Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Richard Wolff on Black Lives Matter, Defunding the Police, and 3rd wave Socialism

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoriesOfEverythingPatreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist, known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School in New York.0:00 On humility functioning as a necessary condition for scholarship 4:04 How Richard came to being a Marxist Economist 14:14 On the West being afraid of Marxism (and why) 17:36 Does the taboo of Marxism highlight an institutional / educational problem? 23:58 Defintions of Marxism / Socialism / Communism 36:02 The "third phase" of Socialism; Richard Wolff's ante 40:10 The different experiments of Communism 42:22 Karl Marx's writings on worker coops 50:59 Is violence justified to bring about the revolution? What defines "self defense"? 53:20 What does Wolff think about the "Defunding The Police" movement? 57:32 Is the state antithetical to Marxism? 1:02:07 On Black Lives Matters 1:04:02 On anarcho-communism / Marxism's relationship to Anarchism 1:06:02 What would Richard advise #BLM to make it more puissant 1:08:02 Is the root problem of the USA racial or economic? 1:12:37 How do we measure who's more "free"? 1:16:43 Richard Wolff is not more "white" than he is an "employee" (polemics on Identity Politics) 1:18:45 Where does Wolff disagree with Marx? 1:22:36 When does the right go too far? When does the left go too far? 1:25:50 What specific policy would Wolff enact if elected? 1:29:50 Kamala Harris' father is a Marxist 1:30:45 Wolff on "quota" based systems, like Afirmative Action 1:35:51 Definitive answer on Affirmative Action 1:38:19 Hegel is disliked because of his association to Marx 1:40:14 Why doesn't Hegelian contradiction lead to ex falso quodlibet 1:42:08 Overview of the "labor theory of value" 1:45:26 A boss pays an employee with the hope of making money, but doesn't, then who's exploited?

Alright, hello Toe listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now. Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business.

Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over 170 countries, your business has global potential. And their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. Shopify has award-winning service and has the internet's best converting checkout. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com

slash theories, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash theories. For me, that's a sign of movement immaturity. If we're going to sit around, and who's more oppressed? Black people? Female people? This person? What? What are we doing? These are qualitative differences. When you reduce qualitative difference to quantity, it's an old mathematical and philosophic problem.

There's something going on there that you ought to interrogate before you answer the question. I want you to know that this is not a debate. I've watched almost all of your interviews, like debate, debate, heated debate with Marxists. These are questions. Think of me as a fool. I don know much you're the scholar i i'm just a filmmaker just a humble obsequious filmmaker i'll ask you questions and peter will do the same you do know i hope that the scholar is exactly described honestly as you've just described yourself. It's just that the scholar functions in an institutional arrangement where he has to, or she now has to, position himself, herself, as some kind of expert, some kind of raised being. And that's, you know, if you have some compassion, it's something that the academic fell into. It shouldn't be blamed on the academic. I mean,

granted, they abuse it, and they exploit it, and all the rest. They do. Most of them do, exploited and all the rest. They do. Most of them do and that's been my experience and I've been an academic all my life. But they're not the author of their own sad position and they often stumble in their own personal lives and in their academic environments because that posturing as the scholar who knows is a heavy burden and it doesn't work well and even the scholars would be better off if they could stop that fakery and get on with talking honestly about their ambivalences, their uncertainties, the parts of the story they can't tell because they don't know.

Instead of looking upon that as like, you know, some defect that they have to mask, find it an opening for an interesting conversation. It's sad, very sad. But then there's no tenure, or maybe that's why there's tenure. That's right. And then if you're unsure, you know, the tendency is to play one-upsmanship games with other academics and to utilize your power position relative to students, to work off on them to act out your own uncertainties, your own lack of confidence, which then in turn, because the students always pick it up,

makes them turn off to education, and I think in part, become an audience for you. All right, man. Peter? All right. So my name is Peter Glinos, and I'm here with Kurt Chiamungal. Kurt, filmmaker and head of Better Left Unsaid. Marxist professor who is going to help us shed some clarity on some of the ideas circulating around Marxism, both in the past and in our times. So my first question for you, Dr. Wolf, is do you mind just starting by telling us in the audience a little bit about yourself, your past, where you're coming from, and what you're working on now, what you're working towards. Okay. I am the child of two immigrants who came to the United States from Europe. My father was French. My mother was German. I was born in the only place my father could get a job as an immigrant when he came here,

which was as a steel worker in Youngstown, Ohio, which is where I was born. I grew up speaking mostly French and German because those were the languages of my home. I really only started learning English when they dropped me off at my kindergarten to start public school. And I'm very grateful that they had the wisdom to teach me these languages so that I grew up basically being trilingual, which for a child is very easy to do and much easier than learning languages later on. But as the child, and I was the first child of immigrants who had fled Europe because of the war and who kind of had the death all around them as part of their lives, all around them as part of their lives, there was a pretty heavy burden on me as a child to fulfill the life ambitions that had been cut short for my parents

because they had to leave the countries and the positions and the careers that they had had over there. So I was early on oriented towards being a proper achiever. And since my mother was German, achievement always meant physical as well as mental capability and ability. So I always played sports as well as doing academic work and being a good student. I had to be a good student because if I came home with anything else, both my mother and father would begin tearing up. I just say that to give you an idea of the level of psychic pressure it was. So I ended up being a very good student and an athlete, and I played the violin and the orchestra, the whole bit. And in those days, Harvard University was making an experiment

and bringing in people who I think normally would not have been brought there. So I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, where I was told... Why would you not normally have been brought there? You said that you were a great student, a great athlete. My experience at Harvard, where I spent four years... Well, let me explain. I went to Harvard, and when I finished at Harvard, I went to Stanford, and when I finished at Stanford, I went to Yale. So I spent 10 years of my life in this rarefied atmosphere of the elite universities of this country. And I know, both because of what I learned there and what I have learned umpteen times since, that this is a highly stratified society who sends its children to the same universities they went to, etc., etc., etc., and I'm not part of that. My parents had nothing to

do with that. They came from another part of the world. I didn't go to Harvard, by the way, because it was Harvard. My parents didn't know what Harvard was. The guidance counselor in the high school, the public high school I went to, thought I should apply to Harvard. And I did, but that was not my first choice at all. I wanted to go to where a friend of mine had gone, a small college called Oberlin in Ohio that I had visited and loved. But Harvard gave me more money and my parents had no money. So my father said, well, this is easy. You're going to Harvard. So I went to Harvard because it was cheap for me, given the fellowship and all the crap I got. I learned once I got there

what this place was, and I've learned since how it works. But people like me do not normally end up at a place like Harvard. That really, the fact that I was good in school or played football or any of the other stuff, really very nice, but it's not what happens. And partly it's not even Harvard that rejects you. It's that you don't even think of applying there. It's just not part of your universe. And it wouldn't have been of mine

had it not been for the guidance counselor's desire that someone from our high school get to Harvard. And I think that year I was their best shot. Anyway, I went- Okay. Let's get to your current work and then what you're working toward. Okay. I didn't like how this country treated my parents as immigrants. They were quite grateful that they were alive, and they gave the United States credit for being alive, so they weren't the critics I was. But I saw what happened, what kind of lives my parents led, and I didn't blame them. I blamed the system. That was an early insight of mine, and I stayed with it ever since. I gave myself the task, understand how and why this system did what it did

to my parents and the people around them that I got to know. So I've been a critic of the system for as long as I've been more or less of an adult. And I found it an interesting challenge that Harvard and Stanford and Yale did their level best to persuade me otherwise. And I took what they were trying to teach me seriously. I didn't dismiss it. I wasn't glad handing what they were offering,. I didn't dismiss it. I wasn't glad handing what they were offering, but they didn't persuade me. They really didn't. And what I also saw, which has been a very important shaping of my life, I saw naked fear. I saw it over and over again at Harvard, at Stanford, and at Yale. And here's what I mean.

