want to answer my question. And after a while, I got to know

some of them, and I found out why. Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to

understand this. Either they would have to say, I don't know, which would be the honest truth for

many of them, but a professor does not want to say in a classroom, I don't know, that it's just not

cool. Or they'd have to, if they knew, they'd have to say something that indicated they didn't know

really much, and they weren't going to do that. Or they would know something. And maybe that would

be because they were interested. They did not want the rest of the students to begin to say,

oh, you know, Professor Smith, you know, he's interested. It is not good for your career.

You don't know how this is going to play out. Who's going to say what to whom. And I could see

in their faces what I later learned because they told me, come to my office hours, we're in the

office, we can talk about it. But I'm, that's how bad it was. Is it not still? Pretty much.

In my field, the great so called debate, I mean, I find it boring, but the great debate for my

colleagues is between what's called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics. Neoclassical,

the government should stay out of the economy, less a fair or liberalism. And the Keynesian

saying, no, you crazy neoclassical. If you do that, you'll have great depressions and the system

will collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems, to fix the weaknesses.

And they hate each other and they throw each other out of their jobs. One of the very few things

they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like me out. That they can find

common ground to do. So I had to learn it all on myself. Why am I telling you this? Because

this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism

of the post World War II period, the vast bulk of all of that is unknown,

not just to the average American person, but to the average American academic,

to the average American who thinks of himself or herself as an intellectual. I mean, I had

had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history, have no idea,

or saying, does this man Lukach, a Hungarian Marxist, he really had interest in,

or to explain that Gramsci was not a great literary critic. He was head of the Communist

Party of Italy for most of his adult life. What does that mean? You like Gramsci as a literary

critic, but they didn't even know. They don't even know. It's been erased. It's a little bit like

stories I've heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet Union, because he

obviously fell out of favor. And so somehow all of his writings, many of which are very interesting

and complicated. Anyway, so what you're going to have in this country is a slow awakening of socialism

from a long hibernation called the Cold War. I never expected to be very honest with you

that I would live to see. I knew it would come because at least things always do,

but I didn't expect to see it. So I have been surprised, as have a lot of us,

that when it starts to happen, it happens fast.

So you see Bernie as an early sign of the awakening from the Cold War to accept the ideas.

Bernie was always a socialist. We all knew. And everybody who paid attention, he denied it.

But 2016, he makes a decision, momentous, to run for president. He's just a senator from Vermont.

Vermont is one of the smallest states in the Union. People who live in Vermont love to tell you

that they are more cows than people in Vermont, etc., etc. So here from this little state,

this elderly gentleman with a New York City accent runs for all and says, I'm a socialist.

And when they attack him, he doesn't run away. I'm a socialist. I'm a socialist. Now, he had been.

It wasn't a secret that suddenly got out. But the great question, and I don't mind telling you

because I went to the right schools. I know a lot of people, you know, Johnny Yellen was my class,

made it Yellen, stuff like that. So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party,

and I said, well, what do you think about Bernie entering the race? Makes no difference. They

get 1% of the vote, right? He was wrong. They had no idea what was coming. But the truth is,

I didn't either. It wasn't just that he didn't get it. I thought his 1% was probably right.

So we were both wrong.

Yeah, change can happen fast. Do you think AOC might be president one day?

Yeah, possible, possible. But two things. Number one, it's fast. Number two,

it's going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate,

calm, non confrontational socialism you can imagine.

So not AOC or Bernie. No, no, they are not confrontational in my judgment.

In terms of the ideas of socialism. I mean, they're both very feisty.

They're feisty personally. But not ideologically. You know, she is, Bernie is also,

you know, in honest moments, and they're both really are pretty honest folks, at least in my

experience. In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that his what he advocates as democratic

socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s. It was a kind of popular government

tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide a lot more support for the working

class than you do now. That's not a fundamental change. That's what he means by socialism.

When he talks about it and he's asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot. Okay. That's

consistent. That's the softest kind of socialism. And that's where we're going to start in a country

coming out of hibernation. Pretty soon it's already happening. There'll be people who need and want

to go further in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are comfortable with.

You can already see the shoots of it now. You know, AOC voted together with most of the others

to support the money for Ukraine. Okay. That lot of people in the socialist movement do not support

that. And that's going to happen. I don't know exactly how that's going to work out. But that

should give people an idea. There are disagreements and they're going to fester and they're going to

grow. Interesting. People in the socialist sphere don't support money from the United States in the

large amounts that it is being sent to Ukraine. Is it because of, it's fundamentally the military

industrial complex is a capitalist institution kind of thing? No. I wonder what the... I mean,

there are some people for whom that's the issue. Then there are people for whom this is, you know,

it's guns and butter and why are we over there when we have such needs at home that are being

neglected. And then there are people who, well, go back to what we talked about at the beginning,

who are more like Lenin and Debs. This is a fight between Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs

and wannabe oligarchs in Ukraine. And what are we doing here? We have to insist that these forces

sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a settlement, don't kill large numbers of Ukraine.

