Lex Fridman Podcast - #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Richard Wolff is a Marxist philosopher and economist. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Skiff: https://skiff.org/lex to get early access - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium - Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit EPISODE LINKS: Richard's Twitter: https://twitter.com/profwolff Richard's Website: https://www.rdwolff.com Contending Economic Theories (book): https://amzn.to/3HykPwT Understanding Marxism (book): https://amzn.to/39qpm8b Understanding Socialism (book): https://amzn.to/3Og9XG3 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:12) - Marxism (15:41) - Communism (50:47) - Human nature (1:03:03) - Economics (1:09:54) - Capitalism (1:42:18) - Governments and corporations (1:53:13) - Stalinism (2:07:12) - Nazis (2:14:08) - Socialism vs Marxism (2:21:48) - Bernie Sanders and AOC (2:38:49) - Cultural Marxism (2:45:49) - Darkest moments (2:51:18) - Advice for young people (2:53:37) - Mortality (2:57:28) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Richard Wolfe. One of the top Marxists, economists, and philosophers in the world. This is a heavy topic. In general, and for me personally, given my family history in the Soviet Union, in Russia, and in Ukraine. Today, the words Marxism, socialism, and communism are used to attack and to divide, much more than to understand and to learn. With this podcast, I seek the latter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx, as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries.

And in general, we need to both steal man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize. And to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept is true, even when doing so is unpleasant and at times dangerous. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description it's the best way to support this podcast. We got skiff for email, indeed for hiring, on it for supplements, blinkest for non-fiction, and linoid for cloud computing. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.

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It's a good motto. Visit linel.com slash Lex and click on the Create Free Account button to get started with a hundred bucks in free credit. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast to support it. We check out our sponsors in the description, and now dear friends, here's Richard Wolf. Let's start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all. What is Marxism? What are the defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology? Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition that takes

its founding inspiration from the works of Karl Marx, but because these ideas that he put forward, spread as fast as they did and as globally as they did. Literally, it's 140 years since Mark's died, and in that time his ideas have become major types of thinking in every country on the earth. If you know much about the great ideas of human history, that's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time. And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity, is that the Marxian ideas interacted with very

different cultural histories, religious histories, and economic conditions. So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently in different places at different times. And therefore Marxism, as a kind of first flush definition, is the totality of all of these very different ways of coming to terms with it. For the first roughly 40, 50 years, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism. Marx himself, that's all he really did. He never wrote a book about communism, he never wrote a book really about socialism.

Either his comments were occasional fragmentary dispersed. What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism. And that's what Marxism was, more or less, in its first 40 or 50 years. The only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks. In 1871, there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany, and in the result was something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian society. And Marx's people, people influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune, in the leadership of the commune. And Marx wasn't that far away. He

was in London. These things were happening in Paris, you know, that's an easy transport even then. sport even then. And for a short time, very short, Marxism had a different quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize the society differently. Before that had only been implicit, now it became explicit. What is the leadership of the Paris commune going to do? And why? And in what order? In other words, governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted a few weeks, the French army regrouped. And under the leadership of people who are very opposed to Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed a large number of the communards, as they were called, and deported them to islands in the Pacific

that were part of the French Empire at the time. The really big change happens in Russia in 1917. Now you have a group of Marxists, led in Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again, a war, like in France, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation because it is the government that loses World War I, has to withdraw, as you know, Brestletovsk and all of that, and the government collapses and the army revolts. And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian social democratic workers party, splits under the pressures of all of this

into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions, Lenin Trotsky and the others are in the Bolshevik division and to make a long story short, he's an exile. His position, Lenin's position makes him get him deported because he says Russian workers should not be killing German workers. I mean, this is a war of capitalist war dividing the world up into colonies and Russian working people have no, but should not kill and should not die for such a thing. As you can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out. Interestingly, in the United States, the comparable leader at that time of the socialist party here, as you know, there was no Communist Party at this point that comes later.

The head of the socialist party, a very important American figure named Eugene Victor Debs, makes exactly the same argument to the Americans should not fight in the war. He's in the pair, has nothing to do with Lenin, I don't even know if they knew of each other, but he does it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States. By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well. Really, very well, remarkable. And he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you see the little link. Although he had much more courage politically than Bernie has.

That's really interesting. I'd love to return to that link maybe later. Yes. History rhymes. Yes, the complicated story. Anyway, the importance in terms of Marxism is that now this seizure of power by a group of Marxists that is a group of people inspired by Marx developing what you might call a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians too, but a Russian interpretation, this now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism into a plan, at least, what are you going to do in the Soviet Union?

And a lot of this was then trial and error. Marx never laid any of this out. Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if he had, cause it was 50 years earlier in another country, et cetera. So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens, then more later in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Korea, and so on,

is that you have kind of a bifurcation. Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism, but another part of it becomes a set, and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative post-capitalist society ought to to look like how it ought to work. And there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion. And I would say that that's still where it is. That you have a tradition now that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism, notion of the alternative, and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework in which I would answer That's what Marxism is about

It's basic idea if you had to have one is that human society Can do better than capitalism and it ought to try and then we can start to talk about What we mean by capitalism fine? then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism. Fine. So we'll look at the critique of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back, what do you think Marx would say if he just looked at the different implementations of the ideas of Marxism throughout the 20th century, where his ideas that were implicit, were made explicit, were his ideas that were implicit, were made explicit, would he shake his head, would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementation? It's like, how do you think he would analyze it?

Well, he had a great sense of humor. I don't know if you had a chance to take a look at his writing, but he had an extraordinary sense of humor. As my guess is, he would deploy his humor and answering this question too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of the interpretations of his work, and he's very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could erase the connection between those things, and the lineage they claim from him, which he would. There's a German word, I don't know if you speak the other languages, there's a wonderful German word called Fetzister.

And it's stronger than the word refuse, it don't know what I'm gonna do with that. And he would talk then, you know, in philosophical terms, because remember, he was a student of philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest. He would wax philosophical and say, you know, that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having a child. You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person,

and we'll find his or her own way. And these ideas, once they're out there, go their own way. And as you said, there's a particular way that this idea spread, the speed of which it spread throughout the world made it even less able to be sort of stabilized and connected back to the origins of where the idea came from. The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians, after the Revolution, because they occupied a position for a while, not very long, but they occupied a position for

a while in which, I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these people criticizing capitalism for a long time, even the Marxists ever since mid-century. And these were the first guys who pulled it off. They made it. And so that there was a kind of presumption around the world, their interpretation must be kind of the right one, because look, they did it.

And so for a while, they could enunciate their interpretation, and it came to be widely grasped as something which, by the way, gets called in the literature, official Marxism. The very idea that you would put that adjective in front of Marxism or Soviet Marxism or Russian Marx, there were these words that, where the adjective was meant to somehow say, kind of, this is the canon. You could depart from it, but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing. And by the 1960s, it was already... It was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of...

And the irony is, particularly here in the United States, where the taboo against Marxism kicks in right after World War II, is so total in this country that I, for example, through most of my adult life, have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time, simply explaining to American audiences that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism, which wasn't the canon before 1917, and hasn't been since at least the 1960s, but they don't know. It's not that they're stupid and it's not that they're ignorant. It's that, well, the ignorance may be, but I mean, it's not a mental problem.

It's the taboo, shut it down. And so all of the reopening that in a way recaptures what went before and develops it in new direction, they just don't know. Nevertheless, it's a serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit. The Russians, the Soviets at the beginning of the 20th century made a serious attempt at saying, okay, beyond the critique of capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this? And so in that sense, not at a high level, but at a detailed level, it's interesting to

look at those particular schools. Maybe. Right. Because for example, I mean, just to take your point one step further, you really cannot understand the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese, and the others, because each of them is a kind of response, let's call it, to the way the Soviets did it.

Are you gonna do it that way? Well, yes, and no is the answer this we will do that way But that we're not gonna do and the differences are huge But you could find a thread I can do that for you if you want in which all of them are in a way reacting They are the originals. Yes, very much so. Like maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones.

There's something like that. Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools of that Soviet Marxism? So we got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even let's expand out to Maoism. So maybe I could speak to sort of Leninism and then please tell me if I'm saying dumb things. There's a I think for Lenin, there was an idea that there could be a small

sort of Vanguard party like a small controlling entity that's like wise and is able to do the central planning decisions. Then for Stalinism, one interesting, so Stalin's implementation of all of this, one interesting characteristic is to move away from the international aspect of the ideal Marxism to make it all about nation, nationalism, the strength of nation. And then so, Maoism is different in that it's focused on agriculture and rural. And then Traski is my don't know except that it's anti-stalin. I mean, I don't even know if there's unique sort of philosophical elements there. Anyway, can you maybe from those or something else speak to different unique elements that are interesting to think about implementation of Marxism in the real world?

Probably the best way to get into this is to describe something that happened in Marxism that then shapes the answer to your question. In the early days of Marx's writings, and you know, his life spans the 19th century, is born in 1818, dies in 1883. So literally, he lives the 19th century. And you might, I mean, to make things simple, you might look at the first half of the first two-thirds of his life as overwhelmingly gathering together the precursors to his own work. Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that partly because he didn't work a regular job and partly because he was an exile in London most of his adult life. He worked in the library. I mean he had a lot of time. He got subsidized a little bit by Engels whose family were manufacturers and

you might say the first half to two-thirds of his life are about the critique of capitalism. And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work, Western Europe, more or less, was interested in. That's what they wanted. And he gave that to them. He wasn't the only one, but he was very, very effective at it. By the last third of his life, he and the other producers of an anti-capitalist movement, people like the chariots in England, that's a whole another movement, the anarchists of various kinds, like Prudong in France or Krapatkin or Bakunin in Russia and so on You put all these together and there was a shift in what the audience Let's call it a mixture of

Millatin working class people on the one hand and Critical or radical intellig people on the one hand and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other, they now wanted a different question. They were persuaded by the analysis. They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would like to do better than. And the question became, how do we do this? Not anymore, should we, why should we, could we maybe fix capital is no, they had gotten to the point the system has to be fundamentally changed. But they got, they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say, well, what will that new system looks like? They didn't go that way. What they did was ask the question, how could we get beyond capitalism?

It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured people's minds, people's daily lives and so on. And the focus of the conversation became, this was already by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism whereby we would get beyond, and again make a long story short. The conversation focused on seizing the government. See, before that, it wasn't that the government was not a major interest. If you read Marx's capital, the great work of his maturity, three volumes, there's almost nothing in the state. He mentions it, but he's interested in the details

of how capitalism works. Factory by factory store by store, what's the structure, the government's secondary for him? But there's also humans within that capitalist system of there's the working class. Right. It's about That's what he's struggle. That's what he's interested in each in the work. Think of it almost mechanically like the workplace in the workplace There some people who do this and other people who do that and they accept this division of authority and they accept this division What's going on here? particularly because he believed that the core economic objective of capitalism was to maximize something called profit, which his analysis located right there in the workings of the enterprise.

The government was not the key factor here. And he was looking at ideas of value. Yes. How much is the, how much value does the labor of the individual workers provide? And that means how do we reward the workers in an ethical way? So those are the questions of, well, we'll get that. Yeah, okay, but the government is not part of that picture. Okay.

