Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism - Lex Fridman 知识图谱

Richard Wolff (03:53.760)

Either his comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed. What he was really interested in was

Richard Wolff (04:01.600)

a critical analysis of capitalism. And that's what Marxism was, more or less, in its first 40 or 50

Richard Wolff (04:09.760)

years. The only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few

Richard Wolff (04:19.760)

weeks. In 1871, there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's

Richard Wolff (04:29.200)

Germany. And then the result was something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris

Richard Wolff (04:35.600)

rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian

Richard Wolff (04:43.120)

society. And Marx's people, people influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune,

Richard Wolff (04:50.560)

in the leadership of the commune. And Marx wasn't that far away. He was in London.

Richard Wolff (04:56.240)

These things were happening in Paris. That's an easy transport even then. And for a short time,

Richard Wolff (05:02.640)

very short, Marxism had a different quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism,

Richard Wolff (05:11.920)

it became a theory of how to organize society differently. Before that had only been implicit.

Richard Wolff (05:21.240)

Now it became explicit. What is the leadership of the Paris Commune going to do? And why? And

Richard Wolff (05:28.800)

in what order? And in other words, governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted

Richard Wolff (05:36.080)

a few weeks, the French army regrouped. And under the leadership of people who were very opposed to

Richard Wolff (05:43.120)

Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed a large number of the communards, as they

Richard Wolff (05:51.120)

were called, and deported them to islands in the Pacific that were part of the French empire at the

Richard Wolff (05:57.680)

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

Richard Wolff (06:06.720)

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

Richard Wolff (06:17.120)

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

Richard Wolff (06:25.120)

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

Richard Wolff (06:31.760)

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

Lex Fridman (06:37.760)

And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers Party,

Richard Wolff (06:46.240)

splits, under the pressures of all of this, into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions. Lenin,

Richard Wolff (06:56.400)

Trotsky and the others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story short,

Richard Wolff (07:00.640)

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

Richard Wolff (07:09.600)

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

Richard Wolff (07:16.640)

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

Richard Wolff (07:24.000)

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

Richard Wolff (07:30.160)

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

Richard Wolff (07:36.560)

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

Richard Wolff (07:42.320)

figure named Eugene Victor Debs, makes exactly the same argument that Americans should not fight in

Richard Wolff (07:50.240)

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

Richard Wolff (07:57.040)

it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States. By the way, he runs for

Richard Wolff (08:02.560)

president from jail and does very well, really very well, remarkable. And he's the inspiration

Richard Wolff (08:09.360)

for Bernie Sanders, if you see the link, although he had much more courage politically than Bernie

Richard Wolff (08:18.080)

has. That's really interesting. I'd love to return to that link maybe later. History rhymes. Yes,

Richard Wolff (08:24.160)

the complicated story. Anyway, the importance in terms of Marxism is that now this seizure of power

Richard Wolff (08:32.800)

by a group of Marxists, that is a group of people inspired by Marx developing what you might call

Richard Wolff (08:40.160)

a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians too, but a Russian interpretation,

Richard Wolff (08:46.560)

this now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism into a plan, at least. What are you

Richard Wolff (08:54.720)

going to do in the Soviet Union? And a lot of this was then trial and error. Marx never laid any of

Richard Wolff (09:02.720)

this out. Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if he had, because it was 50 years

Richard Wolff (09:08.160)

earlier in another country, etc. So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens then

Richard Wolff (09:15.200)

more later in China and Cuba and Vietnam and Korea and so on, is that you have kind of a bifurcation.

Richard Wolff (09:24.160)

Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism, but another part of it becomes a set,

Lex Fridman (09:34.080)

and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative post capitalist

Richard Wolff (09:40.960)

society ought to look like, how it ought to work. And there's lots of disagreement about it,

Richard Wolff (09:48.160)

lots of confusion, and I would say that that's still where it is. You have a tradition now

Richard Wolff (09:55.280)

that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism, notion of the alternative,

Lex Fridman (10:01.760)

and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework in which I would answer,

Richard Wolff (10:07.680)

that's what Marxism is about. Its basic idea, if you had to have one, is that human society

Richard Wolff (10:15.600)

can do better than capitalism, and it ought to try.

Lex Fridman (10:19.520)

And then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism.

Richard Wolff (10:23.680)

Fine.

Lex Fridman (10:25.280)

So we'll look at the critique of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back,

Lex Fridman (10:30.880)

what do you think Marx would say if he just looked at the different implementations of the ideas that

Lex Fridman (10:37.440)

Marxism throughout the 20th century, where his ideas that were implicit were made explicit?

Richard Wolff (10:46.800)

Would he shake his head? Would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations? How do you think

Lex Fridman (10:52.800)

he would analyze it?

Richard Wolff (10:54.000)

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

Lex Fridman (10:57.920)

but he had an extraordinary sense of humorism. My guess is he would deploy his humor in answering

Richard Wolff (11:03.680)

this question, too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of his interpretations of his work,

Lex Fridman (11:10.000)

and he's very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could

Richard Wolff (11:16.320)

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

Richard Wolff (11:24.400)

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

Richard Wolff (11:29.520)

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

Richard Wolff (11:36.480)

something, but with real strong emphasis. Verzichte darauf is a German way of saying,

Richard Wolff (11:43.200)

I don't want anything to do with that.

Richard Wolff (11:46.240)

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

Richard Wolff (11:51.600)

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

Richard Wolff (11:57.760)

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

Richard Wolff (12:04.560)

You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person and will find his or

Richard Wolff (12:10.640)

her own way, and these ideas, once they're out there, go their own way. And as you said, there's

Richard Wolff (12:17.280)

a particular way that this idea spread, the speed at which it spread throughout the world made it

Richard Wolff (12:22.240)

even less able to be sort of stabilized and connected back to the origins of where the idea

Richard Wolff (12:29.120)

came from. The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians after the revolution,

Richard Wolff (12:35.520)

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

Richard Wolff (12:41.360)

while in which, I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these people criticizing

Richard Wolff (12:46.560)

capitalism for a long time, even the Marxists ever since mid century. And these were the first guys

Richard Wolff (12:53.920)

who pulled it off. They made it. And so that there was a kind of presumption around the world,

Richard Wolff (13:00.240)

their interpretation must be kind of the right one, because look, they did it. And so for a while,

Richard Wolff (13:08.560)

they could enunciate their interpretation. And it came to be widely grasped as something which,

Richard Wolff (13:18.400)

by the way, gets called in the literature, official Marxism, the very idea that you would

Richard Wolff (13:23.920)

put that adjective in front of Marxism, or Soviet Marxism or Russian, there were these words that

Richard Wolff (13:31.840)

where the adjective was meant to somehow say, kind of, this is the canon, you can depart from

Richard Wolff (13:37.920)

it, but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing. And by the

Richard Wolff (13:44.640)

1960s, it was already, it was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of,

Lex Fridman (13:54.960)

and the irony is, particularly here in the United States, where the taboo against Marxism kicks in

Richard Wolff (14:02.080)

right after World War II, is so total in this country, that I, for example, through most of

Richard Wolff (14:09.760)

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

Richard Wolff (14:18.640)

audiences that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism, which wasn't the canon

Richard Wolff (14:28.880)

before 1917, and hasn't been since at least the 1960s. But they don't know. It's not that they're

Richard Wolff (14:36.960)

stupid, and it's not that they're ignorant. It's that, well, ignorance may be, but I mean, it's not

Richard Wolff (14:42.000)

a mental problem. It's the taboo. Shut it down. And so all of the reopening that, in a way,

Richard Wolff (14:49.680)

recaptures what went before and develops it in new direction, they just don't know.

Richard Wolff (14:55.440)

LW. Nevertheless, it's a serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit. The Russians,

Richard Wolff (15:04.240)

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

Richard Wolff (15:10.320)

critique of capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this? And so, in that sense,

Richard Wolff (15:16.720)

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

Richard Wolff (15:22.720)

Maybe… RL. Right, because, for example, let me just take your point one step further. You really

Richard Wolff (15:27.760)

cannot understand the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese, and the others,

Richard Wolff (15:34.720)

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

Richard Wolff (15:43.600)

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

Lex Fridman (15:50.400)

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

Richard Wolff (15:56.960)

that for you if you want—in which all of them are, in a way, reacting. LW. To the originals.

Richard Wolff (16:04.000)

RL. Yes, very much so. LW. Like maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones.

Richard Wolff (16:09.920)

RL. Something like that. LW. Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools

Richard Wolff (16:16.000)

of that Soviet Marxism? So we got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even let's expand

Richard Wolff (16:22.960)

out to Maoism. So maybe I could speak to sort of Leninism, and then please tell me if I'm saying

Richard Wolff (16:32.240)

dumb things. I think for Lenin, there was an idea that there could be a small sort of vanguard party,

Richard Wolff (16:41.840)

like a small controlling entity that's like wise and is able to do the central planning decisions.

Richard Wolff (16:49.040)

Then for Stalinism, one interesting—Stalin's implementation of all of this—one interesting

Richard Wolff (16:56.320)

characteristic is to move away from the international aspect of the ideal of Marxism to

Richard Wolff (17:02.720)

make it all about nation, nationalism, the strength of nation. And then so Maoism is

Richard Wolff (17:13.040)

different in that it's focused on agriculture and rural. And then Trotskyism, I don't know

Richard Wolff (17:20.640)

except that it's anti Stalin. I mean, I don't even know if there's unique sort of philosophical

Richard Wolff (17:26.480)

elements there. Anyway, can you maybe from those or something else speak to different unique

Lex Fridman (17:31.280)

elements that are interesting to think about implementation of Marxism in the real world?

Richard Wolff (17:37.920)

Probably the best way to get into this is to describe something that happened in Marxism

Richard Wolff (17:46.080)

that then shapes the answer to your question. In the early days of Marx's writings,

Lex Fridman (17:53.120)

and you know, his life spans the 19th century. He's born in 1818, dies in 1883, so literally

Richard Wolff (18:00.880)

he lives the 19th century. And to make things simple, you might look at the first half of the

Richard Wolff (18:08.720)

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

Richard Wolff (18:17.680)

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

Lex Fridman (18:24.160)

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

Richard Wolff (18:29.920)

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

Richard Wolff (18:35.600)

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

Richard Wolff (18:42.240)

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

Richard Wolff (18:52.080)

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

Richard Wolff (18:58.560)

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

Richard Wolff (19:06.720)

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

Richard Wolff (19:17.040)

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

Richard Wolff (19:25.600)

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

Richard Wolff (19:32.800)

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

Lex Fridman (19:43.200)

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

Richard Wolff (19:49.120)

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

Richard Wolff (19:56.560)

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

Richard Wolff (1:00:00.800)

amongst us would be too devastating. So we can't do that. But what we can do is control it, regulate

Richard Wolff (1:00:09.760)

it, get from the market what it does reasonably well, and prevent it from doing the destructive

Richard Wolff (1:00:16.880)

things it does so badly. So the fundamentally the destructive thing of a market is it's the

Richard Wolff (1:00:23.680)

engine of capitalism, so it creates exploitation of the worker. It facilitates it, and it is an

Richard Wolff (1:00:32.960)

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

Lex Fridman (1:00:40.880)

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

Richard Wolff (1:00:45.360)

Look, the medieval Catholic Church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury.

Richard Wolff (1:00:53.280)

You know, and this was that God said, if there's a person who needs to borrow from you,

Richard Wolff (1:00:59.360)

then that's a person in need. And the good Christian thing to do is to help him. To demand

Richard Wolff (1:01:07.360)

an interest payment rather than to help your fellow man is, God hates you for that. That's a sin.

Richard Wolff (1:01:16.000)

Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes.

Lex Fridman (1:01:19.680)

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

Richard Wolff (1:01:26.080)

with the intimate human interaction. The idea of markets is you're able

Richard Wolff (1:01:33.360)

to create a system that involves thousands, millions of humans, and there'd be some level of

Richard Wolff (1:01:41.600)

safe, self regulating fairness.

Richard Wolff (1:01:46.800)

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

Richard Wolff (1:01:52.160)

I wonder what, so I guess...

Lex Fridman (1:01:53.840)

Suppose you were interested in having, suppose you took us your problem.

Richard Wolff (1:02:00.080)

We have a set of funds that can be loaned out.

Lex Fridman (1:02:04.080)

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

Richard Wolff (1:02:11.680)

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

Richard Wolff (1:02:16.480)

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

Richard Wolff (1:02:24.080)

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

Richard Wolff (1:02:31.360)

decides we're going to fund this one and that one because they're more needed in our society.

Richard Wolff (1:02:38.400)

We're in greater need of solving this problem than that problem. And so we're going to lend

Richard Wolff (1:02:43.760)

money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here,

Lex Fridman (1:02:49.280)

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

Richard Wolff (1:02:55.440)

Whoa, what are you doing? What ethics would justify you doing? It's like a market in general.

Richard Wolff (1:03:02.800)

Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage. That's one

Richard Wolff (1:03:08.080)

basic way to understand it. And so if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word

Richard Wolff (1:03:14.480)

shortage means, has no other meaning, if the demand is greater than the supply, okay, now you've got

Richard Wolff (1:03:20.480)

a problem. You can't satisfy all the demanders because you don't have enough supply. You have

Richard Wolff (1:03:27.600)

a shortage. Okay, now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people who have a lot of

Richard Wolff (1:03:32.960)

money to bid up the price of whatever's short, and that solves your problem because as the price goes

Richard Wolff (1:03:40.480)

up, the poor people, they drop out. They can't buy the thing at the exalted price, so you've got a

Richard Wolff (1:03:47.120)

way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people with the most money. At this point, most

Richard Wolff (1:03:53.680)

human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn against it because it

Lex Fridman (1:04:00.080)

contradicts their Christian, Judaic, Islamic, all of them would say, what? You know what that means?

Richard Wolff (1:04:07.600)

It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat, while the poor

Lex Fridman (1:04:13.440)

person has no milk for their five children. There it is. You want a market? Why?

Richard Wolff (1:04:19.440)

The fundamental thing that seems unfair, there's the resulting inequality. Now...

Lex Fridman (1:04:25.760)

Or death.

Richard Wolff (1:04:26.800)

Or death. Well, that's the ultimate inequality.

Lex Fridman (1:04:30.560)

Yes, it is.

Lex Fridman (1:04:32.160)

What about, and we're going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics,

Lex Fridman (1:04:36.480)

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

Richard Wolff (1:04:45.840)

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

Lex Fridman (1:04:53.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:05:01.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:05:09.600)

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

Richard Wolff (1:05:17.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:05:24.800)

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

Lex Fridman (1:05:28.880)

easier and better on average. What do you say to that?

Richard Wolff (1:05:35.120)

I have several responses to that, but I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's

Richard Wolff (1:05:42.880)

going on there. But let me give you the arguments so that you can hear them,

Lex Fridman (1:05:47.600)

and then you can evaluate them, as can anybody who's listening or watching.

Richard Wolff (1:05:56.160)

Marx was a student of Hegel, and one of Hegel's central arguments was that everything that

Richard Wolff (1:06:01.600)

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

Richard Wolff (1:06:09.760)

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

Lex Fridman (1:06:15.040)

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

Richard Wolff (1:06:20.160)

that are the other side of the good ones, etc. So, the dialectic. Yes, exactly. And Marx,

Richard Wolff (1:06:26.320)

very attentive to that, explicitly agrees with this on many occasions, and applies it,

Richard Wolff (1:06:33.200)

of course, to the central object of his research, capitalism. So, this is not a simple minded fellow

Richard Wolff (1:06:41.040)

who's telling you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this

Richard Wolff (1:06:45.840)

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

Richard Wolff (1:06:53.760)

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

Richard Wolff (1:07:00.800)

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

Lex Fridman (1:07:10.800)

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

Richard Wolff (1:07:18.800)

the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people, Marx now comes back and says,

Richard Wolff (1:07:23.920)

oh wait, wait a minute here. Number one, capitalism as a system has been mostly represented by

Richard Wolff (1:07:36.320)

capitalists, which makes a certain sense. And those capitalists, with very few exceptions,

Richard Wolff (1:07:43.440)

some but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the lives of the mass of people.

Richard Wolff (1:07:51.840)

The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What that means is replace a worker with

Richard Wolff (1:07:58.400)

a machine, move the production from expensive U.S. to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants from

Richard Wolff (1:08:07.200)

other parts of the world, because they will work for less money than the folks that you have here

Richard Wolff (1:08:11.520)

at home. Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for,

Richard Wolff (1:08:18.240)

had to be fought for, for decades over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning

Richard Wolff (1:08:26.160)

to right now. The reason we have a minimum wage, which was passed in the middle of the 1930s,

Richard Wolff (1:08:32.720)

when it was proposed, it was blocked by capitalists. They got together. And today,

Richard Wolff (1:08:39.520)

just a factoid for you, the last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States,

Richard Wolff (1:08:45.520)

federal minimum wage, was in 2009, when it was set at the lofty sum of $7.25 an hour,

Richard Wolff (1:08:56.240)

which you cannot live on. Over the last 12 years or so, whatever it is now, 11, 12, 13 years

Richard Wolff (1:09:04.480)

since then, we have had an increase in the price level in this country every year. And in the last

Richard Wolff (1:09:10.640)

year, 8.5%. During that time that the prices went up, the minimum wage was never raised.