I mean, everybody's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian is a little strange here. What are you

doing? You're supposed to be in favor of peace, you know, and for the United States, which just

finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq to be against another country invading. I

mean, who in the world is going to take this seriously? This is crazy. You know, I invade,

it's good and you invade, it's terrible. What? You know, what are you doing? Why are you doing that?

What's going on here? All of these questions are being active, by the way, not just by socialists,

by lots of other people too, inside the Democratic Party and also inside the Republican Party.

You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that. They are against the stuff in Ukraine. They

don't want the money spent there. They don't want the weapons sent there. They don't like the whole

policy and Trump wobble. So, Mr. Biden's policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the

right and every day that this thing lasts, these criticisms get bigger. Anyway, the point is that

AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War

or isolation from the whole, you know, when I explain to people the contribution made, for

example, to modern Marxism, I'll give you an example, by the French philosopher,

Louis Althusser. I don't know if the name means anything to you. Okay. He was the rector of the

École Normale Supérieure in Paris. That's the equivalent. Imagine in this country, if there

were a university that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT, it would be the university.

Well, the École Normale in France in Paris is the. He was a tenured professor who became the

rector. The rector is like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist

Party, most of his adult life. That was possible in France during the Cold War. That was unthinkable

in this country. You could not in a million years, right? So, Althusser, as a philosopher,

tried to bring a version of postmodernism into Marxism with enormous impact all over the world,

where he traveled, not just in Europe, all over, right? So, if you want to look him up,

I'll spell it out for you. A L T H U S S E R. Luis. The Luis is L O U I S. Luis Althusser.

Look him up. You'll see tons of stuff. By the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember,

of his works in English. By the way, the textbook I wrote in Economics, in case you're ever interested,

was also published by the MIT Press. And the title? Contending Economic Theories.

Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian. That's an MIT. Marxian. Yeah, that's right. And by the way,

when we think, I don't know if there's an interesting distinction between Marxian economics and Marxist,

I suppose Marxism is the umbrella of everything that's... I only use it because Marxist

I use as a noun. A person is a Marxist. Marxian I use as an adjective to qualify, but I don't mean

some great different. There's a last point I would like to make about AOC and Bernie. That's also

general. I'm a historian too. And I know that the transition out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism

was a transition that took centuries and that occurred in fits and starts. So for example,

a feudal manor would start to disintegrate, serfs would run away, they'd run into a town. How would

they live in the town? They had no land anymore because they had run away from the feudal manor.

A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal understanding what they were doing.

A merchant would say to one of these serfs, I'm in the business of buying and then reselling stuff

and living off the difference. But you know, I could make more money if I produced some of this

stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody else. So I'm going to make you a deal. I'm going to

give you money once a week. I'll give you money what we would later call a wage. And you come here

and under my supervision, you make this crap that I'm going to then sell and this all works out.

In other words, there were efforts unconscious, not self aware, to go out of feudalism to a new

system. Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. Some of them lasted weeks or months

or years. But it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general

switch. And once that was done, it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system

we have today. That's the only model we have. So for me, that's what I see when I look at socialism.

I see the Paris commune was an event, an attempt. It lasted a few weeks. I see Russia. That was an

attempt lasted 70 years. Then I see, and you will fill in the blank, I see these are all early

experiments. These are all you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good,

the bad. What do you build on? How do you learn? And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition

when it's serious, that's what it does. So in your ideas, sort of capitalism was a significant

improvement over the feudalism. Yes. And we are coming to an age in overslavery. And we're coming

to an age where capitalism will die out and make, it's not that capitalism is how fundamentally

broken. It's better than the things that came before it. But there is going to be things yet

better and they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and socialism. Is there just just to

linger briefly on the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter? There's something called,

I'm sorry if I'm using the terms incorrectly, but cultural Marxism or the criticisms of

universities being infiltrated by cultural Marxists. Right. I'm not exactly sure. I don't

pay close enough attention. No one is. No, no, no. I do. But it's woke. It's, there's a kind of woke

ideology that I'm not exactly sure. Right. That's not you. What is the fundamental text?

Who is the Karl Marx of wokeness? All I do know is that there's certain characteristics

of woke ideology, which is hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys.

And basically everyone is a bad guy, except the people that are very loudly nonstop saying

that they're the good guy. And that applies for racism, for sexism, for gender politics,

identity politics, all that kind of stuff. Is there any parallels between

Marxian economics and Marxist ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter?

