Upstream - A People's Guide to Capitalism with Hadas Thier

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Why do so many of us often feel like shit when we leave work? Where does that ambient feeling of alienation come from? That nagging sense that we’ve somehow been taken advantage of? That subtle anger — or sometimes even outright hatred — many of us feel towards our supervisors, our managers, our bosses? And why — despite devoting the majority of our waking hours to "making a living" — does it still feel like we’re always one emergency away from financial ruin? A lot of people these days are starting to seriously question the political-economic system we live under. And if you’re someone who listens to this podcast, you’re probably already well aware of the faults and, really, the horrors of this system that we’re all imprisoned in: capitalism. Although it’s relatively easy to critique capitalism through our lived experiences of it, it’s not always as easy to frame those critiques and those nagging feelings into economic language or a political framing. Canonical texts like Marx’s Capital can be fairly opaque and inaccessible, and oftentimes, even among those who study it, capitalism can be difficult to pin down. What is it, exactly? What is it not? And what precisely is that thing that we often think of as its opposition: socialism? In this Conversation, we’ve brought on someone who can explain all of that. Hadas Thier is the author of "A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics," published by Haymarket Books. In this Conversation, Hadas Thier will help us break down capitalism into its most fundamental components — and not in an overly technical way, but in a manner that situates it within historical and modern day events and processes — and which hopefully provides you with a pretty comprehensive and compelling explanation as to why we’re all feeling so exploited, alienated, and imprisoned in this oppressive and life-denying set of operating principles and beliefs we know as capitalism. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And as always, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable. So please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. As soon as you clock in, your time and what you do with that time is not your own.

Whatever gets produced in that time is not something that you have any control or power over, nor is the conditions under which you're producing those things under your control. Capitalism takes the most human characteristic, right, that of labor. You know, human beings have always labored for as long as humans have existed to survive, to remake our environment and so on. Capitalism takes something that's really at the very core of who we are and alienates it from us. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. If you're someone who regularly listens to this podcast, you are likely well aware that capitalism is often what we find when we go upstream to the root causes of the material, social, and ecological challenges of our time.

However, in order to critique and transform our dominant economic system, we must deeply understand our economic system, its operating principles, its history, its ambitions. In this conversation, we've brought on someone who can help us do exactly that. Hadass Tyr is the author of A People's Guide to Capitalism, An Introduction to Marxist Economics,

published by Haymarket Books. In the next hour, she'll help us break down capitalism into its fundamental components, and not in an overly technical way, but in a manner that situates them within historical and modern day events and phenomena. She'll also provide us with a comprehensive and compelling explanation as to why we're all feeling exploited and alienated. And finally, she'll give us a clearer vision as to how we can move closer

to a post-capitalist, more equitable, and ecologically just future. Welcome, Hadass. Good to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thank you. We would love to start with an introduction. How might you introduce yourself and how might you share what compelled you to write A People's Guide to Capitalism? So my name is Hadass Teer. I did, in fact, write A People's Guide to Capitalism. And I basically have been an activist and a socialist my entire adult life and some of my pre-adult life for over 20 years. I'm not an academically trained economist.

I delved into trying to understand the world and understand, you know, how the economy works because capitalism is, you know, a political economic system and you can't separate out any aspect of capitalism from the way that the economy works. And so I felt like for me to really be able to understand the world, I have to understand it. As Marx put it, philosophers have interpreted the world and the point is to change it. And that was sort of where I was coming from and why I delved into trying to get my head around economics and Marxist economics in particular as a means of understanding the world. And because the field of economics and even including left economics, radical and Marxist economics has generally been dominated by men, this made me kind of doubly committed to getting my head around it and stubbornly committing myself to understand

economics. And I started basically by reading Capital, engaging, you know, in study groups and discussions, reading it, getting stuck, then starting again, you know in study groups and discussions reading it getting stuck then starting again you know but basically again and again until I could actually get my head around it and as I did I started to give also more talks at you know socialist and activist conferences and my mission was really to try to make this accessible as possible, to make it easier for other people than it was for me to sort of like ran my head up against a wall trying to understand a lot of these concepts. I wanted to try to help other people get there as easily as possible, to limit the jargon as much as possible, to explain the jargon when it is necessary to use, you know, certain words

and definitions, and most importantly, to kind of connect the broad theory with, you know, real life contemporary world examples to make these ideas really connect with people. And what I found through that process was that people were very relieved to be able to understand concepts that they had not been able to understand before and to make sense of the world around them and make sense of what was that, you know, funny and shitty feeling that they left to work with every day. And really the idea for the book came out of those experiences to try to use what I learned in talking to people and making these ideas as accessible as I could to, you know, a greater audience. And then those kind of pop out sections, making it more timely and going deeper into the specific terms. And yes, definitely a people's guide.