So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when this begins, but it really gets going after he dies. Is this debate among Marxists about the role of the state? They all agree, nearly all of them agree that you have to get the, the working class has to get the state because they see the state as the ultimate guarantor of capitalism. When things get really out of hand, the capitalist calls the police or he calls the army or both of them. And so the government is in a sense, this key institution captured in Marxist language

by the bourgeoisie, by the other side, the capitalist, and yet vulnerable because of suffrage. If suffrage is universal or nearly so, if everybody gets a vote, which in a way capitalism brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism in the French-American revolution, is to create a place where elected represented. So the government being subject to suffrage creates the notion, aha, here's how we're going, we have to seize the state.

And then the, that gets agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how to do it. One side says, you go with the election, you, you, you mobilize the voter, that gets to be called reformism within Marxism. And the other side is revolution. Don't do that. This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged. You can't get there. They've long ago learned how to manipulate parliaments.

They buy the politicians and all that. And therefore, revolution is going to be the way to do it. Revolution gets a very big boost because of the Russians. They did it that way. They didn't do. I mean, they fought in the Duma, in the Parliament, but they didn't. And this focus on the state, I would argue, goes way beyond what the debaters at the time, and if you're interested in the great names, there was a great theorist of the role of the state in a reformist strategy

to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important. His opponents in Germany were Karl Kowtsky and Rosa Luxembourg, two other huge figures in Marxism at the time, and they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate. By the way, that debate still goes on. Reformism versus revolution. In terms of not all that different. I mean, it's adjusted to history, but in terms, that are different.

Can you comment on where you lean in terms of the mechanism of progress reformation versus the problem? I'd rather tell you the historical story. Sure. Over and over and over again, in most cases, the reformists have always won. Because revolution is frightening, is scary, is dangerous, and so most of the time, when you get to the point where it's even a relevant discussion,

not an abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have won. I'll give you an example from the United States. In the great depression of the 1930s, you had an extraordinary shift to the left in the United States, the greatest shift to the left in the country's history before Orsons, nothing like it. Suddenly, you created a vast left wing composed of the labor movement, which when crazy in the 1930s, we organized more people into unions in the 1930s than at any time before or anytime since it is the explosion. And at the same time, the explosion of two socialist parties and the Communist Party that became very powerful and they all worked together creating a

very powerful leftist Presence in this country. They debated in a strategically real way reform or revolution. The reformers were the union people by and large and the Communists were the revolutionaries by and large, because they were affiliated with the communist international, with Russia and all of that. And in between, you might say that the two socialist parties, one that was trotschiest and inspiration, and the other one more moderate, Western European kind of socialism. And they had this intense debate.

And they ended up, the reformists won that debate. There was no revolution in the 1930s here. But there was a reform that achieved unspeakably great successes, which is why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does, because it achieved in a few years in 1930, starting around 1932, three social security in this country we had never had that before. That's the same one we have now. Unemployment insurance never existed before, did you have till today?

Minimum wage for the first time, still have that today. And a federal program of employment that hired 15 million people. I mean, these were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working class. That's the 30s and the 40s. 30s, very much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s. And here's the best part. It was paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. So when people today say, well, you can tax talk to the government, the joke is I have to teach American history to

Americans, because it has been erased from consciousness. We'll return to that. But first, let's take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th century with the Russians. Right. With the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this. Everybody was right, the state is crucial. We were right, we were the revolutionaries, we seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state and socialism is when the working class captures the state, either by reform or revolution, and then uses its power over the state class captures the state, either by reform or revolution,

and then uses its power over the state to make the transition from capitalism to the better thing we're going toward. And again, make a long story short in the interest of time. What happens, which is not unusual in human history, is that the means becomes the end. In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear before he,

you know, he doesn't live very low, he dies in 23. So he's only in power from 17th to 22, but that time he has his brain trouble. And that's in 1923, by the way, not at age 23. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so for this thing. 1923, yeah, he's only there for Yes, yes, yes. For this thing. 1923. He's only there for four or five years. He's very clear.

He even says, I've done work on that. I've published it, so I know this stuff. He says in a famous speech, let's not fool ourselves. We have captured the state, but we don't have socialism. We have to create that. We have to move towards that. With Stalin, you know, Lenin dies and there's a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky loses the fight. He's exiled. He goes to Mexico. Stalin is now alone in power. It does all the things. He's famous

or infamous for. And by the end of the 20s, Stalin makes a decision. I mean, not in the thought that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that they do the following. They declare that they are socialism. In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the state, not when the state capture has enabled you capture the state, not when the state capture has enabled you to do X, Y, Z, other things.

No, no, the state itself, once you have it, is socialism. So when a socialist captures the state, that's socialism. Exactly. And that's exactly right. And I feel like that's definitionally confusing. Well, it shouldn't be because I give you an example. If you go to many parts of the United States today and you ask people, what's socialism? They'll tell you, they'll look you right in the face and they'll say, the post office.

And you know, when I first heard this as a young man, you know what? The post office. It took me a while to understand the post office, Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government runs something. This is socialism. See capitalism is if the government doesn't run it. If a private individual who's not a government official runs it, well then it's capitalism. If the government takes it, then it's socialism. So what is wrong with that

reasoning? So the idea, I think, there's nothing wrong with it's a way of looking at the world. It's just got nothing to do with Marx. Well, there's not even wrong with it's a way of looking at the world It's just got nothing to do with marks. Well, there's marks. There's Marxism. Let's try to pull this apart. So what role Does central planning have in Marxism? so Marxism is concerned with this class struggle With respecting the working class, right Marxism is concerned with this class struggle, with respecting the working class. Right. What is the connection between that struggle

and central planning that is often associated with Marxism? Right. So centralized power, doing... Russia did that. Allocation. So that has to do with a very specific set of implementations initiated by the Soviet Union.

Has nothing to do with Marx. How else can you do? I don't think you can find anywhere in Marx's writing anything about central planning or any other kind of planning. Again, fundamentally, then Marx's work has to do with factories, with workers, with bourgeoisie, and the exploitation of the working class. You still have to take that leap. What is beyond capitalism? Right.

Maybe we should turn to that. Yes. Okay. Yes. What? Okay. We've already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism. How else can we go beyond capitalism? Right. Let me push you a little further. They didn't succeed in my judgment as a Marxist. And I'm now going to tell you why they didn't succeed because they didn't understand as well as they could have or should have what Marxists was trying to do. I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circumstances. This is not a critique of them, but it's a different way of understanding what's going on. All right, so give you an example. Most of my adult life, I have taught

Marxian economics. I'm a professor of economics. I've been that all my life. I'm a graduate of American universities. As it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities. With another conversation, you and I can have. So I went to Harvard, then I went to Stanford, and I finished a Yale. I'm like a poster boy for elite education. They tried very hard. By the way, I had, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League, 20 semesters, one after the other, no break. In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned a word about Marxism. That is, no critique of capitalism was offered to me ever with one except one professor in Stanford in the one semester I studied with him.

He gave me plenty to read, but nobody else. So that's really interesting. You've mentioned that in the past and that's very true, which makes you a very interesting figure to hold your ground intellectually through this idea space where just people don't really even talk about it. Perhaps we can discuss historically why that is, but nevertheless, that's the case. So, Marxian economics, did Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of dismissal? The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object

of dismissal for giving an example. The major textbook in economics that I was taught with and that was. For you be an example, the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many years the canonical book isn't quite anymore, was a book authored by a professor of economics at MIT named Paul Samuelson, and people, you know, a whole generation or two were trained on his textbook. If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree.

And, you know, and the tree is Adam Smith and David Riccardo at the root, and then the different branches of he's trying to give you an idea as a student of how the thing developed. And it's a tree, and everybody on it is the bourgeois. And then there's this one little bridge that goes off like this and sort of starts heading back down. That's Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete because he's not a complete figure, but beyond that, no, there was no. Nothing in the book gives you two paragraphs of an approach. But that's Cold War. I mean, that's really, that's really neither here nor that, that's the craze in this, yeah, that's the Cold War in this country.

My professors were afraid. Anyway, let me get to the, to the core of it. Well, I think it will help. Marx was interested in the relationship of people in the process of production. That he's interested in the factory the office the store What goes on and by that he means what are the relationships? among the people that come together in a workplace and What he analyzes is that there is something going on there that

has not been adequately understood and that has not been adequately addressed as an object needing transformation. What does he mean? The answer is exploitation, which he defines mathematically in the following way. Whenever in a society, any society, you organize people, adults, not the children, not the sick, but healthy adults. In the following way, a big block of them, a clear majority, work, that is, they use their brains and their muscles to transform nature. A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, whatever. In every human community, Marx argues,

there are the people who do that work, but they always produce more chairs, more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume. Whatever they stand in that of living, don't have to be low, to be medium, to be high, but they always produce more than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx only writes this, uses the German word, M-E-H-R, which is the English equivalent of more. It's the more. That more got badly translated into the word surplus. Shouldn't have been, but it was. By by the way, by German and English

people doing the translations. What's the difference to be more in surplus? Is there a nuanced? Yeah, because surplus has a notion of its discretionary, it's sort of extra. He's not taking, you're not making a judgment that it's a simple math equation. Yes, very simple. One might be together. Yes. X minus Y versus X is the total output. Why is the consumption by the producer?

Therefore, X minus Y equals s the surplus. Exactly. Now, Mark's argues, the minute you understand this, you will ask the following question, who gets the surplus, who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it. And Marx's answer is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society. How is that organized? For example, who gets it? What are they asked, if anything, to do with it in exchange for getting it? What's their social role?

For example, here we go now, if you get this and you get the core of it anyway. And I don't charge much. The workers themselves could get it. The workers themselves could get it. That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism. could get it. That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism. Communism would be if the workers who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it. So this has to do not just with who gets it but more importantly who gets the decide who gets it. Well who gets it and who gets to decide what to do with it. Right.

Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it. So the logic, there's the logic of the word sequence. It's produced. It's Marx uses the word appropriated. In other words, whose property, who gets the decide, if you like, what happens, all that property ever meant, is who gets to decide and who's excluded? That's a clean definition of communism for it. Right. That's it. By the way, it's not just clean.

It's the only one. So, what can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context? Yes. Easy. It becomes very easy to. Exploitation exists. Easy becomes very easy to exploitation exists if and when the surplus that's produced is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced slaves Produced a surplus which the master gets Surfs produce a surplus which the Lord gets

Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures, because one class produces a surplus, appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading, class, struggle.

I use a metaphor, simple metaphorical story. You have two children, let's assume, and you take them to Central Park, a few blocks from here. It's a nice day, and the children are playing, and in comes one of those men with an ice cream truck comes by, ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling, your children see the ice cream, daddy, get me an ice cream. So you walk over, you take some money,

and you get two ice cream cones, and you give them to one of the children. The other one begins to scream in Yale and how? Obviously, what's the issue? And you realize you've just made a terrible mistake. So you order the one you gave the two ice cream cones to give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it is. And that's how you solve the problem. Until a psychologist comes along and says, you know, you didn't fix it by what you just did.

You should never have done that in the first place. My response, though, you understand. All of the efforts to deal with inequality and economic, political, cultural, these are all Giving the ice cream cone back to the kid you should you should never do this in the first place There's a reallocation of resources creates bitterness and populace look at our We've this country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my life And I've lived here all my life and I've worked here all my life

It's tearing itself apart and it's tearing itself apart basically over the redivision, the redistribution of wealth, having so badly distributed in the firm, but that's all in marks. And notice as I explain to you what is going on in this tension filled production scene in the office of Factory the store? I don't have to say a word about the government. I'm not interested in the government. The government's really a very secondary matter to this core question.