Richard Wolff (1:09:19.600)

What? This is a time of stock market boom, of growing inequality. This is the nerve of the

Richard Wolff (1:09:31.520)

defender of capitalists, who wants now to get credit for the improvement in the standard of

Richard Wolff (1:09:39.360)

life of the workers that was fought by every generation. You know, it takes your breath away.

Richard Wolff (1:09:45.040)

It's an argument. Whoa. But I take my hat off if I had one, because that is one of the only ways

Richard Wolff (1:09:53.120)

to justify this system. Long ago—let me get to the heart of it—long ago, capitalism could have

Richard Wolff (1:10:02.160)

overcome hunger, could have overcome disease, could have, I mean, way beyond what we have now,

Lex Fridman (1:10:11.600)

but it didn't. And that's the worst moral condemnation imaginable. How do you justify

Richard Wolff (1:10:20.800)

that when you could, you didn't? Look, let me get at it another way, because this may

Richard Wolff (1:10:27.360)

interest you anyway. The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically dynamic.

Richard Wolff (1:10:35.440)

It is. And along the way, it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better. No

Richard Wolff (1:10:41.840)

question. But the notion that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is somehow built

Richard Wolff (1:10:50.560)

into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous—and I can give you a—because

Richard Wolff (1:10:59.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:11:05.840)

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

Lex Fridman (1:11:14.160)

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

Lex Fridman (1:11:20.080)

and he has an output. And let's say the output is 100 units of something, or whatever the price is,

Lex Fridman (1:11:27.520)

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

Richard Wolff (1:11:35.600)

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

Lex Fridman (1:11:42.400)

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

Richard Wolff (1:11:49.520)

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

Lex Fridman (1:11:54.240)

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

Lex Fridman (1:12:00.000)

a machine, a new machine. And the new machine is so effective,

Richard Wolff (1:12:07.600)

you can get the same number of units of output with half the workers. So you don't need to spend

Richard Wolff (1:12:13.920)

$100 on workers. You only need to spend $50. You can do it with half the workers. And so the

Richard Wolff (1:12:20.400)

capitalist goes to the workers—by the way, this happens every day—and he says to half of them,

Richard Wolff (1:12:25.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:12:31.280)

machine. Why does he do that? Because of the $50 he now no longer has to spend on labor, because

Richard Wolff (1:12:38.880)

he doesn't need half of them. He keeps. Everything else is the same. The machine, everything else is

Richard Wolff (1:12:44.640)

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

Richard Wolff (1:12:52.800)

workers. Because when he sells it for $220, that $50 he doesn't have to give to the next

Richard Wolff (1:12:58.480)

job because he has a new machine. So that's what he does. The technology leads. He's happy. He's

Richard Wolff (1:13:06.880)

become more profitable. He's got an extra $50, which is why he buys the machine. The workers

Richard Wolff (1:13:13.760)

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

Richard Wolff (1:13:20.640)

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

Richard Wolff (1:13:25.280)

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

Richard Wolff (1:13:31.600)

know what I'm going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage, my children's education,

Richard Wolff (1:13:36.240)

or whatever else he's got going for himself. Now the point. There was, of course, an alternative

Richard Wolff (1:13:43.040)

path. The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same that

Richard Wolff (1:13:49.440)

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

Richard Wolff (1:13:58.160)

profit as before. But the gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day

Richard Wolff (1:14:06.560)

of the lives of these workers. The majority of workers would have been really helped by this

Richard Wolff (1:14:15.360)

technology. But instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle of

Richard Wolff (1:14:23.280)

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

Lex Fridman (1:14:32.320)

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

Richard Wolff (1:14:37.360)

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

Lex Fridman (1:14:44.080)

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

Lex Fridman (1:14:48.880)

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

Richard Wolff (1:14:56.800)

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

Richard Wolff (1:15:06.720)

the creative interests, family, flourish as a human being, basically strengthen and embolden

Richard Wolff (1:15:15.920)

the basic humanity that's under all of us. Yes. But then what cost does that have on the deadline

Lex Fridman (1:15:27.600)

fueled, competition fueled machine of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism?

Lex Fridman (1:15:36.080)

Slows it down.

Lex Fridman (1:15:37.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:15:44.080)

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

Richard Wolff (1:15:52.240)

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

Richard Wolff (1:15:57.360)

the math problem I gave you is either or, we could mix it. You could have a third less of a working

Richard Wolff (1:16:03.600)

day instead of a half less, and then the other part would be extra profit for our employer,

Richard Wolff (1:16:08.000)

etc. etc. So let's have a democratic discussion of what is the mix between the positive, and we have

Richard Wolff (1:16:16.400)

no such thing. All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only, we know what they

Richard Wolff (1:16:22.880)

do, they always choose the one that maximizes their profit because that's what they were told

Richard Wolff (1:16:27.520)

to do in business school where I've taught. So not only is it an undemocratic decision,

Lex Fridman (1:16:34.160)

but it's lopsided to boot. So we don't have the opportunity, but I would love for us to be good

Richard Wolff (1:16:40.720)

Hegelian Marxists and say, let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision

Richard Wolff (1:16:46.720)

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

Richard Wolff (1:16:53.280)

a dictatorial decision. You know, Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat,

Richard Wolff (1:16:59.360)

not as a notion of how government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is.

Richard Wolff (1:17:10.560)

The dictatorship in these key decisions is not made by some sitting council, it's made by each

Richard Wolff (1:17:16.640)

little capitalist in his or her relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is why Marx

Richard Wolff (1:17:22.800)

focused his analysis on that point. And by the way, I can sketch for you right now so it doesn't

Richard Wolff (1:17:28.560)

lurk in the background what the alternative is. Let's go there. Okay. It goes right back to what

Richard Wolff (1:17:34.080)

I said earlier. The workers themselves, the collection of employees together appropriate

Richard Wolff (1:17:42.480)

their own surplus and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of

Richard Wolff (1:17:51.920)

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

Richard Wolff (1:18:02.160)

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

Richard Wolff (1:18:12.160)

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

Richard Wolff (1:18:20.720)

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

Richard Wolff (1:18:27.760)

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

Richard Wolff (1:18:33.520)

society and that one, including here in the United States, that there were examples of people who

Richard Wolff (1:18:40.560)

organized their production in precisely this way, as a collective democratic community in which

Richard Wolff (1:18:50.000)

everybody had an equal voice. So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to

Richard Wolff (1:18:56.080)

produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output we all help to produce. So let's do it in,

Richard Wolff (1:19:03.680)

you know, in this country where democracy is a value nearly everybody subscribes to.

Richard Wolff (1:19:13.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:19:20.400)

where democracy has never been allowed to enter. The workplace. In the workplace, a tiny group of

Richard Wolff (1:19:28.080)

people, unaccountable to the rest of us, the employer, whether that's an individual, a family,

Richard Wolff (1:19:35.040)

a partnership, or a corporate board of directors, tiny group of people controls economically a vast

Richard Wolff (1:19:43.040)

mass of employees. Those employees don't elect those people, have no nothing. There is no

Richard Wolff (1:19:49.520)

accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable. And this society

Richard Wolff (1:19:56.960)

insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor matter of producing

Richard Wolff (1:20:04.000)

everything in a way that is the direct, it's autocratic. So to push back on a few things.

Lex Fridman (1:20:11.440)

So one is the idea of this society calling itself democratic is that the government is elected

Richard Wolff (1:20:18.400)

democratically and the government is able to pressure the workplace through the process of

Richard Wolff (1:20:24.160)

regulation. You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know, minimum wage, all those kinds of things.

Richard Wolff (1:20:31.040)

That's the one idea. The other is there is a natural force within the capitalist when there's

Richard Wolff (1:20:37.360)

no monopolies of competition being the accountability. So if you're a shitty boss,

Richard Wolff (1:20:45.040)

the employee in the capitalist system has the freedom to move to another company, work for a

Richard Wolff (1:20:50.880)

better boss. So that creates pressure on the employers and the bosses. That's at least the idea

Richard Wolff (1:20:56.880)

that there's two boundaries of you not misbehaving. One is the law, so regulations

Richard Wolff (1:21:05.440)

passed by the government, democratic. And the second is because there's always alternatives,

Richard Wolff (1:21:12.240)

in theory, then that puts pressure on everyone to behave well because you can always leave.

Richard Wolff (1:21:19.200)

So, I mean, that's kinds of accountability. But what you're saying is that does not result

Richard Wolff (1:21:25.920)

in a significant enough accountability for the employer that avoids exploitation of the worker.

Richard Wolff (1:21:32.720)

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

Richard Wolff (1:21:39.040)

to that and then I'll counterargument. First, competition. Here again, we have to be Hegelians

Richard Wolff (1:21:48.560)

just a little. Competition destroys itself. It doesn't need any—the whole point of competition

Richard Wolff (1:21:56.880)

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

Richard Wolff (1:22:02.960)

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

Richard Wolff (1:22:08.720)

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

Richard Wolff (1:22:12.880)

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

Richard Wolff (1:22:17.360)

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

Richard Wolff (1:22:25.200)

he can't serve anymore. So I'm going to buy the used equipment, and thereby many become few.

Richard Wolff (1:22:34.400)

Monopoly is the product of competition. It's not the antithesis, it's the product.

Richard Wolff (1:22:41.360)

LAROI Well, let's see.

Lex Fridman (1:22:43.520)

WOLFF That's where it comes from.

Richard Wolff (1:22:44.720)

LAROI There's another element to the system where there's always a new guy that comes in.

Lex Fridman (1:22:48.880)

WOLFF There isn't. There isn't.

Richard Wolff (1:22:51.600)

LAROI Well, that's the dream. The entrepreneurial spirit of the United States,

Richard Wolff (1:22:58.800)

for example, of a capitalist system is you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build

Richard Wolff (1:23:07.200)

up a business that takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car, Ford, GM,

Richard Wolff (1:23:14.880)

which is what you look at Tesla, for example. That's the American dream. One of the many

Richard Wolff (1:23:20.400)

ideals of the American dream is you can move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world.

Lex Fridman (1:23:30.960)

WOLFF Right.

Richard Wolff (1:23:31.440)

LAROI It can happen.

Lex Fridman (1:23:33.680)

WOLFF It can happen.

Richard Wolff (1:23:34.480)

WOLFF You know what that's like? That's like you can win a lottery.

Lex Fridman (1:23:37.520)

LAROI No, that's not quite. No, the lottery is complete luck. Here,

Richard Wolff (1:23:42.240)

you can work your ass off if you have a good idea.

Lex Fridman (1:23:44.320)

WOLFF The odds are better in the lottery.

Richard Wolff (1:23:46.080)

LAROI That's not true. There's a lot of new businesses.

Lex Fridman (1:23:49.840)

WOLFF How many Teslas do you know?

Richard Wolff (1:23:52.080)

LAROI Tesla is a really bad example because the car

Richard Wolff (1:23:54.080)

company, the automotive sector is so difficult. They operate at such a thin margin of profit.

Richard Wolff (1:24:03.920)

They're probably a good example of capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of

Richard Wolff (1:24:10.800)

lack of innovation. That's a very complicated industry because of the supply chain.

Richard Wolff (1:24:16.880)

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

Richard Wolff (1:24:23.280)

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

Richard Wolff (1:24:29.200)

have a few, they jack up the price. They make an enormous profit. In the irony of capitalism,

Richard Wolff (1:24:36.080)

Marx would love this, they begin to incentivize people to break into this industry because the

Richard Wolff (1:24:42.480)

few remaining are making a wild amount of profit because they are a few and can jigger the market

Richard Wolff (1:24:49.520)

to make it work like that for them. The reason every small capitalist is trying to build market

Richard Wolff (1:24:58.320)

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

Richard Wolff (1:25:04.320)

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

Richard Wolff (1:25:09.600)

PEDRO But yeah, to push back a little bit also, because this is a question also,

Lex Fridman (1:25:16.160)

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

Richard Wolff (1:25:22.960)

decency of human beings? If you give me a choice to press a button to get rid of the competition,

Lex Fridman (1:25:34.240)

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

Richard Wolff (1:25:38.080)

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

Lex Fridman (1:25:44.480)

it's human well being too. So like—

Lex Fridman (1:25:47.680)

PEDRO You think?

Lex Fridman (1:25:48.240)

PEDRO Yes.

Richard Wolff (1:25:50.400)

PEDRO You and I don't live in the same place then.

Lex Fridman (1:25:53.360)

PEDRO So you're saying that the forces of capitalism

Richard Wolff (1:25:56.320)

take over the minds of the people at the top, and then they cease being human.

Lex Fridman (1:26:01.840)

PEDRO No.

Richard Wolff (1:26:02.640)

PEDRO Depending on your model of humans.

Lex Fridman (1:26:07.040)

PEDRO Yeah.

Richard Wolff (1:26:08.000)

PEDRO They lose track of the better angels of their nature,

Lex Fridman (1:26:11.120)

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

Richard Wolff (1:26:15.520)

PEDRO I would put it differently. The system is so set up, it's a little bit like natural

Richard Wolff (1:26:20.080)

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

Richard Wolff (1:26:26.320)

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

Richard Wolff (1:26:32.240)

the way that become selective. If they can't stand it because they have that human quality—and there

Richard Wolff (1:26:38.400)

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

Richard Wolff (1:26:45.760)

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

Richard Wolff (1:26:49.760)

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

Richard Wolff (1:26:56.000)

the people that come by and be a decent—of course, of course. But the system selects the firm. If you

Richard Wolff (1:27:04.480)

don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up, you're toast there anyway. The rest of the

Richard Wolff (1:27:10.400)

people who vote for you are going to kick you out. You can tell them all day long what a lovely

Richard Wolff (1:27:15.120)

person you are. Then they're going to look at you and wonder what happened to you. How did you even

Richard Wolff (1:27:19.360)

get this far with the lovely person horseshoe? RL It's not necessarily just a lovely person.

Lex Fridman (1:27:25.520)

So maybe my—I'll just say my bias is the people I know are, especially at the top of companies,

Richard Wolff (1:27:34.240)

are in the tech sector where innovation is such a big part of it. So I think a lot of the things

Richard Wolff (1:27:44.480)

we're talking about is when there's not much innovation in the system. So—

Richard Wolff (1:27:49.840)

RL Innovation usually comes—in the history of capitalism, innovation comes in spurts.

Richard Wolff (1:27:56.480)

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

Richard Wolff (1:28:01.680)

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

Richard Wolff (1:28:08.720)

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

Richard Wolff (1:28:15.920)

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

Richard Wolff (1:28:21.680)

as they always do, about innovation. But again, it really is—this is a recurring kind of debate and

Richard Wolff (1:28:32.240)

a recurring kind of issue. For me—how do I put this in a way that—no, I don't mean to offend.

Richard Wolff (1:28:41.440)

RL Please, please. RL No, no, no, I don't. I don't want to, but

Richard Wolff (1:28:51.600)

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

Richard Wolff (1:28:58.800)

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

Lex Fridman (1:29:03.600)

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

Richard Wolff (1:29:08.480)

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

Richard Wolff (1:29:18.560)

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

Richard Wolff (1:29:24.480)

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

Lex Fridman (1:29:32.240)

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

Richard Wolff (1:29:39.280)

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

Richard Wolff (1:29:48.560)

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

Richard Wolff (1:29:58.160)

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

Richard Wolff (1:30:04.480)

pay is. But they're jacking it up even more. Why? Because that's what's happening in their universe.

Richard Wolff (1:30:09.600)

That's what—they're all doing it, and they have to do—each one of them justifies that,

Richard Wolff (1:30:13.920)

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

Lex Fridman (1:30:18.320)

but is no comfort for the mass of people who aren't CEOs, for whom this argument isn't very

Richard Wolff (1:30:22.960)

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

Richard Wolff (1:30:32.000)

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

Richard Wolff (1:30:38.320)

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

Lex Fridman (1:30:46.160)

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

Richard Wolff (1:30:50.640)

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

Richard Wolff (1:30:55.760)

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

Richard Wolff (1:31:02.160)

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

Richard Wolff (1:31:07.360)

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

Lex Fridman (1:31:11.920)

Horror. Taking out on—

Richard Wolff (1:31:12.880)

That can turn to anger. Some little 18 year old kid who has to go

Richard Wolff (1:31:16.560)

three hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket. Huh? What? And it happens

Richard Wolff (1:31:24.320)

every day in this country. Every day.

Lex Fridman (1:31:26.080)

So that anger rises up in those little ways now and then bigger and bigger potentially.

Richard Wolff (1:31:33.040)

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

Richard Wolff (1:31:40.320)

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

Richard Wolff (1:31:47.440)

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

Richard Wolff (1:31:54.320)

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

Richard Wolff (1:32:01.120)

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

Richard Wolff (1:32:07.840)

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

Richard Wolff (1:32:15.680)

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

Richard Wolff (1:32:25.520)

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

Richard Wolff (1:32:31.680)

to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it.

Lex Fridman (1:32:35.280)

A public transit system where?

Richard Wolff (1:32:37.600)

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

Lex Fridman (1:32:41.440)

metropolitan area.