Really appreciated the accessibility of the book. And I'm wondering, how would you describe capitalism, particularly to someone unfamiliar with Marxist terms? And I know this might feel cruel, but I was interviewed recently and that was their first question is, what is capitalism? And I feel it's not as cruel for you. So how might you just describe capitalism very simply to someone who maybe is not familiar with the Marxist terms? Sure. So like I said before, a political economic system, right, where politics and the economy can't be separated, that is based on a relationship of exploitation, and which is fundamentally concerned with the production of goods and services for sale on the market. That would be my very quick sentence description. You know, there's more to say about each part of that sentence, but that would be my overview.

Thank you. And I told people that I was going to be speaking with you and asked if they had any questions. And somebody actually wrote related to that word exploitation that you brought up. They said, can capitalism exist without exploitation? Do you have any thoughts on that? My answer is no. It's not possible. I mean, we can talk more about why that is, but in a nutshell, right, that what makes

capitalism an efficient system, efficient from the perspective of profitability, which is what drives capitalism, is its ability to exploit labor. And there's particular ways that capitalism exploits labor that is different than previous forms of exploitation on previous class societies. But in a nutshell, what made capitalism emerge out of previous class societies was its efficiency, and that efficiency was based on the exploitation of labor. And then, of course, of the natural world as well, which you also tap into. And so, yeah, the fact that you used exploitation in your simplest of definitions tells us that capitalism cannot exist without exploitation. I'm wondering in this

definition, who is a capitalist? Because that's another question that comes up for folks. Am I a capitalist? Who's a capitalist? What does that mean? Right. Well, I think, you know, first of all, it does start with that question of exploitation to see who is a capitalist, right? Because, you know, the way that when mainstream economy talks about class at all, which, you know, generally in mainstream discussions, class is conveniently left out. But when it's talked about at all, it's sort of talked about in quantitative terms, right? Like who has more money, who has less money. And who has more money and who has less money is important, and that is symptomatic of a greater question. But at the heart of it is that it's not the case that some people just have more money, and some people have not enough money, but some people have too much money because other people don't have enough money. You know, that it is this

relationship of exploitation that actually produces that vast inequality. So in a nutshell, you know, anyone who holds economic control over the workplaces and dictates the terms of other people's working conditions, anyone who owns capital that can be invested into production is part of the capitalist class. So these are the group of people that have the capital, that are able to invest that capital and put other people to work. So again, that's a social relationship. It's not just a quantitative one. And so I think in the book, I use the example of, you know, in New York City, where I live, bus drivers might make more money because they have a pretty decent union contract than the local bodega owner, the kind of small groceries that exist in New York City.

But the bodega owner actually owns her bodega and basically exploits themselves and a handful of other people and has the control over when the bodega opens and closes, what they're selling, and then what they do with the fruits of that labor. A bus driver, on the other hand, clocks into work, has no control over her shift or the fruits of her labor in the form of bus fares. So it's not just a question of who has more money and who has less money, but a question of who is it that controls the process of production? Who is it that is in control over the exploitation of other people, and so on. And I know this isn't the focus of the book. And in fact, you state that it would take more to go into this. But sometimes when folks think about the definition of capitalism, they use the comparison of communism and socialism to determine it or to define it. So

maybe just briefly, what is communism and socialism, particularly in comparison to capitalism? So whereas capitalism is basically characterized by right, by private ownership. Everything that is produced is then owned by the capitalists, and they make the decisions about how that both the production process occurs, but also what happens at the end of the process, what happens when money is received for those goods and services, where they're invested into, all of those decisions are privately controlled through mechanisms of private property. Socialism or communism is basically the collective ownership and democratic control over the economy. You know, that basically that we would have a complete democratization of the political economic system, instead of having to go into work in somebody else's office or company or factory, etc., producing goods or services, and then clocking