And here comes the big point. If you make a revolution and all you do is remove the private exploiter and substitute a government official without changing the relationship. You can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you're not getting the point of the Marxism. The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation per se. You've got to change the organization of the workplace. So there isn't a group that makes all the decisions and gets the surplus, vis-a-vis another one that produces it. If you do that, you will destroy the whole project.

Not only will you not achieve what you set out to get, but you'll so misunderstand it that the Germans again have a phrase, it's get chief, it goes crooked, it doesn't go right, the project gets off the rails because it can't, it can't understand either what its objective should have been and therefore it doesn't understand how and why it's missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped for. I mean, there's a lot of fascinating questions here. So one is to what degree, so there's human nature,

to what degree does communism, a lack of exploitation of the working class naturally emerge? If you leave two people together in a room and come back a year later, if you leave five people together in a room, if you leave a hundred people and a thousand people, it seems that humans form hierarchies naturally. So the clever, the charismatic, the sexy,

the muscular, the charismatic, the sexy, the muscular, the powerful, whatever you define that, starts becoming a leader and start to do maybe exploitation in a non-negative sense, a more generic sense, starts to become an employer, not in a capitalist sense, but just as a human. Here, you go do this in exchange, I will give you this, but just as a human. Here, you go do this in an exchange. I will give you this just becomes the leadership role. Right. So the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice. The idea sort of of communism will be nice to not steal from the

theory, but doesn't work in practice because of human nature because of human nature. That's thank you. So what can we say about leveraging human nature to achieve some of these ends? There's so many ways of responding. Like in no particular order, here are some of them. The history of the human race, as best I can tell, is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society arise, and as they do, they rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they

are socially disruptive and unacceptable. The argument isn't really then, is there a need or an instinct? Is there some human nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is, this has to be repressed or else we don't have a society. And Freud helps us to understand that that repression is going on all the time, and it has consequences. It's not a finished project, you repress it. It's gone.

It doesn't work like that. So for example, when you get a bunch of people together at some point, they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to want the other person or persons to disappear to be dead to be gone But we don't permit you to do that. We just don't Every economic system that has ever existed Has included people who defend it on the grounds that it is the only system consistent with human nature. And that every effort to go beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you endless documents of every tribal society I've ever studied,

every anthropological community that has ever been studied, slavery wherever it's existed, I can show you endless documents in which the defenders of those systems, not all of them of course, but many defenders used that argument to naturalize a system is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going, to counter the argument that every system is born, every system evolves, and then every system dies. And therefore capitalism since it was born, and since it's been developing, we all know what the next stage of capitalism is. We're looking in for it.

If we're saying, the burden is on the people who think it isn't going to Okay, so it doesn't mean they're wrong, but what you're saying is if we look at history You're deeply suspicious of the argument. This is going against human nature because we keep using that for basically everything including toxic relationship toxic systems. Absolutely destructive systems that said relationship toxic systems destructive systems that said Well, let me just ask a million different questions so so one what about the the argument that sort of the employer the capitalist takes on risk so the yeah versus the employee who just they're doing the The caperos is actually putting up a lot of risk.

What's, are they not in sort of aggregating this organization and taking this giant effort, hiring a lot of people, aren't they taking on risk that this is going to be a giant failure? So first of all, there's risk. Almost in everything you undertake, any project that begins now and ends in the future had takes a risk that between now and that future, something's going to happen that makes it not

work out. I mean, I got into a cab before I came here today in order to do this with you. I took a risk. I could, the cab could have been in an accident. Lightning could have hit us. A bear could have eaten my left foot. Who the hell knows? I should not reward you for the risk you took. No, hold it a second. Let's do this step by step. So everybody's taking a risk. I always found it wonderful. You talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk. Let's go with the worker and with the capitalist. That worker, he moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to take that job. He had, he made a decision to have children. They are teenagers. They're now in school at a time when their friendships are crucial to their development. You can yank them out of the school because his job is gone.

He took an enormous risk to do that job every day. To forestall all the other things he could have done, he was taken a risk that this job would be here tomorrow. Next month, next year, he bought a house which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's now stuck. He has to make a monthly payment. If you make a mistake, you capitalist. He's the one who's going to, you're a capital. You got a lot of money. Otherwise, you wouldn't be in that position. You've got, you've got a cushion. He doesn't. If you investigate, you'll see that in every business. You've got, you've got a cushion. He doesn't. If you investigate,

you'll see that in every business I've ever been, I've been involved in a lot of them. So you think it's possible to actually measure risk or is your basic argument is there's risk involved in a in a lot of both the working class and the bourgeoisie, the say, because he's been taught right. I want this payment a wage for the work I do. And I want this page, this payment for the risk I take. Well, there's some level of communication like that. You have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs, but that's probably built into the salary, all those kinds of things. But you're not incorporating the full spectrum of risk. You don't believe that. This country is now being literally transformed from below by an army of workers who work at Amazon fast food joints. You know what they're complaint is it's killing us

We get paid shit and it's killing us. There is no relationship Except in the minds of the defenders of capitalism between the ugliness the difficulty the danger of labor on the one hand and the wage Let me give you just a couple of examples because this is my this is my job, this is my life, what I do. Right? The median income of a child care worker in the United States, right now, as we speak, is $11.22 an hour. Medians, so 50% make less, 50% make more. The median income for car park attendant is several dollars per hour higher than that. What does the car park attendant do? He stares at your car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it. Maybe he parks it and moves it around to get it in and out.

By any measure that I know of that makes any rational sense, being in charge of toddlers, two, three, four-year-olds, who are at the key moment of mental formation the first five years, to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who watches your car. Come on, I know how to explain it. If that a lower salary, then you give the guy who watches your car. Come on. I know how to explain it. Gender explained all kinds of issues.

The car park people are males and the child care people are females. And that in our culture is a very big marker of what, but the one who said, only the economics professor, nobody else says this stuff, because in economics, I don't know if you were familiar with our profession, but we have something which we call marginal product. This is a, this is a therapist. I was a mathematician before I became an economist. I loved mathematics.

I specialized in mathematics. So I know mathematics pretty well. What economists do is silly is childish, but they think it's mathematics. But think for a minute what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal product of a factor of production like a worker. In the textbook, when it's taught, I've taught this stuff. I hold my nose, but I teach it. Then I explain to students, what I've just taught you is horse shit,

but first I teach it. What is the marginal product, if there might be useful for this? The notion is, if you take away one worker right now from the pile, what will be the diminution of the output? That's the marginal product of that worker. Measured by the amount of the output that diminishes the output of the raw product of the product.

Usually in real terms, so physical, not the value. You could do a value, but it's really more the physical you're in. I mean, there is a transformation thing, I'd love to talk to you about value. It's so interesting. Yes, I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that, but I just want to get to the Hegel, who's Marxist teacher, has a famous line. You can't step in this in the same river twice. And the argument is you and the river have changed

between the first and the second time. So it's a different you and it's a different, you can choose not to pay attention to that. Just you can't claim you're not doing that. You can't claim that you can actually do that because you can't, there is no way to do that. So the meaning that you can't just remove a worker and have a clean mathematical calculation of the effect that it has on the output. That's right. Because too many other things are going on,

too many things are changing and you cannot assume much as you want to that the outcome on the output side is uniquely determined by the change you made on the input side. Can't do that. Even in the average, it's not going to work out. You can take mathematics as full of abstractions. You can abstract, you can say, as we do in the economics, Keteris Parabuss, everything else held constant, but you have to know what

you just did. You held everything, you know why you do that? Because you can't do that in the real world. That's not possible. You better account for that. Otherwise, you're mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted from to get the abstraction. As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiments or an actual experiment of removing every single economist from the world, we better off or worse off much better. Okay. Economics is and I'm one, you know, I'm talking about myself.

See economics, we're going to ship all the columns to Mars and see how it works off. But the serious part of this is that economics, it's really about capitalism. Economics as a discipline is born with capital. There was not such thing. When I teach courses at the university, for example, called History of Economic Thought. And I begin the students with Aristotle and Plato. And I say, you know, they talked about really interesting things, but he never called it economic. There wasn't

it, it made no sense to people to abstract. Something as central to daily life as economics brought it to fire. It may, may know, that's a creation much, much later. That's capitalism that did that created the feeling. So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them particular passages. By the way, footnote, because your audience would like it. Plato and Aristotle talked about markets because they live at a time in ancient Greece when market relations were beginning to intrude upon these societies.

So they were both interested in this phenomena that we're not just producing goods and then distributing among us, we're doing it in a quid pro quo. I'll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange. And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason, they destroy social cohesion. They destroy community. They make some people rich and other people poor, and they set us against each other and it's terrible. And that's what they disagreed on.

Here's what they disagreed on. One of them said, okay, there can be no markets. That was Plato. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no, too late for that. The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in amongst us would be too devastating. So we can't do that. But what we can do is control it, regulate it, get from the market what it does reasonably well and prevent it from doing the destructive things it does so badly. So the fundamentally the destructive thing of a market is it's the engine of capitalism, so it creates exploitation of the worker.

If it still, I wouldn't question it. Facilitate. Facilitate it, and it is an institution that played a lyrostotal feel is a terrible danger to community. Is there, which, by the way, is a way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world. Look, the medieval Catholic church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usually. And this was that God said, if there's a person who needs to borrow from you,

then that's a person in need. And the good Christian thing to do is to help him, to demand an interest payment, rather than to help your fellow man, is God hates you for that. That's a sin. Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes. But would Jesus be crying when you try to scale that system? So that has to do with the intimate human interaction. The idea of markets is you're able to create a system that involves thousands millions of humans and there'd be some level of safe self-regulating fairness.

There might be, but it's hard to imagine that charging interest would be the way to do that. I wonder what, so I guess suppose you were interested in having, suppose you took us your problem, we have a set of funds that can be loaned out. People don't want to consume it, They're ready to lend it. Okay To whom should they lend it? Well, we could say in our society We're gonna run this the way professors in institutions like MIT Work this. They write up a project. They send the project into some government office, where it has looked at against other projects. And this office in the government decides,

we're going to fund this one, and that one, because they're more needed in our society. We are in greater need of solving this problem than that problem. And so we're going to lend money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here because we're going to, but instead what we do is who can pay the highest interest rate? Whoa, what do you do it? Why? Why? What ethics would justify you? Do it. It's like a market in general. Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle you. It's like a market in general. Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage. It's one basic way to understand it. And so if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word shortage, means has no other meaning, if the demand is greater than the supply, okay, now you've got

a problem. You can't satisfy all the demanders because you don't have enough supply. You have a shortage. Okay, now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people who have a lot of money to bid up the price of whatever's short. And that solves your problem because as the price goes up, the poor people can't, they drop out. They can't buy the thing at the exalted price. So you've got a way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people with the most money. At this point, most human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn against it because it contradicts their Christian, Judea, Islamic, all of them would say,

what? You know what that means? It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat while the poor foot person has no milk for their five children. There it is. You want to market? Why? There was a fundamental thing that seems unfair. There's the resulting inequality. Now or death or death. Well, that's the ultimate inequality. Yes, it is. What about, and we're going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics to the sort of debate type of thing?