Richard Wolff (1:32:42.480)

Well, it clearly has to be more than 30 billion, but...

Lex Fridman (1:32:46.000)

Well, it was a few years ago.

Richard Wolff (1:32:47.520)

Sure. But you're saying it's a little bit more than 30 billion.

Lex Fridman (1:32:50.960)

But I'm using a lot of this. Right. It's not crazy stuff.

Richard Wolff (1:32:57.680)

It's a reasonable number.

Lex Fridman (1:32:58.960)

Right. Right.

Richard Wolff (1:32:59.440)

Hey, listen, but there's a...

Lex Fridman (1:33:01.360)

Let me just finish the point.

Richard Wolff (1:33:02.560)

Sure. Yes.

Richard Wolff (1:33:03.360)

Okay. So I'm trying to be rational here. If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do,

Richard Wolff (1:33:13.200)

if it's got a lot to do with fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use

Richard Wolff (1:33:18.640)

of the fossil fuel, particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass

Richard Wolff (1:33:24.400)

transit. We're doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing.

Richard Wolff (1:33:29.680)

Well, you could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit because it's going to be

Richard Wolff (1:33:37.360)

reusable vehicles. It will end, in theory, car ownership. So you just have a more kind of

Lex Fridman (1:33:44.400)

distributed public transit system.

Richard Wolff (1:33:45.680)

If it happens, but you know that that's a side effect. His major goal and the major goal of the

Richard Wolff (1:33:51.520)

other companies that are busy squeezing to get his share of the pie smaller, so they have some,

Richard Wolff (1:33:58.400)

Ford, General Motors, Toyota, all of them are making electric cars now. So what they've done is

Richard Wolff (1:34:04.080)

they've replaced the individual car with fossil fuel with another individual car.

Richard Wolff (1:34:09.840)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:34:10.320)

That's fucking nuts. What are you doing?

Richard Wolff (1:34:12.880)

Well, that's one of the things they're doing, but automation is also another one. But on the Elon

Richard Wolff (1:34:17.600)

side, there's also a hilarious thing named Boring Company, which is working on tunnels, which is

Richard Wolff (1:34:24.000)

actually expanding the flexibility you might have to start playing with ideas of public transit,

Richard Wolff (1:34:31.600)

I think. Listen, I'm now partially living in Austin, Texas, that I don't know if they know

Lex Fridman (1:34:37.920)

what a public transit system is, period.

Lex Fridman (1:34:40.000)

Yes.

Richard Wolff (1:34:40.480)

There's F150 pickup trucks.

Lex Fridman (1:34:41.520)

Most American cities are.

Richard Wolff (1:34:43.200)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:34:43.920)

Well, this is an interesting, so.

Richard Wolff (1:34:47.440)

The older, by the way, footnote, the older this city, the more likely it has public transportation.

Lex Fridman (1:34:54.160)

So you're saying.

Richard Wolff (1:34:54.800)

Boston is the best example.

Lex Fridman (1:34:56.240)

Yes.

Richard Wolff (1:34:56.880)

Have you been, well, you.

Lex Fridman (1:34:58.160)

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I have a place in Boston.

Richard Wolff (1:35:00.320)

Boston with the street railway, Boston is your case study of how to do this,

Lex Fridman (1:35:05.040)

because they've been doing it all along. New York's pretty good, too.

Richard Wolff (1:35:07.840)

There's a tradeoff. Yeah, New York, I would say, is better than Boston because

Lex Fridman (1:35:11.280)

so there's, you know, their technology also helps you out to do the public transit better.

Richard Wolff (1:35:18.400)

It's almost like Boston is a little too old, but yes, I get your point.

Lex Fridman (1:35:21.760)

But there is a, the Ford F150 pickup truck symbolizes something about America,

Lex Fridman (1:35:29.600)

and there is a practical nature to the fact that in order to do public transit,

Richard Wolff (1:35:35.680)

in order to do some of these things that you're talking about with the working class,

Richard Wolff (1:35:42.320)

there has to be a central planning component, or there has to be a centralized component.

Lex Fridman (1:35:48.000)

And America is very much based on the idea of, at least in recent times,

Richard Wolff (1:35:55.200)

I would say from the founding, of individualism, of respecting individual freedom.

Lex Fridman (1:35:59.840)

Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas of Marxism to life,

Lex Fridman (1:36:07.440)

you would trample on individual freedoms?

Lex Fridman (1:36:10.080)

No.

Lex Fridman (1:36:11.760)

Can you respect both?

Richard Wolff (1:36:13.360)

Sure. For me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people

Richard Wolff (1:36:20.560)

who have had that freedom eroded under the capitalist. That's a motive for my Marxism.

Richard Wolff (1:36:26.880)

It was for Marx too. He loved the French Revolution. He loved the liberté, égalité, fraternité,

Richard Wolff (1:36:34.800)

the great three, and then democracy, the American contribution, if you like.

Lex Fridman (1:36:39.520)

He believed in all of that. His critique of capitalism was, it promised it,

Lex Fridman (1:36:44.880)

and then never delivered it. And the reason you have to go beyond it is because

Richard Wolff (1:36:49.280)

it didn't deliver what it had promised. So for me, it is the fulfillment of agenda.

Lex Fridman (1:36:59.440)

But again, I'm a Hegelian Marxist, if you want. Individualism, for me, is not the way it's set

Richard Wolff (1:37:08.960)

up in this society, some sort of antithesis to the government. I think an immense con has been

Richard Wolff (1:37:18.160)

pulled on the American people. And the con works like this. You know what's bad and what's dangerous

Lex Fridman (1:37:24.880)

and threatens you? It's the government. The government's going to come in and tell you

Lex Fridman (1:37:29.200)

what to do. The government's going to run your life. The government's the problem.

Lex Fridman (1:37:33.600)

There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics.

Richard Wolff (1:37:39.040)

Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn, like the so called Great

Richard Wolff (1:37:44.000)

Recession of 2008. Who do they blame? The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed,

Lex Fridman (1:37:51.600)

and what is the media all about? The government. If I were a capitalist, I'd love this. I kick the

Richard Wolff (1:37:58.720)

workers by throwing them out of their home, and they don't get angry at me. They get angry at the

Richard Wolff (1:38:03.840)

government. I fire large numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them as a

Richard Wolff (1:38:09.200)

result of having no job and no income. And they get angry at the senator. I'm laughing all the way

Richard Wolff (1:38:16.080)

to the bank. This is a genius stroke. In theory. But if you look at government, because you said

Richard Wolff (1:38:23.520)

accountability in the capitalist system has no accountability. There's some pushback I give on

Richard Wolff (1:38:27.840)

the accountability. I think there is some accountability we can discuss in a Hegelian way.

Richard Wolff (1:38:32.240)

Who there's more accountability for. I would say that in theory, government is perfectly

Richard Wolff (1:38:40.320)

accountable. That's the whole point of a democratic system is you vote people in. In practice,

Richard Wolff (1:38:46.400)

there's a giant growing bureaucracy that is accountable only on the surface. There's two

Richard Wolff (1:38:52.560)

parties that seem to be the same. Media somehow integrated into making the same two parties that

Richard Wolff (1:39:03.120)

are just wearing different colored shirts to seem like they're very opposed and are arguing and

Richard Wolff (1:39:09.360)

bitterly arguing and calling each other's nasty names and all those kinds of things. But that's

Richard Wolff (1:39:16.240)

government. So who exactly is worse here? Government or companies? Well, why are we asking

Richard Wolff (1:39:24.400)

that question? These are twins. Look, what you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats

Richard Wolff (1:39:31.600)

just now, with which I agree. I would say the same thing about corporations and the government.

Richard Wolff (1:39:36.480)

This is the same people. Literally. Let's go to Churchill. Which one is worse? Let's go to

Richard Wolff (1:39:42.480)

Churchill. Democracy is the worst form of government except all the other ones or whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:39:47.920)

So this kind of same idea. Which one exactly is worse? Because to me, it seems like...

Lex Fridman (1:39:52.960)

Which one between what and what?

Richard Wolff (1:39:54.640)

Government and industry and companies. It's because government is plagued by...

Lex Fridman (1:40:03.520)

I would call it corruption because the corruption of bureaucratic paperwork.

Lex Fridman (1:40:10.000)

But they're not accountable. There doesn't seem to be a serious accountability.

Richard Wolff (1:40:15.600)

Again, we're not living on the same planet. The greatest practitioners of central planning

Richard Wolff (1:40:23.360)

are corporations. Elon has an operation like General Motors, Ford, IBM, or any of the other

Richard Wolff (1:40:32.400)

megacorps. They have to plan. They buy up companies because they don't want to deal

Richard Wolff (1:40:40.080)

in the market. They don't want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs

Richard Wolff (1:40:46.880)

or sell their outputs to somebody they don't control. They want the professor to teach the

Richard Wolff (1:40:53.120)

genius of a market. They hate the market. And when they grow to be big, they keep buying

Richard Wolff (1:40:59.680)

whoever they were dealing with before so they could better control them, which requires them

Richard Wolff (1:41:04.400)

then to plan the production and distribution of goods inside rather than buying them in the market.

Richard Wolff (1:41:12.960)

The model of the government is it's a private corporation. I have spent my life...

Richard Wolff (1:41:18.960)

I'll give you an example. In American universities, big ones, famous ones, not just as a student but as

Richard Wolff (1:41:25.280)

a professor. I've been half a dozen schools. I teach now at the new school here. It's another one,

Richard Wolff (1:41:29.920)

right? They all model themselves after businesses. They model their... You can attack the bureaucracy

Richard Wolff (1:41:37.760)

of universities. Good reason. It's a mess. But they're proudly modeling themselves

Richard Wolff (1:41:45.520)

on organizing their bureaucracy in a businesslike manner. So you're looking at a difference which

Richard Wolff (1:41:53.760)

isn't there. The government and the private sector are partners, and both of them wouldn't have it

Richard Wolff (1:42:00.880)

any other way. The corporations want that from the government, and the government now knows that to

Richard Wolff (1:42:07.440)

please the corporations is the number one objective they have because that's how they keep their jobs

Lex Fridman (1:42:14.000)

and keep their system going. And so for all practical purposes, this is the same people.

Lex Fridman (1:42:20.480)

But there's important differences that I don't know if they're fundamental or just a consequence

Richard Wolff (1:42:27.840)

of history. But if you have government, they're accountable in a different way than companies.

Richard Wolff (1:42:32.800)

Companies are accountable by... Especially if you have a consumer, they're accountable by sort of

Richard Wolff (1:42:38.960)

the consumer spending or not spending their money on whatever the heck the company is selling.

Lex Fridman (1:42:43.120)

Right. The government is accountable by votes. And it seems like

Richard Wolff (1:42:51.200)

government, unlike companies, for most of company's history, is always too big to fail, meaning

Richard Wolff (1:42:58.480)

it can always just print money. It can always save itself. And that creates a bureaucracy.

Richard Wolff (1:43:06.000)

You rarely pay the cost of having made bad decisions if you're in government. You

Richard Wolff (1:43:12.480)

distribute the blame, and it's very unclear who's responsible for bad decisions. So bad decisions

Richard Wolff (1:43:19.200)

in government accumulate. So you become more and more and more inefficient and more and more poor

Richard Wolff (1:43:25.920)

in your decision making in terms of, you said, public transit. Should we build a public transit

Richard Wolff (1:43:30.320)

system in this city or not? That's a difficult decision. That's an interesting decision. I would

Richard Wolff (1:43:36.320)

say it's very often a very good decision. But whoever makes that decision should be accountable

Richard Wolff (1:43:42.560)

for a good or bad decision. And it seems like companies are more accountable. They pay...

Richard Wolff (1:43:49.200)

They feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because it can go bankrupt. There's much more

Richard Wolff (1:43:57.200)

day to day pressure to make good engineering decisions. Government doesn't seem to be under

Richard Wolff (1:44:03.680)

the same level of pressure. Do you disagree with that? I disagree with that. Everything in my

Richard Wolff (1:44:10.160)

history pushes me. You may be living... I may be living in a different planet or taking a different

Richard Wolff (1:44:20.320)

sort of drug. I won't mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a very large

Richard Wolff (1:44:27.840)

company here in the United States, here in the New York area. And it involved two brothers and

Richard Wolff (1:44:37.760)

a family who built it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was kind of the dynamo

Richard Wolff (1:44:48.560)

of the family. And he was more responsible than anybody else building it up.

Lex Fridman (1:44:52.640)

But he took care of his brothers. He had a nice feeling about his brothers. So, the one brother

Richard Wolff (1:44:56.960)

who could not, you know, without help tie his shoes, became a vice president. Got an enormous

Richard Wolff (1:45:05.440)

salary. Got a beautiful office in a skyscraper, not that many blocks from where I'm sitting right

Richard Wolff (1:45:12.560)

now. And that was the way that family handled that company. And all of his relatives that were

Richard Wolff (1:45:23.120)

somewhere in this company doing a variety of whatever, because... And my experience with this,

Lex Fridman (1:45:32.080)

and because I went to the schools, I told you, all my experiences with that group of people,

Richard Wolff (1:45:37.920)

corporate experiences, full of those stories. You know, they made mistake after mistake,

Richard Wolff (1:45:44.480)

which they would tell you didn't undermine. They were always able to blame somebody else,

Richard Wolff (1:45:52.560)

something else that scraped them through. And had they not been able to, they would have been

Richard Wolff (1:45:58.240)

replaced by another person who did the same thing for as long as they could. And they knew it. They

Richard Wolff (1:46:05.280)

would talk about it at family events. That's how I know. I understand that you want the outside

Richard Wolff (1:46:13.280)

world to look at it this way, but it's not my experience.

Lex Fridman (1:46:17.280)

But again, that kind of thing, at the risk of saying human nature again, I wonder what

Richard Wolff (1:46:25.120)

kind of system allows for that more versus less. This is the question of, I would call that, let's

Lex Fridman (1:46:36.480)

put that under the umbrella term of corruption. Which system allows for more corruption?

Lex Fridman (1:46:42.240)

But remember that the way I defined the different system is not more or less government.

Richard Wolff (1:46:46.320)

It's more or less allowing a democratic workplace, reconfiguring it. What happens when everybody

Richard Wolff (1:46:55.280)

has a vote? When you have to explain what the strategies are, what the alternatives are to a

Richard Wolff (1:47:01.760)

larger number of people than a board of directors or major shareholders or whoever it is that most

Richard Wolff (1:47:08.240)

companies are responsible to. And now you've got a whole different universe. It's not a small group

Richard Wolff (1:47:13.840)

that can't be hidden the way it's normally hidden, most of it, and on and on and on.

Richard Wolff (1:47:20.080)

Worker coops is what this is called in many parts of the world. So it's not that I'm advocating

Richard Wolff (1:47:25.200)

something that's never been seen before, not at all. The Marxism I understand is to pick from

Richard Wolff (1:47:32.400)

historical precedents the things that we think will work better. And I think if all the people

Richard Wolff (1:47:40.560)

in enterprise, just to drive the point home, democratically decided they would never give

Richard Wolff (1:47:46.160)

two or three individuals 100 million dollars while everybody else can't send their kid to

Richard Wolff (1:47:50.880)

college. I mean they can do that. So just to return, just to address this point about the

Richard Wolff (1:47:59.280)

particular implementation of Marxism that was the early days in the Soviet Union. Why did

Richard Wolff (1:48:05.440)

Stalinism, for example, lead to so much bloodshed, do you think, and human suffering? Is there any

Richard Wolff (1:48:12.240)

elements within the ideas of Marxism that catalyzed the kind of government, the kind of system that

Richard Wolff (1:48:23.280)

led to that bloodshed? I don't think so. I think there were many things that led to the bloodshed

Lex Fridman (1:48:29.600)

and to all that Stalin's regimes did. And I spent 10 years of my life with another economist writing

Richard Wolff (1:48:41.040)

a book about that to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

Richard Wolff (1:48:50.640)

You might want to take a look at it sometime. I'm going to say a few things now, but all of

Richard Wolff (1:48:56.160)

those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, etc. in that work.

Richard Wolff (1:49:06.240)

Let me start with playing a little bit with Hegel.

Richard Wolff (1:49:12.400)

The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the Soviet Union

Richard Wolff (1:49:21.360)

did, but what the rest of the world did. You had a really interesting move, and I'll give you a

Richard Wolff (1:49:29.200)

parallel from today. The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed. World War I, it fell

Richard Wolff (1:49:40.240)

apart. The Tsar and all of that, it couldn't survive. It had already been in trouble. There

Richard Wolff (1:49:46.800)

was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war to Japan. If you know Russian history,

Richard Wolff (1:49:53.520)

which I assume you do, you'll know that there was a lot leading up to the collapse in 1917.

Richard Wolff (1:50:02.880)

In some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small, that could seize

Richard Wolff (1:50:09.840)

the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists. Earlier on with Kerensky,

Richard Wolff (1:50:17.440)

the first government that tried, it wasn't people all that impressed by Marxism. It was people more

Richard Wolff (1:50:23.920)

skeptical and would not have been called Marxist, probably, by history. They tried. They couldn't.

Richard Wolff (1:50:31.920)

Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year.