back out and going home, that we own collectively, not just all the factories and the offices and the schools, et cetera. But then we also have democratic control over what are those institutions and what are the things that need to be produced and who produces them, that we make those decisions collectively and democratically. Yeah, I'm really hearing you center collectively and democratically made decisions. And I found it helpful. Richard Wolff, he helped me understand that in a lot of people's fear or critique of socialism or communism when they think about maybe China or the USSR, that he reframed that as actually examples of how there isn't that democratic control, democratic decision making and collective well-being centered in those examples. So I don't know if there's anything else you want to add to that. But I found that really helpful, particularly when folks immediately go to those examples by way of critiquing alternatives to capitalism. capitalism. Absolutely. I think that's a really important distinction because there's private ownership or there's the state owning various goods and services. But then the question is,

who owns the state? And unless the state is democratically controlled and owned, then that's not anything like socialism. That's just a different way of controlling the production and distribution of goods and services. Is it the free market reigns, or is it the state helps to direct those things? And actually, there can be a lot of things in between, right? You know, we don't have just a purely free market in any situation. You know, in the United States, which is the bastion of global capitalism, you know, the state is actually very involved in actually supporting the actions of corporations and supporting industry, you know, obviously, massive bailouts of the financial system, massive bailouts of corporations that are considered too big to fail, all of that, you know,

the state and the market are actually very much enmeshed with each other. So we have different kinds of capitalism where some are more state-driven and state-controlled and some are really just let the free market rip. But they're just different forms of there being a small ruling elite that actually owns and controls the vast majority of goods, services, productive capacity in society. And bringing what you're saying into current times, giving a current example, I'm thinking about how we are seeing that right now, particularly with the COVID responses, that we can see that the states, particularly the U.S., can be kind of bureaucratic managers of capitalism. And I know that you speak about this at the very end of your book, but I'm wondering if there's anything you'd say there around the state and how the state is really putting more attention, it feels like, on the economy, managing the economy than health,

probably, and also its relationship with capitalism. What are we learning or seeing there around the topic of the state and capitalism right now related to what you just shared? Yeah, well, the state really manages the affairs of the capitalist class, right? It looks and it's meant to be portrayed as this kind of neutral body. But at the end of the day, a capitalist state is there to manage the affairs of the capitalist class and to look out for the long-term interests of the capitalist class, both at home and abroad. So we see that at home, where the drive for everybody to get back to work as quickly as possible is something that is shared by both Republicans and Democrats. I know people were, anyone who considered themselves on, you know, the progressive end of the political spectrum was horrified, and rightly so, by Trump's handling of the pandemic.

But now, you know, we're supposed to have our democratic savior in the form of Biden. And, you know, there were a number of things that Biden did, and I don't want to completely discount those things that were important and useful. But at the end of the day, it's like, okay, let's get on with our lives, i.e. let's get on with corporate profitability, and everybody has to go back to work. Here where I live in New York City, the mayor, Eric Adams, the newly elected mayor here, was basically like, look, everyone has to get back to work. And he's very honest about it.

He was like, you have to get back to your offices and your jobs because that's the financial ecosystem that we live in. Because it's not just that you go into work, but then you go downstairs and visit the restaurant downstairs. And then you stop by the laundry service to get your suit pressed or whatever. He was like, we just need all that money flowing. And in order for the money to flow, you have to go into work. They're pretty honest and clear about it these days. Yes. And I really hear you speak about

the operating principle of profitability or profit maximization and the metric, right, the metrics that we're seeing now, but also the metrics of capitalism. So perhaps this is good to go into some key ideas or themes, key Marxist terms to help us understand capitalism. So profit is one of them. And profit sometimes is hard to understand. What does profit mean? How does profit happen? And I know you have a whole chapter on this. What is profit and how does it happen? So what can you say by way of an introduction to the concept of profit in terms of a Marxist view? Right. So profit is the lifeblood of capitalism. It's what keeps capitalism moving forward. And when profit stalls and the whole system stalls, right? And

