Transcript
00:00:00 Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the lord gets.
00:00:06 Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets. It’s very simple. These are exploitative
00:00:16 class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another
00:00:26 group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger,
00:00:34 resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle.
00:00:43 The following is a conversation with Richard Wolff, one of the top Marxist economists and
00:00:49 philosophers in the world. This is a heavy topic, in general and for me personally, given my family
00:00:57 history in the Soviet Union, in Russia, and in Ukraine. Today the words Marxism, Socialism,
00:01:04 and Communism are used to attack and to divide, much more than to understand and to learn.
00:01:11 With this podcast, I seek the latter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx,
00:01:18 as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries.
00:01:24 And in general, we need to both steel man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize,
00:01:30 and to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant,
00:01:37 and at times, dangerous. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our
00:01:44 sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Richard Wolff.
00:01:50 Let’s start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all. What is Marxism? What are the
00:01:56 defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology?
00:02:02 Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it’s the tradition that takes its
00:02:09 founding inspiration from the works of Karl Marx. But because these ideas that he put forward
00:02:21 spread as fast as they did, and as globally as they did, literally it’s 140 years,
00:02:30 140 years since Marx died. And in that time, his ideas have become major types of thinking
00:02:41 in every country on the earth. If you know much about the great ideas of human history,
00:02:49 that’s an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time.
00:02:56 And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity, is that the Marxian
00:03:05 ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories, and economic
00:03:12 conditions. So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently in different places
00:03:20 at different times. And therefore, Marxism, as a kind of first flush definition, is the totality
00:03:29 of all of these very different ways of coming to terms with it. For the first roughly 40, 50 years,
00:03:40 Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism. Marx himself, that’s all he
00:03:48 really did. He never wrote a book about communism. He never wrote a book really about socialism.
00:03:53 Either his comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed. What he was really interested in was
00:04:01 a critical analysis of capitalism. And that’s what Marxism was, more or less, in its first 40 or 50
00:04:09 years. The only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few
00:04:19 weeks. In 1871, there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck’s
00:04:29 Germany. And then the result was something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris
00:04:35 rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian
00:04:43 society. And Marx’s people, people influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune,
00:04:50 in the leadership of the commune. And Marx wasn’t that far away. He was in London.
00:04:56 These things were happening in Paris. That’s an easy transport even then. And for a short time,
00:05:02 very short, Marxism had a different quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism,
00:05:11 it became a theory of how to organize society differently. Before that had only been implicit.
00:05:21 Now it became explicit. What is the leadership of the Paris Commune going to do? And why? And
00:05:28 in what order? And in other words, governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted
00:05:36 a few weeks, the French army regrouped. And under the leadership of people who were very opposed to
00:05:43 Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed a large number of the communards, as they
00:05:51 were called, and deported them to islands in the Pacific that were part of the French empire at the
00:05:57 time. The really big change happens in Russia in 1917. Now you have a group of Marxists, Lenin,
00:06:06 Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again, a war,
00:06:17 like in France, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation
00:06:25 because it is the government that loses World War I, has to withdraw, as you know,
00:06:31 Brest, Litovsk and all of that, and the government collapses and the army revolts.
00:06:37 And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers Party,
00:06:46 splits, under the pressures of all of this, into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions. Lenin,
00:06:56 Trotsky and the others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story short,
00:07:00 he’s in exile. Lenin’s position gets him deported because he says Russian workers should not be
00:07:09 killing German workers. I mean, this is a war of capitalists who are dividing the world up into
00:07:16 colonies and Russian working people should not kill and should not die for such a thing. As you
00:07:24 can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out. Interestingly, in the United States, the
00:07:30 comparable leader at that time of the Socialist Party here, as you know, there was no Communist
00:07:36 Party at this point, that comes later. The head of the Socialist Party, a very important American
00:07:42 figure named Eugene Victor Debs, makes exactly the same argument that Americans should not fight in
00:07:50 the war. He has nothing to do with Lenin, I don’t even know if they knew of each other, but he does
00:07:57 it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States. By the way, he runs for
00:08:02 president from jail and does very well, really very well, remarkable. And he’s the inspiration
00:08:09 for Bernie Sanders, if you see the link, although he had much more courage politically than Bernie
00:08:18 has. That’s really interesting. I’d love to return to that link maybe later. History rhymes. Yes,
00:08:24 the complicated story. Anyway, the importance in terms of Marxism is that now this seizure of power
00:08:32 by a group of Marxists, that is a group of people inspired by Marx developing what you might call
00:08:40 a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians too, but a Russian interpretation,
00:08:46 this now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism into a plan, at least. What are you
00:08:54 going to do in the Soviet Union? And a lot of this was then trial and error. Marx never laid any of
00:09:02 this out. Probably wouldn’t have been all that relevant if he had, because it was 50 years
00:09:08 earlier in another country, etc. So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens then
00:09:15 more later in China and Cuba and Vietnam and Korea and so on, is that you have kind of a bifurcation.
00:09:24 Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism, but another part of it becomes a set,
00:09:34 and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative post capitalist
00:09:40 society ought to look like, how it ought to work. And there’s lots of disagreement about it,
00:09:48 lots of confusion, and I would say that that’s still where it is. You have a tradition now
00:09:55 that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism, notion of the alternative,
00:10:01 and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework in which I would answer,
00:10:07 that’s what Marxism is about. Its basic idea, if you had to have one, is that human society
00:10:15 can do better than capitalism, and it ought to try.
00:10:19 And then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism.
00:10:23 Fine.
00:10:25 So we’ll look at the critique of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back,
00:10:30 what do you think Marx would say if he just looked at the different implementations of the ideas that
00:10:37 Marxism throughout the 20th century, where his ideas that were implicit were made explicit?
00:10:46 Would he shake his head? Would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations? How do you think
00:10:52 he would analyze it?
00:10:54 Well, he had a great sense of humor. I don’t know if he had a chance to take a look at his writing,
00:10:57 but he had an extraordinary sense of humorism. My guess is he would deploy his humor in answering
00:11:03 this question, too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of his interpretations of his work,
00:11:10 and he’s very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could
00:11:16 erase the connection between those things and the lineage they claim from him, which he would.
00:11:24 There’s a German word—I don’t know if you speak the other languages—there’s a wonderful
00:11:29 German word called verzichte, and it’s stronger than the word refuse. It’s if you want to refuse
00:11:36 something, but with real strong emphasis. Verzichte darauf is a German way of saying,
00:11:43 I don’t want anything to do with that.
00:11:46 He would talk then in philosophical terms, because remember, he was a student of philosophy.
00:11:51 He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest. He would wax
00:11:57 philosophical and say, you know, that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having a child.
00:12:04 You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person and will find his or
00:12:10 her own way, and these ideas, once they’re out there, go their own way. And as you said, there’s
00:12:17 a particular way that this idea spread, the speed at which it spread throughout the world made it
00:12:22 even less able to be sort of stabilized and connected back to the origins of where the idea
00:12:29 came from. The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians after the revolution,
00:12:35 because they occupied a position for a while, not very long, but they occupied a position for a
00:12:41 while in which, I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these people criticizing
00:12:46 capitalism for a long time, even the Marxists ever since mid century. And these were the first guys
00:12:53 who pulled it off. They made it. And so that there was a kind of presumption around the world,
00:13:00 their interpretation must be kind of the right one, because look, they did it. And so for a while,
00:13:08 they could enunciate their interpretation. And it came to be widely grasped as something which,
00:13:18 by the way, gets called in the literature, official Marxism, the very idea that you would
00:13:23 put that adjective in front of Marxism, or Soviet Marxism or Russian, there were these words that
00:13:31 where the adjective was meant to somehow say, kind of, this is the canon, you can depart from
00:13:37 it, but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing. And by the
00:13:44 1960s, it was already, it was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of,
00:13:54 and the irony is, particularly here in the United States, where the taboo against Marxism kicks in
00:14:02 right after World War II, is so total in this country, that I, for example, through most of
00:14:09 my adult life, have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time simply explaining to American
00:14:18 audiences that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism, which wasn’t the canon
00:14:28 before 1917, and hasn’t been since at least the 1960s. But they don’t know. It’s not that they’re
00:14:36 stupid, and it’s not that they’re ignorant. It’s that, well, ignorance may be, but I mean, it’s not
00:14:42 a mental problem. It’s the taboo. Shut it down. And so all of the reopening that, in a way,
00:14:49 recaptures what went before and develops it in new direction, they just don’t know.
00:14:55 LW. Nevertheless, it’s a serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit. The Russians,
00:15:04 the Soviets at the beginning of the 20th century, made a serious attempt at saying, okay, beyond the
00:15:10 critique of capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this? And so, in that sense,
00:15:16 not at a high level, but at a detailed level, it’s interesting to look at those particular schools.
00:15:22 Maybe… RL. Right, because, for example, let me just take your point one step further. You really
00:15:27 cannot understand the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese, and the others,
00:15:34 because each of them is a kind of response, let’s call it, to the way the Soviets did it.
00:15:43 Are you going to do it that way? Well, yes, and no is the answer. This we will do that way,
00:15:50 but that we’re not going to do. And the differences are huge, but you could find a thread—I can do
00:15:56 that for you if you want—in which all of them are, in a way, reacting. LW. To the originals.
00:16:04 RL. Yes, very much so. LW. Like maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones.
00:16:09 RL. Something like that. LW. Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools
00:16:16 of that Soviet Marxism? So we got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even let’s expand
00:16:22 out to Maoism. So maybe I could speak to sort of Leninism, and then please tell me if I’m saying
00:16:32 dumb things. I think for Lenin, there was an idea that there could be a small sort of vanguard party,
00:16:41 like a small controlling entity that’s like wise and is able to do the central planning decisions.
00:16:49 Then for Stalinism, one interesting—Stalin’s implementation of all of this—one interesting
00:16:56 characteristic is to move away from the international aspect of the ideal of Marxism to
00:17:02 make it all about nation, nationalism, the strength of nation. And then so Maoism is
00:17:13 different in that it’s focused on agriculture and rural. And then Trotskyism, I don’t know
00:17:20 except that it’s anti Stalin. I mean, I don’t even know if there’s unique sort of philosophical
00:17:26 elements there. Anyway, can you maybe from those or something else speak to different unique
00:17:31 elements that are interesting to think about implementation of Marxism in the real world?
00:17:37 Probably the best way to get into this is to describe something that happened in Marxism
00:17:46 that then shapes the answer to your question. In the early days of Marx’s writings,
00:17:53 and you know, his life spans the 19th century. He’s born in 1818, dies in 1883, so literally
00:18:00 he lives the 19th century. And to make things simple, you might look at the first half of the
00:18:08 first two thirds of his life as overwhelmingly gathering together the precursors to his own work.
00:18:17 Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that partly because he didn’t work a regular job,
00:18:24 and partly because he was an exile in London most of his adult life, he worked in the library. I
00:18:29 mean, he had a lot of time. He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were
00:18:35 manufacturers. And you might say the first half to two thirds of his life are about
00:18:42 the critique of capitalism. And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work,
00:18:52 Western Europe more or less, was interested in. That’s what they wanted. And he gave that to them.
00:18:58 He wasn’t the only one, but he was very, very effective at it. By the last third of his life,
00:19:06 he and the other producers of an anti capitalist movement, people like the Chartists in England,
00:19:17 that’s a whole other movement, the anarchists of various kinds, like Proudhon in France,
00:19:25 or Kropotkin or Bakunin in Russia, and so on. You pull all these together, and there was a shift
00:19:32 in what the audience, let’s call it a mixture of militant working class people on the one hand,
00:19:43 and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other. They now wanted a different question.
00:19:49 They were persuaded by the analysis. They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would
00:19:56 like to do better than. And the question became, how do we do this? Not anymore, should we? Why
00:20:03 should we? Could we maybe fix capitalism? No, they had gotten to the point, the system has
00:20:09 to be fundamentally changed. But they didn’t go, you might imagine, they didn’t go and say, well,
00:20:16 what will that new system looks like? They didn’t go that way. What they did was ask the question,
00:20:21 how could we get beyond capitalism? It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured people’s minds,
00:20:31 people’s daily lives, and so on. And the focus of the conversation became, this was already
00:20:39 by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism whereby
00:20:46 we would get beyond. And again, make a long story short, the conversation focused on seizing the
00:20:55 government. Before that, the government was not a major interest. If you read Marx’s Capital,
00:21:03 the great work of his maturity, three volumes, there’s almost nothing in the state. He mentions
00:21:09 it, but he’s interested in the details of how capitalism works, factory by factory, store by
00:21:16 store, office. What’s the structure? The government’s secondary for him. But there’s also humans within
00:21:22 that capitalist system of, there’s the working class. That’s what he’s interested in. He’s
00:21:29 interested in each, think of it almost mechanically like the workplace. In the workplace there,
00:21:34 some people who do this and other people who do that, and they accept this division of authority,
00:21:40 and they accept this division of what’s going on here, particularly because he believed that the
00:21:46 core economic objective of capitalism was to maximize something called profit, which his
00:21:53 analysis located right there in the workings of the enterprise. The government was not the
00:22:00 the key factor here. And he was looking at ideas of value. How much value does
00:22:08 the labor of the individual workers provide? And that means, how do we reward the workers in an
00:22:14 ethical way? And so those are the questions. But the government is not part of that picture.
00:22:23 So it’s very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when this
00:22:28 begins, but it really gets going after he dies, is this debate among Marxists about the role of
00:22:38 the state. They all agreed, nearly all of them agree, that you have to get the state. The working
00:22:45 class has to get the state because they see the state as the ultimate guarantor of capitalism.
00:22:54 When things get really out of hand, the capitalist calls the police or he calls the army or both of
00:23:01 them. And so the government is in a sense this key institution captured in Marxist language
00:23:11 by the bourgeoisie, by the other side, the capitalists, and yet vulnerable because of
00:23:18 suffrage. If suffrage is universal or nearly so, if everybody gets a vote, which in a way
00:23:25 capitalism brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism in the French American Revolution
00:23:32 is to create a place where elected represented. So the government being subject to suffrage
00:23:41 creates the notion, aha, here’s how we’re gonna, we have to seize the state. And then that gets
00:23:49 agreed upon, but there’s a big split as to how to do it. One side says you go with the election,
00:23:56 you mobilize the voter. That gets to be called reformism within Marxism. And the other side
00:24:04 is revolution. Don’t do that. This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged. You can’t
00:24:12 get there. They’ve long ago learned how to manipulate parliaments. They buy the politicians
00:24:19 and all that, and therefore revolution is going to be the way to do it. Revolution
00:24:26 gets a very big boost because the Russians, they did it that way. They didn’t do, I mean,
00:24:32 they fought in the Duma, in the Parliament, but they didn’t. And this focus on the state,
00:24:39 I would argue, goes way beyond what the debaters at the time, and if you’re interested in the great
00:24:47 names, there was a great theorist of the role of the state in a reformist strategy to get power
00:24:55 in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important. His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautsky and
00:25:04 Rosa Luxemburg, the two other huge figures in Marxism at the time, and they wrote the articles
00:25:11 that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate. By the way, that debate still goes on.