No, not much. Mostly Marx, you have to, one of the consequences of the taboo after World War

II is that Marxism, like socialism and communism, become swear words. It's like calling somebody,

well, I won't use bad language, but using a four letter word to describe somebody. So instead

of calling them this or that, you call them a Marxist in many circles. This is even worse than

whatever other adjective you might have used, but it doesn't have a particular meaning that I can

assess. The closest you get is your little list. It is somebody who is concerned about

race and sex and sexual orientation, gender and all of those things and wants there to be

transgendered bathrooms and I don't like any of these people. So I slapped the word Marxism,

or the phrase cultural Marxism, because it isn't Marxism about getting more money or

controlling the industry or all those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned about.

So this is odd since they don't know much about Marxism. I've always been interested

in culture. I mean, Lukacs, the man I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that's what they're famous

for, the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture. Gramsci writes a great

length about the Catholic Church, about theater and painting in Italy and on and on. I mean,

this is just ignorance talking. They don't know anything about that. They wouldn't know what the

names are. It's a label that summarizes kind of a shorthand. I'm against all of this. I don't want

to be told that there's ugly racism in this country and it always has been or sexism or

phobia against gay people or whatever it is that's agitating them. I mean, Marxism or socialism,

I mean, it's just, it's like socialism is the post office. It is, it is a mentality. Well, but I

don't blame them. I mean, it's childish. It's mean spirited. But it comes out of the fact no one

ever sat them down and said, here is this tradition. It's got these kinds of things that people kind

of share and these big differences. Look, an intelligent society, which this country is,

could have and should have done that. It was fear and a kind of terror

that made them behave in the way they did. And we're now seeing it. Having said that, there is

such a thing as cultural Marxism. What that is, is simply those Marxists who devoted themselves

to analyzing how it is that a particular culture is on the one hand shaped by capitalism and on

the other hand, it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow. In other words,

how do we analyze the interaction between the class struggle on the job and attitude towards

sexuality or movements in music or whatever else, culture. And there are Georg Lukacs,

this Hungarian, great name in there, the greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci,

and a modern name just died a couple years ago, a British intellectual named Stuart Hall,

HALL. You want to, if you want, if I were teaching, which I have done, of course,

in cultural Marxism, those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you articles

and books to read of their stuff, because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many others.

So there is something to be said and understood about the kind of culture that capitalism creates

and the kind of culture that enables capitalism. Yes. And Marxists are particularly those

who like to look at that interaction. In other words, they're interested in how capitalism

shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism. There's another name, I forgot.

Stuart Hall is British. Gramsci is Italian. Lukacs is Hungarian. The German is Walter Benjamin,

B E N J A M I N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school

of Marxism that developed in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people,

many of whom were interested in cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against

the narrow Marxism that was so focused on economics and politics. There were people who

said, you're leaving out very important parts of modern society that are shaping the economy

as much as they are shaped by it. And it was that impetus to open Marxism, to be more inclusive,

in what it deemed to be important to understand that this cult, and they call themselves cultural

Marxists, but they had a completely different meaning from this. This is just bad malving.

That's all. Let me ask a more personal question. So for most of the 20th century, no, not most,

but a large many decades in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War and before being

a Marxist is one of the worst things you could be. Have you had dark periods in your own life where

you've gone to some dark places in your mind where it was difficult, like self doubt, difficult to

know like, what the hell am I doing? When you're surrounded by colleagues and people, you said

prestigious universities, both personal interests of career, but also as a human being when everybody,

you know, kind of looks at you funny because you're studying this thing. Did that ever get

you real low? No. I know people who had exactly what you said. I mean, your question's perfectly

reasonable. If I were you, I'd be asking me that question too. And what's wrong with you?

Nothing wrong with the question. And here's the honest truth. I don't know how anomalous I am.

I really don't. But the truth is no, I have, if my wife was sitting here, she'd tell you

what she tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true.

But then again, luck never is the only explanation for things that's part of it.

What can I say? I didn't choose the time of my birth. I didn't choose the communities in which I

grew up or the schools I attended or anything else. No, but the fact that there was no courses or

extensive courses on Marxian economics. But you know, again, I'm haggled. On the one hand,

I was denied good instruction. On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own.

And the motivation when you do that is very different. I'm not the student who sits there

with my notebook, taking notes of what the great professor says and reading the text and getting

ready for the exam. I don't have an exam. And I'm doing something slightly risque, you know,

kind of romantically different and oppositional. I was able to find always one or two professors

that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation, other students who felt enough similar

to me that we could get together and read these books and talk about them. I had a number of

really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me of their time and their effort to teach me

along the way. And I've had the benefit that because I went to all these fancy schools,

I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture. And when I have been put in

difficult positions, I often wave my pedigree and it works like garlic with the devil. They're back

away. They're back away. Because Americans are very deferential to that kind of academic prestige.

But there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken

by this. You have just naturally somebody who just has perseverance.