I would raise a question, or other students, it wasn't just me, that had something to do with the critique of capitalism. And I could see, the way any human being can see it in another, the fear in my instructors faces. And I'm including here the instructors that I liked who were good teachers, and the instructors that I didn't particularly like who weren't such good teachers. Aidan McCullen And this is around 1970s, 1960s? Dr. Dean Mitchell Yeah, it was in the 1960s, mostly the 1960s. I mean, my basic education is the ninth, in

my period of going to the Ivy League, these three schools, that's the 1960s. I mean, my basic education is the ninth, in my period of going to the Ivy League, these three schools, that's the 1960s. Okay. And you attribute that fear to what? The Cold War, McCarthyism, whatever you want to call it. My professors had two problems, basically. The first problem was they often didn't know the answer to the question that I asked. They simply didn't know. And you know, in the academic world, as you've probably discovered, it's very painful for a scholar to say, I don't know, as if that were some fundamental defect that they should be ashamed about. So they were fearful because they did not want, in front of a classroom of young folks like me, to be in the position of saying, I don't know. But they didn't know because Marxism was so toxic

to them in their environment at that time that it went to the point of not reading the books, not learning the arguments. Or the other kind of fear was just, oh my God, I don't want to go there. This is dangerous material. Please ask somebody else. Please go somewhere else with your question. And whatever they said to me, their faces were like tableaus of anxiety and difficulty. And I, you know, like any young person, I think with half a bit of curiosity to his or her soul, I wanted to understand what's going on here. What's happening? Why is this? Every time I bring up something about Marxism or socialism or communism, which by the way were front page news in the daily newspapers all the time at that time. What in the world is going on here? And then I began to ask questions and I began to learn. So let me make a simple statement that summarizes it. I spent 10 years of my life at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. One professor in all those 10 years

assigned us, one, passages from Karl Marx's Capital, his major adult work of analyzing capitalism. One professor during one semester, happened to be at Stanford, by the way, not at Harvard and not at Yale. And I have one BA from Harvard, three master's degrees from Stanford and Yale, and a PhD in economics from Yale. and a PhD in economics from Yale. Now there is no excuse intellectually or any other way for such a lopsided crazy curriculum. That's not about analysis, that's not about priorities, that's about political fear, career fear. These professors did not want, and if by the, if you were to ask me, might some of them have been sympathetic? The answer is they might have been, but they were so scared that I'll never know, and I

can't answer your question if you have that in your mind. By the way, the United States we're living in right now is itself the product of an entire half century of self-censorship that makes it impossible for large numbers of perfectly intelligent human beings in this country to have a clue as to what the critique of capitalism means around the world, the power it has, the influence it has. They can't get it. It's a mystery that continues to overwhelm them. Okay. Could it also be that, as you mentioned in one of your other interviews, Marx is so, has already influenced our critiques of capitalism to such a degree that we don't necessarily need to go back to the source. For example, in physics, we never read Newton. We don't read Archimedes. We know about what Newton has influenced. We don't go to the Principia Mathematica. In biology, you don't read about Lamarck because that's outdated, although you might hear

about why Lamarck's theories are incorrect. You don't go to the source. So could it not also be that? That would make sense if the great Marxist thinkers since Marx were on the reading list, but they're absent also. Part of the loss of not reading the original, which, by the way, isn't that old. Marx's mature writing is 150 years old. It's not inaccessible. It's not, you know, from another universe. But even put that aside, I could give you a list of 20 or 30 or 50 Marxists who came afterwards, who developed the thought, often critically, dropping this, focusing on that, extending it over there.

Those are not on the reading list either, because the topic is the problem. The whole approach, it's like dealing with childishness among academics. I don't want to see it. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know it's there. And the end result is you don't know anything about it. Look, I have the following problem as an academic. I had to learn neoclassical economics, which is the dominant paradigm in this country. I had to learn that because I had to teach it, and I had to get my exams passed properly. And I know Keynesian economics, which is the only slightly critical approach that is allowed. So I can talk to my colleagues about what we share. But the minute I start talking to them about Marxian economics, they don't know what to do. It becomes a difficult conversation,

because they become, at best, the pupil. And I become the teacher, and that's not the relationship they want with me. They want the relationship of colleagues, not of teacher-student, and so the conversation dribbles off or dies or even takes an unpleasant turn. So I've learned, as people like me have had to learn in the United States, to talk the Marxism in a different language so that they can hear it and can maybe process a bit of it instead of having the visceral reaction, which they mostly have, not realizing it's to their own detriment. The creation of these parallel languages to circumnavigate the center's impotence in discussing these topics is something that's not unfamiliar to our time. were simply because of Cold War tensions, or does it highlight an institutional problem in our education system, in the universities, or some other aspect of our education system? before 1945 to be precise, you did have across the American academic spectrum

quite a few seriously critical voices. Yes, they were not as freely allowed in academia as they should have been. I would be the first to say that. But there was nothing like the wholesale silencing that you had in the aftermath of 1945. I'll give you an example. And I'll do it from economics because that's the field I know. One of the great economists of the 20th century was a man named Paul Sweezy, S-W-E-E-Z-Y. You can look him up, lots of books, very famous. We'll cite him in the transcript. Okay. Ironically, a member of the Rockefeller family here in the United States, the rich ones, who also went to Harvard, by the way. who also went to Harvard, by the way. But in a way, parallel to mine, he ended up being a Marxist, long story short, teaching at Harvard, where he had gone to school. He was a professor.

And one of the great inspirations to Paul Sweezy, as a Marxist at Harvard, Paul Sweezy, as a Marxist at Harvard, was the American theorist and economist Thorsten Veblen, whom I hope you know, or if you don't, you ought to learn. One of the great thinkers on the left in the United States before World War I even, let alone World War II. and let alone World War II. And Sweezy was in fact responsible for keeping his legacy, if you like, alive. Veblen taught school in a variety of American universities. Sweezy taught at Harvard,

but with the end, with the Cold War, Harvard, in a typical gesture of academic courage, fired Sweezy. He was the person who was designated as a young instructor to fill the shoes of the most famous professor at Harvard in economics at that time, a man named Joseph Schumpeter. He was retiring, he was an old man, and Sweezy was his prize student despite all of that despite all of Sweezy's connections not only as a thinker and as a successful student but as a member of the Rockefeller family and let me assure you that Harvard takes a great deal of interest

in anybody who has anything to do with the Rockefeller family, as do all these universities. But they fired him because he was politically unpalatable. And he went on to found a magazine called Monthly Review. I'm not sure you're familiar with it. It's been a socialist Marxist magazine in the United States here. It continues to publish now. It started in 1949 when Paul Sweezy got together with Albert Einstein, who was a socialist who wanted to support Marxism. I mention it only because most Americans have cleansed Mr. Einstein of his unfortunate political interests. Anyway, they started this magazine together, Einstein and Sweezy, in

1949, Call Month Review, in which, by the way, I have published articles, full transparency here. But that kind of thing was normal. The professor who, by the way, who the only professor I ever had who assigned marks was a man named Paul Baran, B-A-R-A-N, was a professor at that time in Stanford and had gotten the job immediately at the end of the war because of his participation in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner in the United States of the CIA. He had been a leftist and had been working, as Sweezy and others did, in the anti-fascism movement, which included collaboration with the very same government that later turned on them when the wind changed. But yes, it devastated American academics. And by the way, let me be clear, it still does. The Cold War ended in 1989. At least that's what the history books tell us, with the implosion of

Russia and Eastern Europe. But you wouldn't know it if you go to academic economics in the United States today. It is as lopsidedly unwilling to admit the entire corpus of Marxist scholarship today as it was 30 years ago. I find it stunning. I find it something that really merits some analysis. And one of the reasons, if I can be personal, that you find your way to me is because I am a product of that elite that opens doors for me because I went to those universities. If I had gone to other universities, all other things equal, you would never have heard of me and we wouldn't be having this conversation. That's part of the power of the ranking structure of American academia.

And it's been true all my life. Let's get some definitions out of the way for people. And it's been true all my life. Let's get some definitions out of the way for people. I'm a man of definitions. What's Marxism? What's communism? And what's socialism? Very good.

Let's do that. Marxism, you know, that's easy because it has something to do with Karl Marx. And it has to do with a remarkable reality about Karl Marx. The man lives from 1818 to 1883. He does most of his writings around age 30 and afterwards, so you can narrow down the middle of the 19th century as the core of Marx's writings. So we have, what, 150 years, more or less, since then, and that body of ideas that he writes, quite prolific. Just a footnote in case your audience isn't familiar. Marx is born in Germany, but he's exiled.