00:25:17 Reformism versus revolution?
00:25:19 WOLFF Mhm. And in terms of not all that different. I mean, it’s adjusted to history, but
00:25:24 in terms of different.
00:25:26 SIMON Can you comment on where you lean in terms of
00:25:31 the mechanism of progress, reformation versus revolution?
00:25:34 WOLFF I’d rather tell you the historical story.
00:25:36 SIMON Sure.
00:25:36 WOLFF Over and over and over again, in most cases,
00:25:40 the reformists have always won because revolution is frightening, is scary, is dangerous,
00:25:46 and so most of the time, when you get to the point where it’s even a relevant discussion, not an
00:25:52 abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have won.
00:25:58 I mean, and I’ll give you an example from the United States. In the Great Depression of the
00:26:04 1930s, you had an extraordinary shift to the left in the United States, the greatest shift to the
00:26:11 United States, the greatest shift to the left in the country’s history before or since, nothing
00:26:17 like it. Suddenly, you created a vast left wing composed of the labor movement, which went crazy
00:26:28 in the 1930s. We organized more people into unions in the 1930s than at any time before
00:26:33 or any time since. It is the explosion. And at the same time, the explosion of two socialist parties
00:26:41 and the Communist Party that became very powerful, and they all worked together, creating a very
00:26:48 powerful leftist presence in this country. They debated in a strategically real way reform or
00:26:55 revolution. The reformers were the union people, by and large, and the communists were the
00:27:02 revolutionaries, by and large, because they were affiliated with the Communist International,
00:27:08 with Russia and all of that. And in between, you might say, the two socialist parties,
00:27:13 one that was Trotskyist in inspiration and the other one more moderate Western European kind
00:27:19 of socialism. And they had this intense debate. And they ended up, the reformists won that debate.
00:27:26 There was no revolution in the 1930s here. But there was a reform that achieved unspeakably
00:27:34 great successes, which is why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does, because
00:27:40 it achieved in a few years, in the 1930s, starting around 1932,
00:27:45 three social security in this country. We had never had that before. That’s the same one we
00:27:50 have now. Unemployment insurance never existed before that you have till today. Minimum wage
00:27:57 for the first time, still have that today. And a federal program of employment that hired 15
00:28:03 million people. I mean, these were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working class.
00:28:09 So that’s the 30s and the 40s.
00:28:11 30s. Not much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s. And here’s the best part. It was paid for by taxes
00:28:18 on corporations and the rich. So when people today say, well, you can tax the government,
00:28:24 the joke is I have to teach American history to Americans because it has been erased from
00:28:32 consciousness.
00:28:33 We’ll return to that. But first, let’s take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th century
00:28:38 with the Russians.
00:28:39 With the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this.
00:28:47 Everybody was right. The state is crucial. We were right. We were the revolutionaries.
00:28:52 We seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state. And socialism
00:28:59 is when the working class captures the state, either by reform or revolution, and then uses
00:29:06 its power over the state to make the transition from capitalism to the better thing we’re
00:29:12 going toward. And again, make a long story short, in the interest of time, what happens,
00:29:20 which is not unusual in human history, is that the means becomes the end.
00:29:26 In other words, Lenin, who’s crystal clear before he died, you know, he doesn’t live
00:29:31 very long, he dies in 23. So he’s only in power from 17 to 22. By that time, he has
00:29:38 his brain trouble.
00:29:39 1923, by the way, not at age 23.
00:29:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1923. Yeah, he’s only there for four or five years. He’s very clear.
00:29:48 He even says, I’ve done work on that, I’ve published, so I know this stuff. He says in
00:29:53 a famous speech, let’s not fool ourselves. We have captured the state, but we don’t
00:29:59 have socialism. We have to create that. We have to move towards that.
00:30:06 With Stalin, you know, Lenin dies, and there’s a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky
00:30:12 loses the fight, he’s exiled, he goes to Mexico. Stalin is now alone in power, does
00:30:18 all the things he’s famous or infamous for. And by the end of the 20s, Stalin makes a
00:30:27 decision. I mean, not that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that
00:30:32 they do the following. They declare that they are socialism. In other words, socialism becomes
00:30:41 when you capture the state. Not when the state capture has enabled you to do X, Y, Z, other
00:30:49 things. No, no. The state itself, once you have it, is socialism. So when a socialist
00:30:57 captures the state, that’s socialism. Exactly. That’s exactly right. I feel like that’s
00:31:04 definitionally confusing. Well, it shouldn’t be, because I’ll give you an example. If
00:31:10 you go to many parts of the United States today, and you ask people, what’s socialism?
00:31:16 They’ll look you right in the face and they’ll say, the post office. When I first heard this
00:31:23 as a young man, I go, what? The post office. It took me a while to understand. The post
00:31:30 office, Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government
00:31:36 runs something. This is socialism. See, capitalism is if the government doesn’t run it. If a
00:31:45 private individual who’s not a government official runs it, well, then it’s capitalism.
00:31:52 If the government takes it, then it’s socialism. So what is wrong with that reasoning? So the
00:31:58 idea, I think… There’s nothing wrong with it’s a way of looking at the world. It’s just
00:32:04 got nothing to do with Marx. Well, there’s Marx, there’s Marxism. Let’s try to pull
00:32:09 this apart. So what role does central planning have in Marxism? So Marxism is concerned with
00:32:22 this class struggle, with respecting the working class. What is the connection between that
00:32:31 struggle and central planning that is often… Central planning is often associated with
00:32:36 Marxism. Right. So a centralized power doing… Russia did that. Allocation. So that has to
00:32:44 do with a very specific set of implementations initiated by the Soviet Union. Has nothing
00:32:49 to do with Marx. How else can you do… I don’t think you can find anywhere in Marx’s
00:32:54 writing anything about central planning or any other kind of planning. Again, fundamentally
00:33:00 then, Marx’s work, it has to do with factories, with workers, with the bourgeoisie, and the
00:33:14 exploitation of the working class. Exactly. You still have to take that leap. What is
00:33:20 beyond capitalism? Right. So maybe we should turn to that, focus on that. Yes. Okay. We’ve
00:33:28 already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism. How else can we go
00:33:34 beyond capitalism? Right. Let me push a little further. They didn’t succeed in my judgment
00:33:40 as a Marxist. And I’m now gonna tell you why they didn’t succeed, because they didn’t understand
00:33:46 as well as they could have or should have what Marxist was trying to do. I think I would
00:33:52 have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circumstances. This is not
00:33:55 a critique of them, but it’s a different way of understanding what’s going on. All right.
00:34:01 So give you an example. Most of my adult life I have taught Marxian economics. I’m a professor
00:34:09 of economics. I’ve been that all my life. I’m a graduate of American universities. As
00:34:16 it happens, I’m a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities.
00:34:22 That’s another conversation you and I can have. So I went to Harvard, then I went to
00:34:29 Stanford, and I finished at Yale. I’m like a poster boy for elite education. They tried
00:34:35 very hard. By the way, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League, 20 semesters, one
00:34:42 after the other, no break. In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned a word about Marxism
00:34:51 that is no critique of capitalism was offered to me ever with one except one professor in
00:34:59 Stanford in the one semester I studied with him, he gave me plenty to read, but nobody
00:35:05 else. So that’s really interesting. You’ve mentioned that in the past, and that’s very
00:35:09 true, which makes you a very interesting figure to hold your ground intellectually through
00:35:18 this idea space where just people don’t really even talk about it. Perhaps we can discuss
00:35:25 historically why that is, but nevertheless, that’s the case. So Marxian economics, did
00:35:31 Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of…
00:35:36 Dismissal. The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal. To give
00:35:42 you an example, the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many
00:35:48 years the canonical book, it isn’t quite anymore, was a book authored by a professor of economics
00:35:54 at MIT named Paul Samuelson, and a whole generation or two were trained on his textbook.
00:36:03 If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree, and the tree is Adam Smith and
00:36:10 David Ricardo at the root, and then the different branches of it. He’s trying to give you an
00:36:16 idea as a student of how the thing developed. And it’s a tree, and everybody on it is a
00:36:22 bourgeois. And then there’s this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of
00:36:27 starts heading back down. That’s Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete
00:36:33 because he’s not a complete faker, but beyond that, no, there was no. Nothing in the book
00:36:38 gives you two paragraphs of an approach. But that’s Cold War. I mean, that’s really neither
00:36:47 here. That’s the craziness. Yeah, that’s the Cold War in this country. My professors
00:36:52 were afraid. Anyway, let me get to the core of it, what I think will help. Marx was interested
00:36:59 in the relationship of people in the process of production. He’s interested in the factory,
00:37:05 the office, the store, what goes on, and by that he means what are the relationships among
00:37:12 the people that come together in a workplace. And what he analyzes is that there is something
00:37:22 going on there that has not been adequately understood and that has not been adequately
00:37:31 addressed as an object needing transformation. And what does he mean? The answer is exploitation,
00:37:40 which he defines mathematically in the following way. Whenever in a society, any society,
00:37:48 you organize people, adults, not the children, not the sick, but, you know, healthy adults,
00:37:54 in the following way, a big block of them, a clear majority, work. That is, they use their
00:38:03 brains and their muscles to transform nature. A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater,
00:38:09 whatever. In every human community, Marx argues, there are the people who do that work,
00:38:16 but they always produce more chairs, more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume,
00:38:25 whatever their standard of living. Doesn’t have to be low, can be medium, can be high,
00:38:29 but they always produce more than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx, when he
00:38:38 writes this, uses the German word mehr, m e h r, which is the English equivalent of more. It’s the
00:38:44 more. That more got badly translated into the word surplus. Shouldn’t have been, but it was. By the
00:38:54 way, by German and English people doing the translations. What’s the difference between
00:38:59 more and surplus? Is there a nuanced? Yeah, because surplus has a notion of its discretionary,
00:39:06 it’s sort of extra. He’s not making a judgment that it’s extra. It’s a simple math equation.
00:39:12 Yes, very simple. One minus the other. Yes, x minus y. That’s right. x is the total output,
00:39:20 y is the consumption by the producer, therefore x minus y equals s, the surplus. Exactly. Now, Marx
00:39:29 argues, the minute you understand this, you will ask the following question. Who gets the surplus?
00:39:38 Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it? And Marx’s answer
00:39:47 is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society. How is that organized? For example,
00:39:54 who gets it? What are they asked, if anything, to do with it in exchange for getting it? What’s
00:40:03 their social role? For example, here we go now, if you get this and you get the core of it anyway,
00:40:10 and I don’t charge much, the workers themselves could get it. The workers themselves could get
00:40:20 it. That’s the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism. Communism would be if the workers
00:40:28 who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it. So this has to do not just with who gets
00:40:38 it, but more importantly, who gets to decide who gets it. Well, who gets it and who gets to decide
00:40:43 what to do with it. Right. Because you can’t decide it if you don’t have disposition over it.
00:40:49 So this is the logic of the word sequence. It’s produced. Marx uses the word appropriated. In
00:40:57 other words, whose property, who gets to decide, if you like, what happens. All that property ever
00:41:04 meant is who gets to decide and who’s excluded. That’s a clean definition of communism.
00:41:10 Right. By the way, it’s not just clean. This is the only one.
00:41:14 So can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context?
00:41:20 Easy. It becomes very easy. Exploitation exists if and when the surplus that’s produced
00:41:27 is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced it. Slaves produce a surplus
00:41:34 which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the lord gets. Employees produce a surplus
00:41:42 which the employer gets. It’s very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one
00:41:52 class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who
00:42:01 produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems
00:42:10 you can lump under the heading class struggle. I use a metaphor, simple metaphorical story.
00:42:18 You have two children, let’s assume, and you take them to Central Park a few blocks from here.
00:42:23 It’s a nice day and the children are playing and in comes one of those men with an ice cream truck
00:42:29 comes by. Dingalingalingaling, your children see the ice cream. Daddy, get me an ice cream. So you
00:42:35 walk over, you take some money, and you get two ice cream cones and you give them to one of the
00:42:41 children. The other one begins to scream and yell and howl, obviously. What’s the issue? And you
00:42:49 realize you’ve just made a terrible mistake. So you order the one you gave the two ice cream cones
00:42:55 to give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it is. And that’s how you
00:43:01 solve the problem. Until a psychologist comes along and says, you know, you didn’t fix it by
00:43:08 what you just did. You should never have done that in the first place. My response, so you understand,
00:43:17 all of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic, political culture, these are all
00:43:25 giving the ice cream cone back to the kid. You should never do this in the first place.
00:43:30 LW. The reallocation of resources creates bitterness in the populace.
00:43:34 RL. Look at Arva. This country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my
00:43:39 life, and I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve worked here all my life. It’s tearing itself
00:43:45 apart, and it’s tearing itself apart basically over the redivision, the redistribution of wealth,
00:43:53 having so badly distributed in the first place. But that’s all in Marx. And notice as I explain
00:43:59 to you what is going on in this tension filled production scene in the office, the factory,
00:44:06 the store. I don’t have to say a word about the government. I’m not interested in the government.
00:44:10 The government’s really a very secondary matter to this core question. And here comes the big point.
00:44:18 If you make a revolution and all you do is remove the private exploiter
00:44:25 and substitute a government official without changing the relationship,
00:44:32 you can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you’re not getting the point
00:44:36 of the Marxism. The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation per se.