What about sort of the lifting ties raise all boats, meaning if we look at the 20th century, right. A lot of people maybe disagree with this, but they attribute a lot of the innovation and the average improvement in the quality of life to capitalism, to inventions and innovation, to engineering and science developments that resulted from competition and all those kinds of forces. So not looking at the individual unfairness of exploitation as it's specifically defined, but just observing historically. Looking at the 20th century, we came up with a lot of cool stuff that seemed to have made life easier and better on average.

What do you say to that? I have several responses to that, but I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's going on there. But let me give you the arguments so you can hear them and then you can evaluate them. As can anybody who's listening or watching. Marx was a student of Hegel and one of Hegel's central arguments was that everything that exists exists quote in the contradiction. In simple English,

there's a good and bad side, if you like, to everything. And you won't understand it unless you accept that proposition and start looking for the good things that are the other side of the bad ones and the bad things that are the other side of the good one, etc. So the dialectic, yes exactly. And Marx very attentive to that explicitly agrees with this on many occasions and applies it, of course, to the central object of his research capitalism. So this is not a simple-minded fellow who's telling you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this system achieved or accomplished. And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological dynamism of the system, which Marx takes to be profound because you know he lived at the time when major

breakthroughs in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved. But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement in the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people, Mark's down comes back and says, oh, wait, wait a minute here. Number one, capitalism as a system has been mostly represented by capitalists, which makes a certain sense. And those capitalists with very few exceptions, some, but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the lives of the mass of people. The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What that means is, replace a worker with a machine, move the production from expensive US to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants from other parts of the world, because they will work for less money than the folks that you have here at home.

Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for, for decades, over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning to right now. The reason we have a minimum wage, which was passed 19, middle of the 1930s, when it was proposed, it was blocked by capitalists. They got together, they don't want, and today just a factoid for you. The last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States, Federal minimum wage was in 2009 when it was set at the lofty sum of $7.25 an hour, which you cannot live on. Over the last 12 years or so, whatever it is now 11, 12, 13 years since then, we have had an increase

in the price level in this country every year, and in the last year 8.5%. During that time, the prices went up. The minimum wage was never raised. What? This is a time of stock market boom of growing inequality. This is the nerve of the defender of capitalists who wants now to get credit for the improvement in the standard of life of the workers that was fought by every generation. You know, it takes your breath away. It's an argument,

whoa, but I take my hat off if I had one because that is one of the only ways to justify this system. Long ago, let me get the heart of it, long ago capitalism could have capitalism could have overcome hunger, could have overcome disease, could have, I mean, way beyond what we have now, but it didn't. And that's the worst moral condemnation. Imagine how do you justify that when you could, you didn't. Look, let me get at it another way, because this may interest you anyway. The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically dynamic, it is, and along the way it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better. No question. But the notion that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard

of living is somehow built into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous, and I can give you a, because you do math, you know, you'll understand it. Think of it this way. Imagine a production process in which you have $100 that the capitalist has to lay out for tools, equipment, and raw materials. And $100 that he has to lay out for workers, hire the workers. And he puts them all together and he has an output. And let's say the output is 100 units of something and one of the prices, and that's his revenue. And when he takes his product and sells it

and gets the revenue, let's say the revenue is, it doesn't really matter, it's 120 for lack of a better word. It's 220, sorry. And he takes 100 of it and replaces the tools equipment and raw materials. He used up another 100 to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other 20 is his profit, and he puts that aside. Now along comes a technological breakthrough, a machine, a new machine. And the new machine is so effective,

you can get the same number of units of output with half the workers. So you don't need to spend 100 on workers, you only need to spend 50. You can do it with half the workers. And so the capitalist goes to the workers, by the way, this happens every day, and he says to half of them you'll fire

Don't come back Monday morning. I don't need you. Nothing personal. I got a machine Why does he do that because of the 50 he now no longer has to spend on labor because don't need have for them He keeps everything else is the same the the machine, everything else is just to make their math easy. So he keeps as his own profit the 50 that before he paid for those workers. Yeah. Right. Because when he sells it for 220, that 50 don't have to give to the next job because you had a new machine. So that's what he does. The technology leads. He's happy. He's become more profitable.

He's got an extra 50, which is why buys the machine. The workers are screwed. Half of them just lost their job. Have to go home to their hospital wife, tell them I don't have a job anymore. I didn't do anything wrong. The guy was nice enough to say it was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn't need them. So I'm completely screwed here. I don't know what I'm going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage,

my children's education, or whatever else has got going for himself. All right, now, now the point. There was, of course, an alternative path. The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same that you did before, for half a day's work. You would have got the same output, same revenue, same profit as before. But the gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day of the lives of these workers. The majority of workers would have been really helped by this technology. But instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle of

more money. You want to support a system like this? Well, uh, to go back to Heygo, yes, the good and the bad. Yes. So you just listed the bad and you also first listed the good, the technological innovation of this kind of system. The question is the alternative, uh, whatever, as we try to sneak up to ideas of what the alternative might look

like, what are the good and the bad of the alternative. So you just kind of, as a opposite in the contract, by contrast, showed that while a nice alternative is you work less, get paid the same, you have more leisure time, right, opportunity to pursue other interests, other interests, the creative interests, family, flourish as a human being, basically strengthen and embolden the basic humanity that's under all of us. Yes, but then what costs does that have on the deadline fueled, competition fueled machine of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism? It slows it down. It slows it down.

And the question is, which is more important for the flourishing of humanity? I agree with that. And I love there to be a democratic mechanism. So let's discuss it, let's debate it, and then let's decide what mixture, because it's not either or. The math problem I gave you is either or, we could mix it, you could have a third less of a working day instead of a half less. And then the other part would be extra profit for our employer, et cetera. So let's have a democratic

discussion of what is the mix between the positive and we have no such thing. All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only we know what they do, they always choose the one that maximizes their profit because that's what they were told to do in business debate, which not only we know what they do, they always choose the one that maximizes their profit because that's what they were told to do in business school where I've taught. So we not only is it an undemocratic decision, but it's lopsided to boot. So we don't have the opportunity, but I would love for us to be good Hageelian Marxist and say, let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision that we can. We'll make mistakes, but we'll all make them together.

It won't be one of us making a dictatorial decision. You know, Marx developed a notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not as a notion of how government is not, I'm sorry, not Marx, Lenin did that. Not as a notion of how government is not, I'm sorry, not Marx, Lenin did that. Not as a notion of how a government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is, the dictatorship of these key decisions is not made by some sitting council. It's made by each little capitalist in his, her relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is why Marx focused his analysis on that point.

And by the way, I can sketch for you right now so it doesn't lurk in the background. What the alternative is. Let's go there. Okay. It goes right back to what I said earlier. The workers themselves, the collection of employees together, appropriate their own surplus and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of whether or not to buy a machine and whether or not to use the machine and the savings it might allow to be handled by more leisure for themselves, or as a fund for new developments in technology or new products or whatever they want. And you know, this, this is an old idea in human. Mark's loved that toward the end of his life.

He started reading extensively in anthropology. And one of the reasons he did that toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering that in this society and that, including here in the United States, that there were examples of people who organized their production in precisely this way as a collective democratic community in which everybody had an equal voice. So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output. We all help to produce. So let's do it in, you know, in this country where democracy is a value nearly everybody subscribes to. Think about it this way. The stunning contradiction

that there is a place in our society where democracy has never been allowed to enter. where democracy has never been allowed to enter. The workplace. In the workplace, a tiny group of people, unaccountable to the rest of them. The employer, whether that's an individual, a family, a partnership, or a corporate board of directors. Tiny group of people controls economically a vast mass of employees.

Those employees don't elect those people, have no, nothing, there is no accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable. And this society insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor matter of producing everything in a way that isn't the direct, it's autocratic. So to push back on a few things, so one is the idea of this society calling itself democratic is that the government is able to pressure the workplace through the process of regulation. You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know, minimum wage, all those kinds of things. That's the one idea. The other is there is a natural force within the capitalist when there's no monopolies

of competition being the accountability. So if you're a shady boss, the employee in the capital system has the freedom to move to another company work for a better boss. So that creates pressure on the employers and the bosses, that's at least the idea that you, there's two boundaries of you not misbehaving. One is the law, so regulatory regulations passed by the government,

democratic, and the second is because there's always alternatives in theory, then that was pressure on everyone to behave well because you can always leave. So I mean, that's kinds of accountability, but what you're saying is that does not result in a significant enough accountability or the employer that avoids exploitation of the worker. Absolutely. I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms, and let me respond to that and then I'll counter-argument.

First, competition. Here again, we have to be Hagealians just a little. Competition destroys itself. It doesn't need any, the whole point of competition is to beat the other guy. If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better quality or a lower price or maybe both. Then I win because the customers will come to me because my price is lower

or my quality is better and they'll leave the other guy he'll go out of business. Now let's follow. When he goes out of business because I've won the competition, he fires his workers. I hire them because I'm now going to be able to serve a market. He can't serve anymore. So I'm going to buy the used equipment. I hire them because I'm now going to be able to serve a market. He can't serve anymore. So I'm going to buy the used equipment. I'm going to, and thereby many become fuel. Monopoly is the product of competition. It's not the antithesis. It's the product. Well, let's see. That's what comes from. Well, there's see. That's where it comes from. Well, there's another element to the system,

where there's always a new guy that comes in. There is. There is. Well, that's the entrepreneurial spirit of a free, you know, of the United States, for example, of a capital system is you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build up a business that takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car for GM, which is what, you know, you look at Tesla, for example, right?

That's the American dream. One of the many ideals of the American dream is you can move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world. And it can happen. It can happen. But you're like, you can win a lottery. No, that's not quite. No, the lottery is complete luck. Here, you can work your ass off if you have a good idea. The lots are better in the lottery. That's not true. There's a lot of new businesses. How many testers do you know? Testers are really bad example,

because the car company, Automotive Sector is so difficult to operate as such a thin margin of profit. There are probably a good example of capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of lack of innovation. Because that's a very complicated industry because of the supply chain.

It'll so much. Come on. They have their uniqueness as you're quite right, but so does every other industry. The one thing that's common is that many become few. What you can also have is when you have a few, they jack up the price, they make an enormous profit, and in the irony of capitalism, Marx would love this, they begin to incentivize people to break into this industry because the few remaining are making a wide-earned amount

of profit because they are a few and can jigger the market to make it work like that for them. The reason every small capitalist is trying to build market share, that's a polite way of saying they want to become a monopolist or to be more exact an oligopolist, one of a handful of firms that dominates. That's what they're there for. But yeah, to push back a little bit also, because that's could be, this is a question also, do you think we're in danger of oversimplifying capitalism that completely removes the basic decency of human beings. So if you give me a choice to press a button to get rid of the competition, but that's going

to lead to a lot of suffering, there's a lot of people at the heads of companies that won't press that button, that it's not in the calculation, it's not just money. It's human well-being too. So like, I, yes, I've interviewed, and I don't live in this place, then. So you're saying that the forces of capitalism take over the minds of the people at the top. You got it.

And then they see's being human, essentially. No. The basic, okay. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I'm, depending on your model of humans. Yeah. But they lose track of the better angels of their nature and they just become

cogs in the machine, but they're just happening to be the cogs. I would put it differently, that the system is so set up. It's a little bit like natural selection. The guys who may, I could say the women do a doesn't matter. The people who make it up through the layers of the bureaucracy and get to the top in these things have had to do

things along the way that become selective. If they can't stand it, because they have that human quality and there are people like I know them. They're the ones running an Airbnb and Vermont. They check, they went there and they said, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to treat people like that. I'm going to make a lovely place in Vermont with my husband or my wife or whatever. And I'm going to be enjoying the people that come by and be a decent, of course, of course. But the system selects the firm.