That's the way they punished the political leftists in those days. They didn't kill them. They didn't arrest them. They exiled them. So he left Germany, went to France. They did the same. Went to Belgium. They didn't arrest them. They exiled them. So he left Germany Went to France. They did the same. Went to Belgium They did the same and he ended up where all refugees from Europe in those days did in London Which allowed you to stay there. So he lived the rest of his life in London

Spoke English taught in English wrote in English But mostly in German because that was his basic language. In the 150 years since Marx died, his writings have inspired Marxist thinkers in all fields, natural science, social science, humanities, you name it, in every country on the face of the earth. It's one of the most stunning spreadings in a historically short time. 150 years is not long in history, and there's no country on earth that doesn't have its Marxist institutions, Marxist intellectuals, you name it. So it's everywhere, which suggests, if you're not close to it, that there's something going on in this set of ideas that an awful lot of people find really interesting.

Okay, Professor, I'm going to get you to be a bit terse. What is Marxism? What is socialism? What is communism? I want to make the most of your time. I know you're getting to it. All right, fine. Socialism is a different thing. Socialism existed before Marx, as did communism. Those were existing things that Marx encountered. He had positive and negative reactions to them. Broadly speaking, in terms of what these words have meant, A, I have to tell you that there is no single definition, there is no institution that issues definitions that everybody subscribes to. When you hear that word used, you have to look at the context, you have to read a bit, because what people mean by these terms has always been

contested terrain. That's true of most social science issues, but it's true in spades of this one. So here's what socialism has come to mean. I'm going to narrow it down to three basic alternatives to help you out. Number one, the kind of socialism associated with Scandinavia, Western Europe, and a whole lot of other societies, works roughly like this. You have an economic system in which private enterprises are the dominant form. However, these private enterprises are organized in a very particular way, which is called capitalism. Namely, way, which is called capitalism. Namely, that they organize themselves with a very small number of people in a very dominant, powerful position. In modern capitalism, these are called the major shareholders or the board of directors. Or if you know how a corporation

works, the major shareholders elect the board of directors and tell them what to do. This is a tiny number of people in most enterprises. The vast majority of people in most enterprises are called employees, whereas the first group are called employers. But the way capitalism is set up, all the key decisions about every enterprise are made by a small minority that is not accountable to the large majority in that enterprise. All the key decisions are made, including those that impact the vast majority, but the vast majority is excluded from participating in the decisions. They simply have to live with the results, which include firing them and not paying them any money and throwing their families into whatever dilemma that involves. That's how private capitalism works. And then they interact, these these enterprises with one another by

means of market exchanges. That's typically what we mean by capitalism and the socialism of Western Europe as the prime example involves the reaction of the mass of the people to the grotesquely undemocratic arrangement of a capitalist enterprise by wanting some relief. And the way they get the relief is to utilize their political power to get the government, and remember we're talking about societies in which universal suffrage exists, to get the government, which they vote in, to regulate, control, and limit the private enterprises. That's called socialism. Sometimes it's called market socialism. Sometimes it's called social democracy. Sometimes it's called democratic socialism. Bernie Sanders and AOC like to call it

democratic socialism. The Europeans, who they're copying, like to call it democratic socialism. The Europeans who they're copying like to call it social democracy. That's one kind. Now there's a second kind and on this second kind there's a debate. Is it socialism? Is it communism? Here's the second kind and then I'll tell you what the debate is about. The second kind has the government intervening, not merely- One moment, before we go into the second kind, because you said there were, I just want to make sure we have our ground consolidated. So we said that there were three key characteristics of socialism.

One that there is this private sphere that is disproportionately designed to favor those at the top, the major shareholders, the employers. And this is at odds with a regulatory force from the government in the Democratic Society of Universal Suffrage. These are two forces that are kind of fighting each other in socialism. Are these the features that define Socialism just I just want to make sure before we Define the first kind of socialism. Okay, so the first guy so here's the second Yes, the second kind is the government

Steps in and takes a much more active role. It displaces the private owners and the private directors of the enterprise. It gets rid of them. Think of the Soviet revolution in 1917. It gets rid of them and it replaces all of them with state officials. The government is now, usually in Russia it was called the Council of Ministers. It sets up a government apparatus in which government persons, people who have an official position in a governmental apparatus, replace the major shareholders and the board of directors. And so we talk of, in economics, we talk of state enterprises, but I want to underscore,

some people still call this socialism, other people call it communism. That's usually a question of not being very clear about what happened and what the people themselves say and being lost in the propaganda of the Cold War. Let me give you a simple example. In Russia and China, the political party that makes the revolution calls itself the Communist Party. But never, let me underscore that, never have either the Chinese or the Russians called what they set up

as communism. That's a Western invention. They called their societies socialists. For them, it was a kind of socialism in which the government went beyond regulating, as in Scandinavia and Western Europe, to actually operating large sections. By the way, never 100%, but large sections of the economy as a governmental exercise. USSR stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It's a socialism. And the Communist Party of China refers to China as a socialist economic system with Chinese characteristics. But the notion of a communism was always in those societies the place toward which the political party

was hopefully taking the country, not a status that had ever been achieved. So the Soviet Union disappears before it could arrive at communism. Okay, now, so you have two competing versions of socialism. In one, the government is regulated. Bernie Sanders, AOC, folks like that. In another one, you have the government taking over Russia, China. See, we have a century of the first kind of socialism and we have now a century of the second kind. We have a lot of experience with socialist governments regulating private capitalism. I, for example, can tell you, if you're interested, about Portugal. Portugal has been governed for the last several years by a coalition. It comprises the Portuguese Socialist Party, the Portuguese Communist Party, and the Portuguese Green Party.

I will not embarrass you by asking you whether you were aware that Portugal has been governed by this coalition over recent years. If you are typical Americans you had no clue and that's not enough. Cibiza comes to mind. In Greece? There's definitely a movement in Europe. But Cibiza didn't last real long and the the Portuguese experiment did, and so it is a counter example. In any case, here's my point. The Russian and the Chinese and the Western Europe and the Scandinavian, these kinds of socialism have now been tried over the last century. And while they achieved much that is valuable, they also experienced major failings, major failures, major setbacks. And the job of the Marxist movement that tries to understand and analyze all of

this is to understand both the successes and the failures so that the experiments will have taught us something and the next phase will be more successful and better than these early experiments in going beyond capitalism. We're getting to the third phase. And as a preface, is this the one that you advocate for? Absolutely. So here's the third definition of either socialism, communism, I really don't care about the language all that much. The third version of socialism, or if you like communism, has to do with the response to the analytic of what the first two experiments in socialism of the last century have taught us. And here's the biggest single lesson, since our time is limited, that

the changes made both in the European Western socialism and in the Russia-China governmental apparatus, was that what they changed was what we in economics call the macro level, the big level of the economy. They never, here comes the punchline, they never radically altered the internal organization of the enterprise, the factory, the office, the store,

where the work gets done, where the goods and services are produced and distributed. They left them as a small group of people at the top making all the decisions and the mass of people being excluded from the decisions, but required to live with the consequences of those decisions from which they had been excluded. Therefore, the analytic runs as follows. The failures, the flaws of the existing experiments in socialism can be corrected, can be improved upon, if we take the step of radically democratizing the enterprise, making socialism be not just a macro economic change but fundamentally a microeconomic transformation in which you leave behind the dichotomy employer-employee, which I would argue is simply the modern version of the earlier dichotomies,

lord, serf, master, slave. Get rid of them. Democratize the enterprise. It becomes a community governed by one person. Let me finish. One person, one vote. Where all the decisions, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits or the net revenue or the surplus, depending on how you think about these things, are made democratically. The democratization of the enterprise was not part of European Western socialism, and it was not part of Soviet Chinese socialism either. either. Footnote, for the last seven years, the Cuban Communist Party has been making a major effort to develop what are called worker co-ops, which is what I'm talking about, and make them an important part of the Cuban economy. So there is movement, but that idea that socialism needs the micro level democratization of the enterprise, that's the third kind of socialism, if you like, communism, if you wish, because the word communism then goes back to its root, community, common, and that's what it is, to make a community,

a democratic community, out of the workplace under the slogan, you're never going to have political democracy unless you build it on a foundation of economic democracy. And that's what this kind of socialism advocates. razor blades are like diving boards the longer the board the more the wobble the more the wobble the more nicks cuts scrapes a bad shave isn't a blade problem it's an extension problem henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the international space station and the mars rover now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience by using aerospace grade cnc, Henson makes razors that extend

less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything.