00:44:43 You’ve got to change the organization of the workplace so there isn’t a group that makes all
00:44:49 the decisions and gets the surplus vis a vis another one that produces it. If you do that,
00:44:55 you will destroy the whole project. Not only will you not achieve what you set out to get,
00:45:01 but you’ll so misunderstand it that the Germans again have a phrase,
00:45:06 es geht schief. It goes crooked. It doesn’t go right. The project gets off the rails because
00:45:14 it can’t understand either what its objective should have been, and therefore it doesn’t
00:45:19 understand how and why it’s missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped
00:45:25 for. I mean there’s a lot of fascinating questions here. So one is to what degree,
00:45:33 so there’s human nature, to what degree does communism, a lack of exploitation of the working
00:45:42 class naturally emerge? If you leave two people together in a room and come back a year later,
00:45:48 if you leave five people together in a room, if you leave a hundred people and a thousand people,
00:45:54 it seems that humans form hierarchies naturally. So the clever, the charismatic,
00:46:02 the sexy, the muscular, the powerful, however you define that, starts becoming a leader and start to
00:46:11 do maybe exploitation in a nonnegative sense, a more generic sense, starts to become an employer,
00:46:20 not in a capitalist sense, but just as a human. Here, you go do this, and in exchange I will give
00:46:25 you this. Just becomes the leadership role, right? So the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice,
00:46:33 the idea sort of of communism would be nice to not steal from the world.
00:46:37 Nice in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice because of human nature.
00:46:41 Because of human nature. That’s, thank you. So what can we say about leveraging human nature
00:46:48 to achieve some of these ends? There’s so many ways of responding,
00:46:53 in no particular order. Here are some of them. The history of the human race, as best I can tell,
00:47:01 is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society, arise,
00:47:13 and as they do, they rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they are socially
00:47:22 disruptive and unacceptable. The argument isn’t really then, is there a need or an instinct,
00:47:30 is there some human nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is,
00:47:36 this has to be repressed or else we don’t have a society. And Freud helps us to understand
00:47:43 that that repression is going on all the time and it has consequences. It’s not a finished project,
00:47:49 you repress it, it’s gone, it doesn’t work like that. So for example, when you get a bunch of
00:47:56 people together at some point, they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to
00:48:02 want the other person or persons to disappear, to be dead, to be gone. But we don’t permit you to
00:48:11 do that. We just don’t. Every economic system that has ever existed has included people who defend it
00:48:21 on the grounds that it is the only system consistent with human nature and that every
00:48:29 effort to go beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you
00:48:37 endless documents of every tribal society I’ve ever studied, every anthropological community that
00:48:44 has ever been studied, slavery wherever it’s existed. I can show you endless documents in
00:48:50 which the defenders of those systems, not all of them of course, but many defenders used that
00:48:56 argument. To naturalize a system is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going,
00:49:04 to counter the argument that every system is born, every system evolves, and then every system dies.
00:49:12 And therefore capitalism, since it was born and since it’s been developing, we all know what the
00:49:19 next stage of capitalism is. The burden is on the people who think it isn’t going to die.
00:49:26 Okay, so it doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but what you’re saying is if we look at history,
00:49:31 you’re deeply suspicious of the argument this is going against human nature because we keep
00:49:36 using that for basically everything including toxic relationship, toxic systems, destructive
00:49:42 systems. That said, well, let me just ask a million different questions. So one, what about
00:49:50 the argument that sort of the employer, the capitalist takes on risk versus the employee
00:50:01 who’s just there doing the labor? The capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk. Are they not
00:50:10 in sort of aggregating this organization and taking this giant effort, hiring a lot of people?
00:50:15 Aren’t they taking on risk that this is going to be a giant failure? So first of all, there’s risk
00:50:22 almost in everything you undertake. Any project that begins now and ends in the future takes a
00:50:28 risk that between now and that future something’s going to happen that makes it not work out. I mean,
00:50:34 I got into a cab before I came here today. In order to do this with you, I took a risk. The cab
00:50:42 could have been in an accident. The lightning could have hit us. A bear could have eaten my
00:50:46 left foot. Who the hell knows? But shouldn’t I reward you for the risk you took? No, hold it
00:50:51 a second. Let’s do this step by step. So everybody’s taking a risk. I always found it wonderful.
00:50:57 You talk about risk and then you imagine it’s only some of us who take a risk. Let’s go with
00:51:03 the worker, with the capitalist. That worker, he moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to
00:51:12 take that job. He made a decision to have children. They are teenagers. They’re now in school at a
00:51:20 time when their friendships are crucial to their development. You’re going to yank them out of the
00:51:25 school because his job is gone. He took an enormous risk to do that job every day, to forestall all
00:51:35 the other things he could have done. He was taking a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next
00:51:41 month, next year. He bought a house, which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he’s
00:51:48 now stuck. He has to make a monthly payment. If you make a mistake, you capitalist. He’s the one
00:51:57 who’s going to, you’re a capitalist. You got a lot of money. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in that
00:52:00 position. You’ve got a cushion. He doesn’t. If you investigate, you’ll see that in every business
00:52:08 I’ve ever been in. I’ve been involved in a lot of them. So you think it’s possible to actually
00:52:11 measure risk or is your basic argument is there’s risk involved in a lot of both the working class
00:52:17 and the bourgeoisie, the capitalists. That’s right. And the worker would never come and say,
00:52:23 because he’s been taught right, I want this payment, a wage for the work I do.
00:52:32 And I want this page, this payment for the risk I take. Well, there’s some level of communication
00:52:39 like that. You have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs, but that’s probably built into the salary,
00:52:44 all those kinds of things. But you’re not incorporating the full spectrum of risk.
00:52:50 You don’t believe that. This country is now being literally transformed from below by an army of
00:52:57 workers who work at Amazon, fast food joints. You know what their complaint is? It’s killing us.
00:53:05 We get paid shit and it’s killing us. There is no relationship except in the minds of the defenders
00:53:13 of capitalism between the ugliness, the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one hand and the wage.
00:53:21 Let me give you just a couple of examples. This is my job. This is my life, what I do.
00:53:26 The median income of a child care worker in the United States right now, as we speak,
00:53:33 is $11.22 an hour median. So 50% make less, 50% make more. The median income for car park attendant
00:53:46 is several dollars per hour higher than that. What does the car park attendant do? He stares at your
00:53:53 car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it. Maybe he parks it and he moves it
00:54:02 and he moves it around to get it in and out. By any measure that I know of that makes any rational
00:54:08 sense, being in charge of toddlers, two, three, four year olds who are at the key moment of
00:54:16 mental formation the first five years, to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who
00:54:23 watches your car. Come on, I know how to explain it. Gender explains all kinds of issues that the
00:54:31 car park people are males and the day the child care people are females. And that in our culture
00:54:37 is a very big marker of what, but the one who said only the economics professor, nobody else
00:54:45 says this stuff because in economics, I don’t know if you were familiar with our profession, but
00:54:50 we have something which we call marginal product. This is a fantasy. I was a mathematician. Before
00:54:58 I became an economist, I loved mathematics. I specialized in mathematics. So I know mathematics
00:55:05 pretty well. What economists do is silly, is childish, but they think it’s mathematics.
00:55:13 But think for a minute what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal product
00:55:22 of a factor of production, like a worker. In the textbook when it’s taught, I’ve taught this stuff.
00:55:30 I hold my nose, but I teach it. Then I explain to students what I’ve just taught you is
00:55:35 horse shit, but first I teach it. What is the marginal product if it might be useful?
00:55:39 The notion is if you take away one worker right now from the pile, what will be the diminution
00:55:46 of the output? That’s the marginal product of that worker measured by the amount of the output
00:55:54 that diminishes output of the raw product of the product. Usually in real terms or physical,
00:56:01 not the value. You could do a value, but it’s really more the physical you’re at.
00:56:05 I mean, there is a transformation thing. I’d love to talk to you about value. It’s so interesting.
00:56:11 What is value? I’d be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that,
00:56:16 but I just want to get to this. Hegel, who was Marx’s teacher, has a famous line.
00:56:23 You can’t step in the same river twice. The argument is you and the river have changed
00:56:30 between the first and the second time. It’s a different you and it’s a different river.
00:56:34 You can choose not to pay attention to that. You can’t claim you’re not doing that.
00:56:39 You can’t claim that you can actually do that because you can’t. There is no way to do that.
00:56:44 So the meaning that you can’t just remove a worker and have a clean
00:56:49 mathematical calculation of the effect that it has on the output.
00:56:52 That’s right, because too many other things are going on, too many things are changing,
00:56:57 and you cannot assume, much as you want to, that the outcome on the output side is uniquely
00:57:05 determined by the change you made on the input side. You can’t do that.
00:57:10 Even in the average, it’s not going to work out.
00:57:14 You can take, look, mathematics is full of abstractions. You can say, as we do in economics,
00:57:20 keteris paribus, everything else held constant, but you have to know what you just did. You know
00:57:27 why you do that? Because you can’t do that in the real world. That’s not possible. You better
00:57:31 account for that, otherwise you’re mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted
00:57:39 from to get the abstraction. As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiment
00:57:46 or an actual experiment of removing every single economist from the world, would we be better off
00:57:51 or worse off? Much better off. Okay. Economics, and I’m one, you know, I’m talking about myself.
00:57:57 We’re going to ship all the economists to Mars and see how well it works off.
00:58:03 The serious part of this is that economics, it’s really about capitalism. Economics as a
00:58:12 discipline is born with capital. There was no such thing. I teach courses at the university,
00:58:18 for example, called History of Economic Thought. I begin the students with Aristotle and Plato.
00:58:24 And I say, you know, they talked about really interesting things, but they never called it
00:58:30 economics. It made no sense to people to abstract something as central to daily life as economics
00:58:40 broadly defined. It made no sense. That’s a creation much, much later. That’s capitalism
00:58:46 that did that, created the field. So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them
00:58:52 particular passages. By the way, footnote, because your audience will like it. Plato and Aristotle
00:58:58 talked about markets because they lived at a time in ancient Greece when market relations were
00:59:04 beginning to intrude upon these societies. So they were both interested in this phenomena,
00:59:12 that we’re not just producing goods and then distributing among us. We’re doing it in a quid
00:59:18 pro quo. You know, I’ll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange.
00:59:23 And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason,
00:59:29 they destroy social cohesion. They destroy community. They make some people rich and
00:59:36 other people poor, and they set us against each other, and it’s terrible. And here’s what
00:59:41 that they agreed on that. Here’s what they disagreed on. One of them said, okay, there
00:59:46 can be no markets. That was Plato. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no, too late for
00:59:53 that. The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in
01:00:00 amongst us would be too devastating. So we can’t do that. But what we can do is control it, regulate
01:00:09 it, get from the market what it does reasonably well, and prevent it from doing the destructive
01:00:16 things it does so badly. So the fundamentally the destructive thing of a market is it’s the
01:00:23 engine of capitalism, so it creates exploitation of the worker. It facilitates it, and it is an
01:00:32 institution that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible danger to community. Which, by the way,
01:00:40 is a way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world.
01:00:45 Look, the medieval Catholic Church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury.
01:00:53 You know, and this was that God said, if there’s a person who needs to borrow from you,
01:00:59 then that’s a person in need. And the good Christian thing to do is to help him. To demand
01:01:07 an interest payment rather than to help your fellow man is, God hates you for that. That’s a sin.
01:01:16 Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes.
01:01:19 But would Jesus be crying when you try to scale that system? So that has to do with the
01:01:26 with the intimate human interaction. The idea of markets is you’re able
01:01:33 to create a system that involves thousands, millions of humans, and there’d be some level of
01:01:41 safe, self regulating fairness.
01:01:46 There might be, but it’s hard to imagine that charging interest would be the way to do that.
01:01:52 I wonder what, so I guess…
01:01:53 Suppose you were interested in having, suppose you took us your problem.
01:02:00 We have a set of funds that can be loaned out.
01:02:04 People don’t want to consume it. They’re ready to lend it. Okay. To whom should they lend it?
01:02:11 Well, we could say in our society, we’re going to run this the way professors
01:02:16 in institutions like MIT work this. They write up a project. They send the project into some
01:02:24 government office where it is looked at against other projects. And this office in the government
01:02:31 decides we’re going to fund this one and that one because they’re more needed in our society.
01:02:38 We’re in greater need of solving this problem than that problem. And so we’re going to lend
01:02:43 money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here,
01:02:49 because we’re going to, but instead what we do is, who can pay the highest interest rate?
01:02:55 Whoa, what are you doing? What ethics would justify you doing? It’s like a market in general.
01:03:02 Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage. That’s one
01:03:08 basic way to understand it. And so if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word
01:03:14 shortage means, has no other meaning, if the demand is greater than the supply, okay, now you’ve got
01:03:20 a problem. You can’t satisfy all the demanders because you don’t have enough supply. You have
01:03:27 a shortage. Okay, now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people who have a lot of
01:03:32 money to bid up the price of whatever’s short, and that solves your problem because as the price goes
01:03:40 up, the poor people, they drop out. They can’t buy the thing at the exalted price, so you’ve got a
01:03:47 way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people with the most money. At this point, most
01:03:53 human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn against it because it
01:04:00 contradicts their Christian, Judaic, Islamic, all of them would say, what? You know what that means?
01:04:07 It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat, while the poor
01:04:13 person has no milk for their five children. There it is. You want a market? Why?
01:04:19 The fundamental thing that seems unfair, there’s the resulting inequality. Now…
01:04:25 Or death.
01:04:26 Or death. Well, that’s the ultimate inequality.
01:04:30 Yes, it is.
01:04:32 What about, and we’re going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics,
01:04:36 to the sort of debate type of thing. What about sort of the lifting ties raise all boats?
01:04:45 Meaning, if we look at the 20th century, a lot of people, maybe you disagree with this,
01:04:53 but they attribute a lot of the innovation and the average improvement in the quality of life
01:05:01 to capitalism, to inventions and innovation, to engineering and science developments
01:05:09 that resulted from competition and all those kinds of forces. So, not looking at the individual
01:05:17 unfairness of exploitation as it’s specifically defined, but just observing historically.
01:05:24 Looking at the 20th century, we came up with a lot of cool stuff that seemed to have made life
01:05:28 easier and better on average. What do you say to that?
01:05:35 I have several responses to that, but I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what’s
01:05:42 going on there. But let me give you the arguments so that you can hear them,
01:05:47 and then you can evaluate them, as can anybody who’s listening or watching.
01:05:56 Marx was a student of Hegel, and one of Hegel’s central arguments was that everything that
01:06:01 exists exists, quote, in contradiction. In simple English, there’s a good and bad side,
01:06:09 if you like, to everything. And you won’t understand it unless you accept that proposition
01:06:15 and start looking for the good things that are the other side of the bad ones, and the bad things
01:06:20 that are the other side of the good ones, etc. So, the dialectic. Yes, exactly. And Marx,
01:06:26 very attentive to that, explicitly agrees with this on many occasions, and applies it,
01:06:33 of course, to the central object of his research, capitalism. So, this is not a simple minded fellow
01:06:41 who’s telling you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this
01:06:45 system achieved or accomplished. And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological
01:06:53 dynamism of the system, which Marx takes to be profound, because, you know, he lived at the time
01:07:00 when major breakthroughs in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved.