that's why the whole question of getting the economy back up and running is so central because capitalism can't sort of stagnate and stay still when there's not profits being made and when things aren't moving forward and greater accumulation of profits is not happening, then the whole system stalls out. So the question of profit comes from what Marx called the magical goose of capitalism, which lays golden eggs, that capitalists seem to get something out of nothing, that they invest money into production, and then at the end of the process, wind up with more money than what they invested in. And at the heart of that kind of magical goose of capitalism is the commodification of labor power. Our ability to work is our labor power,

and it has become a commodity under capitalism, right? Which the capitalists buy from us in exchange for a wage. And the heart of understanding where profits come from is distinguishing between what our labor is worth on the labor market in the form of our wages, and then the value of the fruits of our labor. And those are two different things. So a worker is paid one thing in wages, but then will create a lot more value during her work shift than she's paid during in a wage for her job.

So we enter into this arrangement with the bosses where they own our time and our ability to labor during that time. And then whatever we produce for them, even if it's much more than what they paid us, is theirs to keep. They pay us a wage and then they own the products of our labor. And that's at the heart of where profits come from. The example that I like to use a lot and that I use in my book because I just think it's kind of straightforward and a lot of people can relate to it. And now that people in Starbucks are unionizing, which is very exciting, I think it's even more of a relevant example. But let's say you work at Starbucks and they pay you $120 for an eight-hour shift. Most of the time, you know, you can make $120 worth of fancy coffees in an hour or two. But then you don't, after two hours, say, well, you know, fair's fair. I made back the money you paid me. I'm going home. Your labor is theirs for another six hours. And for the additional six hours, you're essentially working for free. And that extra value that you produce during those six hours is what Marx called surplus value. And that's the basis of capitalist profits. And then there's the relationship to the

fruits of our labor by way of this term alienation. And to tell a story, I have a friend who's the designer who worked for a company, but it was really just one boss, one capitalist person who hired him to do the designs. And all of the things that he made, all of the products that he designed, because of how the business was set up, didn't have his name connected with any of them. And so when he left the business, he wasn't able to put them in his portfolio. There was no way that he could say, I designed that suitcase. Right. So it was to me, that was such a clear example of not just the surplus value point, but the relationship of that which we produce. Maybe we'll have less connection, although I don't know this to a pumpkin latte, but we may have creativity involved in the creation of some of those cups. But yeah, can you say more about alienation? Because also this gets to a feeling sense of why capitalism is so exploitative and not ideal. Absolutely. Yeah. And that kind of agreement that you

described with your friend is totally common and totally legal. And it gets to the heart of this process of exploitation that I described, which is that as soon as you clock in, your time and what you do with that time is not your own. Whatever gets produced in that time is not something that you have any control or power over, nor is the conditions under which you're producing those things under your control. And that does get us to the heart of this concept of alienation that you're talking about, right? That capitalism takes the most human characteristic, right, that of labor. You know, human beings have always labored for as long as humans have existed to survive, to remake our environment and so on.

Capitalism takes something that's really at the very core of who we are and alienates it from us. It takes the fruit of our labor and it gives them to someone else. It takes decision making and thought out of the process of labor. It automates and splices up our work as much as possible. It takes, like you were describing, like, well, how much creativity might go into like a pumpkin spice latte or whatever they're called. But that's part of what capitalism does is it actually, wherever there is creativity, it then owns that creativity. But it also takes as much creativity out of the process of work as possible because that makes it more economical from their perspective. The more you de-skill labor, the more you splice it up and automate it, the cheaper it becomes for the capitalist to buy that labor. So you could

envision a different time where actually the barista at the coffee shop had more creative control over what they did and the kind of tea and coffee drinks and whatever that they produced, but that is not economically and financially efficient for the capitalist system. So Marx has this brilliant quote that I'll paraphrase, but basically he talks about workers only feel themselves when they're not at work, and at work, the worker feels outside of herself or himself. And I think that's a feeling that we can all relate to. We finally are free when we get to go home, but that's 40 hours or more of our week

are owned by somebody else. It's an incredibly alienating experience. I'm reminded of another Richard Wolff frame where he said, you know, how could we say we live in a democracy when we enter into a capitalist business? We basically leave democracy at the door. Absolutely. And so for those eight hours plus, however much you're working, you're in a non-democratic space. So really, yeah, how could we say that we are democratically running our society? Exactly. And if you think about who it is that we're allowed to vote for, you know, and there's all sorts of obviously undemocratic aspects about the electoral system in of itself. You know, who is it that has enough money to be able to run for office?