Richard Wolff (1:50:36.960)

The rest of the world, though, was horrified. The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken

Richard Wolff (1:50:45.760)

this immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism, yes,

Lex Fridman (1:50:54.480)

but still not challenging the power. Now it had the power, and in a big country. And they freaked

Richard Wolff (1:51:01.840)

out. If you know American history, the leadership of this country went completely berserk. I mean,

Richard Wolff (1:51:10.400)

we had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before. The 20s were a time

Richard Wolff (1:51:17.600)

of Palmer raids in Boston, the Sacco Vanzetti trials, I mean, really grim hostility. And you

Richard Wolff (1:51:27.760)

had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution.

Richard Wolff (1:51:33.280)

The US, Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops. So what you had right away

Richard Wolff (1:51:41.520)

was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. There was a great professor at Princeton,

Richard Wolff (1:51:51.040)

Meier, I forget his first name, who wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy

Richard Wolff (1:51:58.960)

since 1917 has been obsessed with Russia. Even now, this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia,

Richard Wolff (1:52:08.480)

as if Russia still was the Soviet Union, as if people haven't figured out. That was a big

Richard Wolff (1:52:14.400)

change back in 1989 and 90. Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before, or at least they're not

Richard Wolff (1:52:23.680)

Lenin. They may not be so different from some of the other, but in any case. So you had one factor

Richard Wolff (1:52:31.600)

was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation, the global. I mean, Rosa Luxemburg, I assume you

Richard Wolff (1:52:41.920)

know, Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin. She's a critic of Lenin's, by the way,

Lex Fridman (1:52:48.480)

but she's a leftist, hunted down and hacked into bits, killed. So you're attributing some

Lex Fridman (1:52:56.960)

of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world turned away.

Richard Wolff (1:53:02.160)

Turned against. Turned against. So you turn against is the better word.

Richard Wolff (1:53:05.840)

I mean, not in order of importance, but it's a very important part of the psychology of being,

Richard Wolff (1:53:13.520)

you know, it's what you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence that indeed

Richard Wolff (1:53:19.760)

there was a lot to be afraid of at that time. Nobody had ever done it. Look, you could see the

Richard Wolff (1:53:24.560)

effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at first, that you could have

Richard Wolff (1:53:31.600)

socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous, that socialism was internationalism.

Richard Wolff (1:53:38.640)

Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, workers of the world unite,

Richard Wolff (1:53:45.040)

not workers of Russia unite. He had to go through a procedure of kind of coming to terms

Richard Wolff (1:53:54.640)

with the fact that the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried in Berlin,

Richard Wolff (1:54:00.080)

was tried in Munich, was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here. They all failed.

Richard Wolff (1:54:06.320)

They all failed, and he's left. So the French would say, tout ça, right? All alone. That's one.

Richard Wolff (1:54:15.760)

The second thing is economic isolation. Russia's a poor country, and it needed what it got before

Richard Wolff (1:54:23.840)

the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans particularly, but others

Richard Wolff (1:54:28.400)

too. Now this was all cut off, and you can see the replay with the sanctions program. We're going to

Richard Wolff (1:54:36.480)

do it again. We're going to do it again. We have to do it. The world is different, and the sanctions

Richard Wolff (1:54:41.440)

don't work, but they're going to trial, because it's the history. But that culture today is

Richard Wolff (1:54:49.280)

completely different. Russia's a different place today, but Russia has China, and that changes

Richard Wolff (1:54:54.720)

everything. And they don't get that here yet, but they will. Yeah, there's a very complicated

Richard Wolff (1:55:00.080)

dynamic with China, even with India. Yep. Or Turkey, Brazil. Sorry to say, human nature may

Richard Wolff (1:55:08.880)

change at a slower pace. Yes, that has occurred to me as well. I get that point. So is there,

Lex Fridman (1:55:16.400)

can you steel man the case, or consider the case, that there's something about the implementation

Richard Wolff (1:55:22.400)

of Marxism, maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing on the working class and

Richard Wolff (1:55:29.040)

workers unite, that naturally leads to a formation of a dictatorial force, a dictator that says,

Richard Wolff (1:55:38.160)

let us temporarily give power to this person to manage some of the details of how to run the

Richard Wolff (1:55:46.960)

democracy, of giving voice to the workers so that they get to choose. And then that naturally

Richard Wolff (1:55:54.080)

leads to a dictator, and there's naturally, in human nature, power and absolute power,

Richard Wolff (1:56:00.000)

as the old adage goes, corrupts absolutely. Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marxist ideals,

Richard Wolff (1:56:07.520)

you're going to end up with a dictator, and often, when you give too much power to anyone human,

Richard Wolff (1:56:13.440)

a small number of people, you're going to get into a huge amount of trouble? You've

Richard Wolff (1:56:18.320)

putched things together there that I would... That's what... I think if you give...

Richard Wolff (1:56:22.960)

Putched is a good word. Yeah. It's German.

Richard Wolff (1:56:29.440)

Remember, I told you, my mother was born in Germany. And then your dad is French.

Richard Wolff (1:56:34.160)

Yeah, but he was born in Metz, if you know European. It's a city on the border of France

Lex Fridman (1:56:39.600)

and Germany. If you come from Alsatians, Alsass in German.

Lex Fridman (1:56:45.520)

So they're German speaking, French speaking?

Richard Wolff (1:56:46.880)

Yeah, they're both. It's bilingual because it's been back and forth so many times

Richard Wolff (1:56:52.560)

in medieval days already that it... Literally, you go from one store to another,

Lex Fridman (1:56:56.960)

the proprietor here is French and the proprietor there is German,

Lex Fridman (1:57:00.640)

but they all speak both languages because... You don't speak either of them?

Lex Fridman (1:57:06.320)

I speak Russian.

Richard Wolff (1:57:07.280)

Russian, but not German or French? Ukrainian, no. It took French for four years

Richard Wolff (1:57:12.400)

in high school, but I've forgotten all of it. I remember the romance and the spirit

Richard Wolff (1:57:16.880)

of the language, but not the details. I'm sure I can remember.

Richard Wolff (1:57:20.480)

If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long period of time,

Lex Fridman (1:57:30.160)

and you do it on many levels of ideology, it is not surprising that it sticks and it stays.

Lex Fridman (1:57:40.000)

And you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution and you will discover

Richard Wolff (1:57:45.600)

it has a life of its own and it's going to take a long time before people don't.

Richard Wolff (1:57:51.680)

If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism

Lex Fridman (1:57:59.520)

and that it doesn't want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was

Richard Wolff (1:58:04.000)

Zeus and Diana and all the others, and they were very humanlike, but instead we have one

Richard Wolff (1:58:10.240)

who is the absolute beginning. What are you doing? You're teaching people

Richard Wolff (1:58:17.600)

an authority line that comes from the individual. If you have a sequence of kings,

Richard Wolff (1:58:23.360)

if in your feudal manner the lord sits called the landlord and he has unspeakable power

Lex Fridman (1:58:30.080)

over everything that goes on, and you do this for thousands of years,

Richard Wolff (1:58:35.200)

you can make a Russian revolution in 1917. But if you imagine you've gotten away from all that

Richard Wolff (1:58:42.240)

people assume without ever thinking about it, you're going to have trouble. Stalin is figured

Richard Wolff (1:58:49.760)

here as the originator of his situation. He wasn't. He never had that power. He may have thought that,

Lex Fridman (1:58:58.080)

but I don't. He's the product. Look, the Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn't that kind

Richard Wolff (1:59:05.680)

of guy. You know, he's a baseball playing lawyer. That's what he was. But they made him into Tala.

Lex Fridman (1:59:12.240)

So you're the product of history. No, no, no. It was the systems, feudalism, the nature,

Richard Wolff (1:59:20.880)

it was the structures and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its

Lex Fridman (1:59:27.840)

own rhythm and doesn't follow the calendar of a political revolution.

Richard Wolff (1:59:33.280)

That's the fundamental question. Is there something about communism

Lex Fridman (1:59:36.240)

that creates a mentality that enables somebody like Stalin or Mao?

Richard Wolff (1:59:44.320)

No, I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what

Richard Wolff (1:59:51.120)

they find familiar, to what seems to make sense, and he's the guy. Look, let me give you an example

Richard Wolff (1:59:56.640)

from American history. The Republican Party has traditionally in this country been the party of

Richard Wolff (20:03.920)

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

Richard Wolff (20:09.520)

to be fundamentally changed. But they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say, well,

Lex Fridman (20:16.160)

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

Lex Fridman (20:21.520)

how could we get beyond capitalism? It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured people's minds,

Richard Wolff (20:31.120)

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

Richard Wolff (20:39.360)

by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism whereby

Richard Wolff (20:46.640)

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

Richard Wolff (20:55.200)

government. Before that, the government was not a major interest. If you read Marx's Capital,

Richard Wolff (21:03.360)

the great work of his maturity, three volumes, there's almost nothing in the state. He mentions

Richard Wolff (21:09.440)

it, but he's interested in the details of how capitalism works, factory by factory, store by

Richard Wolff (21:16.480)

store, office. What's the structure? The government's secondary for him. But there's also humans within

Richard Wolff (21:22.560)

that capitalist system of, there's the working class. That's what he's interested in. He's

Richard Wolff (21:29.040)

interested in each, think of it almost mechanically like the workplace. In the workplace there,

Richard Wolff (21:34.960)

some people who do this and other people who do that, and they accept this division of authority,

Lex Fridman (21:40.720)

and they accept this division of what's going on here, particularly because he believed that the

Richard Wolff (21:46.400)

core economic objective of capitalism was to maximize something called profit, which his

Richard Wolff (21:53.280)

analysis located right there in the workings of the enterprise. The government was not the

Richard Wolff (22:00.080)

the key factor here. And he was looking at ideas of value. How much value does

Richard Wolff (22:08.160)

the labor of the individual workers provide? And that means, how do we reward the workers in an

Richard Wolff (22:14.880)

ethical way? And so those are the questions. But the government is not part of that picture.

Lex Fridman (22:23.200)

So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when this

Richard Wolff (22:28.960)

begins, but it really gets going after he dies, is this debate among Marxists about the role of

Richard Wolff (22:38.320)

the state. They all agreed, nearly all of them agree, that you have to get the state. The working

Richard Wolff (22:45.280)

class has to get the state because they see the state as the ultimate guarantor of capitalism.

Richard Wolff (22:54.560)

When things get really out of hand, the capitalist calls the police or he calls the army or both of

Richard Wolff (23:01.600)

them. And so the government is in a sense this key institution captured in Marxist language

Richard Wolff (23:11.040)

by the bourgeoisie, by the other side, the capitalists, and yet vulnerable because of

Richard Wolff (23:18.160)

suffrage. If suffrage is universal or nearly so, if everybody gets a vote, which in a way

Richard Wolff (23:25.920)

capitalism brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism in the French American Revolution

Richard Wolff (23:32.640)

is to create a place where elected represented. So the government being subject to suffrage

Richard Wolff (23:41.040)

creates the notion, aha, here's how we're gonna, we have to seize the state. And then that gets

Richard Wolff (23:49.680)

agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how to do it. One side says you go with the election,

Richard Wolff (23:56.160)

you mobilize the voter. That gets to be called reformism within Marxism. And the other side

Richard Wolff (24:04.480)

is revolution. Don't do that. This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged. You can't

Richard Wolff (24:12.480)

get there. They've long ago learned how to manipulate parliaments. They buy the politicians

Lex Fridman (24:19.760)

and all that, and therefore revolution is going to be the way to do it. Revolution

Richard Wolff (24:26.720)

gets a very big boost because the Russians, they did it that way. They didn't do, I mean,

Richard Wolff (24:32.400)

they fought in the Duma, in the Parliament, but they didn't. And this focus on the state,

Richard Wolff (24:39.440)

I would argue, goes way beyond what the debaters at the time, and if you're interested in the great

Richard Wolff (24:47.440)

names, there was a great theorist of the role of the state in a reformist strategy to get power

Richard Wolff (24:55.280)

in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important. His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautsky and

Richard Wolff (25:04.480)

Rosa Luxemburg, the two other huge figures in Marxism at the time, and they wrote the articles

Richard Wolff (25:11.760)

that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate. By the way, that debate still goes on.

Lex Fridman (25:17.760)

Reformism versus revolution?

Richard Wolff (25:19.200)

WOLFF Mhm. And in terms of not all that different. I mean, it's adjusted to history, but

Richard Wolff (25:24.800)

in terms of different.

Lex Fridman (25:26.000)

SIMON Can you comment on where you lean in terms of

Lex Fridman (25:31.200)

the mechanism of progress, reformation versus revolution?

Lex Fridman (25:34.720)

WOLFF I'd rather tell you the historical story.

Richard Wolff (25:36.480)

SIMON Sure.

Lex Fridman (25:36.980)

WOLFF Over and over and over again, in most cases,

Richard Wolff (25:40.560)

the reformists have always won because revolution is frightening, is scary, is dangerous,

Lex Fridman (25:46.560)

and so most of the time, when you get to the point where it's even a relevant discussion, not an

Richard Wolff (25:52.000)

abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have won.

Richard Wolff (25:58.320)

I mean, and I'll give you an example from the United States. In the Great Depression of the

Richard Wolff (26:04.240)

1930s, you had an extraordinary shift to the left in the United States, the greatest shift to the

Richard Wolff (26:11.760)

United States, the greatest shift to the left in the country's history before or since, nothing

Richard Wolff (26:17.360)

like it. Suddenly, you created a vast left wing composed of the labor movement, which went crazy

Richard Wolff (26:28.000)

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

Richard Wolff (26:33.680)

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

Lex Fridman (26:41.280)

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

Richard Wolff (26:48.160)

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

Richard Wolff (26:55.760)

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

Richard Wolff (27:02.560)

revolutionaries, by and large, because they were affiliated with the Communist International,

Richard Wolff (27:08.320)

with Russia and all of that. And in between, you might say, the two socialist parties,

Richard Wolff (27:13.280)

one that was Trotskyist in inspiration and the other one more moderate Western European kind

Richard Wolff (27:19.920)

of socialism. And they had this intense debate. And they ended up, the reformists won that debate.

Richard Wolff (27:26.320)

There was no revolution in the 1930s here. But there was a reform that achieved unspeakably

Richard Wolff (27:34.800)

great successes, which is why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does, because

Richard Wolff (27:40.480)

it achieved in a few years, in the 1930s, starting around 1932,

Richard Wolff (27:45.280)

three social security in this country. We had never had that before. That's the same one we

Richard Wolff (27:50.480)

have now. Unemployment insurance never existed before that you have till today. Minimum wage

Richard Wolff (27:57.440)

for the first time, still have that today. And a federal program of employment that hired 15

Richard Wolff (28:03.280)

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

Lex Fridman (28:09.440)

So that's the 30s and the 40s.

Richard Wolff (28:11.120)

30s. Not much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s. And here's the best part. It was paid for by taxes

Richard Wolff (28:18.560)

on corporations and the rich. So when people today say, well, you can tax the government,

Richard Wolff (28:24.160)

the joke is I have to teach American history to Americans because it has been erased from

Lex Fridman (28:32.160)

consciousness.

Richard Wolff (28:33.360)

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

Lex Fridman (28:38.480)

with the Russians.

Richard Wolff (28:39.200)

With the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this.

Richard Wolff (28:47.040)

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

Richard Wolff (28:52.640)

We seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state. And socialism

Richard Wolff (28:59.440)

is when the working class captures the state, either by reform or revolution, and then uses

Richard Wolff (29:06.480)

its power over the state to make the transition from capitalism to the better thing we're

Richard Wolff (29:12.880)

going toward. And again, make a long story short, in the interest of time, what happens,

Richard Wolff (29:20.480)

which is not unusual in human history, is that the means becomes the end.

Richard Wolff (29:26.640)

In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear before he died, you know, he doesn't live

Richard Wolff (29:31.200)

very long, he dies in 23. So he's only in power from 17 to 22. By that time, he has

Lex Fridman (29:38.240)

his brain trouble.

Richard Wolff (29:39.120)

1923, by the way, not at age 23.

Richard Wolff (29:42.000)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1923. Yeah, he's only there for four or five years. He's very clear.

Richard Wolff (29:48.240)

He even says, I've done work on that, I've published, so I know this stuff. He says in

Richard Wolff (29:53.440)

a famous speech, let's not fool ourselves. We have captured the state, but we don't

Richard Wolff (29:59.680)

have socialism. We have to create that. We have to move towards that.

Richard Wolff (2:00:02.880)

private enterprise and minimum government. In comes Trump, runs for office in 2016,

Richard Wolff (2:00:10.480)

is elected. What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most

Richard Wolff (2:00:19.120)

massive government intervention in the worlds of economics that we've had for decades. Nobody says

Richard Wolff (2:00:26.880)

anything. The Republicans cave and the Democrats largely too. They cave. He can throw a tariff on

Richard Wolff (2:00:38.320)

anything. He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff.

Richard Wolff (2:00:44.480)

That's not what a tariff is. It's not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman course

Richard Wolff (2:00:50.320)

in economics, which everybody knows, everybody who teaches these courses. No, it doesn't matter. He's

Richard Wolff (2:00:57.120)

still calling the shots. What is going on here is that a society has come to a point where it can't

Richard Wolff (2:01:04.400)

solve its problems and it begins what? To tap into older forms and all of the laissez faire

Lex Fridman (2:01:14.960)

and all of the individualism. And suddenly the Republican Party is gung ho. And now they're

Richard Wolff (2:01:22.560)

going to make abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do with your uterus.