01:07:10 But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement in
01:07:18 the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people, Marx now comes back and says,
01:07:23 oh wait, wait a minute here. Number one, capitalism as a system has been mostly represented by
01:07:36 capitalists, which makes a certain sense. And those capitalists, with very few exceptions,
01:07:43 some but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the lives of the mass of people.
01:07:51 The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What that means is replace a worker with
01:07:58 a machine, move the production from expensive U.S. to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants from
01:08:07 other parts of the world, because they will work for less money than the folks that you have here
01:08:11 at home. Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for,
01:08:18 had to be fought for, for decades over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning
01:08:26 to right now. The reason we have a minimum wage, which was passed in the middle of the 1930s,
01:08:32 when it was proposed, it was blocked by capitalists. They got together. And today,
01:08:39 just a factoid for you, the last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States,
01:08:45 federal minimum wage, was in 2009, when it was set at the lofty sum of $7.25 an hour,
01:08:56 which you cannot live on. Over the last 12 years or so, whatever it is now, 11, 12, 13 years
01:09:04 since then, we have had an increase in the price level in this country every year. And in the last
01:09:10 year, 8.5%. During that time that the prices went up, the minimum wage was never raised.
01:09:19 What? This is a time of stock market boom, of growing inequality. This is the nerve of the
01:09:31 defender of capitalists, who wants now to get credit for the improvement in the standard of
01:09:39 life of the workers that was fought by every generation. You know, it takes your breath away.
01:09:45 It’s an argument. Whoa. But I take my hat off if I had one, because that is one of the only ways
01:09:53 to justify this system. Long ago—let me get to the heart of it—long ago, capitalism could have
01:10:02 overcome hunger, could have overcome disease, could have, I mean, way beyond what we have now,
01:10:11 but it didn’t. And that’s the worst moral condemnation imaginable. How do you justify
01:10:20 that when you could, you didn’t? Look, let me get at it another way, because this may
01:10:27 interest you anyway. The issue is not that capitalism isn’t technologically dynamic.
01:10:35 It is. And along the way, it has developed things that have helped people’s lives get better. No
01:10:41 question. But the notion that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is somehow built
01:10:50 into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous—and I can give you a—because
01:10:59 you do math, you’ll understand it. Think of it this way. Imagine a production process in which
01:11:05 you have $100 that the capitalist has to lay out for tools, equipment, and raw materials,
01:11:14 and $100 that he has to lay out for workers, hire the workers. And he puts them all together,
01:11:20 and he has an output. And let’s say the output is 100 units of something, or whatever the price is,
01:11:27 and that’s his revenue. And when he takes his product and sells it and gets the revenue,
01:11:35 let’s say the revenue is—it doesn’t really matter—it’s $120, for lack of a better word.
01:11:42 And he takes $100 of it and replaces the tools, equipment, and raw materials he used up,
01:11:49 another $100 to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other $20 is his profit,
01:11:54 and he puts that aside. Now along comes a technological breakthrough,
01:12:00 a machine, a new machine. And the new machine is so effective,
01:12:07 you can get the same number of units of output with half the workers. So you don’t need to spend
01:12:13 $100 on workers. You only need to spend $50. You can do it with half the workers. And so the
01:12:20 capitalist goes to the workers—by the way, this happens every day—and he says to half of them,
01:12:25 you’re fired. Don’t come back Monday morning. I don’t need you. It’s nothing personal. I got a
01:12:31 machine. Why does he do that? Because of the $50 he now no longer has to spend on labor, because
01:12:38 he doesn’t need half of them. He keeps. Everything else is the same. The machine, everything else is
01:12:44 just to make the math easy. So he keeps as his own profit the $50 that before he paid for those
01:12:52 workers. Because when he sells it for $220, that $50 he doesn’t have to give to the next
01:12:58 job because he has a new machine. So that’s what he does. The technology leads. He’s happy. He’s
01:13:06 become more profitable. He’s got an extra $50, which is why he buys the machine. The workers
01:13:13 are screwed. Half of them just lost their job, have to go home to their husband and wife,
01:13:20 tell them I don’t have a job anymore. I didn’t do anything wrong. The guy was nice enough to
01:13:25 say it was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn’t need it. So I’m completely screwed here. I don’t
01:13:31 know what I’m going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage, my children’s education,
01:13:36 or whatever else he’s got going for himself. Now the point. There was, of course, an alternative
01:13:43 path. The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same that
01:13:49 you did before, for half a day’s work. You would have got the same output, same revenue, same
01:13:58 profit as before. But the gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day
01:14:06 of the lives of these workers. The majority of workers would have been really helped by this
01:14:15 technology. But instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle of
01:14:23 more money. You want to support a system like this? Well, to go back to Hegel, the good and the bad.
01:14:32 So you just listed the bad and you also first listed the good, the technological innovation
01:14:37 of this kind of system. The question is the alternative, whatever, as we try to sneak up to
01:14:44 ideas of what the alternative might look like, what are the good and the bad of the alternative?
01:14:48 So you just kind of, as a opposite, by contrast, showed that, well, a nice alternative is you work
01:14:56 less, get paid the same, you have more leisure time, opportunity to pursue other interests,
01:15:06 the creative interests, family, flourish as a human being, basically strengthen and embolden
01:15:15 the basic humanity that’s under all of us. Yes. But then what cost does that have on the deadline
01:15:27 fueled, competition fueled machine of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism?
01:15:36 Slows it down.
01:15:37 It slows it down. And the question is which is more important for the flourishing of humanity?
01:15:44 I agree with that. And I’d love there to be a democratic mechanism. So let’s discuss it,
01:15:52 let’s debate it, and then let’s decide what mixture, because it’s not either or,
01:15:57 the math problem I gave you is either or, we could mix it. You could have a third less of a working
01:16:03 day instead of a half less, and then the other part would be extra profit for our employer,
01:16:08 etc. etc. So let’s have a democratic discussion of what is the mix between the positive, and we have
01:16:16 no such thing. All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only, we know what they
01:16:22 do, they always choose the one that maximizes their profit because that’s what they were told
01:16:27 to do in business school where I’ve taught. So not only is it an undemocratic decision,
01:16:34 but it’s lopsided to boot. So we don’t have the opportunity, but I would love for us to be good
01:16:40 Hegelian Marxists and say, let’s take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision
01:16:46 that we can. We’ll make mistakes, but we’ll all make them together. It won’t be one of us making
01:16:53 a dictatorial decision. You know, Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
01:16:59 not as a notion of how government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is.
01:17:10 The dictatorship in these key decisions is not made by some sitting council, it’s made by each
01:17:16 little capitalist in his or her relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is why Marx
01:17:22 focused his analysis on that point. And by the way, I can sketch for you right now so it doesn’t
01:17:28 lurk in the background what the alternative is. Let’s go there. Okay. It goes right back to what
01:17:34 I said earlier. The workers themselves, the collection of employees together appropriate
01:17:42 their own surplus and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of
01:17:51 whether or not to buy a machine and whether or not to use the machine and the savings it might allow
01:18:02 to be handled by more leisure for themselves or as a fund for new developments in technology or
01:18:12 new products or whatever they want. And you know, this is an old idea in humans. Marx loved that.
01:18:20 Toward the end of his life, he started reading extensively in anthropology. And one of the
01:18:27 reasons he did that toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering that in this
01:18:33 society and that one, including here in the United States, that there were examples of people who
01:18:40 organized their production in precisely this way, as a collective democratic community in which
01:18:50 everybody had an equal voice. So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to
01:18:56 produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output we all help to produce. So let’s do it in,
01:19:03 you know, in this country where democracy is a value nearly everybody subscribes to.
01:19:13 Think about it this way, the stunning contradiction that there is a place in our society
01:19:20 where democracy has never been allowed to enter. The workplace. In the workplace, a tiny group of
01:19:28 people, unaccountable to the rest of us, the employer, whether that’s an individual, a family,
01:19:35 a partnership, or a corporate board of directors, tiny group of people controls economically a vast
01:19:43 mass of employees. Those employees don’t elect those people, have no nothing. There is no
01:19:49 accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable. And this society
01:19:56 insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor matter of producing
01:20:04 everything in a way that is the direct, it’s autocratic. So to push back on a few things.
01:20:11 So one is the idea of this society calling itself democratic is that the government is elected
01:20:18 democratically and the government is able to pressure the workplace through the process of
01:20:24 regulation. You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know, minimum wage, all those kinds of things.
01:20:31 That’s the one idea. The other is there is a natural force within the capitalist when there’s
01:20:37 no monopolies of competition being the accountability. So if you’re a shitty boss,
01:20:45 the employee in the capitalist system has the freedom to move to another company, work for a
01:20:50 better boss. So that creates pressure on the employers and the bosses. That’s at least the idea
01:20:56 that there’s two boundaries of you not misbehaving. One is the law, so regulations
01:21:05 passed by the government, democratic. And the second is because there’s always alternatives,
01:21:12 in theory, then that puts pressure on everyone to behave well because you can always leave.
01:21:19 So, I mean, that’s kinds of accountability. But what you’re saying is that does not result
01:21:25 in a significant enough accountability for the employer that avoids exploitation of the worker.
01:21:32 WOLFF Absolutely. I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms. And let me respond
01:21:39 to that and then I’ll counterargument. First, competition. Here again, we have to be Hegelians
01:21:48 just a little. Competition destroys itself. It doesn’t need any—the whole point of competition
01:21:56 is to beat the other guy. If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better
01:22:02 quality or a lower price or maybe both, then I win because the customers will come to me
01:22:08 because my price is lower or my quality is better, and they’ll leave the other guy,
01:22:12 he’ll go out of business. Now, let’s follow. When he goes out of business, because I’ve won
01:22:17 the competition, he fires his workers. I hire them because I’m now going to be able to serve a market
01:22:25 he can’t serve anymore. So I’m going to buy the used equipment, and thereby many become few.
01:22:34 Monopoly is the product of competition. It’s not the antithesis, it’s the product.
01:22:41 LAROI Well, let’s see.
01:22:43 WOLFF That’s where it comes from.
01:22:44 LAROI There’s another element to the system where there’s always a new guy that comes in.
01:22:48 WOLFF There isn’t. There isn’t.
01:22:51 LAROI Well, that’s the dream. The entrepreneurial spirit of the United States,
01:22:58 for example, of a capitalist system is you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build
01:23:07 up a business that takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car, Ford, GM,
01:23:14 which is what you look at Tesla, for example. That’s the American dream. One of the many
01:23:20 ideals of the American dream is you can move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world.
01:23:30 WOLFF Right.
01:23:31 LAROI It can happen.
01:23:33 WOLFF It can happen.
01:23:34 WOLFF You know what that’s like? That’s like you can win a lottery.
01:23:37 LAROI No, that’s not quite. No, the lottery is complete luck. Here,
01:23:42 you can work your ass off if you have a good idea.
01:23:44 WOLFF The odds are better in the lottery.
01:23:46 LAROI That’s not true. There’s a lot of new businesses.
01:23:49 WOLFF How many Teslas do you know?
01:23:52 LAROI Tesla is a really bad example because the car
01:23:54 company, the automotive sector is so difficult. They operate at such a thin margin of profit.
01:24:03 They’re probably a good example of capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of
01:24:10 lack of innovation. That’s a very complicated industry because of the supply chain.
01:24:16 WOLFF Come on. They have their uniqueness as you’re quite right, but so does every other
01:24:23 industry. The one thing that’s common is that many become few. What you can also have is when you
01:24:29 have a few, they jack up the price. They make an enormous profit. In the irony of capitalism,
01:24:36 Marx would love this, they begin to incentivize people to break into this industry because the
01:24:42 few remaining are making a wild amount of profit because they are a few and can jigger the market
01:24:49 to make it work like that for them. The reason every small capitalist is trying to build market
01:24:58 share—that’s a polite way of saying they want to become a monopolist or to be more exact,
01:25:04 an oligopolist, one of a handful of firms that dominates. That’s what they’re there for.
01:25:09 PEDRO But yeah, to push back a little bit also, because this is a question also,
01:25:16 do you think we’re in danger of oversimplifying capitalism that completely removes the basic
01:25:22 decency of human beings? If you give me a choice to press a button to get rid of the competition,
01:25:34 but that’s going to lead to a lot of suffering, there’s a lot of people at the heads of companies
01:25:38 that won’t press that button. That it’s not in the calculation, it’s not just money,
01:25:44 it’s human well being too. So like—
01:25:47 PEDRO You think?
01:25:48 PEDRO Yes.
01:25:50 PEDRO You and I don’t live in the same place then.
01:25:53 PEDRO So you’re saying that the forces of capitalism
01:25:56 take over the minds of the people at the top, and then they cease being human.
01:26:01 PEDRO No.
01:26:02 PEDRO Depending on your model of humans.
01:26:07 PEDRO Yeah.
01:26:08 PEDRO They lose track of the better angels of their nature,
01:26:11 and they just become cogs in the machine, but they just happen to be the cock at the top.
01:26:15 PEDRO I would put it differently. The system is so set up, it’s a little bit like natural
01:26:20 selection. The guys who may—I could say the women too, it doesn’t matter—the people who make it up
01:26:26 through the layers of the bureaucracy and get to the top in these things have had to do things along
01:26:32 the way that become selective. If they can’t stand it because they have that human quality—and there
01:26:38 are people, I’ve known them—they’re the ones running an Airbnb in Vermont. They went there and
01:26:45 they said, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not going to treat people like that. I’m going to
01:26:49 make a lovely place in Vermont with my husband or my wife or whatever, and I’m going to be enjoying
01:26:56 the people that come by and be a decent—of course, of course. But the system selects the firm. If you
01:27:04 don’t do what has to be done to make the profit go up, you’re toast there anyway. The rest of the
01:27:10 people who vote for you are going to kick you out. You can tell them all day long what a lovely
01:27:15 person you are. Then they’re going to look at you and wonder what happened to you. How did you even
01:27:19 get this far with the lovely person horseshoe? RL It’s not necessarily just a lovely person.
01:27:25 So maybe my—I’ll just say my bias is the people I know are, especially at the top of companies,
01:27:34 are in the tech sector where innovation is such a big part of it. So I think a lot of the things
01:27:44 we’re talking about is when there’s not much innovation in the system. So—
01:27:49 RL Innovation usually comes—in the history of capitalism, innovation comes in spurts.