If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g dot com slash everything and use the code everything. So that idea of communists comes from commune uh with those utopian commune experiments and in those interestingly enough there was uh a movement to communes pre-soviet union in russia that kind of helped spark that so this idea of you start small and you create these smaller experiments and then you scale them to the larger picture, to the macro picture,

is definitely something that wouldn't be unprecedented in the history of communism. Let me add, there are many experiments, and they weren't just in Russia. They were all over the place. There were many experiments in what I would call the communism of a worker co-op type of enterprise. There were many here in the United States that I'm speaking to you from and in Canada

as well. So it's all over the place. There is nothing new in a sense. What you have is a determination now to institute it on a social scale. And one more thing, because it seems to trouble Americans when I talk, this notion that you start in a small group, a communal workshop that has 10 people in it or 20 people, and then you build from there as somehow not workable. I got news for you. That's how capitalism developed. The early capitalisms that came out of feudal Europe, they were tiny. They were five people and 10 people. They had to learn how to grow. In the process of growing, they invented the joint stock company, the whole notion that you could have an owner who wasn't on the spot working with you, those were traumatic and difficult transitions.

They will be difficult for the collective democratic communism, too. But no one should think that because you started small, that makes you in any way different from every other economic system. And on that note, right, of joint stock companies, Marx, when he writes on co-ops, mentions them, right? He says, with the development of cooperatives on the workers' part and joint stock companies on the part of the bourgeoisie, the last pretext for confusing profit of enterprise with the wages of management was removed. And profit came to appear in practice as what is undeniably

all right sorry as what is undeniably uh was in theory mere surplus value value for which no equivalent was paid he says this in the third volume of capital and so there's definitely this this discussion with uh cooper. Do you feel that cooperatives, in your review of Marx, are cooperatives, do his writings on cooperatives take a central role, or do they take a sideline role? If this is sort of the true Marxism, wouldn't we expect Marx to just mainly focus on cooperatives? Yeah, I would never argue that it's Marx's main goal. Let me remind you a little bit about Marx. He took the analysis of capitalism as a whole as his project. And that's crazy. Nobody can do that. No single person could ever do that. He undertook it,

as the French would say, faute de mieux, because it was the best he could do, and so he was going to try it. He only finished volume one. Volumes two and three were put together from his notebooks and his scribblings, volume two by Engels and volume three by Kautsky, people who came after him or were colleagues of his. So they made the decision, given what was in their minds at the time, of what was important and what was not and which notebook would be developed and which wouldn't, etc., etc. So Marx's comments on co-ops, which weren't a major historical phenomena, were secondary to him. You know, he didn't write about the state either. There's no Marxist theory of the state. There's very little on world trade and stuff like that. These were important topics. We know that because he said so.

But he didn't get to the kind of analytic of them that later Marxists have been able to do. analytic of them that later Marxists have been able to do. So I think what you see is people like me, given what happened in the century after Marx died, building up on parts of his analytic that other people found less important because of the times in which they live. I'm not sure what in the world exactly you would want to infer from that. One more example. When I first started getting interested in Marxian economics, my reading led me to believe that there was a very important question about the relationship between Marx's theory of value on the one hand and explaining market prices on the other. Since I was taking courses in economics,

I can tell you that at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, all economics is about explaining prices. It's sometimes called price theory because that's what it focuses on. It took me a long time to figure out that Marx wasn't interested in prices. That was for him a secondary, tertiary issue. He was interested in conflict between classes. He was interested in the dynamic that makes capitalist societies function and change. And for him, prices were a minor matter. And you have to understand that. But Marxists for a while didn't and went through enormous conniptions trying to figure out how to transform the value system Marx articulates in volume one and three with the price system that Western capitalist economics deals with. Since I was a mathematician, it was quick for me to understand that the

mathematical posing of this problem missed the whole point, even though it engaged an entire generation of economists, because after World War II, what was lost to economics in terms of the broader social issues was replaced by a fetishization of very simple minded math and arithmetic, which the economists thought was the greatest breakthrough imaginable, but wasn't. So in the past, too, you've talked about how private property and the idea of government ownership were something that Marx didn't really have as a central focus and it sort of misattributed to his works, right? You say, you would have to search long and hard in the very voluminous works of Karl Marx to find one word about this. He wasn't interested in the government. He didn't write an article or a book about the government.

He wasn't interested. And so this misattribution, what caused it? A strategic decision made by socialists in the 19th century, the kind of thing that happens in all schools of thought as they evolve. As you read Marx, as people like Marx, and he wasn't the only one in the 19th century, not by a long shot, and you became aware in the middle of the 19th century

that the great promises of the French Revolution had been betrayed, that the French Revolution had said to the Europeans that if you bring in capitalism to replace feudalism you will achieve Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood and if you deal with the American Revolution add democracy. That capitalism brings those human values into reality. That was the promise of the French revolution, because that's what was its slogan, liberty, equality, fraternity. Okay, by the 19th century, critics were able to make the following insight. Capitalism sure has replaced feudalism, but as a mechanism to deliver

liberty, equality, and fraternity, it is a 100% bust. It failed. And the only interesting question was, for them, why? Why did this promise get betrayed? Marx's answer was it got betrayed because capitalism itself is the obstacle to achieving liberty, equality, fraternity. Of course, it could not bring what it is itself the enemy of. And he devoted himself to making that case in his writings. And he succeeded along with others. So by the middle of the 19th century, you have an enormous body, most beautifully encapsulated in German-speaking Europe,

Austria on the one hand and Germany on the other, in terms of the SPD in Germany, the socialist party of, in German, the country is called Deutschland, the SPD, socialist party of Deutschland. And in Austria, the flourishing of Marxist theory on a scale no one had ever seen before, was the first flower of the post-Marx generation of Marxists, who, by the way, were personally connected to Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and all of modern thinking, which is another reason why excluding Marxism from the curriculum is such a mind-bending craziness. Anyway, the question then became in the 19th century, how are you going to get from capitalism to the socialism

that can bring liberty, equality, and fraternity in the way capitalism couldn't? And the answer they arrived at was, grab the state. See if the mass of people can get their hands on the state, because that will be the strategic key way to move. If we get the state, then we can use the power of the state to make the transition beyond capitalism, because there's no other way to get the liberty, equality, and fraternity that we have been motivated by the French Revolution to seek. So the focus on the state becomes a strategic decision. It has nothing to do with the basic theory. It has to do with how we're going to get there. And the big debate then becomes, by the end of the 19th century, do you grab the state by means of a violent revolution,

or by evolutionary parliamentary politics? And that's what engages. The state becomes really important. And what about for you? Is violence ever justified to bring about socialism? Only if it's the self-defense. If the bourgeoisie can't leave quietly, then they'll have to leave some other way. Well, when you say self-defense, violence can be interpreted as words, as we've seen on some of the contemporary discourse, like you're assaulting me with your words. There are various ways of defining what self-defense is. So when you say self-defense, what are you meaning by that? Well, in the world as I see it today, the monopoly of physical force is in the hands of governments that are in turn agents of and tools of the capitalist system, which they are devoted

to reproduce. If the mass of people don't want capitalism anymore, then the question becomes what is the capitalist part of the society that has the control of the monopoly of means of physical force, what are they going to do? If they accede to the will of the people to move on and have a different system, then we don't need violence. But if they decide to use their monopoly of force, and the way I read history, they don't hesitate at all. Then the question becomes for us, will we defend ourselves, or will we not? Speaking of force, Lenin in the state and revolutions, he doesn't like judges. He doesn't like police. He doesn't like the military because those are tools of the

bourgeoisie. What do you like or not like about the defunding movement, defunding the police movement? I'll be glad to come back to that. Let me just finish the other point that I was making, because I was still answering this question about the state. Go on, my friend. Okay. So here's what happened. Socialists figured it out. They figured out how to get the state. In Russia, they did it by a revolution. In Western Europe, as in Portugal, as I gave you an example a minute ago, they did it in parliamentary means. And you know they've done it quite successfully in many countries. Socialists have taken political or state power. done that, given the theory and the strategy developed in the 19th century, how are you going to go about making the transition, which is why you got state power, from capitalism to socialism? And at that point, very very important, the capitalists understood they had been defeated. They tried every which way to block socialist parties

from coming to power, violently in many cases. But they failed. They couldn't do it. The socialists outmaneuvered them and became players in terms of the state. The response of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalistsists if you like, was then to cut a deal, having lost the effort to prevent socialists from state power. Now they had

to deal with the reality that the socialists had it. And again, make a long story short, although we can go into it, the deal that was struck was we the capitalists will undo you unless you come to terms with us. And coming to terms with us meant a redefinition of socialism. No longer would it be the process of a radical alteration of society. No, no. What it would be, would be, to be blunt, capitalism with a human face. We socialists will be in power, but we'll make it softer. We'll force the capitalists to have a minimum wage.