And then the role of campaign contributions and, you know, corporate cash and gerrymandering and all sorts of things that make the quote-unquote democratic process very undemocratic. But it's also so completely limited who it is that we actually get to vote for. It's like 10 steps removed from us, you know? We don't get to vote for our bosses. We don't get to vote for the policemen that, like, patrol our streets. We don't get to vote for, in most cases, judges. And, you know, every aspect of our lives is actually, in the main, not democratically controlled at all. Yes. And yeah, bringing in police and judges, I'm thinking of a graph or a frame that I once saw that showed kind of this level beneath the capitalists, which are the upholders of capitalism, like folks who uphold the status quo. So again, as we said earlier

about the state can be bureaucratic managers of capitalism, just yeah, those who uphold the status quo and maintain those power structures, just bringing that in as well. So you brought in profit. What about growth? What's the relationship with capitalism and growth? Because could we not say the goal of capitalism or for capitalists is to create that surplus value and make a profit and then keep it? But do they have to grow in their profit? Is that also an operating value of capitalism? And of course, just really naming, we have to speak about this, particularly in relation with the climate and our ecological systems that we are going far beyond the carrying capacity of our planet. So what's the relationship with capitalism and growth

that you see? Yeah, exactly. I think that's a very important question and very well said, because where capitalism has taken us to the brink of planetary disaster. And the reason that it has is that actually it can't stop growing. There's a few different reasons, right, why we're on a collision course with planetary sustainability. One is that capitalism needs as cheap of an input into the production process as possible. And you talked earlier about metrics, right? Capitalism doesn't have metrics for human lives, for planetary sustainability. It only has metrics for profits. That's what the market measures. And so as long as there is oil to be had, then it turns the wheels of capitalism. Oil is used for basically every aspect of capitalist production, and it would be disruptive

to the economy to stop using it. And it would be disruptive to, obviously, the very entrenched and powerful oil industry. So that's one aspect of it. But then the other aspect of it is this propensity towards ever-growing accumulation, that capitalism has to grow or it dies, you know. And the reason for that is the market mechanisms of competition, that every company does not by itself just decide, okay, well, we have a sense of how many gadgets need to be made, how many people want these gadgets. And so let's figure out how many need to be made. Okay. And then they're made. Actually, in every industry, there's many competing firms. And each company has to dominate the market as

much as possible in order to survive. And in order to dominate that market space, it has to continually grow at the expense of its competitors. And part of the reason for that is that every time a profit is made, it's not, you know, if the capitalist just pockets that profit and says, well, that was pretty good. I made a lot of money. I'll call it a day. Then that's the end actually of that company. But every capitalist has to take that profit and then invest it into ever more efficient and ever faster productive technologies in order to be able to make the gadgets even more quickly and even more efficiently and in greater volume than your competitors. And so that process of constantly taking profits and reinvesting them

into faster and greater productive technologies that fuels a constant growth within the system. that fuels a constant growth within the system. Some aspects of that mean that there's great technological advances, you know, that we could, if we lived in a different society, use those technological advances for good. But under capitalism, that constant drive to advance technology and to produce more quickly and so on is done at the detriment of the planet and of the humans that actually produce those things. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Hadass Tier, author of A People's Guide to Capitalism.

We'll be right back for the second half of our show. Through the true low bush you see her lips are miming one still funny Her horizon text trip along her body Staring at the posters on your wall. As they talk about my chances. Boy, you're so tragic. Your flow was damaged months ago. Dropped a hot cocktail singing to me I'm so

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You might think you do But I bet you don't That was Juno by Choker. Now back to our conversation with Hadass Tyr, the really fortunate experience to travel to Mondragon in Spain and visit one of the world's largest cooperative ecosystems. And we worked on a documentary series about cooperatives. And one thing that we did notice was that sometimes cooperatives can still be profit driven. And even this tendency of growth growth and there were ways that we saw that Mondragon was trying to compete in the global market and thereby some of the things didn't feel to us in alignment with the values and there are many beautiful things of cooperatives but what one thing that I'm hearing

though is that it can't just be the democratization of the workplace, so changing all businesses to worker cooperatives, but really bringing in this state piece as well. And I think you really touched on it in your book when you wrote about socialism and growth. And I think that is a beautiful question. Would we still have growth imperative and growth in socialism? So can you talk a little bit about maybe socialism and growth at the heart of it is that there are a lot of really interesting things that happen and a lot of interesting experiments that can happen within cooperative systems. And I think a lot for us to learn from. But I think that the main challenge there is that it still functions within a capitalist society and therefore can't escape that competitive imperative. Like you said, in order to compete with other companies that are not cooperatives, you have to exploit yourselves, democratically exploit yourselves in order to compete with much more exploitative companies.