01:27:56 There’s the electric period, the chemistry period, the nuclear period. There’s now whatever you want
01:28:01 to call it, the artificial intelligence or robotics or computer. It comes, and then there’s a flurry
01:28:08 as everything is reorganized around whatever the newest technology is, and then you have a period
01:28:15 where you can get excited about that, and the very rich people who come to the top can talk endlessly,
01:28:21 as they always do, about innovation. But again, it really is—this is a recurring kind of debate and
01:28:32 a recurring kind of issue. For me—how do I put this in a way that—no, I don’t mean to offend.
01:28:41 RL Please, please. RL No, no, no, I don’t. I don’t want to, but
01:28:51 the problem with capitalism is—and maybe you’ll like this—the problem with capitalism is
01:28:58 not that it is the one thing that’s consistent with human nature. That’s what its defenders
01:29:03 would like to have us believe. But if anything, I would argue the opposite,
01:29:08 that it is such a contradiction to parts of our nature, not other parts, that it can never quite
01:29:18 make it. There’s always going to be the people who don’t go along with it, people you’re talking
01:29:24 about, who do quit along the way, or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top by god knows
01:29:32 what hook or what crook that they did it. But most of them go—and you know why? Because their
01:29:39 humanity is contradicted by what it is they’re being asked to do. I mean, the corporate sector
01:29:48 this year—just to give you an idea—CEOs are jacking up their wage package. They’re already
01:29:58 out of whack. I mean, the average CEO pay is now three, three hundred times what the average worker
01:30:04 pay is. But they’re jacking it up even more. Why? Because that’s what’s happening in their universe.
01:30:09 That’s what—they’re all doing it, and they have to do—each one of them justifies that,
01:30:13 I have to do that, otherwise I’d lose my guy to the next one. Which, of course, is true,
01:30:18 but is no comfort for the mass of people who aren’t CEOs, for whom this argument isn’t very
01:30:22 exciting. So they’re doing that at a time when the American people can’t cope. They’ve just gone
01:30:32 through the COVID disaster. They’ve gone through the second worst economic crash of capitalism
01:30:38 in our history. After two years of this one, two punch, they got an inflation, a third punch,
01:30:46 and we are now predicting rising interest rates and a recession at the end of the year
01:30:50 or early next year. You can’t do this to a working class. When this was done to the
01:30:55 German working class in the 1920s, Hitler was the result. You keep doing that in this country,
01:31:02 we’re already watching it, you’re going to get that too. You’re already getting bits and pieces.
01:31:07 You can’t keep doing it. So there’s a quiet suffering amidst the working class that’s growing.
01:31:11 Horror. Taking out on—
01:31:12 That can turn to anger. Some little 18 year old kid who has to go
01:31:16 three hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket. Huh? What? And it happens
01:31:24 every day in this country. Every day.
01:31:26 So that anger rises up in those little ways now and then bigger and bigger potentially.
01:31:33 By the way, there’s one more thing on the rationality. And this goes to Elon Musk.
01:31:40 If you’re interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year. The number
01:31:47 was just released yesterday. 49,000. Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country.
01:31:54 They use up an enormous amount of energy. They use up enormous amount of resources.
01:32:01 There is a way to make transportation much more rational. And we’ve known it for decades. It’s
01:32:07 called mass transportation. It’s a really beautifully maintained, crystal clear, clean,
01:32:15 frequent system of buses, trains, street trolleys, vans. It could easily be done in this society.
01:32:25 In fact, I once did a project that I estimated cost $30 billion. That’s less than we’re sending
01:32:31 to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it.
01:32:35 A public transit system where?
01:32:37 Everywhere in this country. All the major metropolitan. This country’s overwhelmingly
01:32:41 metropolitan area.
01:32:42 Well, it clearly has to be more than 30 billion, but…
01:32:46 Well, it was a few years ago.
01:32:47 Sure. But you’re saying it’s a little bit more than 30 billion.
01:32:50 But I’m using a lot of this. Right. It’s not crazy stuff.
01:32:57 It’s a reasonable number.
01:32:58 Right. Right.
01:32:59 Hey, listen, but there’s a…
01:33:01 Let me just finish the point.
01:33:02 Sure. Yes.
01:33:03 Okay. So I’m trying to be rational here. If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do,
01:33:13 if it’s got a lot to do with fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use
01:33:18 of the fossil fuel, particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass
01:33:24 transit. We’re doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing.
01:33:29 Well, you could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit because it’s going to be
01:33:37 reusable vehicles. It will end, in theory, car ownership. So you just have a more kind of
01:33:44 distributed public transit system.
01:33:45 If it happens, but you know that that’s a side effect. His major goal and the major goal of the
01:33:51 other companies that are busy squeezing to get his share of the pie smaller, so they have some,
01:33:58 Ford, General Motors, Toyota, all of them are making electric cars now. So what they’ve done is
01:34:04 they’ve replaced the individual car with fossil fuel with another individual car.
01:34:09 Yeah.
01:34:10 That’s fucking nuts. What are you doing?
01:34:12 Well, that’s one of the things they’re doing, but automation is also another one. But on the Elon
01:34:17 side, there’s also a hilarious thing named Boring Company, which is working on tunnels, which is
01:34:24 actually expanding the flexibility you might have to start playing with ideas of public transit,
01:34:31 I think. Listen, I’m now partially living in Austin, Texas, that I don’t know if they know
01:34:37 what a public transit system is, period.
01:34:40 Yes.
01:34:40 There’s F150 pickup trucks.
01:34:41 Most American cities are.
01:34:43 Yeah.
01:34:43 Well, this is an interesting, so.
01:34:47 The older, by the way, footnote, the older this city, the more likely it has public transportation.
01:34:54 So you’re saying.
01:34:54 Boston is the best example.
01:34:56 Yes.
01:34:56 Have you been, well, you.
01:34:58 Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I have a place in Boston.
01:35:00 Boston with the street railway, Boston is your case study of how to do this,
01:35:05 because they’ve been doing it all along. New York’s pretty good, too.
01:35:07 There’s a tradeoff. Yeah, New York, I would say, is better than Boston because
01:35:11 so there’s, you know, their technology also helps you out to do the public transit better.
01:35:18 It’s almost like Boston is a little too old, but yes, I get your point.
01:35:21 But there is a, the Ford F150 pickup truck symbolizes something about America,
01:35:29 and there is a practical nature to the fact that in order to do public transit,
01:35:35 in order to do some of these things that you’re talking about with the working class,
01:35:42 there has to be a central planning component, or there has to be a centralized component.
01:35:48 And America is very much based on the idea of, at least in recent times,
01:35:55 I would say from the founding, of individualism, of respecting individual freedom.
01:35:59 Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas of Marxism to life,
01:36:07 you would trample on individual freedoms?
01:36:10 No.
01:36:11 Can you respect both?
01:36:13 Sure. For me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people
01:36:20 who have had that freedom eroded under the capitalist. That’s a motive for my Marxism.
01:36:26 It was for Marx too. He loved the French Revolution. He loved the liberté, égalité, fraternité,
01:36:34 the great three, and then democracy, the American contribution, if you like.
01:36:39 He believed in all of that. His critique of capitalism was, it promised it,
01:36:44 and then never delivered it. And the reason you have to go beyond it is because
01:36:49 it didn’t deliver what it had promised. So for me, it is the fulfillment of agenda.
01:36:59 But again, I’m a Hegelian Marxist, if you want. Individualism, for me, is not the way it’s set
01:37:08 up in this society, some sort of antithesis to the government. I think an immense con has been
01:37:18 pulled on the American people. And the con works like this. You know what’s bad and what’s dangerous
01:37:24 and threatens you? It’s the government. The government’s going to come in and tell you
01:37:29 what to do. The government’s going to run your life. The government’s the problem.
01:37:33 There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics.
01:37:39 Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn, like the so called Great
01:37:44 Recession of 2008. Who do they blame? The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed,
01:37:51 and what is the media all about? The government. If I were a capitalist, I’d love this. I kick the
01:37:58 workers by throwing them out of their home, and they don’t get angry at me. They get angry at the
01:38:03 government. I fire large numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them as a
01:38:09 result of having no job and no income. And they get angry at the senator. I’m laughing all the way
01:38:16 to the bank. This is a genius stroke. In theory. But if you look at government, because you said
01:38:23 accountability in the capitalist system has no accountability. There’s some pushback I give on
01:38:27 the accountability. I think there is some accountability we can discuss in a Hegelian way.
01:38:32 Who there’s more accountability for. I would say that in theory, government is perfectly
01:38:40 accountable. That’s the whole point of a democratic system is you vote people in. In practice,
01:38:46 there’s a giant growing bureaucracy that is accountable only on the surface. There’s two
01:38:52 parties that seem to be the same. Media somehow integrated into making the same two parties that
01:39:03 are just wearing different colored shirts to seem like they’re very opposed and are arguing and
01:39:09 bitterly arguing and calling each other’s nasty names and all those kinds of things. But that’s
01:39:16 government. So who exactly is worse here? Government or companies? Well, why are we asking
01:39:24 that question? These are twins. Look, what you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats
01:39:31 just now, with which I agree. I would say the same thing about corporations and the government.
01:39:36 This is the same people. Literally. Let’s go to Churchill. Which one is worse? Let’s go to
01:39:42 Churchill. Democracy is the worst form of government except all the other ones or whatever.
01:39:47 So this kind of same idea. Which one exactly is worse? Because to me, it seems like…
01:39:52 Which one between what and what?
01:39:54 Government and industry and companies. It’s because government is plagued by…
01:40:03 I would call it corruption because the corruption of bureaucratic paperwork.
01:40:10 But they’re not accountable. There doesn’t seem to be a serious accountability.
01:40:15 Again, we’re not living on the same planet. The greatest practitioners of central planning
01:40:23 are corporations. Elon has an operation like General Motors, Ford, IBM, or any of the other
01:40:32 megacorps. They have to plan. They buy up companies because they don’t want to deal
01:40:40 in the market. They don’t want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs
01:40:46 or sell their outputs to somebody they don’t control. They want the professor to teach the
01:40:53 genius of a market. They hate the market. And when they grow to be big, they keep buying
01:40:59 whoever they were dealing with before so they could better control them, which requires them
01:41:04 then to plan the production and distribution of goods inside rather than buying them in the market.
01:41:12 The model of the government is it’s a private corporation. I have spent my life…
01:41:18 I’ll give you an example. In American universities, big ones, famous ones, not just as a student but as
01:41:25 a professor. I’ve been half a dozen schools. I teach now at the new school here. It’s another one,
01:41:29 right? They all model themselves after businesses. They model their… You can attack the bureaucracy
01:41:37 of universities. Good reason. It’s a mess. But they’re proudly modeling themselves
01:41:45 on organizing their bureaucracy in a businesslike manner. So you’re looking at a difference which
01:41:53 isn’t there. The government and the private sector are partners, and both of them wouldn’t have it
01:42:00 any other way. The corporations want that from the government, and the government now knows that to
01:42:07 please the corporations is the number one objective they have because that’s how they keep their jobs
01:42:14 and keep their system going. And so for all practical purposes, this is the same people.
01:42:20 But there’s important differences that I don’t know if they’re fundamental or just a consequence
01:42:27 of history. But if you have government, they’re accountable in a different way than companies.
01:42:32 Companies are accountable by… Especially if you have a consumer, they’re accountable by sort of
01:42:38 the consumer spending or not spending their money on whatever the heck the company is selling.
01:42:43 Right. The government is accountable by votes. And it seems like
01:42:51 government, unlike companies, for most of company’s history, is always too big to fail, meaning
01:42:58 it can always just print money. It can always save itself. And that creates a bureaucracy.
01:43:06 You rarely pay the cost of having made bad decisions if you’re in government. You
01:43:12 distribute the blame, and it’s very unclear who’s responsible for bad decisions. So bad decisions
01:43:19 in government accumulate. So you become more and more and more inefficient and more and more poor
01:43:25 in your decision making in terms of, you said, public transit. Should we build a public transit
01:43:30 system in this city or not? That’s a difficult decision. That’s an interesting decision. I would
01:43:36 say it’s very often a very good decision. But whoever makes that decision should be accountable
01:43:42 for a good or bad decision. And it seems like companies are more accountable. They pay…
01:43:49 They feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because it can go bankrupt. There’s much more
01:43:57 day to day pressure to make good engineering decisions. Government doesn’t seem to be under
01:44:03 the same level of pressure. Do you disagree with that? I disagree with that. Everything in my
01:44:10 history pushes me. You may be living… I may be living in a different planet or taking a different
01:44:20 sort of drug. I won’t mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a very large
01:44:27 company here in the United States, here in the New York area. And it involved two brothers and
01:44:37 a family who built it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was kind of the dynamo
01:44:48 of the family. And he was more responsible than anybody else building it up.
01:44:52 But he took care of his brothers. He had a nice feeling about his brothers. So, the one brother
01:44:56 who could not, you know, without help tie his shoes, became a vice president. Got an enormous
01:45:05 salary. Got a beautiful office in a skyscraper, not that many blocks from where I’m sitting right
01:45:12 now. And that was the way that family handled that company. And all of his relatives that were
01:45:23 somewhere in this company doing a variety of whatever, because… And my experience with this,
01:45:32 and because I went to the schools, I told you, all my experiences with that group of people,
01:45:37 corporate experiences, full of those stories. You know, they made mistake after mistake,
01:45:44 which they would tell you didn’t undermine. They were always able to blame somebody else,
01:45:52 something else that scraped them through. And had they not been able to, they would have been
01:45:58 replaced by another person who did the same thing for as long as they could. And they knew it. They
01:46:05 would talk about it at family events. That’s how I know. I understand that you want the outside
01:46:13 world to look at it this way, but it’s not my experience.
01:46:17 But again, that kind of thing, at the risk of saying human nature again, I wonder what
01:46:25 kind of system allows for that more versus less. This is the question of, I would call that, let’s
01:46:36 put that under the umbrella term of corruption. Which system allows for more corruption?
01:46:42 But remember that the way I defined the different system is not more or less government.
01:46:46 It’s more or less allowing a democratic workplace, reconfiguring it. What happens when everybody
01:46:55 has a vote? When you have to explain what the strategies are, what the alternatives are to a
01:47:01 larger number of people than a board of directors or major shareholders or whoever it is that most
01:47:08 companies are responsible to. And now you’ve got a whole different universe. It’s not a small group
01:47:13 that can’t be hidden the way it’s normally hidden, most of it, and on and on and on.