We'll force the capitalists to offset the horrible capitalist business cycles with some other kind of modify. We'll have an unemployment pro. Socialism will become a less harsh capitalism than it had been before. Just don't mess with our dominance in the enterprise. And that's why it's important to understand with Marx, and hence the quotation, that for Marx, it was never an exciting question whether the government played the role of capitalists or a private person did.

Who the capitalist is, is not the issue. It's the capital. It's as if you had said to me, slavery didn't exist in such and such a society because alongside the private slaves, the government had slaves. Who the hell cares? Nobody would question slavery on the grounds that the government played a big role or feudalism. And let me tell you, by the way, that slavery and feudalism had governmental apparatuses that had slaves and had serfs. The fact that there are governments that have employees doesn't change that it's capitalism. It just says there's state capitalism alongside the private, which is in no way unique to capitalism. And it has squat to do with socialism or communism, other than as a moment in the history when a strategic

gain was undone by a redefinition of what socialism meant. So from the sound of it, these socialists get into power, they become the government, they strike a deal with these capitalists, and, you know, the corruption starts there. My question is, who are these capitalists? Is it possible that the socialists get into power, and they have no intention of sharing it? That is to say that they quickly become exploiters themselves, and that it's the state that sort of dooms Marxism as opposed to these more anarchistic strains of Marxism that focus on the bottom up like worker co-ops, communal living in the woods somewhere like in the case for Russia or the peasant commune. Is the state, and this is against conventional wisdom, I

suppose, but is the state antithetical to Marxism? Well, that's been a debate inside Marxism for a very, very long time. In the middle of the 19th century, Marx himself had a political alliance, as well as a personal friendship, with a Russian named Bakunin, who was arguably at that time the leading theorist of anarchism in the world, or for any period of time. And they worked together. They together formulated the International Workingmen's Association, which was the beginning of the internationals that we've had ever since. So from the beginning, Marxism and anarchism have had a very complicated relationship, sometimes close, sometimes

hostile to one another. And so Lenin is the person who coined the phrase, when asked his question, what do you want the state to be in your new society? He says, our goal is the withering away of the state. And to dismiss that as some kind of, you know, Trumpian verbiage is not to understand the long history of engagement between Marxism and anarchism precisely on what is the role of the state, both as a transitional strategic issue and as a long-term institution. You said Trumpian. It's interesting because Bannon actually says he loves Lenin for that line, which is kind of crazy. But anyway, I want to know what you think. Do you believe that the

state is antithetical to Marxism? I also like Mr. Bannon because I think his concept of charitable foundation is one that ought to be more widely understood. I'm sorry, your last question was? That's interesting. Okay. My last question was, do you believe that state is antithetical to Marxism? I get the broader context, i.e. Was Bakunin or maybe more preferable anarchists, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, were they right on the issue as opposed to the Marxists? Well, I've always understood them to be a necessary complement to one another, which is why I think they got together in the first place. In other words,

another, which is why I think they got together in the first place. In other words, you're going, the old Marxist argument was the state is the agent of the ruling class, that the state is an institution designed to reproduce the society as a whole in the manner that the ruling class wishes it to be reproduced. If you got rid of the dichotomy between ruler and rule that exists inside the enterprise, then there wouldn't be a need for the state, and it would then wither away. And on that basis, a deal could be made, a strategic alliance in principle and in practice between Marxists and anarchists. In order for us to get rid of the state, we need the democratization of the workplace. And in order to solidify the dominance socially of a democratic workspace, you need to get

rid of the state, okay? We have a shared objective. If we work together, we can together better achieve the shared objective than if either of us function on our own. So let's not only not be enemies, let's be allies with the conjoint goal of getting rid of the state and creating the institutions at the base of society that can make sure the state is A, not necessary, and B, not allowed to return. While we're on the way to getting rid of the state, what about defunding the police? And also, I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on some contemporary issues like the Black Lives Matter movement, and do you see them furthering the cause of Marxism?

Well, I think like most movements, they have within them the potential or the actuality of merging with Marxist movements, allying with Marxist movements, cooperating with Marxist movements, and they have within them the potential to refuse any such thing and to reject it. And that those issues and those questions are in fact being fought out inside. If I ask myself why the Rockefeller Fund gives as much money as it does to Black Lives Matter, I think I know what the answer is. And I understand why they're doing that and why they have always done that and why the Ford Foundation does it also. It's a question of shaping as best you can, which way this internal debate in a movement like Black Lives Matter works. When it comes to defunding the police, for me, these are strategic questions, not principle questions.

The police function in a certain way in our society, and they do that for particular reasons. I do find it strange to imagine, and I hope most of the people pushing this are not doing what I'm about to say, but to imagine that you can go to the last step of a long process, namely what the police do, fix it without changing the context that makes it what it is. If you defund the police and you have some other agency step in to do God knows what, it will end up doing what the police do because you haven't changed the social system within which the police are given their tasks, paid their money, rewarded and punished for the things they do and don't do. That's what has to be changed. Otherwise, you're just changing the personnel or you're changing

the who of the behavior rather than the behavior and its place in the social system. And it sounds like we've once again returned to the more anarchistic tendencies of starting from the bottom up as opposed to regulatory change from the top down. I understand why anarchists like to believe that this is anarchism, but it isn't. The anarchists have no monopoly on the notion that you do social development from the bottom up. monopoly on the notion that you do social development from the bottom up. The Marxist movement in many, many of its incarnations has been rigidly clear that its logic is to transform at the base and force it onto those at the top. This is, the anarchism

shares that with Marxism, absolutely, no doubt, but it shares it. It isn't the sole carrier of a notion of bottom-up development. That's really given that anarchism has been a much smaller movement around the world than Marxism and socialism, always and everywhere, I mean I think it's fair to suggest that these are shared notions of development and putting the adjective anarchist in front of them is a little strange. Let's imagine that an anarchist would own a label. I think it would be very against that philosophy to own a label, even their own.