Well, I would put it, I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would put it a little

differently. I think capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system.

And nothing has happened to change my mind. In other words, the development

just kept giving me more and more evidence that this, and I must say over the last 10 years,

what's really changed the last 10 years. I mean, I can't describe to you how big that changes.

And that may be more important than anything else we've discussed.

Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television or a radio

thing or give a talk at some conference or something. Once every two or three months,

I'd be invited and I would do like academics often do. I now do two to three to four interviews

every day. There's a hunger. Wow, is there a hunger. It's fascinating.

And I want to be honest with you. As I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be

a kind of a pregnant pause from the podium that I lean into the microphone and I say,

with as much smile as I can get, I'm having the time of my life.

And that's the truth. I never expected, look, I'm used to teaching a classroom,

a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or 10 students or a regular undergraduate

class with 30 or an occasional introductory course with a few hundred. I've done all of those

things many times, but an audience that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube

and all of that. No, that's new. Is there advice you can give given your bold and nonstandard

career and life advice you can give to high school students, college students about how

to have a career like that or maybe how to have a career or a life they can be proud of?

Yeah. First of all, my advice is go for it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely

better than they were when I had to do it. And I could do it and I'm happy I did it. Becoming

a teacher is one of those decisions I made that I've never regretted. And I've never regretted

being a critic of this society. Never. I find it edifying. I find it, I mean, the gratitude

people expressed to me for helping them see kind of what's going on is unbelievably encouraging.

I mean, what can I tell you? So that feels you. That feels you enjoy. Pointing out that the emperor

has no clothes feels you. That's a life not just important. Because most of the people

who say something like that to me are people who, if they had the vocabulary and some of them do,

would say, you know, I thought I was seeing through that outfit that I was wearing. I thought it

and they did. And all they needed was a little extra. This information or that factoid or this

logic. Ah, yeah. And they have that. And I remember having that too. When I had a teacher

who made something clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude. And now I get that

gratitude a good bit. And yes, it is enormously gratifying. And I'm not sure I could could get

it any other way. And I had learned and I'm walking proof that being a critic of society

and doing it systematically and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life.

Very good life. Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes

to an end. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it? Afraid of it? No. Think about it? Yes.

Yes. I'm not afraid. I've always thought, you know, death is hard for the people that are left

when you're dead, you know. I worry more about my wife. I'm very attached to my wife.

I might mention to you, I got married when I was 23 years old. That's my wife to this day.

So I'm lucky because that's, if you get married to anybody at age 23, it's either luck or it isn't.

What role has love played in your life? Enormous. Because I came from a family, you know, if your

family is political refugees, which mine were, who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another

continent, learn another language, find another life income and job and the disruption goes real

deep for any refugees. So my mother and father were both refugees. They met as refugees.

So I had to, in a way, make it up to them. I had to be, I was the first child of their,

I have a younger sister, but I was the first child. And, you know, there's a lot of psychological

pressure on you if you're in that situation. Nobody means you harm, but you've got to do

what they couldn't, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do. It's the closest

they're going to get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university students. My father

was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life. So I had to perform. You

know, I went to high school here in the United States. I had to get all A's. I had to be on the

football team. I had to play the violin in the orchestra. I had to do all these because everything

had to be achieved. So I'm an achievement crazy person that way. And, but that's functional in

this dysfunctional society. But on top of that, that's an achievement within the game of this

particular society, but then love seems to be a thing that's greater than that game. Is that

something that made you a better person? Oh God. How was it? How was it made you a better

Marxian and a better? Everything because my wife, my wife by profession is a psychotherapist. Excellent.

I love it. And I needed it. Yeah. And so I married it. I didn't know what I was doing at the time,

but I think as I look back on it, that was more than a little what was going on.

And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family never

talked about, never dealt with, never at least explicitly engaged in any of that.

Because it was all about survival. The immigrant challenge is survival.

Yes, that's right. Survive, survive. And you're so busy that you tell yourself you can't do that.

You, of course, you can. And there are other reasons why you're not going to look at those

problems. But the survival is so urgent that you can fool yourself this way. And my parents

did that. One last question. What's the meaning of life, Richard Wolff? Why are we here?

I will quote you, Mr. Marx. Let's go.

No. Life is struggle. And for me, I have found

that to be true, that the struggle, whether it is to build a relationship with your child,

I have two children, whether it's to build one with your spouse, whether it's to understand

a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this

relationship to a student or to an audience. These are, it's a struggle to do all those things.

But that network of struggles, that makes life

interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.

And meaningful. And very meaningful. And that latter thing, I got to say,

you do masterfully. You're one of the great communicators and educators out there today.

And it's a huge honor that you will sit with me for so many hours. Thank you. This is awesome.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolff. To support this podcast,

please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from

Karl Marx. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however,

is to change it. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.