01:47:20 Worker coops is what this is called in many parts of the world. So it’s not that I’m advocating
01:47:25 something that’s never been seen before, not at all. The Marxism I understand is to pick from
01:47:32 historical precedents the things that we think will work better. And I think if all the people
01:47:40 in enterprise, just to drive the point home, democratically decided they would never give
01:47:46 two or three individuals 100 million dollars while everybody else can’t send their kid to
01:47:50 college. I mean they can do that. So just to return, just to address this point about the
01:47:59 particular implementation of Marxism that was the early days in the Soviet Union. Why did
01:48:05 Stalinism, for example, lead to so much bloodshed, do you think, and human suffering? Is there any
01:48:12 elements within the ideas of Marxism that catalyzed the kind of government, the kind of system that
01:48:23 led to that bloodshed? I don’t think so. I think there were many things that led to the bloodshed
01:48:29 and to all that Stalin’s regimes did. And I spent 10 years of my life with another economist writing
01:48:41 a book about that to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
01:48:50 You might want to take a look at it sometime. I’m going to say a few things now, but all of
01:48:56 those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, etc. in that work.
01:49:06 Let me start with playing a little bit with Hegel.
01:49:12 The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the Soviet Union
01:49:21 did, but what the rest of the world did. You had a really interesting move, and I’ll give you a
01:49:29 parallel from today. The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed. World War I, it fell
01:49:40 apart. The Tsar and all of that, it couldn’t survive. It had already been in trouble. There
01:49:46 was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war to Japan. If you know Russian history,
01:49:53 which I assume you do, you’ll know that there was a lot leading up to the collapse in 1917.
01:50:02 In some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small, that could seize
01:50:09 the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists. Earlier on with Kerensky,
01:50:17 the first government that tried, it wasn’t people all that impressed by Marxism. It was people more
01:50:23 skeptical and would not have been called Marxist, probably, by history. They tried. They couldn’t.
01:50:31 Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year.
01:50:36 The rest of the world, though, was horrified. The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken
01:50:45 this immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism, yes,
01:50:54 but still not challenging the power. Now it had the power, and in a big country. And they freaked
01:51:01 out. If you know American history, the leadership of this country went completely berserk. I mean,
01:51:10 we had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before. The 20s were a time
01:51:17 of Palmer raids in Boston, the Sacco Vanzetti trials, I mean, really grim hostility. And you
01:51:27 had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution.
01:51:33 The US, Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops. So what you had right away
01:51:41 was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. There was a great professor at Princeton,
01:51:51 Meier, I forget his first name, who wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy
01:51:58 since 1917 has been obsessed with Russia. Even now, this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia,
01:52:08 as if Russia still was the Soviet Union, as if people haven’t figured out. That was a big
01:52:14 change back in 1989 and 90. Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before, or at least they’re not
01:52:23 Lenin. They may not be so different from some of the other, but in any case. So you had one factor
01:52:31 was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation, the global. I mean, Rosa Luxemburg, I assume you
01:52:41 know, Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin. She’s a critic of Lenin’s, by the way,
01:52:48 but she’s a leftist, hunted down and hacked into bits, killed. So you’re attributing some
01:52:56 of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world turned away.
01:53:02 Turned against. Turned against. So you turn against is the better word.
01:53:05 I mean, not in order of importance, but it’s a very important part of the psychology of being,
01:53:13 you know, it’s what you would call paranoid if there weren’t quite as much evidence that indeed
01:53:19 there was a lot to be afraid of at that time. Nobody had ever done it. Look, you could see the
01:53:24 effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at first, that you could have
01:53:31 socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous, that socialism was internationalism.
01:53:38 Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, workers of the world unite,
01:53:45 not workers of Russia unite. He had to go through a procedure of kind of coming to terms
01:53:54 with the fact that the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried in Berlin,
01:54:00 was tried in Munich, was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here. They all failed.
01:54:06 They all failed, and he’s left. So the French would say, tout ça, right? All alone. That’s one.
01:54:15 The second thing is economic isolation. Russia’s a poor country, and it needed what it got before
01:54:23 the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans particularly, but others
01:54:28 too. Now this was all cut off, and you can see the replay with the sanctions program. We’re going to
01:54:36 do it again. We’re going to do it again. We have to do it. The world is different, and the sanctions
01:54:41 don’t work, but they’re going to trial, because it’s the history. But that culture today is
01:54:49 completely different. Russia’s a different place today, but Russia has China, and that changes
01:54:54 everything. And they don’t get that here yet, but they will. Yeah, there’s a very complicated
01:55:00 dynamic with China, even with India. Yep. Or Turkey, Brazil. Sorry to say, human nature may
01:55:08 change at a slower pace. Yes, that has occurred to me as well. I get that point. So is there,
01:55:16 can you steel man the case, or consider the case, that there’s something about the implementation
01:55:22 of Marxism, maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing on the working class and
01:55:29 workers unite, that naturally leads to a formation of a dictatorial force, a dictator that says,
01:55:38 let us temporarily give power to this person to manage some of the details of how to run the
01:55:46 democracy, of giving voice to the workers so that they get to choose. And then that naturally
01:55:54 leads to a dictator, and there’s naturally, in human nature, power and absolute power,
01:56:00 as the old adage goes, corrupts absolutely. Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marxist ideals,
01:56:07 you’re going to end up with a dictator, and often, when you give too much power to anyone human,
01:56:13 a small number of people, you’re going to get into a huge amount of trouble? You’ve
01:56:18 putched things together there that I would… That’s what… I think if you give…
01:56:22 Putched is a good word. Yeah. It’s German.
01:56:29 Remember, I told you, my mother was born in Germany. And then your dad is French.
01:56:34 Yeah, but he was born in Metz, if you know European. It’s a city on the border of France
01:56:39 and Germany. If you come from Alsatians, Alsass in German.
01:56:45 So they’re German speaking, French speaking?
01:56:46 Yeah, they’re both. It’s bilingual because it’s been back and forth so many times
01:56:52 in medieval days already that it… Literally, you go from one store to another,
01:56:56 the proprietor here is French and the proprietor there is German,
01:57:00 but they all speak both languages because… You don’t speak either of them?
01:57:06 I speak Russian.
01:57:07 Russian, but not German or French? Ukrainian, no. It took French for four years
01:57:12 in high school, but I’ve forgotten all of it. I remember the romance and the spirit
01:57:16 of the language, but not the details. I’m sure I can remember.
01:57:20 If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long period of time,
01:57:30 and you do it on many levels of ideology, it is not surprising that it sticks and it stays.
01:57:40 And you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution and you will discover
01:57:45 it has a life of its own and it’s going to take a long time before people don’t.
01:57:51 If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism
01:57:59 and that it doesn’t want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was
01:58:04 Zeus and Diana and all the others, and they were very humanlike, but instead we have one
01:58:10 who is the absolute beginning. What are you doing? You’re teaching people
01:58:17 an authority line that comes from the individual. If you have a sequence of kings,
01:58:23 if in your feudal manner the lord sits called the landlord and he has unspeakable power
01:58:30 over everything that goes on, and you do this for thousands of years,
01:58:35 you can make a Russian revolution in 1917. But if you imagine you’ve gotten away from all that
01:58:42 people assume without ever thinking about it, you’re going to have trouble. Stalin is figured
01:58:49 here as the originator of his situation. He wasn’t. He never had that power. He may have thought that,
01:58:58 but I don’t. He’s the product. Look, the Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn’t that kind
01:59:05 of guy. You know, he’s a baseball playing lawyer. That’s what he was. But they made him into Tala.
01:59:12 So you’re the product of history. No, no, no. It was the systems, feudalism, the nature,
01:59:20 it was the structures and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its
01:59:27 own rhythm and doesn’t follow the calendar of a political revolution.
01:59:33 That’s the fundamental question. Is there something about communism
01:59:36 that creates a mentality that enables somebody like Stalin or Mao?
01:59:44 No, I think it’s the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what
01:59:51 they find familiar, to what seems to make sense, and he’s the guy. Look, let me give you an example
01:59:56 from American history. The Republican Party has traditionally in this country been the party of
02:00:02 private enterprise and minimum government. In comes Trump, runs for office in 2016,
02:00:10 is elected. What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most
02:00:19 massive government intervention in the worlds of economics that we’ve had for decades. Nobody says
02:00:26 anything. The Republicans cave and the Democrats largely too. They cave. He can throw a tariff on
02:00:38 anything. He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff.
02:00:44 That’s not what a tariff is. It’s not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman course
02:00:50 in economics, which everybody knows, everybody who teaches these courses. No, it doesn’t matter. He’s
02:00:57 still calling the shots. What is going on here is that a society has come to a point where it can’t
02:01:04 solve its problems and it begins what? To tap into older forms and all of the laissez faire
02:01:14 and all of the individualism. And suddenly the Republican Party is gung ho. And now they’re
02:01:22 going to make abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do with your uterus.
02:01:29 What? What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power. They’re hoping
02:01:36 what? Do they like the government? No. They’re desperate. This is not a pro government
02:01:43 and it wasn’t in Russia either. They were in a desperate fix and so, and he took advantage.
02:01:52 So to which degree would you say Marx’s ideas led to the creation of the
02:02:03 National Socialism Party of German workers, hence the Nazi Party, the fascist party in the 30s
02:02:11 and the 40s at the head of whom was Hitler, which I just recently learned he was
02:02:18 employee number seven of the party or whatever, the seventh person to have joined the party
02:02:23 and have created one of the most consequential and powerful political parties in the history
02:02:30 of the 20th century. What degree did Marx’s ideas, Marxism ideas have to play? It is the National
02:02:38 Socialist Party of German workers. Right. Workers. National Socialist Deutsche Arbeiter Partei,
02:02:50 German Worker Party. Worker Party. National Socialist German Worker Party. So. Well here’s
02:02:56 the history. Did he care about the workers or did he just use the workers as a populist message?
02:03:03 The only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler was provide him with his stepping stone to power,
02:03:10 but had nothing, no other, he didn’t know anything about it, didn’t care anything about it,
02:03:14 nor did the people around him. Here’s the story of what happened there,
02:03:18 which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history, the work that I did.
02:03:25 The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German Party. It started around 1870,
02:03:32 Marx was still alive. Some of his own family were leaders, Fernand Lassalle and others, his daughters.
02:03:40 By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany.
02:03:45 Nobody understood it. It was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution
02:03:53 in 1917. Here was a political party that was now in every German city, in every German town,
02:04:00 powerful and enjoying its rise up. My family is involved in this, I really do know the story.
02:04:11 It meant that starting around 1906, 1907, 1908, if you wanted to have any kind of presence
02:04:23 in the German working class, you had to use the word socialist. You had to, otherwise they wouldn’t
02:04:29 pay attention. The other parties called themselves Catholic. Germany is divided, the upper two,
02:04:36 the northern two thirds is Protestant, the southern third is Catholic. Munich and Bavaria
02:04:42 is Catholic and every other part of Germany basically is Protestant. You could be in the
02:04:47 Catholic Party, that was the south, or you could be in various conservative, Prussian and other.
02:04:54 But if you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing, in Germany
02:04:59 a very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time. Germany was the major
02:05:06 competitor to Britain for the empire. The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and
02:05:12 US taking over from Britain’s empire. So the German working class was it. So anybody who wanted
02:05:21 to approach the working class in whatever way had to come to terms and be friendly to socialism.
02:05:31 Other parties did this too, just like Hitler. They put the word socialist in their party,
02:05:37 but they wanted to make it clear that they weren’t anything to do with the Soviet Union
02:05:43 or anything to do with Marxism. So they put the word national. Nazi is the first four letters
02:05:49 of national, national in German, and the ZI is how you spell national in the German.
02:05:56 National socialism, but definitely not communists.
02:05:58 That’s right. They killed communists. They fought communists in the street.
02:06:03 They had pitched battles. They literally threatened each other’s existence and their
02:06:09 lives. And the first people that he arrested and put in jail were not Jews and gypsies and all the
02:06:15 other people he eventually killed. It was communists. They were the number one, and
02:06:20 socialists right behind him. Why? Because up until he takes power, January of 1933,
02:06:26 that’s when Hitler takes power, the last elections, two of them in 1932,
02:06:32 the socialists and communists, they vote together, 50% of the vote in Germany.
02:06:36 So he appealed to the German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said,
02:06:43 the communists and socialists are going to win. And you’re just the capitalists. You have too
02:06:50 few people. You need a mass base, and I’m the only one that can do that.
02:06:56 And it was just a populist message that he used.
02:06:59 That’s right. But it was explicitly done as a deal. The ruling group said to Hindenburg,
02:07:07 the old Prussian man who was in charge of the German government at the time,
02:07:11 you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise, he would never have
02:07:16 done it. He had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler
02:07:22 as a little funny man with a mustache who was Austrian, wasn’t even German. For them,
02:07:28 that mattered. So he comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism,
02:07:37 which he immediately does. Only people who don’t know or care about the history
02:07:44 pick up on the word. It’s like there are people here in the United States who like to say,
02:07:53 we are not a democracy, we are a republic, which is like saying, I’m not a banana, I’m a fruit.
02:08:00 You have to explain to these people, a banana is a kind of fruit. So you have to explain to people,
02:08:07 yes, we’re a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy as a way to govern the republic,
02:08:14 because to say you’re a republic doesn’t imply what kind of government you have. You have to
02:08:18 go through that with people so they kind of get it.
02:08:20 And certain words have power beyond their actual meaning. They’re used in communication,
02:08:26 whether it’s negative, like racist, or positive, like freedom of speech.
02:08:31 RL. Or Democrat, with a D.
02:08:33 RG. Yeah, and then you use that to mean something.
02:08:36 RL. Who knows?
02:08:37 RG. Or negative, stop Donnie, stop being a socialist, or whatever that means that’s not
02:08:44 even used in any kind of philosophical or economic sense. So let’s fast forward to today.
02:08:50 RL. Right.
02:08:50 RG. You mentioned Bernie Sanders.
02:08:52 RL. Right.
02:08:52 RG. There’s another popular figure that represents some ideas of maybe let’s call it democratic
02:08:59 socialism, and maybe let’s try to start to sneak up on a definition of what that could
02:09:03 possibly mean, but AOC, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, she’s from these parts.
02:09:10 RL. Yes, Queens.
02:09:11 RG. So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC, are they open to some ideas in Marxism?
02:09:21 Are they representing those ideas well in both the economic and the political sense?
02:09:26 RL. Okay.