Richard Wolff (2:01:29.600)

What? What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power. They're hoping

Richard Wolff (2:01:36.800)

what? Do they like the government? No. They're desperate. This is not a pro government

Lex Fridman (2:01:43.200)

and it wasn't in Russia either. They were in a desperate fix and so, and he took advantage.

Lex Fridman (2:01:52.320)

So to which degree would you say Marx's ideas led to the creation of the

Richard Wolff (2:02:03.840)

National Socialism Party of German workers, hence the Nazi Party, the fascist party in the 30s

Lex Fridman (2:02:11.280)

and the 40s at the head of whom was Hitler, which I just recently learned he was

Richard Wolff (2:02:18.720)

employee number seven of the party or whatever, the seventh person to have joined the party

Lex Fridman (2:02:23.680)

and have created one of the most consequential and powerful political parties in the history

Richard Wolff (2:02:30.080)

of the 20th century. What degree did Marx's ideas, Marxism ideas have to play? It is the National

Richard Wolff (2:02:38.000)

Socialist Party of German workers. Right. Workers. National Socialist Deutsche Arbeiter Partei,

Richard Wolff (2:02:50.080)

German Worker Party. Worker Party. National Socialist German Worker Party. So. Well here's

Lex Fridman (2:02:56.560)

the history. Did he care about the workers or did he just use the workers as a populist message?

Richard Wolff (2:03:03.280)

The only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler was provide him with his stepping stone to power,

Lex Fridman (2:03:10.960)

but had nothing, no other, he didn't know anything about it, didn't care anything about it,

Richard Wolff (2:03:14.560)

nor did the people around him. Here's the story of what happened there,

Richard Wolff (2:03:18.640)

which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history, the work that I did.

Richard Wolff (2:03:25.360)

The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German Party. It started around 1870,

Richard Wolff (2:03:32.000)

Marx was still alive. Some of his own family were leaders, Fernand Lassalle and others, his daughters.

Richard Wolff (2:03:40.960)

By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany.

Richard Wolff (2:03:45.280)

Nobody understood it. It was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution

Richard Wolff (2:03:53.840)

in 1917. Here was a political party that was now in every German city, in every German town,

Richard Wolff (2:04:00.800)

powerful and enjoying its rise up. My family is involved in this, I really do know the story.

Richard Wolff (2:04:11.040)

It meant that starting around 1906, 1907, 1908, if you wanted to have any kind of presence

Richard Wolff (2:04:23.360)

in the German working class, you had to use the word socialist. You had to, otherwise they wouldn't

Richard Wolff (2:04:29.360)

pay attention. The other parties called themselves Catholic. Germany is divided, the upper two,

Richard Wolff (2:04:36.560)

the northern two thirds is Protestant, the southern third is Catholic. Munich and Bavaria

Richard Wolff (2:04:42.000)

is Catholic and every other part of Germany basically is Protestant. You could be in the

Richard Wolff (2:04:47.600)

Catholic Party, that was the south, or you could be in various conservative, Prussian and other.

Lex Fridman (2:04:54.400)

But if you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing, in Germany

Richard Wolff (2:04:59.920)

a very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time. Germany was the major

Richard Wolff (2:05:06.640)

competitor to Britain for the empire. The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and

Richard Wolff (2:05:12.640)

US taking over from Britain's empire. So the German working class was it. So anybody who wanted

Richard Wolff (2:05:21.280)

to approach the working class in whatever way had to come to terms and be friendly to socialism.

Richard Wolff (2:05:31.200)

Other parties did this too, just like Hitler. They put the word socialist in their party,

Lex Fridman (2:05:37.680)

but they wanted to make it clear that they weren't anything to do with the Soviet Union

Richard Wolff (2:05:43.600)

or anything to do with Marxism. So they put the word national. Nazi is the first four letters

Richard Wolff (2:05:49.920)

of national, national in German, and the ZI is how you spell national in the German.

Lex Fridman (2:05:56.480)

National socialism, but definitely not communists.

Richard Wolff (2:05:58.880)

That's right. They killed communists. They fought communists in the street.

Richard Wolff (2:06:03.520)

They had pitched battles. They literally threatened each other's existence and their

Richard Wolff (2:06:09.200)

lives. And the first people that he arrested and put in jail were not Jews and gypsies and all the

Richard Wolff (2:06:15.360)

other people he eventually killed. It was communists. They were the number one, and

Richard Wolff (2:06:20.160)

socialists right behind him. Why? Because up until he takes power, January of 1933,

Lex Fridman (2:06:26.560)

that's when Hitler takes power, the last elections, two of them in 1932,

Richard Wolff (2:06:32.400)

the socialists and communists, they vote together, 50% of the vote in Germany.

Lex Fridman (2:06:36.720)

So he appealed to the German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said,

Richard Wolff (2:06:43.760)

the communists and socialists are going to win. And you're just the capitalists. You have too

Lex Fridman (2:06:50.720)

few people. You need a mass base, and I'm the only one that can do that.

Lex Fridman (2:06:56.080)

And it was just a populist message that he used.

Richard Wolff (2:06:59.520)

That's right. But it was explicitly done as a deal. The ruling group said to Hindenburg,

Richard Wolff (2:07:07.360)

the old Prussian man who was in charge of the German government at the time,

Richard Wolff (2:07:11.920)

you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise, he would never have

Richard Wolff (2:07:16.480)

done it. He had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler

Richard Wolff (2:07:22.480)

as a little funny man with a mustache who was Austrian, wasn't even German. For them,

Richard Wolff (2:07:28.720)

that mattered. So he comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism,

Lex Fridman (2:07:37.200)

which he immediately does. Only people who don't know or care about the history

Richard Wolff (2:07:44.240)

pick up on the word. It's like there are people here in the United States who like to say,

Richard Wolff (2:07:53.680)

we are not a democracy, we are a republic, which is like saying, I'm not a banana, I'm a fruit.

Richard Wolff (2:08:00.800)

You have to explain to these people, a banana is a kind of fruit. So you have to explain to people,

Richard Wolff (2:08:07.440)

yes, we're a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy as a way to govern the republic,

Richard Wolff (2:08:14.000)

because to say you're a republic doesn't imply what kind of government you have. You have to

Lex Fridman (2:08:18.080)

go through that with people so they kind of get it.

Lex Fridman (2:08:20.160)

And certain words have power beyond their actual meaning. They're used in communication,

Lex Fridman (2:08:26.560)

whether it's negative, like racist, or positive, like freedom of speech.

Richard Wolff (2:08:31.920)

RL. Or Democrat, with a D.

Lex Fridman (2:08:33.760)

RG. Yeah, and then you use that to mean something.

Lex Fridman (2:08:36.240)

RL. Who knows?

Richard Wolff (2:08:37.120)

RG. Or negative, stop Donnie, stop being a socialist, or whatever that means that's not

Richard Wolff (2:08:44.400)

even used in any kind of philosophical or economic sense. So let's fast forward to today.

Lex Fridman (2:08:50.080)

RL. Right.

Richard Wolff (2:08:50.560)

RG. You mentioned Bernie Sanders.

Lex Fridman (2:08:52.000)

RL. Right.

Richard Wolff (2:08:52.400)

RG. There's another popular figure that represents some ideas of maybe let's call it democratic

Richard Wolff (2:08:59.040)

socialism, and maybe let's try to start to sneak up on a definition of what that could

Richard Wolff (2:09:03.600)

possibly mean, but AOC, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, she's from these parts.

Lex Fridman (2:09:10.240)

RL. Yes, Queens.

Lex Fridman (2:09:11.120)

RG. So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC, are they open to some ideas in Marxism?

Lex Fridman (2:09:21.600)

Are they representing those ideas well in both the economic and the political sense?

Richard Wolff (2:09:26.560)

RL. Okay.

Lex Fridman (2:09:28.640)

RG. Where do I begin?

Richard Wolff (2:09:31.440)

RL. Yeah, the socialist movement predates Marx, was always larger than Marx, and has

Lex Fridman (2:09:39.840)

gone on to develop separately after Marx's death. So...

Richard Wolff (2:09:44.320)

RG. Can we pause on that actually? Is there a nice way to delineate, draw a line between

Richard Wolff (2:09:50.800)

Marxism and socialism? Or if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism, can you speak to like,

Lex Fridman (2:09:59.760)

maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism is?

Richard Wolff (2:10:04.720)

RL. Right. Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics, and as I said

Richard Wolff (2:10:16.080)

earlier, devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism, and that's its strength, how it does that,

Lex Fridman (2:10:29.120)

how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works. That is really the

Richard Wolff (2:10:36.640)

forte of the Marxist tradition. Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism

Richard Wolff (2:10:44.800)

figures. It's there so that people who aren't Marxists are nonetheless aware of Marxism,

Richard Wolff (2:10:52.560)

like it more or less, study it more or less. But it's a broader notion that I like to use

Richard Wolff (2:10:59.600)

this sentence to describe. It's a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism, that really

Richard Wolff (2:11:07.520)

there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the

Richard Wolff (2:11:16.800)

world think are adequate, that we are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who

Richard Wolff (2:11:23.760)

thought they could do better than slavery, and all the people who thought they could do better

Richard Wolff (2:11:27.680)

than feudalism. We've made progress. Feudalism was a progress over slavery. Capitalism was a

Richard Wolff (2:11:35.120)

progress over both of them. And progress hasn't stopped. And we are the people who, in a variety

Richard Wolff (2:11:41.840)

of ways, want the progress to go further and are not held back by believing that capitalism is

Richard Wolff (2:11:51.840)

somehow the best beyond which we cannot go or even think. We find that to be, in the worst sense of

Richard Wolff (2:11:59.680)

the word, a reactionary way of thinking. And we're that large community. Many of us are not interested

Richard Wolff (2:12:07.920)

in economics all that much. We don't think that's the focal area. We are socialists, for example,

Richard Wolff (2:12:16.080)

because we want to do something to deal with climate change. We think the world is about to

Richard Wolff (2:12:22.400)

kill itself physically, and we want to take steps with other people to stop that, to fix that, etc.,

Richard Wolff (2:12:31.600)

etc. So that's, for me, a kind of difference. It's a little difficult to say because there's no

Richard Wolff (2:12:39.440)

other figure like Marx that has an equal impact, an equal place within the broad socialist

Richard Wolff (2:12:49.520)

tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition. But that's very

Richard Wolff (2:12:58.560)

specialized, and that's a whole other kind of conversation. And whatever you say, the influence

Richard Wolff (2:13:05.520)

of the great anarchist thinkers—Kropotkin, Bakunin, Sorel, and others—still doesn't

Richard Wolff (2:13:14.160)

amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far. That could change, but I mean, up to

Lex Fridman (2:13:21.120)

this point, that's the—I think that's a way of understanding the relationship.

Richard Wolff (2:13:28.880)

Yeah, that's an interesting thing that some of the ideas within anarchism—and of course,

Richard Wolff (2:13:33.440)

it's one of the more varied disciplines because there's such, maybe by definition, such variety

Richard Wolff (2:13:41.920)

in their thinkers—but they kind of stand for a dismantling of a power center, and that,

Lex Fridman (2:13:52.560)

if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism.

Richard Wolff (2:13:56.880)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (2:14:00.080)

There's a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas

Richard Wolff (2:14:04.080)

that uses the phrase, quote, the withering away of the state. That's a quotation from Lenin.

Richard Wolff (2:14:14.880)

People should understand that's a quotation from Lenin. And it was made by Lenin. In other words,

Richard Wolff (2:14:22.000)

Lenin was saying, that's a good thing. That's something we stand for. We want to create the

Richard Wolff (2:14:28.240)

conditions under which there is a—because you remember the communists, or whatever,

Richard Wolff (2:14:34.400)

they weren't called that at first in Russia before the revolution. They were just socialists.

Richard Wolff (2:14:40.080)

They were hunted down and persecuted by the government left and right. They had no love

Richard Wolff (2:14:44.560)

for the government. The government was their literal, everyday enemy. And being critical

Richard Wolff (2:14:51.440)

of government didn't just mean this particular government, but of the whole—being a Marxist,

Richard Wolff (2:14:57.600)

you always ask the questions of the social constitution of whatever it is you're struggling

Richard Wolff (2:15:03.040)

against. So there was this interest, why is the state so important? Especially because if you

Richard Wolff (2:15:08.960)

understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism, it didn't have powerful states.

Richard Wolff (2:15:15.120)

One of Lenin's greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia, and it goes back

Richard Wolff (2:15:20.800)

centuries. It's a huge book, three or four inches thick, and I'm one of the few people who've read

Richard Wolff (2:15:26.720)

it. And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of

Richard Wolff (2:15:35.520)

feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe. The development of a powerful

Richard Wolff (2:15:41.360)

central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate to hold on, which ought to be

Richard Wolff (2:15:48.400)

suggestive that maybe the turn to powerful governments here in the United States or in Europe

Lex Fridman (2:15:54.880)

and Europe is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can't go on and has to marshal every

Richard Wolff (2:16:03.440)

last bit of power it can, not to be lost in history. It would be interesting to see what

Richard Wolff (2:16:12.160)

the Soviet Union would look like if Lenin never died. A lot of people have asked that question

Richard Wolff (2:16:18.080)

over the years, a lot of people. There's Stalin sliding in in the middle of the night,

Richard Wolff (2:16:24.080)

erasing the withering away of the state part. So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie

Richard Wolff (2:16:32.000)

Sanders, what are your thoughts about these modern political figures that represent some of these

Richard Wolff (2:16:35.840)

ideas, and they sometimes refer to those ideas as democratic socialism? The crucial thing about

Richard Wolff (2:16:41.840)

Bernie and about AOC, and this is particularly true about Bernie, because AOC is much younger

Lex Fridman (2:16:48.400)

and Bernie's an older man. Bernie, being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student,

Richard Wolff (2:16:59.280)

as an activist, and then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont as a mayor and all

Richard Wolff (2:17:05.040)

the rest. He lived through what, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America.

Lex Fridman (2:17:12.720)

And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945, 6 to the present, I mean,

Richard Wolff (2:17:19.200)

really never stopped, was a Manichean worldview. The United States is good, it defines democracy,

Lex Fridman (2:17:29.920)

and the Soviet Union is awful, it defines whatever the opposite of democracy should be called.

Richard Wolff (2:17:35.920)

Good here, evil there. It was taken so far that even among the ranks of academic individuals,

Richard Wolff (2:17:48.720)

it was impossible to have a conversation. I mean, I can't tell, just make it very personal,

Richard Wolff (2:17:56.160)

the number of times I would raise my hand in my classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale,

Lex Fridman (2:18:02.800)

and I would ask a question that had something to do with Marxism,

Lex Fridman (2:18:08.640)

because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses to teach this to me,

Richard Wolff (2:18:13.440)

except by people who trashed it, other than that, and I didn't want that.

Lex Fridman (2:18:20.160)

So I would ask a question, and I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I didn't

Richard Wolff (2:18:26.640)

much care for and those who were good teachers that I liked, fear. It was just fear. They didn't

Richard Wolff (2:18:32.640)

want to go there. They didn't want to answer my question. And after a while, I got to know some

Richard Wolff (2:18:37.920)

of them, and I found out why. Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to

Richard Wolff (2:18:42.560)

understand this. Either they would have to say, I don't know, which would be the honest truth for

Richard Wolff (2:18:47.680)

many of them, but a professor does not want to say in a classroom, I don't know, that's just

Richard Wolff (2:18:52.400)

not cool. Or they'd have to, if they knew, they'd have to say something that indicated they didn't

Richard Wolff (2:18:59.600)

know really much, and they weren't going to do that. Or they would know something, and maybe

Richard Wolff (2:19:05.360)

that would be because they were interested. They did not want the rest of the students to begin to

Richard Wolff (2:19:12.160)

say, oh, you know, Professor Smith, you know, he's interested. This is not good for your career. You

Richard Wolff (2:19:20.400)

don't know how this is going to play out. Who's going to say what to whom? And I could see in

Richard Wolff (2:19:25.520)

their faces what I later learned, because they told me, come to my office hours. We're in the

Richard Wolff (2:19:31.680)

office. We can talk about it. But that's how bad it was. Is it not still? Pretty much. In my field,

Richard Wolff (2:19:40.800)

the great so called debate, I mean, I find it boring, but the great debate for my colleagues

Richard Wolff (2:19:46.000)

is between what's called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics. Neoclassical, the

Richard Wolff (2:19:52.640)

government should stay out of the economy. Let's say fair or liberalism. And the Keynesian saying,

Richard Wolff (2:19:58.800)

no, you crazy neoclassical, if you do that, you'll have Great Depressions, and the system will

Richard Wolff (2:20:04.240)

collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems, to fix the weaknesses. And

Richard Wolff (2:20:10.880)

they hate each other, and they throw each other out of their jobs. One of the very few things that

Richard Wolff (2:20:15.600)

they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like me out. That they can find common

Richard Wolff (2:20:22.800)

ground to do. So I had to learn it all on my own. Why am I telling you this? Because this taboo means

Richard Wolff (2:20:34.000)

that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism of the post World

Richard Wolff (2:20:43.280)

War II period, the vast bulk of all of that is unknown, not just to the average American person,

Lex Fridman (2:20:52.480)

but to the average American academic, to the average American who thinks of himself or herself

Richard Wolff (2:20:58.160)

as an intellectual. I mean, I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet

Richard Wolff (2:21:05.680)

history. They have no idea. Or saying there's this man Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist, he really had

Richard Wolff (2:21:13.440)

interest in, or to explain that Gramsci was not a great literary critic. He was head of the

Richard Wolff (2:21:20.800)

Communist Party of Italy for most of his adult life. What does that mean? You like Gramsci as a

Richard Wolff (2:21:28.240)

literary critic, but they didn't even know. They don't even know. It's been erased. It's

Richard Wolff (2:21:35.440)

a little bit like stories I've heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet

Richard Wolff (2:21:41.600)

Union because he obviously fell out of favor. And so somehow all of his writings, many of which are

Richard Wolff (2:21:48.240)

very interesting and complicated, anyway. So what you're going to have in this country is a slow

Richard Wolff (2:21:56.400)

awakening of socialism from a long hibernation called the Cold War. I never expected, to be very

Richard Wolff (2:22:04.800)

honest with you, that I would live to see it. I knew it would come, because these things always do,

Lex Fridman (2:22:11.040)

but I didn't expect to see it. So I have been surprised, as have a lot of us, that when it

Richard Wolff (2:22:18.240)

starts to happen, it happens fast. So you see Bernie as an early sign of the awakening from

Richard Wolff (2:22:26.960)

the Cold War to accept the idea of socialism. Bernie was always a socialist. We all knew.