But yeah, no, I agree. No label. The bottom up, and we can then ask the question, who in the various actors in the social drama, who's committed to a notion of bottom up transformation, and who isn't? And there's, I think, where you get the debate inside socialism these days. Are we in favor of the government doing 12 more things than it currently does? Or are we in favor of the government doing 12 more things than it currently does? Or are we in favor of a bottom-up transformation? And the worker co-op movement is a bottom-up notion of social change,

which calls itself socialist, communist, Marxist, and so forth. Okay, bottom-up. Imagine you can advise the people of the Black lives matter movement as a whole they're all watching this what would you change redirect about the movement to make it more efficacious in your estimation well i don't know i had i wouldn't have taken on myself the position of articulating either such a question or an answer so So I don't know what I would say. I would hope that the anti-capitalism, which I already see is present in the Black Lives Matter statements that I've

read, interviews I've watched and so on. I would hope that that's a growing, deepening commitment, that an awareness that the problem of an other in a capitalist society, which exists everywhere in the world, has landed on the African American community from the beginning here, American community from the beginning here, to understand the role it plays and to be insistent, I guess that would be my hope, to be insistent that the transformation beyond capitalism is a central part of what can finally liberate African Americans from the subordination that they have suffered in this society for so long. There's been a debate of whether or not the root cause of much of the suffering for the African American community in the United States is economic or racial. or racial. And I believe it was Sanders who said that the root problem of our country was economy, something that we needed to fix. And I believe it was one of the leaders of the Black

Lives movement who directly refuted it and said, nope, the problem is ultimately racial. is ultimately racial. To me, this sort of strikes the difference between this more, let's say, it's called the older left guard socialists and the newer identity politics tendencies of the left. Do you find that this is a divide that might stunt or present a stumbling block to socialism? What should be the socialists attitude towards identity politics? Well, we don't all mean the same thing by these words. Let me try anyway, to get at it. I find the discussion of what the ultimate cause of things is boring. I don't know exactly what's at stake here. I suspect it's organizational turf, and I don't like it. Or prioritization. Well, you know, that's a very different thing. Priority is one thing. You know, we all make

priority. I decide what I'm going to do at 10 o'clock today, and I don't do something, and I don't do something else, but I don't make the world depend on it. I don't say that one is the more fundamental. I give a priority. I'm more touched by something than the next person. My autobiography is different from yours, and therefore, I don't expect that the things that spark my passion are identical to yours. And I don't expect that the things that you know spark my passion are identical to yours and I don't find that interesting your mother was not mine your community of growing up was not mine

you're a different person from me and we can have different priorities I assume we have different priorities I think every political movement that ever got anywhere was a movement of people who had different priorities, but understood the need for a movement that captured, that brought together people who had different priorities. thing strikes me as odd. I'm not sure. Let's decide moment to moment, day by day, what is a good target for our activities over this week, over this month. And some days that decision will be shaped this way. And other days it'll be shaped that way. We make our priorities, tactical, strategic, and so on, but we do it knowing that each of us is a different person with different motivations, different personal priorities, and I'm okay with that. I don't think there's any way out of it anyway. The trick is not to debate what's the most important. That strikes me as nutty. You and I don't have the same standards for that. That's what we debate, and then we vote, and then we see how it works out.

But the rest of it strikes me, and here you get my suspicions get aroused. What is the motivation? I worry. What is the motivation of posing the question? Since it makes no sense to me, I wonder, why are we asking whether it's more fundamental to have the economic change than the racial change or the you name it change? For me, that's a sign of movement immaturity. If we're going to sit around, and who's more oppressed? Black people? Female people? This person?

What? What are we doing? These are qualitative differences. When you reduce qualitative difference to quantity, it's an old mathematical and philosophic problem. There's something going on there that you ought to interrogate before you answer the question. It's like what you do if a person accosts you in a dark space and says, I'm going to give you free choice. I can either bash you over the head with this brick or I can stab you. If you start agonizing over which way to go in this question, you've

made a strategic error because the response there is, I don't accept the question. Not that I'm going to choose which is the better answer. And for me, that's how I react to what I think you mean by identity politics. Okay. I have a quick aside about the dark space. I'm going to accost you in it. You mentioned that, let's imagine we have socialistic societies and capitalistic than the socialistic, if by your definition they come about, they would be more free. That the capitalistic societies have promised freedom, liberty,

you used the word liberty, but haven't delivered. However, liberty, freedoms are qualitative distinctions, yet you're saying that socialistic, in your definition of worker co-ops being engendered and pervasive would allow for more liberty. And that to me is a quantitative now analysis because you've said more, which is less, more, less than is, you know, lesser equal than sign. Okay. So how are you transmuting this qualitative notion of freedom to a quantitative? And why does that not suffer from the same problems that you just outlined with measures of oppression, let's say? If I made a verbal slip and I made quality into quantity, then you're absolutely right to

catch me on it and caution me about doing that. I don't think I did it, but I'm sure I'm the product of the school systems in which I was produced, and making that kind of slip, it's an epistemological slip, is part of the game as you learn and as you change. I would insist that what the socialists are about is a changed quality of what the word liberty would mean, what the reality of a society that honored liberty, equality, and fraternity would have to mean. And that's necessarily built in because we don't mean the same things by these words, liberty, equality, fraternity. I mean, people who are carrying guns into Midwestern courtrooms because they don't want to wear face masks use the word liberty to describe what they're doing. They want the liberty to breathe on other people with the disease.

It's like asking me, for me, it reads like, oh, I want the liberty of going through the traffic intersection without paying attention to the green and the red light. I mean, I understand the use of the word liberty, but it has no residence for me. I mean, by liberty, something completely different from that, which they don't recognize. And I understand that. So I shouldn't use words like more or less, because we're really talking about very differently qualitative notions of what would exist. If we may defend the idea of setting priorities, you know, especially in political movements as to what is important and what is not important and which ones take precedence, you know, there's a

current debate, but not only between identity politics and socialism, that you find on the ground that is a debate that transcends what's on the ground, but even bubbles up to policy decisions as to whether or not funding should be directed more towards people of particular groups or to the poor in aggregate or in general. When it comes to this idea of liberty that you mentioned with the masks, people storming to, or trump your liberty to not have me do that. And to me, I think the answer is kind of clear on that one person, but, you know, some people do not think so. So I think it is worthy having these discussions, even in a liberal society as to where, where do our rights take precedent? Where do our issues take their importance anyway so

when we look at the world now and we see this uh conflict between identity politics and socialism could i could i interrupt sure i don't like that way of posing it, and I want to just object to it. For me, if I'm advocating for what I guess is meant here by socialism, I'm advocating on behalf of people who are employees and who have an identity as such. So I am an employee. I may also be a male. I may also be white. I may also be educated. I may also be unskilled. I may be all kinds. I have lots of identifications, lots of communities, if you like, in which I participate. And the composite of all of them makes me who I am. I wouldn't understand that I'm more a man than I am white, or I'm more an employee than I am white, or any, I don't understand literally what I'm supposed to make of these

things. Again, for me, a successful political movement is an alliance, if you like, or a coalition or whatever word you want of people who have different sets of identifications that get together because they can define a common objective and they can work together to try to come up with strategies and tactics to achieve whatever the common objectives have been determined to be. That's what I think of, and a socialist's contribution is to bring, for me, the organization of the economy at both the micro and macro levels into play as among the varying identities each of us brings into the possibility of a social transformational movement. I'm curious to know where you disagree with Marx. What are your biggest gripes? Biggest gripes? Well, you know, it has to do with the tradition of Marxism afterwards.

I'm a little bit pissed off that he did not write as he had promised he would or that he hoped he would. The works about the state, the works about international trade, the works about what we now call economic development, I think there were problems there. I think that the early work he did with Engels around the analysis of household, male-female relationships, particularly in the household, was a wonderful beginning. was a wonderful beginning. And I'm distraught that more work didn't follow about that whole, the origins of the family

and how that linked up to the rest of capitalism. I think Marx could have worked more than he did. He did great contributions, but he could have done more than he did. He did great contributions, but he could have done more on why the Paris Commune of 1870. Marx is still alive at that time and he writes very famous pamphlets about the Paris Commune and at that time it was the first effort to go beyond capitalism in a major European country, France, Paris, and his own people were involved in it. He wrote a very good essay about what went wrong,

but he could have done much more. Since Lenin used Marx's writings on the Paris Commune to shape his strategy for the Russian Revolution, had Marx done more work analyzing particularly the ambivalence of the rest of the French about the Paris Commune, it would have cautioned Lenin in ways that I wish. And here's perhaps the biggest one. Marx also made comments about worker co-ops, as Lenin did. They recognized the potential, but they did not do what it is I'm suggesting now has to be done. They never devoted an analytic focus on asking the question, how should socialist society transform the workplace? Let's remember, that's where most people spend most of their adult lives. Nine to five, five days of the week, you go to work. It defines those five days. You prepare for work, you do your work, you recoup

from work, you go to a bar to have a happy hour to cope with what the work meant to you, it shapes your personal life, it shapes your sexual life, it shapes everything about you. One would think that Marxists focus on the working class, including how the workplace shapes the ideological openness of workers to a movement for socialism, that there would have been on the part of Marx and Marxists later, the kind of analytic focus on the household, on gender relationships, on the identification of sexuality and so on. So I think those are areas that Marx disappoints me because I learned so much from what he did focus on. I wish he had given comparable analytical attention to those kinds of topics.