If you don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up You're toaster anyway. They're the rest of the people who vote for you are gonna kick you out You can tell them how well they long what a lovely person you are Then they're gonna look at you and wonder what happened to you? How did you even get this far with the lovely person? Horses. Okay, okay, okay, okay. It's not necessarily just lovely person. So maybe my, I'll just say my bias is the people I know are in, especially at the top of companies are in the tech sector, where innovation is such a big part

of it. So I think a lot of the things we're talking about is when there's not much innovation in the system. So innovation usually comes in the history of capitalism, innovation comes in spurts. There's the electric period, the chemistry period, the nuclear period, there's now whatever you call it, the artificial intelligence or robotics or computer. It doesn't, it comes and then there's a flurry as everything is reorganized around whatever the newest technology is and then you have a period where you can get excited about that and the very rich people who come to the top can talk endlessly as they always do about innovation.

can talk endlessly as they always do about innovation. But again, you know, it really is, this is a recurring kind of debate and a recurring kind of I think that please, please, I don't want to but The problem with capitalism is and maybe you like this the problem with capitalism is Not that it is the one thing that's consistent with human nature. That's what it's would like to have us believe. But if anything, I would argue the opposite, that it is such a contradiction to parts of our nature, not other parts, that there it can never quite make it. There's always going to be the people who don't go along with it, people you're talking about, who do quit along the way, or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top. By God knows what hook or what crook that way did it, but most of them go, and you know why? Because their humanity is contradicted by what it is they're being asked to do.

I mean, the corporate sector this year, just to give you an idea. CEOs are jacking up their wage package. They're already out of whack. I mean, the average CEO pays now three, 300 times what the average worker pays. But they're jacking it up even more. Why? Because that's what's happening in their universe. That's what they're all doing it. And they have to do each one of them justifies that I have to do that.

Otherwise, I'd lose my guy to the next one, which of course is true, but it's no comfort for the mass of people who want CEOs for whom this argument is very exciting. So there are, they're doing that at a time when the American people can't cope. They've just gone through the COVID disaster. They've gone through the worst, second worst economic crash of capitalism in our history. After two years of this one, two punch, they got an inflation, a third punch, and we are now predicting rising interest rates in a recession at the end of the year or early next year. You can't do this to a working class.

When this was done to the German working class in the 1920s, Hitler was the result. You keep doing that in this country. We're already watching it. You're going to get that too. You're already getting bits and pieces. We're already watching it. You're gonna get that too. You're already getting bits and pieces. You can't keep doing this. So the client's suffering amidst the working class that's growing.

Taking out on a content to anger. So I'm a little 18 year old kid who has to go three hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket. Huh? What? And it happens every day in this country. Every day. So that anger rises up in those little ways now and the bigger, bigger, bigger.

And this is potentially. By the way, there's one more thing on the rationality. And this goes to Elon Musk. If you're interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year. Number was just released yesterday, 49,000. Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country. They use up an enormous amount of energy. They use up enormous amount of resources. There is a way to make transportation much more rational. And we've moaned for decades.

It's called mass transportation. It's a really beautifully maintained crystal clear, clean, frequent system of buses, trains, street trolleys, vans, it could easily be done in this society. In fact, I once did a project that I estimated, it cost $30 billion. That's less than we're sending to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it. A public transit system where? Everywhere, this country. All the major metro metro, this country's overwhelmingly metropolitan area.

Well, if you air, it has to be more than 30 billion, but, but, well, it was a few years ago. Sure, but you're saying it's not a lot of it. It's insane. Right. It's not crazy stuff. It's a reasonable number. Right.

Right. Listen, but there's a, and we'll, let me just finish the point. Sure. Yes. Yes. Okay. So, I'm trying to be rational here. If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do, if it's got a lot to do with fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use of the fossil fuel

particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass transit. We don't, we're doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing. Well, there's, you know, on, you could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit because it's going to be reusable vehicles. It will end in theory, car ownership. So you just have a more kind of distributed public transit. If it happens, but you know that that's a side effect. His major goal and the major goal of the other companies that are busy squeezing to get his share by the smallers

that they have some for General Motors, tell you all of them are making electric cars. So what they've done is they've replaced the individual car with fossil fuel with another individual car. Yeah, that's fucking nuts. What are you doing? It's one of the things they're doing, but automation is also another one.

But on the Elon side, there's also hilariously in the boring company, which is working on tunnels, which is actually expanding the flexibility you might have to start playing with ideas of public transit. I think, listen, I'm now partially living in Austin, Texas, that I don't know if they know what a public transit system is, period. Yes.

There's most of them, I think, pick up trucks. Well, this is an interesting so The older that by the way footnote the older the city the more likely it has public transportation So you're saying Boston is the best example. Yes, you have you been able you yeah, yeah, of course Yeah, I have a place in Boston with the street railway Boston is your case study of how to do this because they've been doing it all along. New York's pretty good too. There's a trade out. Yeah.

New York I would say is better than Boston because there's, you know, their technology also helps you out to do the public chances of better. It's almost like Boston is a little too old, but yes, I get your point. But there is the Ford F-150 pick truck symbolizes something about America. And there is a practical nature to the fact that in order to do public transit, in order to do some of these things that you're talking about with the working class, there has to be a central planning component, or there has to be a centralized component. And America is very much based on the idea of at least in recent times,

well, I would say from the founding of individualism, of respecting individual freedom. Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas and Marxism to life, you would trample on individual freedoms? No. Can you expect both? Sure. For me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people who have had that freedom eroded under the capitalist.

So that's a motive for my Marxism. It was for Marx too. He loved the French Revolution. He loved the Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, the Great Three, and then democracy, the American contribution, if you're like. He believed in all of that. His critique of capitalism was it promised it and then never delivered it. And the reason you have to go beyond it is because it didn't deliver what it had promised. So for me, it is the fulfillment of a journey. But again, I'm a Higadian Marxist, so if you want. Individualism, for me, is not the way it's set up in this society, some sort of antithesis to the government.

I think an immense con has been pulled on the American people, and the con works like this. You know what's bad and what's dangerous and threatens you? It's the government. The government is going to come in and tell you what to do. The government is going to run your life. The government's the problem. There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics. Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn, like the so-called Great Recession

of 2008. Who do they blame? The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed, and what is the media all about? The government. If I were a capitalist, I'd love this. I kicked the workers by throwing them out of their home,

and they don't get angry at me, they get angry at the government. I fire large numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them as a result of having no job and no income. And they get angry at the senator. I'm laughing all the way to the bank. This is a genius stroke. In theory, but if you look at government, because you said accountability in the capitalist system has no accountability, there's some pushback I give on the accountability. I think there is some accountability work can discuss in a Halein way who there's more accountability

for, I would say that in theory, government is perfectly accountable. That's the whole point of a democratic system is you vote people in. In practice, there's a giant growing bureaucracy that is accountable only on the surface. There's two parties that seem to be are the same media somehow integrated into making the the same two parties that are just wearing different colored shirts, to seem like they're very opposed and are arguing and bitterly arguing and calling each other's mouthless, nasty names and all those kinds of things. Okay, but that's government. So exactly is worse here. I had government or companies. Why are we asking that question?

These are twins. Look, what you were, what you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats just now, with which I agree. Yeah. I would say the same thing about corporations and the government. This is the same people. Literally, let's go to Churchill, which one is the, which one is worse? Let's go to Churchill. like democracy is the worst form of government except all the other ones or whatever. So this kind of same idea which one exactly is worse because to me it seems like which one between what a government and industry and companies it's because government is plagued by I I would call it corruption, because the corruption of bureaucratic paperwork, and then, because they're not account,

there doesn't seem to be a serious accountability. Again, we're not living on the same planet. The greatest practitioners of central planning are corporations. The greatest practitioners of central planning or corporations, Elon has an operation, like General Motors Ford, IBM, or any other megacorps. They have to plan. They buy up companies because they don't want to deal in the market. They don't want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs

or sell their outputs to somebody they don't control. They want to profess it to teach the genius of a market. They hate the market. And when they grow to be big, they keep buying whoever they were dealing with before so they could better control them, which requires them then to plan the production and distribution of goods inside, rather than buying them in the market. The model of the government is the private corporation. I have spent my life, give you an example, in American universities, big ones, famous ones.

Not just as a student, but as a professor, I mean, I've been a half a dozen schools. I teach now at a new school here. It's another one, right? They all model themselves after businesses. They model, you can attack the bureaucracy of universities. Good reason, it's a mess. But they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing their bureaucracy in a business

like manner. So you're looking at a difference, which isn't there. The government and the private sector are partners, and both of them wouldn't have it any other way. The corporations want that from the government, and the government now knows that to please the corporations is the number one objective they have, because that's how they keep their jobs

and keep their system going. And so for all practical purposes, this is the same people. But there's important differences that I don't know if they're fundamental or just a consequence of history. But if you have government, they're accountable in a different way than companies. Companies that are accountable by, especially if you have a consumer, they're accountable by sort of the consumer spending or not spending their

money on whatever the heck the company is selling. The government is accountable by votes. And it seems like government, unlike companies, for most of companies' history is always too big to fail, meaning it can always just print money. It can always save itself, And that creates a bureaucracy, you never, you rarely pay the cost of having made bad decisions if you're in government. You distribute the blame. And it's very unclear who's responsible for bad decisions. So bad decisions and government accumulate. So you become more and more and more inefficient and more and more poor in your decision making in terms of you said, public transit. Should we build a public

transit system in this city or not? That's a difficult decision. That's an interesting decision. I would say it's very often a very good decision. But whoever makes that decision should be accountable for a good or bad decisionision and it seems like companies are more accountable. They pay They feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because they can go back cropped They I mean there's much more day-to-day pressure to make good Engineering decisions Government doesn't seem to be under the same level of pressure. It's you disagree with that.

I disagree with that. Everything in my history pushes me. I may be living a different... Who knows? A planet. Or taking a different sort of drug. I won't mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a very large company here in the United States, here in the New York area. And it involved two brothers and a family who built it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was kind of the dynamo of the family, and he was more responsible than anybody else building it up. But he took care of his brothers. He

had a nice feeling about his brothers. So the one brother who could not, you know, without help, ties shoes became a vice president. Got an enormous salary. Got a beautiful office in a skyscraper. Not that many blocks from where I'm sitting right now. And that was the way that family handled that company. And all of his relatives were somewhere in this company, doing a variety of whatever, because, and my experience with this, and because I went to the schools I told you, all my experiences with that group of people, corporates, I followed those stories. You know,

corporates, I follow those stories. You know, they made mistake after mistake. They wish they would tell you, but didn't didn't undermine their, they were always able to blame somebody else, something else that scraped them through. And had they not been able to, they would have been replaced by another person who did the same thing for as long as they could. have been replaced by another person who did the same thing for as long as they could. And they knew it. They would talk about it at family events. That's how I know. Yeah, that's, I mean, I understand that you want the outside world to look at it this way, but my experience.