Lex Fridman (2:22:32.720)

And everybody who paid attention, he denied it. But 2016, he makes a decision, momentous,

Richard Wolff (2:22:40.240)

to run for president. He's just a senator from Vermont. Vermont is one of the smallest

Richard Wolff (2:22:46.320)

states in the Union. People who live in Vermont love to tell you that there are more cows than

Richard Wolff (2:22:51.280)

people in Vermont, et cetera, et cetera. So here from this little state, this elderly gentleman

Richard Wolff (2:22:57.920)

with a New York City accent runs for office and says, I'm a socialist. And when they attack him,

Richard Wolff (2:23:03.760)

he doesn't run away. I'm a socialist. I'm a socialist. Now, he had been. It wasn't a secret

Richard Wolff (2:23:09.920)

that suddenly got out. But the great question—and I don't mind telling you, because I went to the

Richard Wolff (2:23:15.920)

right schools. I know a lot of people. You know, Janet Yellen was my classmate at Yale,

Lex Fridman (2:23:21.680)

and stuff like that. So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party,

Lex Fridman (2:23:26.960)

and I said, well, what do you think about Bernie entering the race?

Richard Wolff (2:23:31.280)

Makes no difference. He doesn't get 1% of the vote. Right? He was wrong. They had no idea

Lex Fridman (2:23:37.600)

what was coming. But the truth is, I didn't either. It wasn't just that he didn't get it.

Richard Wolff (2:23:42.960)

I thought his 1% was probably right. So we were both wrong.

Lex Fridman (2:23:46.960)

Yeah, change can happen fast. Do you think AOC might be president one day?

Richard Wolff (2:23:51.120)

Yeah. Possible. Possible. But two things. Number one, it's fast. Number two,

Richard Wolff (2:24:02.800)

it's going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate,

Richard Wolff (2:24:12.240)

calm, nonconfrontational socialism you can imagine.

Lex Fridman (2:24:18.160)

So not AOC or Bernie.

Richard Wolff (2:24:19.680)

No, no. They are not confrontational, in my judgment.

Lex Fridman (2:24:23.280)

In terms of the ideas of socialism. I mean, they're both very feisty.

Richard Wolff (2:24:26.960)

They're feisty personally, but not ideologically.

Richard Wolff (2:24:33.280)

Bernie is also, in honest moments, and they both really are pretty honest folks,

Richard Wolff (2:24:40.560)

at least in my experience. In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that what he advocates

Richard Wolff (2:24:47.840)

as democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s. It was a kind of popular

Richard Wolff (2:24:56.480)

government, tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide a lot more support for the

Richard Wolff (2:25:02.960)

working class than you do now. That's not a fundamental change. That's what he means

Richard Wolff (2:25:08.880)

by socialism. When he talks about it and he's asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot.

Richard Wolff (2:25:15.680)

Okay, that's consistent. That's the softest kind of socialism, and that's where we're going to

Richard Wolff (2:25:23.600)

start in a country coming out of hibernation. Pretty soon, it's already happening, there'll

Richard Wolff (2:25:29.200)

be people who need and want to go further in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are

Richard Wolff (2:25:35.520)

comfortable with. You can already see the shoots of it now. AOC voted, together with most of the

Richard Wolff (2:25:43.360)

others, to support the money for Ukraine. Okay, a lot of people in the socialist movement do not

Richard Wolff (2:25:49.760)

support that. I don't know exactly how that's going to work out, but that should give people

Richard Wolff (2:25:56.880)

an idea. There are disagreements, and they're going to fester, and they're going to grow.

Lex Fridman (2:26:03.040)

So people in the socialist sphere don't support money from the United States in the large amounts

Richard Wolff (2:26:08.800)

that it is being sent to Ukraine. Is it because it's fundamentally the military, industrial

Richard Wolff (2:26:13.920)

complex is a capitalist institution kind of thing? No, there are some people for whom that's the

Richard Wolff (2:26:19.840)

issue. Then there are people for whom it's guns and butter, and why are we over there when we have

Richard Wolff (2:26:28.000)

such needs at home that are being neglected? And then there are people who, well, go back to what

Richard Wolff (2:26:34.320)

we talked about at the beginning, who are more like Lenin and Debs. This is a fight between

Richard Wolff (2:26:41.600)

Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs in Ukraine, and what are we

Richard Wolff (2:26:48.800)

doing here? We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate

Richard Wolff (2:26:55.680)

a settlement, don't kill large numbers of Ukraine. I mean, everybody's willing to fight to the last

Richard Wolff (2:27:00.400)

Ukrainian is a little strange here. What are you doing? You're supposed to be in favor of peace,

Richard Wolff (2:27:06.240)

you know, and for the United States, which just finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and

Richard Wolff (2:27:11.840)

Iraq, to be against another country invading. I mean, who in the world is going to take this

Lex Fridman (2:27:16.480)

seriously? This is crazy. You know, I invade, it's good, and you invade, it's terrible. What?

Richard Wolff (2:27:23.920)

You know, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? What's going on here? All of these

Richard Wolff (2:27:30.160)

questions are being active—by the way, not just by socialists, by lots of other people too—inside

Richard Wolff (2:27:35.680)

the Democratic Party and also inside the Republican Party. You watch that Tucker Carlson or people

Richard Wolff (2:27:42.080)

like that, they are against the stuff in Ukraine. They don't want the money spent there, they don't

Richard Wolff (2:27:47.920)

want the weapons sent there, they don't like the whole policy, and Trump wobble.

Lex Fridman (2:27:53.600)

So Mr. Biden's policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right,

Lex Fridman (2:27:58.720)

and every day that this thing lasts, these criticisms get bigger. Anyway, the point is that

Richard Wolff (2:28:05.440)

AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War

Richard Wolff (2:28:18.160)

isolation from the whole—you know, when I explain to people the contribution made, for example,

Richard Wolff (2:28:25.760)

to modern Marxism—I'll give you an example—by the French philosopher Louis Althusser. I don't

Richard Wolff (2:28:32.080)

know if the name means anything to you. Okay. He was the rector of the École Normale

Richard Wolff (2:28:38.720)

Supérieure in Paris. That's the equivalent. Imagine in this country if there were a university

Richard Wolff (2:28:45.680)

that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. It would be the university. Well, the École Normale

Richard Wolff (2:28:53.600)

in France, in Paris, is the—he was a tenured professor who became the rector. The rector is

Richard Wolff (2:29:00.800)

like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist Party most of his

Richard Wolff (2:29:06.160)

adult life. That was possible in France during the Cold War. That was unthinkable in this country.

Richard Wolff (2:29:12.240)

You could not in a million years, right? So Althusser, as a philosopher, tried to bring

Richard Wolff (2:29:21.200)

a version of postmodernism into Marxism, with enormous impact all over the world, where he

Richard Wolff (2:29:29.760)

traveled—not just in Europe, all over, right? So if you want to look him up, I'll spell it out for

Richard Wolff (2:29:35.680)

you. Sure. A.L.T.H.U.S.S.E.R. Louis. The Louis is spelled L.O.U.I.S. Louis Althusser. Look him up.

Richard Wolff (2:29:46.880)

You'll see tons of stuff. By the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember, of his works

Richard Wolff (2:29:53.200)

in English. By the way, the textbook I wrote in economics, in case you're ever interested,

Richard Wolff (2:29:59.600)

was also published by the MIT Press. And the title? Contending Economic Theories.

Richard Wolff (2:30:05.440)

Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian. That's at MIT. Marxian. Yeah, that's right. And by the way,

Richard Wolff (2:30:12.320)

when we think—I don't know if there's an interesting distinction between Marxian economics

Lex Fridman (2:30:18.160)

and Marxist—I suppose Marxism is the umbrella of everything that's— I only use it because

Richard Wolff (2:30:26.480)

Marxist I use as a noun. A person is a Marxist. Marxian I use as an adjective to qualify. But

Richard Wolff (2:30:35.200)

I don't mean some great difference. There's a last point I would like to make about

Richard Wolff (2:30:39.760)

AOC and Bernie that's also general. I'm a historian, too, and I know that the transition

Richard Wolff (2:30:49.440)

out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism was a transition that took centuries and that occurred

Richard Wolff (2:30:56.320)

in fits and starts. So, for example, a feudal manor would start to disintegrate. Serfs would

Richard Wolff (2:31:02.800)

run away. They'd run into a town. How would they live in the town? They had no land anymore because

Richard Wolff (2:31:09.040)

they had run away from the feudal manor. A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal

Richard Wolff (2:31:15.440)

understanding what they were doing. A merchant would say to one of these serfs, I'm in the

Richard Wolff (2:31:22.720)

business of buying and then reselling stuff and living off the difference, but, you know,

Richard Wolff (2:31:27.280)

I could make more money if I produce some of this stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody

Richard Wolff (2:31:33.120)

else. So I'm going to make you a deal. I'm going to give you money once a week. I'll give you

Richard Wolff (2:31:38.400)

money, what we would later call a wage, and you come here and under my supervision you make this

Richard Wolff (2:31:43.600)

crap that I'm going to then sell and this all works out. In other words, there were efforts,

Richard Wolff (2:31:51.520)

unconscious, not self aware, to go out of feudalism to a new system.

Richard Wolff (2:31:59.040)

Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. Some of them lasted weeks or months or

Richard Wolff (2:32:04.960)

years, but it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general

Richard Wolff (2:32:14.960)

switch and once that was done it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system we have

Richard Wolff (2:32:21.760)

today. That's the only model we have. So for me that's what I see when I look at socialism.

Richard Wolff (2:32:28.800)

I see the Paris Commune was an event, an attempt. It lasted a few weeks. I see Russia, that was an

Richard Wolff (2:32:38.080)

attempt, lasted 70 years. Then I see, and you know, fill in the blank, I see these are all early

Richard Wolff (2:32:44.480)

experiments. These are all you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good, the bad,

Lex Fridman (2:32:52.960)

what do you build on? How do you learn? And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition

Richard Wolff (2:32:58.640)

when it's serious, that's what it does. So in your ideas sort of capitalism was a significant

Richard Wolff (2:33:04.800)

improvement over the feudalism and we are coming to an age and over slavery and we're coming to

Richard Wolff (2:33:12.320)

an age where capitalism will die out and make, it's not that capitalism is somehow fundamentally

Richard Wolff (2:33:18.720)

broken. It's better than the things that came before but there's going to be things yet better

Lex Fridman (2:33:24.400)

and they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and socialism. Is there just to linger briefly on

Richard Wolff (2:33:32.640)

the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter. There's something called, I'm sorry if I'm using

Richard Wolff (2:33:41.600)

the terms incorrectly, but cultural Marxism. Criticisms of universities being infiltrated

Richard Wolff (2:33:51.120)

by cultural Marxists. I'm not exactly sure. I don't pay close enough attention, but it's woke.

Lex Fridman (2:34:00.560)

There's a kind of woke ideology that I'm not exactly sure. What is the fundamental text?

Richard Wolff (2:34:09.360)

Who's the Karl Marx of wokeness? All I do know is that there's certain characteristics

Richard Wolff (2:34:16.960)

of woke ideology, which is hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys.

Lex Fridman (2:34:28.160)

And basically everyone is a bad guy except the people that are very loudly nonstop saying that

Richard Wolff (2:34:35.120)

they're the good guy. And that applies for racism, for sexism, for gender politics,

Richard Wolff (2:34:47.200)

identity politics, all that kind of stuff. Is there any parallels between Marxian economics

Lex Fridman (2:34:54.960)

and Marxist ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter?

Richard Wolff (2:35:00.160)

WOLFF No, not much. One of the consequences

Richard Wolff (2:35:05.440)

of the taboo after World War II is that Marxism, like socialism and communism, become swear words.

Richard Wolff (2:35:13.120)

It's like calling somebody, well, I won't use bad language, but using a four letter word to describe

Richard Wolff (2:35:20.480)

somebody. So instead of calling them this or that, you call them a Marxist. In many circles,

Richard Wolff (2:35:26.720)

this is even worse than whatever other adjective you might have used, but it doesn't have a

Richard Wolff (2:35:32.880)

particular meaning that I can assess. The closest you get is your little list. It is somebody who is

Richard Wolff (2:35:41.680)

concerned about race and sex and sexual orientation, gender and all of those things,

Lex Fridman (2:35:50.640)

and wants there to be transgendered bathrooms. And I don't like any of these people, so I slap

Richard Wolff (2:35:59.360)

the word Marxism or the phrase cultural Marxism, because it isn't Marxism about getting more money

Richard Wolff (2:36:07.120)

or controlling the industry or all those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned

Richard Wolff (2:36:14.320)

about. So this is odd, since they don't know much about Marxism. I've always been interested

Richard Wolff (2:36:19.120)

in culture. I mean, Lukacs, the man I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that's what they're famous

Richard Wolff (2:36:25.360)

for, the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture. Gramsci writes at great

Richard Wolff (2:36:32.560)

length about the Catholic Church, about theater and painting in Italy and on and on. I mean,

Richard Wolff (2:36:40.240)

this is just ignorance talking. They don't know anything about that. They wouldn't know what the

Richard Wolff (2:36:43.680)

names are. It's a label that summarizes, kind of a shorthand, I'm against all of this. I don't

Richard Wolff (2:36:51.120)

want to be told that there's ugly racism in this country, and it always has been, or sexism, or

Richard Wolff (2:36:59.920)

phobia against gay people, whatever it is that's agitating them. Marxism or socialism,

Richard Wolff (2:37:06.480)

I mean, it's just like socialism is the post office. It is a mentality. Well, but I don't

Richard Wolff (2:37:13.760)

blame them. I mean, it's childish. It's mean spirited. But it comes out of the fact no one

Richard Wolff (2:37:20.640)

ever sat them down and said, you know, here is this tradition. It's got these kinds of things

Richard Wolff (2:37:26.800)

that people kind of share and these big differences. Look, an intelligent society,

Richard Wolff (2:37:33.280)

which this country is, could have and should have done that. It was fear and a kind of terror that

Richard Wolff (2:37:40.560)

made them behave in the way they did, and we're now seeing it. Having said that, there is such a

Richard Wolff (2:37:45.520)

thing as cultural Marxism. What that is is simply those Marxists who devoted themselves to analyzing

Lex Fridman (2:37:58.320)

how it is that a particular culture is, on the one hand, shaped by capitalism and, on the other hand,

Richard Wolff (2:38:07.600)

it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow. In other words, how do we analyze the

Richard Wolff (2:38:14.560)

interaction between the class struggle on the job and attitude towards sexuality, or movements in

Richard Wolff (2:38:24.880)

music, or whatever else culture. And there are Georg Lukács, this Hungarian, great name in there,

Richard Wolff (2:38:32.400)

the greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci. And a modern name, just died a couple years ago,

Richard Wolff (2:38:38.640)

a British intellectual named Stuart Hall, H A L L. If I were teaching, which I have done,

Richard Wolff (2:38:46.480)

a course in cultural Marxism, those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you

Richard Wolff (2:38:55.280)

articles and books to read of their stuff, because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many

Richard Wolff (2:39:02.560)

others. So there is something to be said and understood about the kind of culture that

Richard Wolff (2:39:07.040)

capitalism creates and the kind of culture that enables capitalism. Yes, and Marxists are

Richard Wolff (2:39:13.360)

particularly those who like to look at that interaction. In other words, they are interested

Richard Wolff (2:39:18.320)

in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism. There is another name, I

Richard Wolff (2:39:24.080)

forgot. Stuart Hall is British, Gramsci is Italian, Lukács is Hungarian. The German is Walter Benjamin,

Richard Wolff (2:39:34.720)

B E N J A M I N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school of Marxism that

Richard Wolff (2:39:44.240)

developed in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people, many of whom were interested in

Richard Wolff (2:39:49.600)

cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against the narrow Marxism that was so focused on

Richard Wolff (2:39:56.560)

economics and politics. There were people who said, you're leaving out very important parts

Richard Wolff (2:40:02.080)

of modern society that are shaping the economy as much as they are shaped by it. And it was that

Richard Wolff (2:40:08.480)

impetus to open Marxism to be more inclusive in what it deemed to be important to understand

Richard Wolff (2:40:15.680)

that this cult, and they call themselves cultural Marxists, but they had a completely different

Lex Fridman (2:40:20.560)

meaning from this. This is just, you know, just bad mouthing, that's all.