And so there is constantly that pull when you're living in a society that's still a capitalist society. So I think that what the goal has to be with socialism is not just democracy in individual workplaces, but a system-wide democracy, one where you take out the profit motive and you replace it with a democratic imperative, right, where we collectively decide what are the priorities of society and what are the productive necessities, are bringing us back from the brink of climate disaster, education. If those things are the priorities, then a number of things flow from that. And you can actually plan an economy in a democratic way that is based on those priorities. And then once you take out the profit motive, you take out the need for endless growth and you instead replace it with a sustainable,

you can call it still growth, but it means a different thing, right? Growth of humanity, you know, that you produce as many things as actually need to be produced, and you do them in the most sustainable possible way, that you replace our system of automobiles with a system of public transportation, high-speed rail, all those kind of things. When those are your priorities, then the production towards those priorities takes a much different form. Thank you for that. And I'm just thinking of another question that folks often ask, which are, are all markets capitalist? And I'm hearing part of an answer to that question in what you just shared. But yeah, I'm just wondering, like, would we still have markets and agree that some things

would be on the market and some things would be more planned? Like, what is the relationship between capitalism and markets in general? Yeah, so it's a very interesting question. And it's very much debated on the socialist left about the role of markets after capitalism under a socialist society. And I think one thing that we can say is that markets under capitalism have a very particular kind of characteristic to them, right? Which is that they measure how profitable something is. And so investment flows to the things that are most profitable. And that's what the market is able to systematize. Is it possible to have a different kind of market when you take out the profit imperative? That's a very debatable question. In my personal opinion,

I think that certainly, at the very least, in a transition out of capitalism, we will have to depend on markets for some things, right? Planning an international economy is a complicated thing and can't just be done through, you know, government databases. And part of what markets can do is actually give you a sense of what it is that people are trying to buy. And then those things are then produced in greater quantities. And a market can do that more quickly, not very efficiently. Actually, there's a lot of inefficiencies built into that, but more efficiently than us creating out of scratch, very complicated databases to figure out what's needed and how to produce those things and the

quantities that are needed and so on. I think that the thing that would need to be done in a transitionary phase, and I don't know how long that lasts exactly, is to first and foremost take certain things outside of the market immediately. And so we're talking about health care. We're talking about energy. We're talking about education, food production, the things that people and the planet require for our lives and health, those things just have to be taken out of the market.

And then there's a lot of things that I think are more secondary that could be, at least in a temporary way, left to the market to help to organize that kind of production as needed. Thank you. Very, very thoughtful and clear. And I love the phrase after capitalism. Just hearing that is hopeful, inspiring. And this gets to a myth about capitalism, that capitalism is a historical, that it's always been here, that there is no alternative to capitalism. And one thing I appreciate is you go into the history. And so I want to bring in this term primitive accumulation and share a quote. This is from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The quote is, the first person who having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say,

this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried to his fellow men, do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one. So I just want to bring in that the myth that capitalism is ahistorical and instead what is primitive accumulation and what was before capitalism? How did we get to here? So those are great questions and big questions. I guess I'll start by saying a few basic things,

which is that human beings have been around for a long time, not as long as the planet, but much longer than capitalism. And the example that I use in my book is that if you were to condense all of human history into a 24-hour period, capitalism takes up the last three minutes of that 24-hour period. Relative to the span of human history, it's a relatively new system. Now, that doesn't mean that it is, in fact, very new and that it's not fully entrenched, which capitalism unfortunately has become entrenched globally and is very adaptable. But it does mean that capitalism had a beginning, that it's not something that is just intrinsic to human nature. Human beings just love to barter and love to organize ourselves into hierarchies. And that is really the libertarian ideology is this idea that we're