But again, what's that kind of thing at the risk of saying human nature again, I wonder what kind of system allows for that more versus less. This is the question of I would call that let's put that under the umbrella term of corruption, which system allows for more corruption. I remember the way I defined the different system is not more or less government. It's more or less allowing a democratic workplace reconfiguring it. What happens when everybody has a vote, when you have to explain what the strategies are, what the alternatives are, to a larger number of people than a board of directors or a major shareholders or whoever it is that most companies are responsible to. And now you've got a whole different universe,

it's not a small group of people, can't be hidden the way it's normally hidden, most of it on and on and on. This is, you know, worker co-ops is what this is called in many parts of the world. So it's not that I'm advocating something that's never been seen before, not at all. The Marxism I understand is to pick from historical precedents the things that we think will work better. And I think if all the people in an enterprise, just to drive the point home, democratically decided they would never give two or three individuals a hundred million dollars while everybody else can send their kid to college. I mean, that can do that. So just to return, just to address this point about the particular implementation of Marxism,

that was the early days in the Soviet Union. Why did Stalinism, for example, lead to so much bloodshed, do you think, and human suffering? Is there any elements within the ideas of Marxism that catalyzed the kind of government, the kind of system that led to that bloodshed. I don't think so. I think there are many things that led to the bloodshed, and so all that Stalin's regimes did. And I spent 10 years in my life with another economist writing a book about that to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise in fall of the Soviet Union. You might want to take a look at it sometime, but there I'm going to say a

few things now, but all of those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, etc. in that work. Let me start with, you know, playing a little bit with Hagel. The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the Soviet Union did, but what the rest of the world did. I mean, you had a really interesting move, and I'll give you a parallel from today.

The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed. World War I, just a Philippine, a czar, and all of that. It couldn't survive. It had already been in trouble. There was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war. To Japan, if you know Russian history, which I assume you group, very small, that could seize the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists. You know, earlier on with Karenski, the first government that tried, it wasn't people that were all that impressed by Marxism. It was people more skeptical and would not have been called Marxist probably by history.

They couldn't, they tried. They couldn't lend it and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year. The rest of the world though was horrified. The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken this immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism, yes, but still not challenging the power, now it had the power, and in a big country. And they freaked out. If you know American history, this country, the leadership of this country went completely berserk. I mean, we had a repression of the left, the

likes of which we had not seen before. The 20s were a time of Palmer raids in Boston, the Sackle Vanzetti trials, I mean, really grim hostility. And you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution. The US, Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops. So what you had right away was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. This was a great professor at Princeton, Meyer, forget his first name, who wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy since 1917 has been obsessed with Russia. Even now this this fight with Ukraine is

Half about Russia as if Russia still was the Soviet Union as if people haven't figured out That was a big change back in 1989 and 90 you know Yeltsin and and Putin are not what what you had before or at least They're not learning They may not be so different from some of the other but in any case. So you had one factor was the other isolation, the other condemnation, the global, I mean, Rosa Luxembourg, I mean, I assume you know the, you know, Rosa Luxembourg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin. She's a critic of London's, by the way, but she's leftist, hunted down and hacked into

bits, killed. So you are attributing some of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world turned away. Turned against the better way. Very, yeah, I mean, not in order of importance, but it's a very important part of the psychology of being, you know, it's what you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence that it did. There was a lot to be afraid of at that time.

Nobody had ever done it. Look, you could see the effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at first, that you could have socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous. That socialism was internationalism. Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, workers of the world unite, not workers of Russia, unite, workers of the, he had to go through a procedure of kind of coming to terms with the fact that the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried in Berlin, was tried in Munich,

was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here, they were failed. They all failed. And he's left. So the French would say, to serve, right, you know, all alone, that's one. The second thing is economic isolation. Russia is a poor country, and it needed what it got before the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans, particularly, but others too. Now this was all cut off.

And you can see the replay with the sanctions progress. It's we're going to do it again. We're going to do it again. We have to do it. We have the world is different and the sanctions don't work, but they're going to try it. They're going to try. Because it's the history. But that culture was, today is completely different. Russia is a different place today, but Russia has China, and that changes everything. And they don't get that here yet, but they will. Yeah, there's a very complicated dynamic with China, even with India. But, or trust.

Sorry to say human nature may change at a slower pace. Yes, that has occurred to me as well. I get that point. So, can you steal man the case or consider the case that there's something about the implementation and Marxism? Maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing on the working class and the workers unite, that naturally leads to a formation of a dictator, a dictator that says, let us temporarily give power to this person to manage some of the details of how to run the democracy of

giving voice to the workers so that they get to choose. And then that naturally leads to a dictator and there's naturally in human nature, power and absolute power as the old adage goes corrupts absolutely. Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marx's ideals, you're going to end up with a dictator, and often when you give too much power to anyone human, a small number of people, you're gonna get into huge amount of trouble.

You've put things together there that I would set forth. I think if you, if you give, put as a good word. Yeah. that I would step forward. I think if you if you give, put just as a good word, yeah, uh, German, um, the, uh, if you, I remember I told him my mother was born in Germany. And and then your dad is French. Yeah. But he was born in Mets, if you know, your, your, your peer, it's a city on the border of

France and Germany. If you come from the Al-Alsacian, Al-Alzaz in, in Germany. So they're German speaking, for actually? Yes, they both. It's bilingual because it's been back and forth so many times in medieval days already that it literally you go from one store to another, the proprietor here is French and the proprietor there is German, but they all speak both languages because you don't speak either of them. I speak Russian, but not German.

Very Ukrainian. No, it took French for four years in high school, but I forgot all of it. I remember the romance and the spirit of the language, but not the details. I'm sure I can remember. If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long period of time, and you do it on many levels of ideology, it is not surprising that it sticks and it stays, and you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution, and you will discover it has a life of its own, and it's going to take a long time before people don't.

If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism, and that it doesn't want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was Zeus and Diana and all the others, And they were very human-like, but instead we have one who is the absolute beginning. What are you doing? You're teaching people an authority line that comes from the individual. If you have a sequence of kings, if in your feudal manner the Lord sits, called the Landlord, he has unspeakable power over everything that goes on, and you do this for thousands of years. You can make a Russian revolution in 1917, but if you imagine, you've gotten away

from all that people assume, without ever thinking about it, you're going to have trouble. Stalin is figured here as the originator of his situation, he wasn't. He didn't never had that power. He may have thought that, but I don't. He's the product. Looked to Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn't that kind of guy. You know, he's a baseball player, playing lawyer. That's what he was. But they made him into Tadah. So it's not the system of history. No, no, no, it's it was the systems, feudalism, the nature. It was the structures and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its own rhythm and doesn't take, doesn't follow the calendar of a political revolution.

That's the fundamental question. Is there something about communism that creates some mentality that enables somebody like Stalin or Mao? I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what they find familiar to what seems to make sense and he's the guy. Look, let me give you an example from American history. The Republican party has traditionally in this country been the party of private enterprise and minimum government. Income Trump runs for office in 2016, is elected. What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most massive government intervention

in the world of economics that we have had for debt. Nobody says anything. The Republicans cave and the Democrats largely too. They cave. He can throw a tariff on anything. He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff. Let's not what the tariff is. It's not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman course in economics, which everybody knows. Everybody who teaches these courses. No, it doesn't matter. He's still calling the shots.

What is going on here is that a society has come to a point where it can't solve its problems and it begins what to tap into older forms and all of the less a fair and all of the individualism for them. And suddenly, the Republican Party is going, and now they're going to make abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do with your uterus. What? What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power.

They're hoping what? Do they like the government? No. They're desperate. This is not a pro-government. And it wasn't in Russia, Ilya. They were in a desperate fix and so he took advantage. So to which degree did would you say Marx's ideas led to the creation of the national socialism party of German workers has the Nazi party, the fascist party,

the 30s and the 40s. At the head of the phone was Hitler, which had just recently learned he was employing number seven of the party, or whatever, the seventh person to have joined the party and have created one of the most consequential and powerful political parties in the history of the 20th century. What degree did Marx ideas, Marxism ideas have to play? It is the national socialist party of German workers. What? solicissites the national so soliciss Deutsche, Al-Baita Patai German worker party worker party national socialist German worker party so well Here's the history good and you care about the workers that they just use the workers as a Populous message the only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler

was provide him with his stepping stone to power, but it had nothing, no other. He didn't know anything about it, didn't care anything about it, nor did the people around him. Here's the story of what happened there, which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history, the work that I history. The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German party. It started around 1870, Marx, it was still alive. Some of his own family were leaders, Ferdinand Lasal and other his daughters.

By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany. Nobody understood it. It was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution in 1970. Here was a political party that was now in every German city, in every German town, powerful and enjoying its rise up. That's my family is involved in this. I mean, I really do know the story. It meant that starting around 1967,

eight, if you wanted to have any kind of presence in the German working class, you had to use the word socialist. Yeah, I had to. Otherwise, they wouldn't pay attention. The other parties called themselves Catholic. Germany is divided. The northern two-thirds is Protestant. The southern third is Catholic.

Munich and the area is Catholic and we other parts of Germany basically, Protestant. You could be in the Catholic party, that was the South, or you could be in various conservative Prussian and other, but if you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing every, I mean, Germany, very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time. You know, Germany was the major competitor of Britain for the Empire. The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and US taking over from Britain's Empire.

So the German working class was it. So anybody who wanted to approach the working class in whatever way had to come to terms and be friendly to socialism. Other parties did this to just like Hitler. They put the word socialist in their party, but they wanted to make it clear that they weren't anything to do with the Soviet Union or any into Marxism. So they put the word national, Nazi is the first four letters of national, not so on all in German and they ZIs how you spell national in the German national socialism but definitely not communists. That's right. They killed community. They fought communists in the street. They had pitched battles, they literally

threatened each other's existence, and they're like, and the first people that he arrested and put in jail were not Jews and Gypsies and all the other people. He eventually killed, it was Camini's. They were the number one and socialist right behind them. Why? Because up until he takes power, January of 1933, that's when Hitler takes power. The last elections, two of them, in 1932, the socialist and communist, the vote together, 50% of the vote in Germany. So he appealed to the German

manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said, the Communists and Socialists are going to win. You won't, and you're just the Capitalists. You have two few people. You need a mass base, and I'm the only one that can do that. And they're just the populist message that he used. That's right. But it was explicitly done as a deal. The ruling group said to Hindenburg, the old Prussian man who was in charge of the German government at the time, you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise, he would never have thought he had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler as a little little funny man with a mustache who was Austrian was in German You know the bull for them that mattered. So he he comes in as the enemy

The smasher of socialism and communism, which he immediately does Only people who don't know or care about the history pick up on the word. You know, it's like there are people here in the United States who like to say, we are not a democracy, we are a republic, which is like saying, I'm not a banana, I'm a fruit. We have to explain to these people a banana. So you have to explain to people. Yes, we're a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy as the way to govern the republic because to say your republic doesn't imply what kind of government you have to go through that with people so they can't get it. And certain words have power beyond their actual meaning that used in communication,

whether it's negative like racist or positive like freedom of speech or Democrat or Democrat. With a D. Yeah. And then you use that to mean something who knows or negative, what did you stop Donnie? Stop being a socialist or or whatever whatever that means that's not even used as any kind of philosophical economic sense. So let's fast forward to today. You mentioned Bernie Sanders. Right. There's another popular figure that represents some of ideas of maybe let's call a democratic socialism and maybe let's try to start and maybe let's try to start sneak up on a definition of what that could possibly mean. But AOC, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, she's from these parts.