Richard Wolff (2:40:27.120)

LW Let me ask a more personal question. So for most of the 20th century, no not most,

Lex Fridman (2:40:33.600)

but a large many decades in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War and before,

Richard Wolff (2:40:39.840)

being a Marxist is one of the worst things you could be. Have you had dark periods in your own

Richard Wolff (2:40:46.800)

life where you've gone to some dark places in your mind where it was difficult, like self doubt,

Richard Wolff (2:40:54.400)

difficult to know, like what the hell am I doing? When you're surrounded by colleagues and people,

Richard Wolff (2:41:00.400)

you said prestigious universities, both personal interest of career, but also as a human being,

Richard Wolff (2:41:06.480)

when everybody, you know, kind of looks at you funny because you're studying this thing. Did

Lex Fridman (2:41:14.400)

that ever get you real low?

Richard Wolff (2:41:16.160)

RL No. I know people who had exactly what you said. I mean, your question's perfectly reasonable.

Lex Fridman (2:41:21.680)

If I were you, I'd be asking me that question too.

Lex Fridman (2:41:23.920)

LW And what's wrong with you?

Richard Wolff (2:41:26.400)

RL Nothing wrong with the question. And here's the honest truth. I don't know how anomalous I am. I

Richard Wolff (2:41:33.440)

really don't. But the truth is, no. I have, if my wife was sitting here, she'd tell you what she

Richard Wolff (2:41:41.360)

tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true. But then again,

Richard Wolff (2:41:47.760)

luck never is the only explanation for things. That's part of it. What can I say? I didn't choose

Richard Wolff (2:41:58.320)

the time of my birth. I didn't choose the communities in which I grew up or the schools I

Richard Wolff (2:42:03.440)

attended or anything else.

Richard Wolff (2:42:04.800)

RL No, but the fact that there was no courses or extensive courses on Marxian economics.

Richard Wolff (2:42:09.440)

RL But you know, again, I'm Hegel. On the one hand, I was denied good instruction.

Richard Wolff (2:42:14.880)

On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own. And the motivation when you do that is

Richard Wolff (2:42:21.600)

very different. I'm not the student who sits there with my notebook, taking notes of what the great

Richard Wolff (2:42:27.520)

professor says and reading the text and getting ready for the exam. I don't have an exam. I'm

Richard Wolff (2:42:35.440)

doing something slightly risque, you know, kind of romantically different and oppositional. I was

Richard Wolff (2:42:45.520)

able to find always one or two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation,

Richard Wolff (2:42:52.960)

other students who felt enough similar to me that we could get together and read these books and

Richard Wolff (2:42:59.440)

talk about them. I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me

Richard Wolff (2:43:06.960)

of their time and their effort to teach me along the way. And I've had the benefit that because I

Richard Wolff (2:43:14.560)

went to all these fancy schools, I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture.

Lex Fridman (2:43:21.920)

And when I have been put in difficult positions, I often wave my pedicure at them and say,

Richard Wolff (2:43:27.840)

I often wave my pedigree and it works like garlic with the devil. They back away. They back away.

Richard Wolff (2:43:35.600)

Because Americans are very deferential to that kind of academic prestige.

Lex Fridman (2:43:40.480)

But there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken by this. You

Richard Wolff (2:43:46.160)

have just naturally somebody who just has perseverance.

Richard Wolff (2:43:53.600)

WOLFF Well, I would put it, I understand what you're saying, but I would put it a little

Richard Wolff (2:43:57.440)

differently. I think capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system and nothing

Richard Wolff (2:44:08.080)

has happened to change my mind. In other words, the development just kept giving me more and more

Richard Wolff (2:44:20.640)

evidence. And I must say over the last 10 years, what's really changed? The last 10 years. I mean,

Richard Wolff (2:44:30.000)

I can't describe to you how big that change is. And that may be more important than anything else

Richard Wolff (2:44:35.040)

we've discussed. Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television or

Richard Wolff (2:44:44.160)

a radio thing or give a talk at some conference or something. Once every two or three months,

Richard Wolff (2:44:52.080)

I'd be invited and I would do it, like academics often do. I now do two to three to four

Richard Wolff (2:44:59.280)

interviews every day. So, there's a hunger. How is there hunger? And I want to be honest with you.

Richard Wolff (2:45:09.680)

WOLFF As I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause

Richard Wolff (2:45:16.160)

from the podium that I lean into the microphone and I say, with as much smile as I can get,

Richard Wolff (2:45:23.200)

I'm having the time of my life. And that's the truth. That's the truth. I never expected, look,

Richard Wolff (2:45:32.320)

I'm used to teaching a classroom, a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or 10

Richard Wolff (2:45:37.200)

students or a regular undergraduate class with 30 or an occasional introductory course

Richard Wolff (2:45:44.080)

with a few hundred. I've done all of those things many times. But an audience, you know,

Richard Wolff (2:45:52.800)

that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that, no, that's new.

Richard Wolff (2:45:58.080)

LESTER Is there advice you can give, given your bold and nonstandard career and life, advice you

Richard Wolff (2:46:07.600)

can give to high school students, college students about how to have a career like that, or maybe

Lex Fridman (2:46:14.160)

how to have a career or a life they can be proud of? WOLFF Yeah. First of all, my advice is go for

Richard Wolff (2:46:24.640)

it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely better than they were when I had to do it.

Lex Fridman (2:46:32.400)

And I could do it and I'm happy I did it. Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made

Richard Wolff (2:46:40.800)

that I've never regretted. And I've never regretted being a critic of this society,

Richard Wolff (2:46:48.800)

ever. I find it edifying. I find it, I mean, the gratitude people express to me for helping them

Lex Fridman (2:46:58.880)

see kind of what's going on is unbelievably encouraging. I mean, what can I tell you?

Richard Wolff (2:47:04.400)

LESTER So that fills you, that fills you with joy. Pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes

Richard Wolff (2:47:08.720)

fills you. That's a life not just important. WOLFF And you know why? It's because most of the people

Richard Wolff (2:47:14.720)

who say something like that to me are people who, if they had the vocabulary, and some of them do,

Richard Wolff (2:47:21.920)

would say, you know, I thought I was seeing through that outfit that I was wearing. I thought

Richard Wolff (2:47:28.800)

it and they did. And all they needed was a little extra this information or that factoid or this

Richard Wolff (2:47:36.480)

logic. And they have that. And I remember having that too. When I had a teacher who made something

Richard Wolff (2:47:43.920)

clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude. And now I get that gratitude a good bit.

Lex Fridman (2:47:50.640)

And yes, it is enormously gratifying. And I'm not sure I could get it any other way.

Richard Wolff (2:48:00.400)

I have learned and I'm walking proof that being a critic of society and doing it systematically

Lex Fridman (2:48:09.040)

and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life. A very good life.

Richard Wolff (2:48:15.360)

LESTER Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes to an end.

Lex Fridman (2:48:25.040)

Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?

Richard Wolff (2:48:27.680)

WOLFF Afraid of it? No. Think about it? Yes. Yes. I'm not afraid. I've always thought,

Richard Wolff (2:48:36.400)

you know, death is hard for the people that are left when you're dead. It's not going to bother

Richard Wolff (2:48:41.360)

you very much. So I worry more about my wife. I'm very attached to my wife. I might mention to you,

Richard Wolff (2:48:49.200)

I got married when I was 23 years old. That's my wife to this day. So I'm lucky because if you get

Richard Wolff (2:48:58.800)

married to anybody in age 23, it's either luck or it isn't. LESTER What role has love played

Richard Wolff (2:49:07.840)

in your life? WOLFF Enormous.

Richard Wolff (2:49:11.360)

Because I came from a family, you know, if your family is political refugees, which mine were,

Richard Wolff (2:49:17.280)

who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another continent, learn another language,

Richard Wolff (2:49:24.240)

find another life, income and job. The disruption goes real deep for any refugee. So my mother and

Richard Wolff (2:49:35.200)

father were both refugees. They met as refugees. So I had to, in a way, make it up to them. I had

Richard Wolff (2:49:48.240)

to be, I was the first child of their younger sister, but the first child. And, you know,

Richard Wolff (2:49:56.560)

there's a lot of psychological pressure on you if you're in that situation. Nobody means you harm,

Lex Fridman (2:50:02.320)

but you've got to do what they couldn't, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do.

Richard Wolff (2:50:10.640)

It's the closest they're going to get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university

Richard Wolff (2:50:17.200)

students. My father was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life.

Lex Fridman (2:50:26.640)

So I had to perform. You know, I went to high school here in the United States. I had to get

Richard Wolff (2:50:32.400)

all A's. I had to be on the football team. I had to play the violin in the orchestra. I had to

Richard Wolff (2:50:36.720)

do all these because everything had to be achieved. So I'm an achievement crazy person that

Richard Wolff (2:50:44.480)

way. But that's functional in this dysfunctional society. But on top of that, that's an achievement

Richard Wolff (2:50:52.320)

within the game of this particular society. But then love seems to be a thing that's greater

Richard Wolff (2:50:58.800)

than that game. Is that something that made you a better person? Oh, God, yes. How is it

Richard Wolff (2:51:04.320)

made you a better Marxian and a better human? Everything. Because my wife, by profession,

Richard Wolff (2:51:10.160)

is a psychotherapist. Excellent. I love it. And I needed it. And so I married it. I didn't know

Lex Fridman (2:51:17.840)

what I was doing at the time, but I think as I look back on it, that was more than a little what

Richard Wolff (2:51:24.400)

was going on. And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my

Richard Wolff (2:51:32.560)

family never talked about, never dealt with, never at least explicitly engaged in any of that.

Richard Wolff (2:51:42.480)

Because it was all about survival. The immigrant challenge is survival. Survive. And you're so busy

Richard Wolff (2:51:50.320)

that you tell yourself you can't do that. Of course you can. And there are other reasons

Lex Fridman (2:51:55.280)

why you're not going to look at those problems. But the survival is so urgent that you can fool

Richard Wolff (2:52:01.280)

yourself this way. And my parents did that. One last question. What's the meaning of life,

Richard Wolff (2:52:08.880)

Richard Wolff? Why are we here? I will quote you, Mr. Marx. Let's go. Life is struggle. And for me,

Richard Wolff (2:52:20.400)

I have found that to be true. That the struggle, whether it is to build a relationship with your

Richard Wolff (2:52:29.920)

child, I have two children, whether it's to build one with your spouse, whether it's to understand

Richard Wolff (2:52:36.880)

a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this

Richard Wolff (2:52:44.800)

relationship to a student or to an audience. It's a struggle to do all those things. But that

Richard Wolff (2:52:53.440)

network of struggles, that makes life interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.

Lex Fridman (2:53:02.640)

And meaningful.

Richard Wolff (2:53:04.000)

Very meaningful.

Lex Fridman (2:53:05.040)

And that latter thing, I got to say, you do masterfully. You're one of the great communicators

Lex Fridman (2:53:09.520)

and educators out there today. And it's a huge honor that you would sit with me for so many hours.

Lex Fridman (2:53:14.640)

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Richard Wolff (2:53:15.440)

This is awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolff.

Lex Fridman (2:53:19.680)

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

Lex Fridman (2:53:24.240)

And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.

Richard Wolff (2:53:28.240)

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Richard Wolff (2:53:35.760)

Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Richard Wolff (30:06.880)

With Stalin, you know, Lenin dies, and there's a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky

Richard Wolff (30:12.240)

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

Richard Wolff (30:18.000)

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

Richard Wolff (30:27.120)

decision. I mean, not that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that

Richard Wolff (30:32.560)

they do the following. They declare that they are socialism. In other words, socialism becomes

Richard Wolff (30:41.840)

when you capture the state. Not when the state capture has enabled you to do X, Y, Z, other

Richard Wolff (30:49.600)

things. No, no. The state itself, once you have it, is socialism. So when a socialist

Richard Wolff (30:57.600)

captures the state, that's socialism. Exactly. That's exactly right. I feel like that's

Richard Wolff (31:04.960)

definitionally confusing. Well, it shouldn't be, because I'll give you an example. If

Lex Fridman (31:10.160)

you go to many parts of the United States today, and you ask people, what's socialism?

Richard Wolff (31:16.160)

They'll look you right in the face and they'll say, the post office. When I first heard this

Richard Wolff (31:23.360)

as a young man, I go, what? The post office. It took me a while to understand. The post

Richard Wolff (31:30.080)

office, Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government

Richard Wolff (31:36.960)

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

Richard Wolff (31:45.840)

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

Richard Wolff (31:52.000)

If the government takes it, then it's socialism. So what is wrong with that reasoning? So the

Richard Wolff (31:58.880)

idea, I think... There's nothing wrong with it's a way of looking at the world. It's just

Richard Wolff (32:04.160)

got nothing to do with Marx. Well, there's Marx, there's Marxism. Let's try to pull

Richard Wolff (32:09.280)

this apart. So what role does central planning have in Marxism? So Marxism is concerned with

Richard Wolff (32:22.320)

this class struggle, with respecting the working class. What is the connection between that

Richard Wolff (32:31.760)

struggle and central planning that is often... Central planning is often associated with

Richard Wolff (32:36.800)

Marxism. Right. So a centralized power doing... Russia did that. Allocation. So that has to

Richard Wolff (32:44.000)

do with a very specific set of implementations initiated by the Soviet Union. Has nothing

Richard Wolff (32:49.600)

to do with Marx. How else can you do... I don't think you can find anywhere in Marx's

Richard Wolff (32:54.960)

writing anything about central planning or any other kind of planning. Again, fundamentally

Richard Wolff (33:00.880)

then, Marx's work, it has to do with factories, with workers, with the bourgeoisie, and the

Richard Wolff (33:14.480)

exploitation of the working class. Exactly. You still have to take that leap. What is

Richard Wolff (33:20.080)

beyond capitalism? Right. So maybe we should turn to that, focus on that. Yes. Okay. We've

Richard Wolff (33:28.000)

already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism. How else can we go

Richard Wolff (33:34.240)

beyond capitalism? Right. Let me push a little further. They didn't succeed in my judgment

Richard Wolff (33:40.000)

as a Marxist. And I'm now gonna tell you why they didn't succeed, because they didn't understand

Richard Wolff (33:46.880)

as well as they could have or should have what Marxist was trying to do. I think I would

Richard Wolff (33:52.160)

have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circumstances. This is not

Richard Wolff (33:55.360)

a critique of them, but it's a different way of understanding what's going on. All right.

Lex Fridman (34:01.120)

So give you an example. Most of my adult life I have taught Marxian economics. I'm a professor

Richard Wolff (34:09.840)

of economics. I've been that all my life. I'm a graduate of American universities. As

Richard Wolff (34:16.720)

it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities.

Richard Wolff (34:22.640)

That's another conversation you and I can have. So I went to Harvard, then I went to

Richard Wolff (34:29.440)

Stanford, and I finished at Yale. I'm like a poster boy for elite education. They tried

Richard Wolff (34:35.600)

very hard. By the way, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League, 20 semesters, one

Richard Wolff (34:42.160)

after the other, no break. In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned a word about Marxism

Richard Wolff (34:51.280)

that is no critique of capitalism was offered to me ever with one except one professor in

Richard Wolff (34:59.200)

Stanford in the one semester I studied with him, he gave me plenty to read, but nobody

Richard Wolff (35:05.360)

else. So that's really interesting. You've mentioned that in the past, and that's very

Richard Wolff (35:09.520)

true, which makes you a very interesting figure to hold your ground intellectually through

Richard Wolff (35:18.560)

this idea space where just people don't really even talk about it. Perhaps we can discuss

Richard Wolff (35:25.600)

historically why that is, but nevertheless, that's the case. So Marxian economics, did

Richard Wolff (35:31.360)

Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of...

Richard Wolff (35:36.080)

Dismissal. The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal. To give

Richard Wolff (35:42.160)

you an example, the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many

Richard Wolff (35:48.000)

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

Richard Wolff (35:54.800)

at MIT named Paul Samuelson, and a whole generation or two were trained on his textbook.