You know, as we were talking before, we said that a a whole a large part of this channel is about when does the right go too far when does the left go too far now you can pull a noam chomsky and say that only the right goes too far even though he admitted that the left at least the democratic left has abandoned the working class when do you see the right is going too far ideologically speaking and when do you see the left is going too far, like, can equality be taken too far? Can diversity be taken too far? You interpreted it as you wish. Well, I'm not clear I understand the question, but being a student of Marx requires one to be, in my judgment anyway, also a student of Marx's philosophic teacher. And Marx's philosophic teacher was a man named Hegel. And one of the things Hegel argues in his work is that

everything is contradictory. And that if you don't see the contradictions in something, you're not getting it. That there's stuff you are occluding, and then it becomes a psychological question why you would do that. So I don't expect liberty, freedom, quality to be uncontradictory concepts. So when earlier it was said, I don't remember which of us said it, that the liberty of one person is the absence of liberty to another. That's exactly what Hegel would argue. That's not a flaw in someone's understanding of liberty. That's what liberty is. It is a contradictory reality, because all reality is, and I'll pardon my language, overdetermined.

Anything we can think about, anything we can touch, anything we can see, is overdetermined by everything else going on in this society. You or I are shaped by countless, literally an infinity, of economic, political, cultural, natural phenomena that impinge on us. The air, the water, the dream, the comment of your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, all of those things shape us. And they shape us in different ways. They push and pull us in all together. We're full of the resulting contradictions that emerge as the other side of our overdetermination. And that applies to liberty or African-American-ness, if that's the right word, or any other construct that we come up with mentally or encounter in our physical world.

So I'm not, I don't find it a flaw of the concept of liberty or anything else that people don't agree about it, see it differently, experience it differently, want it differently. That's what social life is in part, a struggle in which we all push for whatever at those varying moments shapes us as a desideratum, as something we would like to push for. Professor Edward Stewart, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He's a comparative economics professor at Northeastern Illinois University. He said, I have a question for Richard Wolff.

And he's a Keynesian. He said, I have a question for Richard Wolff. And he's a Keynesian. He said, Biden wins. Let's imagine. You can advise Biden. What specific policy would you like to see enacted? I would advise him to resign. Okay, your president. What specific policy would you enact?

Yeah. Okay, you're president. What specific policy would you enact? and would enact a Green New Deal. I would enact a government hiring program that would deal with our unemployment by basically saying that anybody who lost a job from a private employer, ipso facto now has a job at at least equivalent pay from the federal government. That would get us 20, 30, 40 million, depending on how you count, people who would now be a new labor

force for the government. They would not be governed by profitability calculations as private capitalists are. They would do what is socially useful. That would begin by testing everybody for coronavirus to determine what kind of strategic public health initiatives are necessary, because that's based on who has what disease growing in what numbers in what regions. And that would employ millions of people and the rest would be employed on the kind of ecological New Deal. New Deal. And by the way, this would simply be a step one in which we recoup and recuperate the policies that worked well in the Great Depression, because that's the situation we're in now, and make them the opening gun. And then I would, because of it being me, then I would turn to an enormous program of creation of a worker co-op based sector of the American economy. Why? To give Americans for the first time the knowledge

with which to make a freedom of choice real. They're going to be able to choose between working in a hierarchical top-down undemocratic capitalist enterprise or a democratic worker co-op. I would create through government steps the kind of sector of the economy that already exists in Italy. In Italy, if you go to the province of Emilia-Romagna, you will go to a place in Italy, a province, where 40% of the industries are organized as worker co-ops. I would replicate that in the United States. Let me finish. That every American would be able to know, because in his or her community or in his or her family,

there's someone buying from or working in a worker co-op democratic enterprise. So everybody would know what it is like to work in and shop from such an enterprise, so that you could choose in a rational way what kind of economic system you want. You wanted half capitalist, half worker co-op, two-thirds, one-third, 75%, 25%, 100% one way. Let's see. Let's put the whole question of the economic system to a democratic decision based on a population that has some idea of what the alternative is. Those are the kinds of steps I would take. I have no illusion. Neither Mr. Biden nor Ms. Harris had the idea, the concept, the capability or any history enabling them to do any of this.

So, one- By the way, just a footnote to show you how the world changes. Kamala Harris somewhere does have this, and the reason is her father. Her father is a colleague of mine. Her father thinks like I do. He's a Marxist, a Marxist economics professor. And he was at Stanford for most of his adult life. Bringing it all the way around. So my question for you is what are your thoughts on quotas that help, that are racially or

gender-based quotas to help correct inequalities? Do you think this is a viable strategy to correct inequalities? Well, it should never have happened. I don't believe it could ever have happened. The quotas or the inequality? Both.

But the quotas have been part of American education. If you're talking about quotas in education, but for me, quotas anyway. There's a fellow named Will Kinlicka, who's sort of the father of this sort of statist version of multiculturalism that's very popular here in Canada. I believe he's the Dean of Political Science at Queen's University.

And he advocates very much for that style, affirmative action, but across the board for all sectors, not all sectors, but sort of replicating and expanding that into other, let's say, institutions? I may end up in the same place. For me, the American education system, just to take that as an example, has been a quota-governed system from day one. For me, capitalism is a quota-based system. There's a quota on capitalists. There's only a certain number of them, and the rest of us get to be employees who are told what to do. Quota is built into this system, and there's always been quotas. You know, it used to be that the quota was you had to be white and male and that was it. You got into the university. And if you lacked either of those two, there was a quota and your quota was zero. And then if you made a lot of noise, your quota would be two.

So you're talking unspoken quotas? That's supposed to formal? Or are we talking formal as well? Because neighborhoods used to have right yeah the quotas the quotas run a continuum from formal written legal all the way over to informal illegal unspoken you know and everywhere in between the quotas but the quotas have always been there however they have been construed all that that that the modern struggle over quotas seems to me to represent is the determination, which has always happened to quotas, that sooner or later, as the society changes, the quotas have to change because the relative size and strength and political power of the different quota groups alters. And sooner or later, they're going to want the quotas to reflect what their social power or their social position or even their social consciousness

tells them is appropriate. It's a little bit like international treaties. They are always out of date about the time they get signed, because the power relationships among the countries that sign the agreement changes. And therefore, it's only a matter of time before they want the documents governing their international relations to reflect the change in their actual economic and political statuses. And I think that's what quota struggles are about. The African-American community wants to be let in and not blocked out. I understand that. They were blocked out for a very long time. Their quota was zero or next to zero or maybe zero plus a few examples to look good.

But they want a change across the board in their exclusions, which were always kinds of quota system. And women want the same thing. And Latin American immigrant groups want the same thing. I mean, if you look at like the history of the white flag, right, you can look on the deeds to old houses like Chicago and you'll find on the deed no Irish, blacks, Jews, things like that. In this country they were called covenants. All kinds of communities did these things, some of which had legal status of covenants in which a developer, for example, would require everybody who bought a home in some area to sign a document that he or she would not sell it to a African American or Jew or whatever it was.