Yes, please. So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC, are they open to some ideas and Marxism? Are they representing those ideas well in both the economic and the political sense? Okay. Where do I begin? The socialist movement predates Marx, was always larger than Marx and has gone on to develop separately after Marx's death. So can we pause on that actually? Is there a nice way to delineate draw a line between Marxism and socialism or if Marxism is kind of a part

of socialism? Can you speak to like maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism is. Right. Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics. And as I said earlier, devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism a critique of capitalism, and that's its strength, how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works. That is really the forte of the Marxist tradition. Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism figures it's there, so that people who aren't Marxists are nonetheless aware of Marxism, like it more or less, study it more or less. But it's a broader notion that I like to use this sentence to describe.

It's a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism. That really there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the world think are adequate. That we are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who thought they could do better than slavery to all the people who thought they could do better than slavery, and all the people who thought they could do better than feudalism. We've made progress. Futalism was a progress over slavery. Capitalism was a progress over both of them, and progress hasn't stopped.

And we are the people who, in a variety of ways, want the progress to go further and are not held back by believing that capitalism is somehow the best beyond which we cannot go or even think we find that to be in the worst sense of the word a reactionary way of, and we're that large community. Many of us are not interested in economics all that much. We don't think that's the focal area. We are socialists, for example, because we want to do something to deal with climate change. We think the world is about to kill itself physically, and we want to take steps with other people to stop that, to fix that, et cetera, et cetera. So that's for me a kind of difference. It's a little difficult to say, because there's no other figure figure like Marx that has an equal impact, an equal place within the broad socialist tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition, but that's very

specialized and that's a whole nother kind of conversation. And whatever you say, the influence of the great anarchist thinkers, Kropatkin, Bakunin, Sorrell and Freire, and others still doesn't amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far. That could change, but I mean up to this point, that's the, I think that's a way of understanding the relationship. Yeah, that's interesting that some of the ideas within anarchism, and of course it's one of the more varied disciplines. Right.

There's such, maybe by definition, such variety in their thinkers, but they kind of stand for a dismantling of a power center. And that, if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism. Absolutely. So where you have the, you know, there's a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas that uses the phrase, quote, the withering away of the state. That's a quotation from Lenin. People should understand that's a quotation from Lenin. And it was made by Lenin, positive, in other words, Lenin was saying, that's a good thing. That's something we stand for.

We want to create the conditions under which there is a will. Because you remember the communists, so what I mean, they won't call that at first in Russia before the revolution. They were just socialists. They were hunted down and persecuted by the government left and right. They had no love for the government the government was their literal everyday enemy and being critical of government didn't just mean this particular government, but of the whole

being a Marxist you always ask the questions of the social Constitution of whatever it is you're struggling against so So there was this interest. Why is the state so important? Especially because if you understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism, it didn't have powerful states. One of Lenin's greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia, and he goes back centuries to a huge book, a three or four inches thick, and I'm one of the few people who've read it. And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe. The development of

a powerful central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate to hold on, which ought to be suggestive, that maybe the turn to powerful governments here in the United States, or in Europe, is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can't go on and has to marshal every last bit of power it can not to be lost in the history. It would be interesting to see what the Soviet Union would look like if Lenin never died. A lot of people have asked that question over the years. A lot of people.

They are just stalling, sliding in in the middle of the night, erasing the withering away of the state part. Yes, exactly. So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie Sanders, what are your thoughts about these modern political figures that represent some of these ideas? And they sometimes refer to those ideas as democratic socialism. Right. The crucial thing about Bernie and about AOC, and this particularly true about Bernie, because

AOC is much younger and Bernie is an older man. Bernie, being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student, as an activist, then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont, as a mayor and all the rest. He lived through, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America. And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945, six to the present, I mean, really never stopped, was a mannequin worldview. The United States is good. It defines democracy. And the Soviet Union is awful. It defines whatever the opposite of democracy should be called.

Good here evil there. It was taken so far that even in among the ranks of academic individuals, it was impossible to have a conversation. I mean, I can't tell, just make it very personal. The number of times I would raise my hand in my classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale. And I would ask a question that had something to do with Marxism because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses to teach this to me, except by people who trashed it, other than that. And I didn't want that. So I would ask a question. And I would see in the faces of my teachers Both those I didn't much care for and those who were good teachers that I liked Fear just fear. They didn't want to go there. They didn't want to answer my question

And I after a while I got to know some of them and I found out why Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to understand this Either they would have to say I don't know which would be the honest truth for many of them, but a professor doesn't want to say in a classroom, I don't know, it's not cool. Or they'd have to, if they knew, they'd have to say something that indicated, there's no real in much and they weren't eager to do that. Or they would know something. And maybe that would be they would know something. And maybe

that would be because they were interested. They did not want the rest of the students to begin to say, oh, you know, Professor Smith, you know, he's interested. It's not good for your career. You don't know how this is going to play out, who's going to say what the whom I could see in their faces, what I later learned because they told me, don't come to my office hours, you're in the office, we can talk about it. But that's how bad it was. Is it not still pretty much in my field, the great so-called debate. I find it boring, but the great debate for my colleagues is between what's called neoclassical economics

and Keynesian economics. Neoclassical, the government should stay out of the economy. Let's say fair or liberalism. And the Keynesian saying, no, you crazy neoclassical. If you do that, you'll have great depressions and the system will collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems to fix the weaknesses and they hate each other and they throw each other out of their jobs. One of the very few things they can do

together that they agree on is keeping people like me out. That they can find common ground to do. So I had to learn it all on my soul. Why am I telling you this? Because this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism of the post-World War II period, The vast bulk of all of that is unknown, not just to the average American person, but to the average American academic, to the average American who thinks of himself or herself as an intellectual. I mean, I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history to have no idea.

Or saying, does this man Lukacchia Hungarian Marxist? He really had interest in, or to explain that Gromschi was not a great literary critic. He was head of the communist party of Italy for most of his adult life. What does that mean? You like Gramsci as a literary critic, but they didn't even know. They don't even know. It's been erased. It's a little bit like stories I've heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased

in the Soviet Union because he obviously fell out of favor and so somehow all of his writings, many of which are very interesting and complicated. Anyway, so what you're going to have in this country is a slow awakening of socialism from a long hibernation called the Cold War. I never expected to be very honest with you that I would live to see. I knew it would come because at least things always do, but I didn't expect to see it. So I have been surprised as have a lot of us that when it starts to happen, it happens fast.

So the UC Bernie is an early sign of the awakening. Absolutely. Uh, for the court of the war to, to accept the ideas. Bernie was always a social, we all knew. And everybody who paid attention, he didn't hide it. But 2016, he got, he makes a decision momentous to run for president. He's just a senator from Vermont. Vermont is one of the smallest

states in the union. People who live in Vermont love to tell you that they're more cows than people in Vermont, that's entry, et cetera. So here from this little state, this elderly gentleman with a New York City accent runs for, or, and says, I'm a socialist. And when they attack him, he doesn't run away. I'm a socialist. I'm a socialist. Now he had been. He wasn't that it wasn't a secret that suddenly got out. But the great question, and I don't mind telling you because I went to the right schools. I know a lot of people in the you know, Johnny Elin was my classmate at Yale and stuff like that. So I was speaking with a high official

of the Democratic Party and I said, well, what do you think about Bernie entering the race? Makes no difference. Is I get 1% of the vote? Right. He was wrong. Yeah, they had no idea what was coming. But the truth is, I didn't either.

It wasn't just that he didn't get it. I thought his 1% was probably right. So we were both wrong. Yeah, change can happen fast. Do you think AOC might be present on one day? Yeah. Possible. Possible. But two things. Number one, it's fast. Number two, it's going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate, calm, non-confrontational socialism you can imagine. So not a OC or a Bernie? No, no, they are not confrontational in my judgment. In terms of the ideas of socialism.

Yeah, I mean, they're both very feisty. They're feisty personally, but not, but not ideologically. Got it. You know, she is, Bernie is also, you know, in honest moments, and they're both really are pretty honest folks, at least in my experience. In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that what he advocates as democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s. It was a kind of popular government tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide a

lot more support for the working class than you do now. That's not a fundamental change. That's what he means by socialism. When he talks about it and he's asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot. Okay, that's consistent. That's the softest kind of socialism. And that's where we're going to start in a country coming out of hibernation. Pretty soon it's already happening. There'll be people who need and want to go further in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are comfortable with. You can already see the the shoots of it now. You know, AOC voted together with most of the others to support the money for you, Craig.

Okay, that lot of people in the socialist movement do not support that. And that's going to, I don't know exactly how that's going to work out, but that should give people an idea. There are disagreements and they're going to fester and they're going to work. Interesting. They don't, so people in the socialist fear don't support money from the United States in the larger Mons that it is being sent to Ukraine is it because of it's a fundamentally the military industrial complex is a capitalist institution kind of thing No, no, what the I mean there are some people for whom that's the issue then there are people for whom

This is you know, it's guns and butter and why are we, why are we over there when we have such needs at home that are being neglected? Yeah. And then there are people who, well, go back to what we talked about at the beginning, who are more like Lenin and Debs, this is a fight between Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and want to be oligarchs in Ukraine. And what are we doing here? We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a settlement, don't kill large numbers of Ukraine. I mean, everybody's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.

There's a little strange here. What are you doing? You're supposed to be in favor of peace, you know, and for the United States, which just finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq to be against another country invading them. I mean, who in the world is going to take this seriously? This is crazy. You know, I invade it's good and you invade it's terrible. What? invade, it's good and you invade is terrible. What? You know, what are you doing? What why are you doing? What what's what's going on here? All of these questions are being active by way, not just by socialists, by lots of other people too, inside the Democratic Party and also inside the

Republican Party. You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that. They are against the stuff in You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that. They are against the stuff in in Ukraine They don't want the money spent there. They want the weapons sent there They don't like the whole policy. It's you and Trump wobble. So mr. Biden's policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right and Every day that this thing lasts these criticisms get bigger Anyway, the point is that AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War isolation from the whole, you know, when I explain to people, the contribution made, for for example to modern Marxism I'll give you an example by the the French philosopher Luis Althoussire I don't know if the name means anything to you. Okay. He was the rector of the a coal normal

Superior in Paris. That's the equivalent Imagine in this country if there were a university that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. I mean, it would be THE university. Well, the I call normal in France in Paris is THE. He was a tenured professor who became the Rector. The Rector is like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist Party, most of his adult life. That was possible in France during the Cold War. That was unthinkable in this country. You could not, in a million years, right? So, I, Al Queserre as a philosopher, tried to bring a version of postmodernism into Marxism, with enormous impact all over the world,

where he traveled, not just in Europe all over, right? So if you want to look him up, I'll spell it out for you. ALTHUSSER, the Louis, the Louis, the L O U I S Luis Al Tisa look at my up. You'll see tons of stuff. By the way MIT press is a major publisher if I remember of his works in English. By the way, the textbook I wrote in economics in case you ever interested was also published by the MIT press in In the title of the Contending Economic Theories, the Eoclassical, Keynesian, and Marksian. That's an MIT. Marksian. Yeah, that's right. And by the way, when we think, I don't know if there's

an interesting distinction between Marksian, economics, and Marxist, as opposed to Marxism is the umbrella of everything that's that I only use it because Marxist I use as a noun a person is a Marxist Marxian I use as an adjective to qualify but I don't mean some great different there's a last point I would like to make about aoc and Bernie That's also general. I'm a historian too, and I know that the transition out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism was a transition that took centuries, and that occurred in fits and starts. So for example, a feudal manner would start to disintegrate.