Richard Wolff (36:03.200)

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

Richard Wolff (36:10.480)

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

Richard Wolff (36:16.240)

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

Richard Wolff (36:22.480)

bourgeois. And then there's this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of

Richard Wolff (36:27.760)

starts heading back down. That's Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete

Richard Wolff (36:33.040)

because he's not a complete faker, but beyond that, no, there was no. Nothing in the book

Richard Wolff (36:38.720)

gives you two paragraphs of an approach. But that's Cold War. I mean, that's really neither

Richard Wolff (36:47.520)

here. That's the craziness. Yeah, that's the Cold War in this country. My professors

Richard Wolff (36:52.080)

were afraid. Anyway, let me get to the core of it, what I think will help. Marx was interested

Richard Wolff (36:59.280)

in the relationship of people in the process of production. He's interested in the factory,

Richard Wolff (37:05.680)

the office, the store, what goes on, and by that he means what are the relationships among

Richard Wolff (37:12.800)

the people that come together in a workplace. And what he analyzes is that there is something

Richard Wolff (37:22.320)

going on there that has not been adequately understood and that has not been adequately

Richard Wolff (37:31.760)

addressed as an object needing transformation. And what does he mean? The answer is exploitation,

Richard Wolff (37:40.560)

which he defines mathematically in the following way. Whenever in a society, any society,

Richard Wolff (37:48.800)

you organize people, adults, not the children, not the sick, but, you know, healthy adults,

Richard Wolff (37:54.960)

in the following way, a big block of them, a clear majority, work. That is, they use their

Richard Wolff (38:03.120)

brains and their muscles to transform nature. A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater,

Richard Wolff (38:09.920)

whatever. In every human community, Marx argues, there are the people who do that work,

Lex Fridman (38:16.400)

but they always produce more chairs, more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume,

Richard Wolff (38:25.120)

whatever their standard of living. Doesn't have to be low, can be medium, can be high,

Lex Fridman (38:29.680)

but they always produce more than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx, when he

Richard Wolff (38:38.200)

writes this, uses the German word mehr, m e h r, which is the English equivalent of more. It's the

Richard Wolff (38:44.960)

more. That more got badly translated into the word surplus. Shouldn't have been, but it was. By the

Richard Wolff (38:54.720)

way, by German and English people doing the translations. What's the difference between

Richard Wolff (38:59.360)

more and surplus? Is there a nuanced? Yeah, because surplus has a notion of its discretionary,

Richard Wolff (39:06.080)

it's sort of extra. He's not making a judgment that it's extra. It's a simple math equation.

Richard Wolff (39:12.480)

Yes, very simple. One minus the other. Yes, x minus y. That's right. x is the total output,

Richard Wolff (39:20.400)

y is the consumption by the producer, therefore x minus y equals s, the surplus. Exactly. Now, Marx

Lex Fridman (39:29.200)

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

Richard Wolff (39:38.400)

Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it? And Marx's answer

Richard Wolff (39:47.560)

is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society. How is that organized? For example,

Richard Wolff (39:54.800)

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

Richard Wolff (40:03.440)

their social role? For example, here we go now, if you get this and you get the core of it anyway,

Lex Fridman (40:10.640)

and I don't charge much, the workers themselves could get it. The workers themselves could get

Richard Wolff (40:20.480)

it. That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism. Communism would be if the workers

Richard Wolff (40:28.960)

who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it. So this has to do not just with who gets

Richard Wolff (40:38.160)

it, but more importantly, who gets to decide who gets it. Well, who gets it and who gets to decide

Lex Fridman (40:43.840)

what to do with it. Right. Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it.

Lex Fridman (40:49.440)

So this is the logic of the word sequence. It's produced. Marx uses the word appropriated. In

Richard Wolff (40:57.920)

other words, whose property, who gets to decide, if you like, what happens. All that property ever

Richard Wolff (41:04.400)

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

Lex Fridman (41:10.160)

Right. By the way, it's not just clean. This is the only one.

Lex Fridman (41:14.880)

So can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context?

Richard Wolff (41:20.080)

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

Richard Wolff (41:27.600)

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

Richard Wolff (41:34.480)

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

Richard Wolff (41:42.000)

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

Richard Wolff (41:52.000)

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

Richard Wolff (42:01.920)

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

Richard Wolff (42:10.320)

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

Richard Wolff (42:18.240)

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

Richard Wolff (42:23.440)

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

Richard Wolff (42:29.440)

comes by. Dingalingalingaling, your children see the ice cream. Daddy, get me an ice cream. So you

Richard Wolff (42:35.600)

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

Richard Wolff (42:41.520)

children. The other one begins to scream and yell and howl, obviously. What's the issue? And you

Richard Wolff (42:49.040)

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

Richard Wolff (42:55.520)

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

Richard Wolff (43:01.440)

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

Lex Fridman (43:08.480)

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

Richard Wolff (43:17.040)

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

Richard Wolff (43:25.520)

giving the ice cream cone back to the kid. You should never do this in the first place.

Lex Fridman (43:30.560)

LW. The reallocation of resources creates bitterness in the populace.

Richard Wolff (43:34.080)

RL. Look at Arva. This country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my

Richard Wolff (43:39.920)

life, and I've lived here all my life, and I've worked here all my life. It's tearing itself

Richard Wolff (43:45.360)

apart, and it's tearing itself apart basically over the redivision, the redistribution of wealth,

Richard Wolff (43:53.520)

having so badly distributed in the first place. But that's all in Marx. And notice as I explain

Richard Wolff (43:59.840)

to you what is going on in this tension filled production scene in the office, the factory,

Richard Wolff (44:06.000)

the store. I don't have to say a word about the government. I'm not interested in the government.

Richard Wolff (44:10.640)

The government's really a very secondary matter to this core question. And here comes the big point.

Lex Fridman (44:18.400)

If you make a revolution and all you do is remove the private exploiter

Lex Fridman (44:25.520)

and substitute a government official without changing the relationship,

Lex Fridman (44:32.640)

you can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you're not getting the point

Richard Wolff (44:36.560)

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

Richard Wolff (44:43.360)

You've got to change the organization of the workplace so there isn't a group that makes all

Richard Wolff (44:49.040)

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

Richard Wolff (44:55.120)

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

Lex Fridman (45:01.760)

but you'll so misunderstand it that the Germans again have a phrase,

Richard Wolff (45:06.880)

es geht schief. It goes crooked. It doesn't go right. The project gets off the rails because

Richard Wolff (45:14.800)

it can't understand either what its objective should have been, and therefore it doesn't

Richard Wolff (45:19.600)

understand how and why it's missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped

Richard Wolff (45:25.760)

for. I mean there's a lot of fascinating questions here. So one is to what degree,

Lex Fridman (45:33.520)

so there's human nature, to what degree does communism, a lack of exploitation of the working

Richard Wolff (45:42.160)

class naturally emerge? If you leave two people together in a room and come back a year later,

Richard Wolff (45:48.960)

if you leave five people together in a room, if you leave a hundred people and a thousand people,

Richard Wolff (45:54.480)

it seems that humans form hierarchies naturally. So the clever, the charismatic,

Richard Wolff (46:02.560)

the sexy, the muscular, the powerful, however you define that, starts becoming a leader and start to

Richard Wolff (46:11.360)

do maybe exploitation in a nonnegative sense, a more generic sense, starts to become an employer,

Richard Wolff (46:20.960)

not in a capitalist sense, but just as a human. Here, you go do this, and in exchange I will give

Richard Wolff (46:25.520)

you this. Just becomes the leadership role, right? So the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice,

Lex Fridman (46:33.200)

the idea sort of of communism would be nice to not steal from the world.

Richard Wolff (46:37.680)

Nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice because of human nature.

Richard Wolff (46:41.680)

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

Richard Wolff (46:48.320)

to achieve some of these ends? There's so many ways of responding,

Richard Wolff (46:53.280)

in no particular order. Here are some of them. The history of the human race, as best I can tell,

Richard Wolff (47:01.600)

is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society, arise,

Lex Fridman (47:13.360)

and as they do, they rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they are socially

Richard Wolff (47:22.160)

disruptive and unacceptable. The argument isn't really then, is there a need or an instinct,

Richard Wolff (47:30.160)

is there some human nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is,

Richard Wolff (47:36.560)

this has to be repressed or else we don't have a society. And Freud helps us to understand

Richard Wolff (47:43.520)

that that repression is going on all the time and it has consequences. It's not a finished project,

Richard Wolff (47:49.920)

you repress it, it's gone, it doesn't work like that. So for example, when you get a bunch of

Richard Wolff (47:56.160)

people together at some point, they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to

Richard Wolff (48:02.880)

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

Richard Wolff (48:11.040)

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

Richard Wolff (48:21.600)

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

Richard Wolff (48:29.920)

effort to go beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you

Richard Wolff (48:37.040)

endless documents of every tribal society I've ever studied, every anthropological community that

Richard Wolff (48:44.160)

has ever been studied, slavery wherever it's existed. I can show you endless documents in

Richard Wolff (48:50.400)

which the defenders of those systems, not all of them of course, but many defenders used that

Richard Wolff (48:56.800)

argument. To naturalize a system is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going,

Richard Wolff (49:04.400)

to counter the argument that every system is born, every system evolves, and then every system dies.

Lex Fridman (49:12.240)

And therefore capitalism, since it was born and since it's been developing, we all know what the

Richard Wolff (49:19.360)

next stage of capitalism is. The burden is on the people who think it isn't going to die.

Richard Wolff (49:26.800)

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

Richard Wolff (49:31.840)

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

Richard Wolff (49:36.720)

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

Richard Wolff (49:42.160)

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

Richard Wolff (49:50.080)

the argument that sort of the employer, the capitalist takes on risk versus the employee

Richard Wolff (50:01.120)

who's just there doing the labor? The capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk. Are they not

Lex Fridman (50:10.000)

in sort of aggregating this organization and taking this giant effort, hiring a lot of people?

Richard Wolff (50:15.040)

Aren't they taking on risk that this is going to be a giant failure? So first of all, there's risk

Richard Wolff (50:22.000)

almost in everything you undertake. Any project that begins now and ends in the future takes a

Richard Wolff (50:28.400)

risk that between now and that future something's going to happen that makes it not work out. I mean,

Richard Wolff (50:34.880)

I got into a cab before I came here today. In order to do this with you, I took a risk. The cab

Richard Wolff (50:42.080)

could have been in an accident. The lightning could have hit us. A bear could have eaten my

Richard Wolff (50:46.400)

left foot. Who the hell knows? But shouldn't I reward you for the risk you took? No, hold it

Richard Wolff (50:51.200)

a second. Let's do this step by step. So everybody's taking a risk. I always found it wonderful.

Richard Wolff (50:57.040)

You talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk. Let's go with

Richard Wolff (51:03.040)

the worker, with the capitalist. That worker, he moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to

Richard Wolff (51:12.160)

take that job. He made a decision to have children. They are teenagers. They're now in school at a

Richard Wolff (51:20.400)

time when their friendships are crucial to their development. You're going to yank them out of the

Richard Wolff (51:25.440)

school because his job is gone. He took an enormous risk to do that job every day, to forestall all

Richard Wolff (51:35.200)

the other things he could have done. He was taking a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next

Richard Wolff (51:41.920)

month, next year. He bought a house, which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's

Richard Wolff (51:48.720)

now stuck. He has to make a monthly payment. If you make a mistake, you capitalist. He's the one

Richard Wolff (51:57.120)

who's going to, you're a capitalist. You got a lot of money. Otherwise, you wouldn't be in that

Richard Wolff (52:00.480)

position. You've got a cushion. He doesn't. If you investigate, you'll see that in every business

Richard Wolff (52:08.400)

I've ever been in. I've been involved in a lot of them. So you think it's possible to actually

Richard Wolff (52:11.920)

measure risk or is your basic argument is there's risk involved in a lot of both the working class

Lex Fridman (52:17.360)

and the bourgeoisie, the capitalists. That's right. And the worker would never come and say,

Richard Wolff (52:23.760)

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

Lex Fridman (52:32.560)

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

Richard Wolff (52:39.200)

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

Richard Wolff (52:44.640)

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

Richard Wolff (52:50.720)

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

Richard Wolff (52:57.680)

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

Richard Wolff (53:05.760)

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

Richard Wolff (53:13.520)

of capitalism between the ugliness, the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one hand and the wage.

Richard Wolff (53:21.120)

Let me give you just a couple of examples. This is my job. This is my life, what I do.

Richard Wolff (53:26.880)

The median income of a child care worker in the United States right now, as we speak,

Richard Wolff (53:33.520)

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

Richard Wolff (53:46.480)

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

Richard Wolff (53:53.440)

car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it. Maybe he parks it and he moves it

Lex Fridman (54:02.080)

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

Richard Wolff (54:08.800)

sense, being in charge of toddlers, two, three, four year olds who are at the key moment of

Richard Wolff (54:16.320)

mental formation the first five years, to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who

Richard Wolff (54:23.200)

watches your car. Come on, I know how to explain it. Gender explains all kinds of issues that the

Richard Wolff (54:31.120)

car park people are males and the day the child care people are females. And that in our culture

Richard Wolff (54:37.360)

is a very big marker of what, but the one who said only the economics professor, nobody else

Richard Wolff (54:45.600)

says this stuff because in economics, I don't know if you were familiar with our profession, but

Richard Wolff (54:50.160)

we have something which we call marginal product. This is a fantasy. I was a mathematician. Before

Richard Wolff (54:58.320)

I became an economist, I loved mathematics. I specialized in mathematics. So I know mathematics

Richard Wolff (55:05.040)

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

Lex Fridman (55:13.840)

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

Richard Wolff (55:22.480)

of a factor of production, like a worker. In the textbook when it's taught, I've taught this stuff.

Richard Wolff (55:30.240)

I hold my nose, but I teach it. Then I explain to students what I've just taught you is

Lex Fridman (55:35.040)

horse shit, but first I teach it. What is the marginal product if it might be useful?

Richard Wolff (55:39.360)

The notion is if you take away one worker right now from the pile, what will be the diminution

Richard Wolff (55:46.320)

of the output? That's the marginal product of that worker measured by the amount of the output

Richard Wolff (55:54.240)

that diminishes output of the raw product of the product. Usually in real terms or physical,

Richard Wolff (56:01.280)

not the value. You could do a value, but it's really more the physical you're at.

Richard Wolff (56:05.360)

I mean, there is a transformation thing. I'd love to talk to you about value. It's so interesting.

Lex Fridman (56:11.840)

What is value? I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that,

Lex Fridman (56:16.800)

but I just want to get to this. Hegel, who was Marx's teacher, has a famous line.

Richard Wolff (56:23.680)

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

Richard Wolff (56:30.400)

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

Richard Wolff (56:34.560)

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

Richard Wolff (56:39.440)

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

Lex Fridman (56:44.960)

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

Lex Fridman (56:49.840)

mathematical calculation of the effect that it has on the output.

Richard Wolff (56:52.480)

That's right, because too many other things are going on, too many things are changing,

Lex Fridman (56:57.200)

and you cannot assume, much as you want to, that the outcome on the output side is uniquely

Richard Wolff (57:05.600)

determined by the change you made on the input side. You can't do that.

Lex Fridman (57:10.160)

Even in the average, it's not going to work out.

Richard Wolff (57:14.000)

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

Richard Wolff (57:20.640)

keteris paribus, everything else held constant, but you have to know what you just did. You know

Lex Fridman (57:27.360)

why you do that? Because you can't do that in the real world. That's not possible. You better

Richard Wolff (57:31.840)

account for that, otherwise you're mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted

Richard Wolff (57:39.280)

from to get the abstraction. As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiment

Richard Wolff (57:46.240)

or an actual experiment of removing every single economist from the world, would we be better off

Richard Wolff (57:51.360)

or worse off? Much better off. Okay. Economics, and I'm one, you know, I'm talking about myself.

Lex Fridman (57:57.920)

We're going to ship all the economists to Mars and see how well it works off.

Richard Wolff (58:03.920)

The serious part of this is that economics, it's really about capitalism. Economics as a

Richard Wolff (58:12.640)

discipline is born with capital. There was no such thing. I teach courses at the university,

Richard Wolff (58:18.080)

for example, called History of Economic Thought. I begin the students with Aristotle and Plato.

Lex Fridman (58:24.480)

And I say, you know, they talked about really interesting things, but they never called it

Richard Wolff (58:30.000)

economics. It made no sense to people to abstract something as central to daily life as economics

Richard Wolff (58:40.400)

broadly defined. It made no sense. That's a creation much, much later. That's capitalism

Richard Wolff (58:46.400)

that did that, created the field. So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them

Richard Wolff (58:52.000)

particular passages. By the way, footnote, because your audience will like it. Plato and Aristotle

Richard Wolff (58:58.960)

talked about markets because they lived at a time in ancient Greece when market relations were

Richard Wolff (59:04.880)

beginning to intrude upon these societies. So they were both interested in this phenomena,

Richard Wolff (59:12.720)

that we're not just producing goods and then distributing among us. We're doing it in a quid

Richard Wolff (59:18.160)

pro quo. You know, I'll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange.

Lex Fridman (59:23.440)

And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason,

Richard Wolff (59:29.920)

they destroy social cohesion. They destroy community. They make some people rich and

Richard Wolff (59:36.240)

other people poor, and they set us against each other, and it's terrible. And here's what

Richard Wolff (59:41.360)

that they agreed on that. Here's what they disagreed on. One of them said, okay, there

Richard Wolff (59:46.720)

can be no markets. That was Plato. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no, too late for

Richard Wolff (59:53.920)

that. The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in