My question is do we fight old quotas with new quotas? Or do we get rid of quotas? No, my guess is the only way you can fight an old quota at this point, given the depths of its thing, is to do what you can offer a no quota system, but you can't deliver it. So it's a bit of a phony because it's baked in, it's cemented into the system. It operates on a thousand levels. levels. That's I think what the phrase systemic racism is designed to gesture toward. That it's built in on a general way across the system and a change here or a law adjustment over there that's not going to do it. You got too many things that will get recreate, let me put it this way reinstitute the effective quota that existed before even when you got rid of it here because the forces that made for those quotas haven't been addressed you know for sure for sure 100 i mean the idea of systemic racism is that it goes so deep it

goes beyond just the formal state, but the informal power systems that we have in our society that embed that ideology. But at the end of the day, do we have, say, something like a formal quota, like affirmative action? Well, for me, I don't think that works. I'm not against it, but I don't think it solves the problem. And I tend to be critical because I see it as a way of kicking the proverbial can down the road. Okay, we're going to now have X percent of these. That's not going to change, you know, what is fundamentally going on in this society. I would rather go at it from the systemic change if we agree that there is systemic racism or systemic sexism or whatever it is. Let's deal with the system that supposedly underlies. What would it mean, for example, that if you made it a fundamental right of everyone in the United States to have a job, to have the job pay no less than 80% of the median wage in this country, and that

everybody is entitled to proper housing that has to be at least x square feet per person. I mean suppose you really began to deal with the quality of the job and the quality of the income and the quality of the housing and the quality of the neighborhood services. Begin to say to everybody, we really are a society that does not allow a ghetto over here, a ghetto over there, whole industries that are female versus industries that are male and all the rest that we know exists if we don't do those basic changes the rest of it strikes me as substitution for solution not solution well it was stalin who said that quantity has a quality of its own. Yes. That's where you begin to get the Hegelian, the brilliance of what Hegel did, why Hegel becomes the great thinker

for all of Europe in the 19th century. Everything in Europe that happens starting in around 1810 or 1820, everything is derivative of Hegel. The influence is overwhelming. And by the way, in most countries, this is kind of Hegel. The influence is overwhelming. And by the way, in most countries, this is kind of grasped. In the United States, of course not, because the association of Marx with Hegel also condemned poor Hegel to be ignored too. I once gave a talk at Yale to a philosophy seminar where I tried to explain

why students interested in Hegel, and there were a few, despite the department's hostility, why they should be interested in Marx. And they were terrified, by the way, they were terrified. It was another example of what I began our conversation with, the anxiety of association. You get anywhere near this Marxian paradigm, and you know, like a child with a hot stove, keep your fingers away. anywhere near Marx, even though Marx talks at great length about his Hegelian heritage, what was important about Hegel, what was buried in capital from Hegel, and it's sad, really. And this notion of contradiction, this notion that things don't exist versus don't not exist, but that existence and non-existence are two sides of the same thing. And where that leads you and what that opens up is so sad that Americans, you know, don't get it. It just closes off, like the paranoia about Marxism, it closes off vast realms of knowledge for no reason at all other than to

pander to a short-term political narrative from people they don't respect at all. It's extraordinary. It's really extraordinary. How does the contradiction in the Hegelian sense not lead to the principle of explosion? I don't know what the principle of explosion is. So that is from any contradiction, you can derive whatever fact you like. Unless the proper term is to call it a Hegelian paradox, which is like an apparent contradiction. It's not a true contradiction. A and not A. The Hegelian notion is that A and not A have a boundary between them. And that that boundary is a property of

both sides, so that not A is a property of A and vice versa. That's my understanding of Hegel's notion. So we can't conceptualize our life without conceptualizing our death. Our life is bounded by our death and that makes death part of life and vice versa. That for me that's what the Hegelian notion of contradiction involves and it means that everything that exists is in the process of not existing. It has its own not existence in its own being, in its own definition. The arrow flying through the air, where is it? And the answer is, it's always where it is, but in its movement, it's not where it is.

Okay. I know that you've been extremely generous with your time. While I got you, I got some labor theory of value questions. Quick. Okay. I know that you've been extremely generous with your time. I have a, while I got you, I got some labor theory of value questions. Quick. I have another five minutes and I have to go. That's fine. Totally fine. Okay. If you want, we can do this again. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I want to call you Richie. Most people call me Rick, so you can call me Rick.

All right, Rick. The problem I have with the surplus, well, why don't you quickly, quickly outline to the audience the labor theory of value? Very quickly in simplest terms. When you sit down with an employer and you have a conversation about getting a job, here's how the conversation basically goes. Here's what you're going to be asked to do. Come at nine, leave at five, sit over there, work with this machine, do this work. Why are you there? Because I already have a bunch of machines

and I have an office and I have a factory and I have a bunch of workers. I'm adding you to all of that. And I'm doing that because by adding you, I can improve either the quality or the quantity or both of the outputs, the goods and services that this enterprise is committed to producing. So by virtue of adding you, I'm going to have X more product to sell. Let's assume that that's worth a hundred bucks. So now the question is what am I going to pay you to come and do this work? Well the answer is I'm

going to do a little calculation. I'm going to count up the extra raw materials and tools that are going to be used up in making the extra 100 bucks worth of output. Let's say that's 20 bucks. Okay, now I know what I got. I'm going to have 100 bucks output. I'm going to have to spend 20 bucks of tools, equipment, and raw materials. That leaves me 80 bucks. How much am I going to pay you? Answer. Something less than 80 bucks, I'm gonna pay you 50 bucks. Why? Because by paying you 50 bucks and using up the 20 bucks of tools, equipment, and raw materials, I will have 70 bucks of cost for a hundred dollar output. The difference between what I pay you and what I sell the product for, that's the surplus. You've produced it by your labor, because otherwise I couldn't produce it.

I don't do anything. You do the work. I sit there and stare at you. You do the work. You produce more than you get for doing it. The difference between what I pay you, what Marx calls the value of your labor power, and the value that your labor creates in that difference is the surplus. And every worker in capitalism knows it. You know when you sit with the employer that the only way you would ever be paid anything, a million dollars an hour, three dollars an hour, the only way you're going to get that money is if hiring you brings him more value than it costs him to hire you. Because if it didn't, he wouldn't hire you unless you were his son-in-law and maybe not even then. Okay. Great summation. And the existence of the surplus is what equals exploitation. No, exploitation means that there's a surplus appropriated by a person different from the person who produced it.

It's not exploitation. Okay, cool. I've paid people and made nothing. The reason why I don't think that this – I have some issues. The reason why is because I don't think the surplus or the labor theory of value takes into account hope or uncertainty. But I'm sure it does. I'm just a rudimentary man. Okay. I've paid people and made nothing because I hoped that I would make something

from them. So who was being exploited there? It had nothing to do with hope. You hope that you would make money. Your employee hoped that you would make money because the employee has hope too, hoping not to lose the frigging job, hope that he didn't move his family from Timbuktu to wherever you are and will have to move them again, hope that he doesn't have to yank his teenager out of school. Everybody's full of hope. The difference is you make all the decisions. And assume the risk. He has risk. I just went through the risks your

employee took. He took your job. He could have taken another job. He moved to that town to get the job. He took all kinds of risks, only he has no control over how the risk he took works out. You have all the control, not only over the risk you took, but the risk he took. But worse, after you take the risk, and let's hope you're successful, he still has the risk that you'll fire him, because you'll find something else that attracts your risk-taking. The degree of risk-taking, the burden is on him, not you. Only capitalists would have imagined the lopsided notion that because they take a risk and they don't want to understand what a worker does when he or she takes a job,

that they're the only risk-taker. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say both people take risks? Yeah, both people take risks. Only one of them is rewarded for it. Only one of them is stably rewarded for them, the employee. He's not stable if you don't get the satisfaction from the risk you've taken. If for whatever reason you don't like this job, you think you can make more money somewhere else, he's taking the risk. You'll fire him. He can't even be sure that if he does his job and

you make money, you'll keep him on the job. You may fire him for someone else. All the risks is overwhelmingly on his side. I know. Let me push, please, and correct me because, okay, I have a contract with him and he's like three months. So you're secure in your three month pay. You get to work 40 hours a week at $20 an hour for three months. But I am assuming the risk, because I don't know. Yes, that's wrong too. And I explained to you, but then I have to cut off because I have somewhere I've got to be at 11. Okay, here it is. Less than 7% of American workers today in the private sector are governed by a trade union that protects them with a legal contract. So in fact, you can fire a person no matter how many months you have worked

out with him at no legal risk. The person who works in the private sector in the United States today assumes all the frigging risk. You can be told to work in a different way. You can be told to work in a different space. You can be told to suffer this kind of quality air, that kind of quality water, and you can be fired at any moment. All the risk is in the part of the employee, but he has no power. You assume a risk and you have power to determine how to pursue this risk, And you have power to determine how to pursue this risk, how to react to changing circumstances in this risk, and how to utilize the rewards if your risk-taking paid off. I understand you take some risk, but the notion that you, the capitalist, are the only one is a kind of solipsistic conceit that really blows my mind. But look, I do have to

go. I appreciate this. Send me a link. If you want to do it again, get in touch. Thank you so much, sir. All right. All right. Take care, man. It was a pleasure. Pleasure, man. Pleasure.