just built to be in hierarchies. And that's just not the case for the majority of human history, right? Capitalism did have a beginning and it can have an end. So the question of how is it that we got here? And where did we come from? So I love that quote that you read. And I think that part of what's beautiful about it, but also heartbreaking about it, is that it never could have been as simple enough as somebody just saying, no, no, because it wasn't just an idea out there, but it was a process that took place over, you know over several centuries and was violently enforced because actually most people didn't get down with that system and weren't in favor of just turning over their land to somebody else. this incredibly violent process. It's sometimes known as the enclosure movement, right, in England. That's where capitalism first got its toehold, was in England. And there, you know, millions of acres of common land were violently confiscated, turned into privately owned plots, and all the traditional rights to common land were revoked and restricted to private ownership that required violence, coercion, laws, all sorts of really grotesque things that happened in the process. of very few land owners and the masses of people were left without land and without a means of

self-sustenance, which really brings us back to this question of capitalism and the relationship of exploitation that happens in the workplace. The reason that we have to go to work and be exploited in this incredibly unfair arrangement is because we don't have a choice but to work or to starve. And that's why it was so necessary in order for capitalism to gain a foothold, it needed to have masses of people that had no choice and no means of self-sustenance other than to go work for somebody else. And that's really what helped to define capitalism as opposed to previous class societies where under feudalism, you know, these were incredibly oppressive and exploitative systems. This is not to say that that would have been a better society, but there was no

pretense there, right? It was like you were born into being a serf and you had to turn over the fruits of your labor and your labor and so on to the Lord on whose plot you lived on or whatever, or else, you know, violence. Under capitalism, there is actually the threat of violence. The laws are enforced by the police, but the basic day-to-day exploitation that happens under capitalism is a sort of silent coercion of economic coercion to have to work in order to live. And another related way to think about this or another related question, the show's theme is called Upstream, and it's about going upstream to the root causes. So I really appreciate that you brought up that there was resistance and many people, including still today, you know, fight the enclosing of commons

into private ownership, fight exploitation, of course, and to hear that in that transition. And so I'm wondering, you know, if you're to go upstream from all of these elements of capitalism that we are just seeing so clearly in this conversation are providing so much suffering and harm to both us as humans but also to our planet what are the kind of root causes that are allowing and creating and repeating this system in its power and domination over us? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, certainly capitalism has this historical route that we were just talking about, right? Where not only capitalism, but then before capitalism, the different class societies that arose before capitalism,

those are also relatively new in human history, where the vast majority of human history, humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies that were, had various forms of social organization, but that tended towards a more egalitarian and collective means of organizing bands of groups of people and so on. So we have various historical roots where at times there were things that made sense, right? Where in order to better survive within the environment that humans lived in, agriculture, communities that were settled in that could store surplus goods, you know, that could store surplus goods, you know, those things had some basic survival elements built into them. And it developed over time that over the course of millennia, basically, that the need for more social classes in order to be able to control those surpluses, etc., that developed

over time. So there's this sort of like historical root of classes first, and then capitalism as the sort of most recent version of class society, as the most like efficient, profitable version of class society. You know, but then there are the things that keep it in place, right? Which is essentially that we have a very small group of people, a very small minority of the world's population, because they have, it goes back to this question of capitalism being political economic system, that you can't separate politics from economy, that because they have economic power, they also have political power. That we have a system where this tiny minority of people that own most of the world's wealth have it in their interest to maintain that status quo. It's simply a matter of material interest. When you have that much economic, material, and political power, you don't have an interest in giving it up. And so that really gets

to the heart, I think, of socialist politics in a way, right? And of radical politics, which is that we're never going to just be given over the goods and the democratic decision-making and so on, part of society just benevolently bequeathed to us out of the goodness of anybody's heart or because they've seen a change in heart. And I think you can see that very clearly in the fact that even when we're on the brink of planetary destruction, even when we're in the midst of a global health crisis

that is claiming hundreds of thousands of millions of lives, that even under those conditions, the capitalist class is not going to just give up what they have a material stake in upholding. And so that's why the need to actually organize the vast majority of society. That's the reason to organize working class people who have an interest in something different. That, I think, gets it to the heart of socialist and radical organizing and why it's so critical. So just to bring in a quote from your book related to what you're just speaking about, you write, working class struggle cannot be wielded individually. I can't simply throw down