02:09:28 RG. Where do I begin?
02:09:31 RL. Yeah, the socialist movement predates Marx, was always larger than Marx, and has
02:09:39 gone on to develop separately after Marx’s death. So…
02:09:44 RG. Can we pause on that actually? Is there a nice way to delineate, draw a line between
02:09:50 Marxism and socialism? Or if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism, can you speak to like,
02:09:59 maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism is?
02:10:04 RL. Right. Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics, and as I said
02:10:16 earlier, devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism, and that’s its strength, how it does that,
02:10:29 how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works. That is really the
02:10:36 forte of the Marxist tradition. Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism
02:10:44 figures. It’s there so that people who aren’t Marxists are nonetheless aware of Marxism,
02:10:52 like it more or less, study it more or less. But it’s a broader notion that I like to use
02:10:59 this sentence to describe. It’s a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism, that really
02:11:07 there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the
02:11:16 world think are adequate, that we are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who
02:11:23 thought they could do better than slavery, and all the people who thought they could do better
02:11:27 than feudalism. We’ve made progress. Feudalism was a progress over slavery. Capitalism was a
02:11:35 progress over both of them. And progress hasn’t stopped. And we are the people who, in a variety
02:11:41 of ways, want the progress to go further and are not held back by believing that capitalism is
02:11:51 somehow the best beyond which we cannot go or even think. We find that to be, in the worst sense of
02:11:59 the word, a reactionary way of thinking. And we’re that large community. Many of us are not interested
02:12:07 in economics all that much. We don’t think that’s the focal area. We are socialists, for example,
02:12:16 because we want to do something to deal with climate change. We think the world is about to
02:12:22 kill itself physically, and we want to take steps with other people to stop that, to fix that, etc.,
02:12:31 etc. So that’s, for me, a kind of difference. It’s a little difficult to say because there’s no
02:12:39 other figure like Marx that has an equal impact, an equal place within the broad socialist
02:12:49 tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition. But that’s very
02:12:58 specialized, and that’s a whole other kind of conversation. And whatever you say, the influence
02:13:05 of the great anarchist thinkers—Kropotkin, Bakunin, Sorel, and others—still doesn’t
02:13:14 amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far. That could change, but I mean, up to
02:13:21 this point, that’s the—I think that’s a way of understanding the relationship.
02:13:28 Yeah, that’s an interesting thing that some of the ideas within anarchism—and of course,
02:13:33 it’s one of the more varied disciplines because there’s such, maybe by definition, such variety
02:13:41 in their thinkers—but they kind of stand for a dismantling of a power center, and that,
02:13:52 if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism.
02:13:56 Absolutely.
02:14:00 There’s a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas
02:14:04 that uses the phrase, quote, the withering away of the state. That’s a quotation from Lenin.
02:14:14 People should understand that’s a quotation from Lenin. And it was made by Lenin. In other words,
02:14:22 Lenin was saying, that’s a good thing. That’s something we stand for. We want to create the
02:14:28 conditions under which there is a—because you remember the communists, or whatever,
02:14:34 they weren’t called that at first in Russia before the revolution. They were just socialists.
02:14:40 They were hunted down and persecuted by the government left and right. They had no love
02:14:44 for the government. The government was their literal, everyday enemy. And being critical
02:14:51 of government didn’t just mean this particular government, but of the whole—being a Marxist,
02:14:57 you always ask the questions of the social constitution of whatever it is you’re struggling
02:15:03 against. So there was this interest, why is the state so important? Especially because if you
02:15:08 understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism, it didn’t have powerful states.
02:15:15 One of Lenin’s greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia, and it goes back
02:15:20 centuries. It’s a huge book, three or four inches thick, and I’m one of the few people who’ve read
02:15:26 it. And he’s very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of
02:15:35 feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe. The development of a powerful
02:15:41 central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate to hold on, which ought to be
02:15:48 suggestive that maybe the turn to powerful governments here in the United States or in Europe
02:15:54 and Europe is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can’t go on and has to marshal every
02:16:03 last bit of power it can, not to be lost in history. It would be interesting to see what
02:16:12 the Soviet Union would look like if Lenin never died. A lot of people have asked that question
02:16:18 over the years, a lot of people. There’s Stalin sliding in in the middle of the night,
02:16:24 erasing the withering away of the state part. So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie
02:16:32 Sanders, what are your thoughts about these modern political figures that represent some of these
02:16:35 ideas, and they sometimes refer to those ideas as democratic socialism? The crucial thing about
02:16:41 Bernie and about AOC, and this is particularly true about Bernie, because AOC is much younger
02:16:48 and Bernie’s an older man. Bernie, being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student,
02:16:59 as an activist, and then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont as a mayor and all
02:17:05 the rest. He lived through what, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America.
02:17:12 And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945, 6 to the present, I mean,
02:17:19 really never stopped, was a Manichean worldview. The United States is good, it defines democracy,
02:17:29 and the Soviet Union is awful, it defines whatever the opposite of democracy should be called.
02:17:35 Good here, evil there. It was taken so far that even among the ranks of academic individuals,
02:17:48 it was impossible to have a conversation. I mean, I can’t tell, just make it very personal,
02:17:56 the number of times I would raise my hand in my classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale,
02:18:02 and I would ask a question that had something to do with Marxism,
02:18:08 because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses to teach this to me,
02:18:13 except by people who trashed it, other than that, and I didn’t want that.
02:18:20 So I would ask a question, and I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I didn’t
02:18:26 much care for and those who were good teachers that I liked, fear. It was just fear. They didn’t
02:18:32 want to go there. They didn’t want to answer my question. And after a while, I got to know some
02:18:37 of them, and I found out why. Because you don’t know how the rest of the class is going to
02:18:42 understand this. Either they would have to say, I don’t know, which would be the honest truth for
02:18:47 many of them, but a professor does not want to say in a classroom, I don’t know, that’s just
02:18:52 not cool. Or they’d have to, if they knew, they’d have to say something that indicated they didn’t
02:18:59 know really much, and they weren’t going to do that. Or they would know something, and maybe
02:19:05 that would be because they were interested. They did not want the rest of the students to begin to
02:19:12 say, oh, you know, Professor Smith, you know, he’s interested. This is not good for your career. You
02:19:20 don’t know how this is going to play out. Who’s going to say what to whom? And I could see in
02:19:25 their faces what I later learned, because they told me, come to my office hours. We’re in the
02:19:31 office. We can talk about it. But that’s how bad it was. Is it not still? Pretty much. In my field,
02:19:40 the great so called debate, I mean, I find it boring, but the great debate for my colleagues
02:19:46 is between what’s called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics. Neoclassical, the
02:19:52 government should stay out of the economy. Let’s say fair or liberalism. And the Keynesian saying,
02:19:58 no, you crazy neoclassical, if you do that, you’ll have Great Depressions, and the system will
02:20:04 collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems, to fix the weaknesses. And
02:20:10 they hate each other, and they throw each other out of their jobs. One of the very few things that
02:20:15 they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like me out. That they can find common
02:20:22 ground to do. So I had to learn it all on my own. Why am I telling you this? Because this taboo means
02:20:34 that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism of the post World
02:20:43 War II period, the vast bulk of all of that is unknown, not just to the average American person,
02:20:52 but to the average American academic, to the average American who thinks of himself or herself
02:20:58 as an intellectual. I mean, I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet
02:21:05 history. They have no idea. Or saying there’s this man Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist, he really had
02:21:13 interest in, or to explain that Gramsci was not a great literary critic. He was head of the
02:21:20 Communist Party of Italy for most of his adult life. What does that mean? You like Gramsci as a
02:21:28 literary critic, but they didn’t even know. They don’t even know. It’s been erased. It’s
02:21:35 a little bit like stories I’ve heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet
02:21:41 Union because he obviously fell out of favor. And so somehow all of his writings, many of which are
02:21:48 very interesting and complicated, anyway. So what you’re going to have in this country is a slow
02:21:56 awakening of socialism from a long hibernation called the Cold War. I never expected, to be very
02:22:04 honest with you, that I would live to see it. I knew it would come, because these things always do,
02:22:11 but I didn’t expect to see it. So I have been surprised, as have a lot of us, that when it
02:22:18 starts to happen, it happens fast. So you see Bernie as an early sign of the awakening from
02:22:26 the Cold War to accept the idea of socialism. Bernie was always a socialist. We all knew.
02:22:32 And everybody who paid attention, he denied it. But 2016, he makes a decision, momentous,
02:22:40 to run for president. He’s just a senator from Vermont. Vermont is one of the smallest
02:22:46 states in the Union. People who live in Vermont love to tell you that there are more cows than
02:22:51 people in Vermont, et cetera, et cetera. So here from this little state, this elderly gentleman
02:22:57 with a New York City accent runs for office and says, I’m a socialist. And when they attack him,
02:23:03 he doesn’t run away. I’m a socialist. I’m a socialist. Now, he had been. It wasn’t a secret
02:23:09 that suddenly got out. But the great question—and I don’t mind telling you, because I went to the
02:23:15 right schools. I know a lot of people. You know, Janet Yellen was my classmate at Yale,
02:23:21 and stuff like that. So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party,
02:23:26 and I said, well, what do you think about Bernie entering the race?
02:23:31 Makes no difference. He doesn’t get 1% of the vote. Right? He was wrong. They had no idea
02:23:37 what was coming. But the truth is, I didn’t either. It wasn’t just that he didn’t get it.
02:23:42 I thought his 1% was probably right. So we were both wrong.
02:23:46 Yeah, change can happen fast. Do you think AOC might be president one day?
02:23:51 Yeah. Possible. Possible. But two things. Number one, it’s fast. Number two,
02:24:02 it’s going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate,
02:24:12 calm, nonconfrontational socialism you can imagine.
02:24:18 So not AOC or Bernie.
02:24:19 No, no. They are not confrontational, in my judgment.
02:24:23 In terms of the ideas of socialism. I mean, they’re both very feisty.
02:24:26 They’re feisty personally, but not ideologically.
02:24:33 Bernie is also, in honest moments, and they both really are pretty honest folks,
02:24:40 at least in my experience. In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that what he advocates
02:24:47 as democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s. It was a kind of popular
02:24:56 government, tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide a lot more support for the
02:25:02 working class than you do now. That’s not a fundamental change. That’s what he means
02:25:08 by socialism. When he talks about it and he’s asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot.
02:25:15 Okay, that’s consistent. That’s the softest kind of socialism, and that’s where we’re going to
02:25:23 start in a country coming out of hibernation. Pretty soon, it’s already happening, there’ll
02:25:29 be people who need and want to go further in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are
02:25:35 comfortable with. You can already see the shoots of it now. AOC voted, together with most of the
02:25:43 others, to support the money for Ukraine. Okay, a lot of people in the socialist movement do not
02:25:49 support that. I don’t know exactly how that’s going to work out, but that should give people
02:25:56 an idea. There are disagreements, and they’re going to fester, and they’re going to grow.
02:26:03 So people in the socialist sphere don’t support money from the United States in the large amounts
02:26:08 that it is being sent to Ukraine. Is it because it’s fundamentally the military, industrial
02:26:13 complex is a capitalist institution kind of thing? No, there are some people for whom that’s the
02:26:19 issue. Then there are people for whom it’s guns and butter, and why are we over there when we have
02:26:28 such needs at home that are being neglected? And then there are people who, well, go back to what
02:26:34 we talked about at the beginning, who are more like Lenin and Debs. This is a fight between
02:26:41 Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs in Ukraine, and what are we
02:26:48 doing here? We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate
02:26:55 a settlement, don’t kill large numbers of Ukraine. I mean, everybody’s willing to fight to the last
02:27:00 Ukrainian is a little strange here. What are you doing? You’re supposed to be in favor of peace,
02:27:06 you know, and for the United States, which just finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and
02:27:11 Iraq, to be against another country invading. I mean, who in the world is going to take this
02:27:16 seriously? This is crazy. You know, I invade, it’s good, and you invade, it’s terrible. What?
02:27:23 You know, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? What’s going on here? All of these
02:27:30 questions are being active—by the way, not just by socialists, by lots of other people too—inside
02:27:35 the Democratic Party and also inside the Republican Party. You watch that Tucker Carlson or people
02:27:42 like that, they are against the stuff in Ukraine. They don’t want the money spent there, they don’t
02:27:47 want the weapons sent there, they don’t like the whole policy, and Trump wobble.
02:27:53 So Mr. Biden’s policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right,
02:27:58 and every day that this thing lasts, these criticisms get bigger. Anyway, the point is that
02:28:05 AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War
02:28:18 isolation from the whole—you know, when I explain to people the contribution made, for example,
02:28:25 to modern Marxism—I’ll give you an example—by the French philosopher Louis Althusser. I don’t
02:28:32 know if the name means anything to you. Okay. He was the rector of the École Normale
02:28:38 Supérieure in Paris. That’s the equivalent. Imagine in this country if there were a university
02:28:45 that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. It would be the university. Well, the École Normale
02:28:53 in France, in Paris, is the—he was a tenured professor who became the rector. The rector is
02:29:00 like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist Party most of his
02:29:06 adult life. That was possible in France during the Cold War. That was unthinkable in this country.
02:29:12 You could not in a million years, right? So Althusser, as a philosopher, tried to bring
02:29:21 a version of postmodernism into Marxism, with enormous impact all over the world, where he
02:29:29 traveled—not just in Europe, all over, right? So if you want to look him up, I’ll spell it out for
02:29:35 you. Sure. A.L.T.H.U.S.S.E.R. Louis. The Louis is spelled L.O.U.I.S. Louis Althusser. Look him up.
02:29:46 You’ll see tons of stuff. By the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember, of his works
02:29:53 in English. By the way, the textbook I wrote in economics, in case you’re ever interested,
02:29:59 was also published by the MIT Press. And the title? Contending Economic Theories.