Surfs would run away, then run into a town. How would they live in the town? They had no land anymore, because they had run away from the feudal manner. A deal was struck. It was out to people involved in the deal understanding what they were doing. A merchant would say to one of these surfs, I'm in the business of buying and then reselling stuff and living off the difference. But you know, I could make more money if I produce some of this stuff

myself rather than buy it from somebody else. So I'm going to, I'm going to make you a deal. I'm going to give you money once a week or give you a money, what we would later call a wage. And you come here and under my supervision, you make this crap that I'm going to then sell. And this all works. In other words, there were efforts unconscious, not self-aware, to go out of feudalism to a new system. Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. to the few days and then fell apart. Some of them last of weeks or months or years, but it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general switch. And once that was done, it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system we have today. That's the only model we have. So for me, that's what I see when I look at socialism. I see the Paris commune was an event, an attempt.

Lest it a few weeks. I see Russia. That was an attempt last at 70 years. Then I see, I even fill in the blank, I see, these are all early experiments. These are all, you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good, the bad. What do you build them on? How do you learn? And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition, when it's serious, that's what it does. So, in the E.R.I.D.S. capitalism was a significant improvement over the feudalism.

And we are coming to an age and over slavery. And we're coming to an age where capitalism will die out and make it's not that capitalism is how fundamentally broken. It's better than the things that came before, but there is going to be things yet better and they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and Socialism is there just just the linger briefly on the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter There's something called I'm sorry if I'm using the terms incorrectly, but

Cultural Marxism, criticisms of universities being infiltrated by cultural Marxists. I'm not exactly sure. I don't pay close enough attention. No, no, no, no, no, I do. But it's woke. It's there's a there's a kind of woke ideology that I'm not exactly sure what is not you that what is the fundamental text? Yeah, there's the Karl Marx of of walkness. All I do know is that there's certain characteristics of woke ideology, which is hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys. And basically everyone is a bad guy, except the people that are very loudly non-stop saying that they're the good guy. And that applies for racism, for sexism for gender, gender politics, identity politics,

all that kind of stuff. Is there any parallels between Marxian economics and Marxist ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter? No, not much. Mostly Marxist, you have to, one of the consequences of the taboo after World War II is that Marxism, like socialism and communism, become swear words. It's

like calling somebody, well, I won't use bad language, but using a four letter word to describe somebody. Yes. So instead of calling them, you know, this or that, you call them a Marxist. In many circles, this is even worse than whatever other adjective you might have used. But it doesn't have a particular meaning that I can assess. The closest you get is your little list. It is somebody who is concerned about race and sex and sexual orientation, gender, and all of those things, and wants there to be trans-gendered bathrooms. And I don't like any of these people, so I slap the word Marxism or the phrase cultural

Marxism, because it isn't Marxism about getting more money or controlling the industry or all those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned about. So this is odd since they don't know much about Marxism. I've always been interested in culture. I mean, Lukash the man I mentioned to you before, Gromschy, that's what they're famous for. The analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture. Gromschy writes a great length about the Catholic Church about theater and painting in Italy and on. I mean, this is just ignorance talking. They don't know anything about that.

They wouldn't know what the names are. It's a label that summarizes kind of a shorthand. I'm against all of this. I don't want to be told that there's ugly racism in this country and it always has been or sexism or phobia against gay people. Whatever it is that's agitating them Marxism or socialism. I mean, it's just it's like socialism is to post off and it is it is a mental well, but I don't blame them. I mean, it's childish It's mean spirited, but it comes out of the fact no one ever sat them down and said, do you hear is this tradition? fact no one ever sat them down and said, do you hear is this tradition? It's got these kinds of things that people kind of share.

And these big differences look, an intelligent society which this country is could have and should have done that. It was fear and a kind of terror that made them behave in the way they did it. We're now seeing it. Having said that, there is such a thing as cultural Marxism. What that is is simply those Marxists who devoted themselves

to analyzing how it is that a particular culture is on the one hand shaped by capitalism, and on the other hand it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow. In other words, how do we analyze the interaction between the class struggle on the job and attitude towards sexuality or movements in music or whatever else culture. And there are Georg Gloucac, this Hungarian, great name indeed, the greatest of all the names Antonio Gramsci. And a modern name just died a couple years ago, a British intellectual name Stuart Hall, H-A-L-L. You want to, if you want, if I were teaching,

which I have done, of course, in cultural Marxism, those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you articles and books to read of their stuff because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many others. So there is something to be said and understood about the kind of culture, the capitalism creates, and the kind of culture that enables capitalism. Yes.

And Marxists are particularly those who like to look at that interaction. In other words, they're interested in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism. There's another name I forgot. Stuart Hall is British, Grame Shee is Italian, Lukacchus Hungarian, the German is Walter Benjamin, B-E-N-J-A-M-I-N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school of Marxism that developed in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people, many of whom were interested in cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against the narrow Marxism that was so focused on economics and politics. There were people who said, you're leaving out very important parts of modern society

that are shaping the economy as much as they are shaped by it. And it was that impetus to open Marxism, to be more inclusive in what it deemed to be important to understand that this cult, and they call themselves cultural Marxists, but they had a completely different meaning from this. This is just, you know, bad malady. That's all. Let me ask a more personal question. So for most of the 20th century,

no, not most, but a large many decades in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War and before being a Marxist is one of the worst things you could be. Have you had dark periods in your own life where you've gone to some dark places in your mind? Where it was difficult, like, self-doubt, difficult to know, like, what the hell am I doing? When you're surrounded by colleagues and people, you said prestigious universities, both personal interests of career, but also as a human being, when everybody, you know, kind of looks at you funny because you're studying this thing.

Did that ever get you real low? No, I know people that who had exactly what you said, I mean, your questions perfectly reasonable. If I were you, I'd be asking me that question too. And what's wrong with you? Nothing wrong with the question. And here's the honest truth. I don't know how anomalous I am. I really don't. But the truth is, no, I have, if my wife was sitting here, she tells you what she tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true. But then again, luck never is the only explanation for things. It's part of it.

What can I say? I didn't choose the time of my birth. I didn't choose the communities in which I grew up or the schools I attended or anything else. But the fact that there was no courses or extensive courses, I marked the economics. But you know, again, I'm Hegel. On the one hand, I was denied good instruction. On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own. And the motivation when you do that is very different. I'm not the student who sits there with my notebook taking notes of what the great professor says and

reading the text and getting ready for the exam. I don't have an exam. I'm doing something slightly risque, you know, kind of romantically different and oppositional. I was able to find always one or two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation, other students who felt enough similar to me that we could get together and read these books and talk about them. I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me of their time and their effort to teach me along the way. And I've had the benefit that because I went to all these fancy schools, I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture.

And when I have been put in difficult positions, I often wave my pedigree, and it works like garlic with the devil. It back away. They back away. Because Americans are very deferential to that kind of academic prestige. But there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken by this you have Just naturally somebody Who just has perseverance?

Well, I would put it I mean I understand what you're saying, but I would put it all differently. I think Capitalism struck me early on in my life Capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system. And nothing has happened to change my mind. In other words, the development, just just kept giving me more and more evidence. But this, and I must say over the last 10 years, what's really changed? The last 10 years. I mean, I can't describe to you how big that changes. And that may be more important than anything else we've discussed. Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event,

an interview on television or a radio thing or give a talk at some conference or something. Once every two or three months, I'd be invited and I could do it. Academics often do. I now do two to three to four interviews every day. So there's a hunger. There's a wow, is there hunger? It's fast enough. And I want to be honest with you. As I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause from the podium, you know, that I lean into the microphone and they say, with as much smile as I can get I'm having a time of my life

And that's the truth. Yeah, that's the truth. I Never expect it look. I'm used to teaching a classroom a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or ten students or or a regular undergraduate class with 30 or an occasional introductory course with a few hundred. I've done all of those things many times. But an audience, you know, that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that, no, that's new. Is there advice you can give given your bold and non-standard career and life advice you can give to high school

students, college students about how to have a career like that or maybe how to have a career or life they can be proud of. Yeah, first of all my advice is go for it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely better than they were when I had to do it. And I could do it, and I can, I'm happy I did it. Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made that I've never regretted. And I've never regretted being a critic of this society. Never. I find it edifying. I find it. I mean, the gratitude people express to me for helping them see kind of what's going on is unbelievably encouraging. I mean, what can I tell you? So that fills you with joy, pointing out that the emperor

has no clothes fills you. That's a life, not just important as a joy. It's because most of the people who say something like that to me are people who, if they had the vocabulary and some of them do, would say, you know, I thought I was seeing through that outfit that I was wearing. I thought it and they did.

And all they needed was a little extra this information or that factoid or this logic eye. And they have that. And I remember having that too. When I had a teacher who made something clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude. And now I get that gratitude, a good bit. And yes, it is enormously gratifying.

And I'm not sure I could get it any other way. And I had learned, and I'm walking proof that being a critic of society and doing it systematically and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life. Very good life. Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes to an end. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it? One other aspect of human nature is that life comes to an end.

Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it? Afraid of it? No. Think about it. Yes. Yes. I'm not afraid. I've always thought, you know, the death is hard for the people that are left when you're dead, you know. It's not about you very much. So it's, I worry more about my wife. I'm very attached to my wife. I might mention to you, I got married when I was 23 years old, and that's my wife to this day. So I'm lucky, because that's, if you get married

to anybody, and age 23 to either. Well, it isn't. What is, uh, what role has this love played in your life? Enormous. Because I came from a family, you know, if your family is political refugees, which mind what? Who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another continent, learn another language, find another life, income and job, and the disruption goes real deep for any refugee. So my mother and in a way make it up to them. I had to be, I was the first child of their, I have a younger sister, the first child. And you know, there's a lot of psychological pressure

on you if you're in that situation. Nobody means you arm, but you've got to do what they couldn't, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do. It's the closest they're going to get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university students. My father was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life. So I had to perform. I went to high school. Here in the United States, I had to get all A's. I had to be on the football team. I had to play the violin. The orchestra had to do all this because everything had to be achieved.

So I'm an achievement crazy person that way. But that's functional in this dysfunctional society. But on top of that, that's an achievement within the game of this particular society. But then love seems to be a thing that's greater than that game. Is that something that made you a better person? Oh God. How is it? How is it made you a better Marxian and a better... Everything, because my wife, my wife by profession, is a psychotherapist. Excellent. I love it.

And I needed it. Yeah. And so I married it. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I think, as I look back on it, that was more than a little what was going on. And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family never talked about, never dealt with, never, at least explicitly engaged in any of that.

Because it's all about survival, the immigrant challenges, survival, and you're so busy that you tell yourself you can't do that. Of course, you can, and there were other reasons why you're not going to look at those problems, but the survival is so urgent that you can fool yourself this way, and my parents did that. One last question. What's the meaning of life, ritual? Why I will quote you, Mr. Marx. Let's go. Life is struggle. And for me, I have found that to be true, that the struggle, whether it is to build a relationship with

your child, I have two children, whether it's to build one with your spouse, whether it's to understand a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this relationship to a student or to an audience. These are, it's a struggle to do all those things, but that network of struggles that makes life interesting, intriguing, and satisfying. I'm meaningful. And that latter thing I got to say you do masterfully. You're one of the great communicators and

educators out there today and it's a huge honor that you assist with me for so many hours. Thank you. This is awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolf to support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some words from Karl Marx. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.