my shovel or my laptop and go on strike, but I need the participation of my coworkers to effectively stop production. Nor can the goal be to win only individual gains. Taking home a shovel, a coffee machine, or a printer will do me little good, but the entire workplace owned collectively by my co-workers and me could be put to use. So I just want to share that piece there. And I'm really hearing you speak about organizing. You also speak about withdrawing our labor. You talk about how workers, you say workers literally, sometimes metaphorically, have our hands on the gears of production. So if we collectively withdraw our labor power, along with it, we withdraw the means to return a profit. And without profits, the system cannot survive. how you see this change as possible happening and how it is happening, if we can end with that, and maybe any invitations you have besides reading A People's Guide to Capitalism to understand these relationships and be able to change them. How else might folks get involved and see

themselves as part of this larger transition? Yeah, that's, I think, the million-dollar question is what do we actually do about it? And I think that the point that you started with is so important, right, about where our power comes from. The capitalist class has that economic political power that I talked about, and that can't be underestimated. However, we have a different kind of power as the vast majority of people in the world. And not just numerically, but we have

an economic power that's different than having millions and billions and trillions of dollars. It's that we produce the profits in order for society to run. And there is some admission of that early on in the pandemic when there was a lot of talk about essential workers, right? That actually grocery workers, you know, delivery workers, nurses, school teachers, you know, that these are the people that are much more central to society running than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. central to society running than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. And it means that when workers actually withhold our labor, go out on strike, or take other kinds of job actions, we have an incredible amount of power because they cannot make a profit without us. And that's been the example of, you know, every strike that we've seen recently at John Deere among teachers, that we actually,

when we're organized collectively and when we're organized where it is that we produce a profit, we have a particular strength and power there. So I think that that's really important and it's heartening and hopeful in a world that very much feels, and in a lot of ways is, out of our control, that there is a power that we have and it needs to be organized. So I think to your question about what can people do apart from reading and understanding, it's you take that understanding in order to get involved and actually do something about it. to get involved and actually do something about it. And the clearer the understanding, I think the stronger the organizing efforts can be. So I think those two things can go hand in hand, but I think that there's a lot that's happening right now, right? There's certainly everywhere you look and on a local level, right? There's things that are happening that you can get involved in here in New York. All these high school students just organized walkouts at their schools against the covid policies of the mayor that we just sort of stay in school no matter what, no matter how many students and teachers are getting sick, no matter what the hospitalization rates.

You know, you see these walkouts happening. You see a growth of strikes happening. You know, you see these walkouts happening, you see a growth of strikes happening. We've seen, obviously, like mass protests over the last couple of years around challenging racism. Where those kinds of organizing efforts exist is where we can build popular power, right, through social movements and through workplace organizing. And that's where out of those kind of organizing efforts also come more longstanding organizations, so that it's not just one-off protest here, one-off walkout or strike there, but that we're actually using any organizing efforts to then build unions, build organizations, build any kind of organizing structures that we can. So I think that that's really critical. And at the same time, there's also like a growing strength in some of the electoral contests for state power that are happening, both, on the national level and on the local level. I think these two things really can feed into each other where when you have people like AOC and the squad or Bernie or here in New York, we have a number of local democratic

socialists that are in office that can actually give confidence to grassroots organizing and give a much more popular and broad amplification of all of these kind of ideas. I think that gives people more confidence to organize more at the same time that the kind of organizing that happens on the ground can provide a kind of pressure that's needed that individual lawmakers can't provide themselves. By being one lawmaker in a sea of capitalist henchmen, you need a kind of popular power to exert that kind of pressure. So I think that there's exciting elements happening on both those fronts that people can get involved in, in either or both. And I think it's a really important and exciting time to be doing it. We have a long way to go. The left is still

really in its infancy in some ways in this country, but also, you know, on the ascendancy in terms of how many people are looking towards these ideas, how many people are getting involved in these kind of organizing efforts. And we're living in a moment where like the urgency couldn't be stronger for people to get involved, to question the way that the system works and to actually do something about it. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Hadass Tier, author of A People's Guide to Capitalism,

An Introduction to Marxist Economics, published by Haymarket Books. Thank you to Choker for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was written by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations that you make to Upstream are tax exempt.

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