02:30:05 Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian. That’s at MIT. Marxian. Yeah, that’s right. And by the way,
02:30:12 when we think—I don’t know if there’s an interesting distinction between Marxian economics
02:30:18 and Marxist—I suppose Marxism is the umbrella of everything that’s— I only use it because
02:30:26 Marxist I use as a noun. A person is a Marxist. Marxian I use as an adjective to qualify. But
02:30:35 I don’t mean some great difference. There’s a last point I would like to make about
02:30:39 AOC and Bernie that’s also general. I’m a historian, too, and I know that the transition
02:30:49 out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism was a transition that took centuries and that occurred
02:30:56 in fits and starts. So, for example, a feudal manor would start to disintegrate. Serfs would
02:31:02 run away. They’d run into a town. How would they live in the town? They had no land anymore because
02:31:09 they had run away from the feudal manor. A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal
02:31:15 understanding what they were doing. A merchant would say to one of these serfs, I’m in the
02:31:22 business of buying and then reselling stuff and living off the difference, but, you know,
02:31:27 I could make more money if I produce some of this stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody
02:31:33 else. So I’m going to make you a deal. I’m going to give you money once a week. I’ll give you
02:31:38 money, what we would later call a wage, and you come here and under my supervision you make this
02:31:43 crap that I’m going to then sell and this all works out. In other words, there were efforts,
02:31:51 unconscious, not self aware, to go out of feudalism to a new system.
02:31:59 Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. Some of them lasted weeks or months or
02:32:04 years, but it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general
02:32:14 switch and once that was done it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system we have
02:32:21 today. That’s the only model we have. So for me that’s what I see when I look at socialism.
02:32:28 I see the Paris Commune was an event, an attempt. It lasted a few weeks. I see Russia, that was an
02:32:38 attempt, lasted 70 years. Then I see, and you know, fill in the blank, I see these are all early
02:32:44 experiments. These are all you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good, the bad,
02:32:52 what do you build on? How do you learn? And that’s what the socialist and Marxist tradition
02:32:58 when it’s serious, that’s what it does. So in your ideas sort of capitalism was a significant
02:33:04 improvement over the feudalism and we are coming to an age and over slavery and we’re coming to
02:33:12 an age where capitalism will die out and make, it’s not that capitalism is somehow fundamentally
02:33:18 broken. It’s better than the things that came before but there’s going to be things yet better
02:33:24 and they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and socialism. Is there just to linger briefly on
02:33:32 the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter. There’s something called, I’m sorry if I’m using
02:33:41 the terms incorrectly, but cultural Marxism. Criticisms of universities being infiltrated
02:33:51 by cultural Marxists. I’m not exactly sure. I don’t pay close enough attention, but it’s woke.
02:34:00 There’s a kind of woke ideology that I’m not exactly sure. What is the fundamental text?
02:34:09 Who’s the Karl Marx of wokeness? All I do know is that there’s certain characteristics
02:34:16 of woke ideology, which is hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys.
02:34:28 And basically everyone is a bad guy except the people that are very loudly nonstop saying that
02:34:35 they’re the good guy. And that applies for racism, for sexism, for gender politics,
02:34:47 identity politics, all that kind of stuff. Is there any parallels between Marxian economics
02:34:54 and Marxist ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter?
02:35:00 WOLFF No, not much. One of the consequences
02:35:05 of the taboo after World War II is that Marxism, like socialism and communism, become swear words.
02:35:13 It’s like calling somebody, well, I won’t use bad language, but using a four letter word to describe
02:35:20 somebody. So instead of calling them this or that, you call them a Marxist. In many circles,
02:35:26 this is even worse than whatever other adjective you might have used, but it doesn’t have a
02:35:32 particular meaning that I can assess. The closest you get is your little list. It is somebody who is
02:35:41 concerned about race and sex and sexual orientation, gender and all of those things,
02:35:50 and wants there to be transgendered bathrooms. And I don’t like any of these people, so I slap
02:35:59 the word Marxism or the phrase cultural Marxism, because it isn’t Marxism about getting more money
02:36:07 or controlling the industry or all those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned
02:36:14 about. So this is odd, since they don’t know much about Marxism. I’ve always been interested
02:36:19 in culture. I mean, Lukacs, the man I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that’s what they’re famous
02:36:25 for, the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture. Gramsci writes at great
02:36:32 length about the Catholic Church, about theater and painting in Italy and on and on. I mean,
02:36:40 this is just ignorance talking. They don’t know anything about that. They wouldn’t know what the
02:36:43 names are. It’s a label that summarizes, kind of a shorthand, I’m against all of this. I don’t
02:36:51 want to be told that there’s ugly racism in this country, and it always has been, or sexism, or
02:36:59 phobia against gay people, whatever it is that’s agitating them. Marxism or socialism,
02:37:06 I mean, it’s just like socialism is the post office. It is a mentality. Well, but I don’t
02:37:13 blame them. I mean, it’s childish. It’s mean spirited. But it comes out of the fact no one
02:37:20 ever sat them down and said, you know, here is this tradition. It’s got these kinds of things
02:37:26 that people kind of share and these big differences. Look, an intelligent society,
02:37:33 which this country is, could have and should have done that. It was fear and a kind of terror that
02:37:40 made them behave in the way they did, and we’re now seeing it. Having said that, there is such a
02:37:45 thing as cultural Marxism. What that is is simply those Marxists who devoted themselves to analyzing
02:37:58 how it is that a particular culture is, on the one hand, shaped by capitalism and, on the other hand,
02:38:07 it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow. In other words, how do we analyze the
02:38:14 interaction between the class struggle on the job and attitude towards sexuality, or movements in
02:38:24 music, or whatever else culture. And there are Georg Lukács, this Hungarian, great name in there,
02:38:32 the greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci. And a modern name, just died a couple years ago,
02:38:38 a British intellectual named Stuart Hall, H A L L. If I were teaching, which I have done,
02:38:46 a course in cultural Marxism, those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you
02:38:55 articles and books to read of their stuff, because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many
02:39:02 others. So there is something to be said and understood about the kind of culture that
02:39:07 capitalism creates and the kind of culture that enables capitalism. Yes, and Marxists are
02:39:13 particularly those who like to look at that interaction. In other words, they are interested
02:39:18 in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism. There is another name, I
02:39:24 forgot. Stuart Hall is British, Gramsci is Italian, Lukács is Hungarian. The German is Walter Benjamin,
02:39:34 B E N J A M I N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school of Marxism that
02:39:44 developed in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people, many of whom were interested in
02:39:49 cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against the narrow Marxism that was so focused on
02:39:56 economics and politics. There were people who said, you’re leaving out very important parts
02:40:02 of modern society that are shaping the economy as much as they are shaped by it. And it was that
02:40:08 impetus to open Marxism to be more inclusive in what it deemed to be important to understand
02:40:15 that this cult, and they call themselves cultural Marxists, but they had a completely different
02:40:20 meaning from this. This is just, you know, just bad mouthing, that’s all.
02:40:27 LW Let me ask a more personal question. So for most of the 20th century, no not most,
02:40:33 but a large many decades in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War and before,
02:40:39 being a Marxist is one of the worst things you could be. Have you had dark periods in your own
02:40:46 life where you’ve gone to some dark places in your mind where it was difficult, like self doubt,
02:40:54 difficult to know, like what the hell am I doing? When you’re surrounded by colleagues and people,
02:41:00 you said prestigious universities, both personal interest of career, but also as a human being,
02:41:06 when everybody, you know, kind of looks at you funny because you’re studying this thing. Did
02:41:14 that ever get you real low?
02:41:16 RL No. I know people who had exactly what you said. I mean, your question’s perfectly reasonable.
02:41:21 If I were you, I’d be asking me that question too.
02:41:23 LW And what’s wrong with you?
02:41:26 RL Nothing wrong with the question. And here’s the honest truth. I don’t know how anomalous I am. I
02:41:33 really don’t. But the truth is, no. I have, if my wife was sitting here, she’d tell you what she
02:41:41 tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true. But then again,
02:41:47 luck never is the only explanation for things. That’s part of it. What can I say? I didn’t choose
02:41:58 the time of my birth. I didn’t choose the communities in which I grew up or the schools I
02:42:03 attended or anything else.
02:42:04 RL No, but the fact that there was no courses or extensive courses on Marxian economics.
02:42:09 RL But you know, again, I’m Hegel. On the one hand, I was denied good instruction.
02:42:14 On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own. And the motivation when you do that is
02:42:21 very different. I’m not the student who sits there with my notebook, taking notes of what the great
02:42:27 professor says and reading the text and getting ready for the exam. I don’t have an exam. I’m
02:42:35 doing something slightly risque, you know, kind of romantically different and oppositional. I was
02:42:45 able to find always one or two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation,
02:42:52 other students who felt enough similar to me that we could get together and read these books and
02:42:59 talk about them. I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me
02:43:06 of their time and their effort to teach me along the way. And I’ve had the benefit that because I
02:43:14 went to all these fancy schools, I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture.
02:43:21 And when I have been put in difficult positions, I often wave my pedicure at them and say,
02:43:27 I often wave my pedigree and it works like garlic with the devil. They back away. They back away.
02:43:35 Because Americans are very deferential to that kind of academic prestige.
02:43:40 But there’s a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken by this. You
02:43:46 have just naturally somebody who just has perseverance.
02:43:53 WOLFF Well, I would put it, I understand what you’re saying, but I would put it a little
02:43:57 differently. I think capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system and nothing
02:44:08 has happened to change my mind. In other words, the development just kept giving me more and more
02:44:20 evidence. And I must say over the last 10 years, what’s really changed? The last 10 years. I mean,
02:44:30 I can’t describe to you how big that change is. And that may be more important than anything else
02:44:35 we’ve discussed. Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television or
02:44:44 a radio thing or give a talk at some conference or something. Once every two or three months,
02:44:52 I’d be invited and I would do it, like academics often do. I now do two to three to four
02:44:59 interviews every day. So, there’s a hunger. How is there hunger? And I want to be honest with you.
02:45:09 WOLFF As I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause
02:45:16 from the podium that I lean into the microphone and I say, with as much smile as I can get,
02:45:23 I’m having the time of my life. And that’s the truth. That’s the truth. I never expected, look,
02:45:32 I’m used to teaching a classroom, a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or 10
02:45:37 students or a regular undergraduate class with 30 or an occasional introductory course
02:45:44 with a few hundred. I’ve done all of those things many times. But an audience, you know,
02:45:52 that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that, no, that’s new.
02:45:58 LESTER Is there advice you can give, given your bold and nonstandard career and life, advice you
02:46:07 can give to high school students, college students about how to have a career like that, or maybe
02:46:14 how to have a career or a life they can be proud of? WOLFF Yeah. First of all, my advice is go for
02:46:24 it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely better than they were when I had to do it.
02:46:32 And I could do it and I’m happy I did it. Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made
02:46:40 that I’ve never regretted. And I’ve never regretted being a critic of this society,
02:46:48 ever. I find it edifying. I find it, I mean, the gratitude people express to me for helping them
02:46:58 see kind of what’s going on is unbelievably encouraging. I mean, what can I tell you?
02:47:04 LESTER So that fills you, that fills you with joy. Pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes
02:47:08 fills you. That’s a life not just important. WOLFF And you know why? It’s because most of the people
02:47:14 who say something like that to me are people who, if they had the vocabulary, and some of them do,
02:47:21 would say, you know, I thought I was seeing through that outfit that I was wearing. I thought
02:47:28 it and they did. And all they needed was a little extra this information or that factoid or this
02:47:36 logic. And they have that. And I remember having that too. When I had a teacher who made something
02:47:43 clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude. And now I get that gratitude a good bit.
02:47:50 And yes, it is enormously gratifying. And I’m not sure I could get it any other way.
02:48:00 I have learned and I’m walking proof that being a critic of society and doing it systematically
02:48:09 and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life. A very good life.
02:48:15 LESTER Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes to an end.
02:48:25 Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?
02:48:27 WOLFF Afraid of it? No. Think about it? Yes. Yes. I’m not afraid. I’ve always thought,
02:48:36 you know, death is hard for the people that are left when you’re dead. It’s not going to bother
02:48:41 you very much. So I worry more about my wife. I’m very attached to my wife. I might mention to you,
02:48:49 I got married when I was 23 years old. That’s my wife to this day. So I’m lucky because if you get
02:48:58 married to anybody in age 23, it’s either luck or it isn’t. LESTER What role has love played
02:49:07 in your life? WOLFF Enormous.
02:49:11 Because I came from a family, you know, if your family is political refugees, which mine were,
02:49:17 who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another continent, learn another language,
02:49:24 find another life, income and job. The disruption goes real deep for any refugee. So my mother and
02:49:35 father were both refugees. They met as refugees. So I had to, in a way, make it up to them. I had
02:49:48 to be, I was the first child of their younger sister, but the first child. And, you know,
02:49:56 there’s a lot of psychological pressure on you if you’re in that situation. Nobody means you harm,
02:50:02 but you’ve got to do what they couldn’t, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do.
02:50:10 It’s the closest they’re going to get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university
02:50:17 students. My father was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life.
02:50:26 So I had to perform. You know, I went to high school here in the United States. I had to get
02:50:32 all A’s. I had to be on the football team. I had to play the violin in the orchestra. I had to
02:50:36 do all these because everything had to be achieved. So I’m an achievement crazy person that
02:50:44 way. But that’s functional in this dysfunctional society. But on top of that, that’s an achievement
02:50:52 within the game of this particular society. But then love seems to be a thing that’s greater
02:50:58 than that game. Is that something that made you a better person? Oh, God, yes. How is it
02:51:04 made you a better Marxian and a better human? Everything. Because my wife, by profession,
02:51:10 is a psychotherapist. Excellent. I love it. And I needed it. And so I married it. I didn’t know
02:51:17 what I was doing at the time, but I think as I look back on it, that was more than a little what
02:51:24 was going on. And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my
02:51:32 family never talked about, never dealt with, never at least explicitly engaged in any of that.
02:51:42 Because it was all about survival. The immigrant challenge is survival. Survive. And you’re so busy
02:51:50 that you tell yourself you can’t do that. Of course you can. And there are other reasons
02:51:55 why you’re not going to look at those problems. But the survival is so urgent that you can fool
02:52:01 yourself this way. And my parents did that. One last question. What’s the meaning of life,
02:52:08 Richard Wolff? Why are we here? I will quote you, Mr. Marx. Let’s go. Life is struggle. And for me,
02:52:20 I have found that to be true. That the struggle, whether it is to build a relationship with your
02:52:29 child, I have two children, whether it’s to build one with your spouse, whether it’s to understand
02:52:36 a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this
02:52:44 relationship to a student or to an audience. It’s a struggle to do all those things. But that
02:52:53 network of struggles, that makes life interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.
02:53:02 And meaningful.
02:53:04 Very meaningful.
02:53:05 And that latter thing, I got to say, you do masterfully. You’re one of the great communicators
02:53:09 and educators out there today. And it’s a huge honor that you would sit with me for so many hours.
02:53:14 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
02:53:15 This is awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolff.
02:53:19 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:53:24 And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.
02:53:28 The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
02:53:35 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.