Marxism (with Dr. Richard Wolff)

Hey everybody, welcome back to the CISIVIS 55 podcast. Today I'm joined by Dr. Richard Wolfe. He's a Marxist economist, professor, and I'm going to let you introduce yourself a little bit more. Okay, I'd be glad to, and first of all, thank you for the invitation. I'm glad to do this kind of thing. The minute you use the word Marxist, as I'm sure you know, all kinds of people get all kinds of weird in their heads worrying about what that might mean as if there is a single definition or a single attribute or adjective that will explain it all. That has never been true. Marxism is a very broad intellectual tradition. It comes from the work of Karl Marx. He died in 1883, so we have 150 years since that time. Marxism in that 150 years has spread to every country on the face of this earth. It has been interpreted and applied and used by countless people with different economic systems, cultural systems, religions, economic development, anything that would spread that fast across that enormous range of difference would produce alternative interpretations. In other words, Marxism is many different things. And the minute you have somebody tell you, this is what Marxism is. My advice to you, including if you hear me talk like that, is to stop listening because you're not dealing with a person who understands, you're dealing with a person who has a partisan agenda, and that's a little different. So, having said that, I have an interpretation of Marx that comes from studying Marx. I read all of his works. I've done it more than once in my life. I've learned a great deal. I'm grateful to him. As I am to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and countless other important thinkers who have taught me. To be proud, as many Americans are, that they know nothing about Marxism, that they've never picked up a book or an article by him, have never studied it, is the equivalent of saying, "I am a very ignorant person, and I'm terribly proud of that fact." I mean, that would work as a joke, but it really wouldn't work in a serious conversation. It's like going out on a camping trip with somebody who proudly tells you, "I don't use matches. I go out there in the woods, and I rub the wet sticks together for an hour and a half, and I get a spark. Isn't that wonderful?" Well, it has a certain charm, but I wouldn't go out on a camping trip with you again. I would like to take matches. Marx provides matches. Marx helps you understand, and that's why I recommend to people learn a little bit about it. I became interested in Marx's ideas when I went to college. I didn't know much about it before. I could see all around me here in the United States that there were lots of social problems that weren't getting any better. What we now referred to as racism, sexism, income inequality, wealth inequality, social instability, all of those kinds of things were all around me, and I saw them. I knew everybody else saw them. Nobody's blind or very few people are. But I also noticed that nobody wanted to talk about these problems, and certainly no one wanted to ask the logical question, "Are these problems part of the system we live in, or are they explained in some other way?" I thought that was a perfectly reasonable question. However, my professors were frightened when I asked it. Eventually, someone said, "You're interested in the system, means you're interested in capitalism, which is our system, and therefore you're being critical of capitalism." I said, "Well, you might want to read Karl Marx because that's what he did. I became a person who uses that material. Is it the only material I use, of course not. What it is very valuable, I would recommend it to anyone who finds anything I'm about to say to you is interesting. I continued my studies. I don't mind telling you because some people will be interested. My education was for 10 years here in the United States. I was born in Ohio in the middle of the country. The universities I attended for 10 years, two semesters a year, 20 semesters. I studied economics, I studied history, I studied those kinds of subjects. Even though I had started out as a mathematician and a biochemist, I changed in college. I did fine in college. I went to Ivy League schools. I'm the product of the elite schools in the country. Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, those are the only schools I ever attended. I have my PhD in economics from Yale. I've been a professor of economics most of my adult life and have a dozen different universities. I also founded an organization called Democracy at Work, who has two objectives. Number one, to show that it is the capitalist system that is the problem we have to face. However hard it is to do that, trying to fix this system, it's a little too late and it's too little to get at those problems. Then to use Marxian as well as other ideas to shape an agenda for how we can do better than capitalism. Just as human society figured out how to do better than slavery and how it figured out how to do better than feudalism, it is perfectly reasonable, rational, and appropriate for us to ask whether and how we can do better than capitalism. For that question to be answered, Marxism and Marxian theory are a big valuable asset. Thank you. That was probably one of the most thorough answers to who I'll wait too long. No, no, no, that's perfect because usually a lot of guests, they just sometimes they'll just say, no, you've already said everything that I was going to say. That was great. There's one question that's going to maybe rest on certain assumptions I have about Marxism that might be incorrect and I'd be interested in picking those apart. But from my understanding, one of the kind of main ways in which Marx looks at different systems is that they all have inherent contradictions that eventually can lead to new systems taking place. So I think he looks at slavery to feudalism, to capitalism. Capitalism appears to be very good at kind of adapting to these contradictions for better or worse and for a certain subset of people, it benefits them and such as the capitalists and for a lot of other people, it seems to not do so well for them. But I'm thinking, I think you brought up in an interview one time, like the crisis in the 70s where consumers no longer had enough money to spend in order to generate profits for capitalists. And so to kind of adjust to this, whereas other systems might eventually fall under this issue, the capitalists kind of introduced debt and credit. So consumers could still spend things without having much of anything. So I think there's maybe an economic argument about how it adjusts to these contradictions. But also, I'd like to kind of talk about the cultural aspect of that with the idea of capitalist realism, where it seems to kind of profit off of cultural critiques of its own system. Like we have a lot of media nowadays, it's very, I think, left leaning and critical of capitalism, but it's also ironically still part of the system in one way. So if you want to pull apart any assumptions made there, or if you kind of have an answer of how Marxism could potentially see a post-capitalist world where these contradictions eventually don't figure themselves out, I'd love to hear that. For a journey of discovery, as we wrestle with the latest social narratives, belief systems, ancient prophecies, strange phenomena and spirituality, your worldview will never be the same again. Rise above the noise. Visit riseradio.net today. Sure, let me do two things. Let me talk a little bit in general, but I'm going to use examples from right now to make it as clear and as concrete for people as I possibly can. And using examples from now is relying on the fact that we all know a little bit at least about things that are going on now. So first, you're absolutely right. Marx was a student of the German philosophy professor George Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Hegel in the German. The greatest philosopher in Germany arguably period ever, but certainly one of the great handful of people that were dominating the 19th and 20th centuries of Western thought, of German thought and well beyond Germany. Hegel is the champion, if you like, of contradiction. Everything exists, says Hegel, in contradiction. Or to use the language in which average people have been able to figure this idea out, too, the good is always wrapped up in the bad and vice versa. That everything has its good side and its bad side. It's a naïve or an ignorant person who only sees the one side, doesn't understand that the other side is there, too, that the feelings we have, the thoughts we have, are full of contradictions as we are. And you can again see it in common language. I love that person. Yeah, well, there are moments when you hate them. And instead of being frightened when you have a feeling of hatred towards someone you love, you will be better off if you understand that that's a contradiction that's called part of life. And you have to come to terms with the contradiction, not imagine yourself able to ever get to a place where you only have the one and you never have the other. It's like a young person who's frustrated at being single and begins to imagine if only I could find a partner and get married. Well, then my problems will be over. No, says the wise marriage counselor. When you're single, you have one set of problems. When you get married, you have a different set. It's perfectly reasonable for you to prefer one set to another, but to imagine that if you give up being single, to become married, you won't have any problems is to misunderstand the contradictions that are part of life. And vice versa, if you're married and you're frustrated and then you get divorced because you think, if only I'm out of this marriage, it's the same mistake. And it's a tragic mistake because it can really do a number on the quality of your life. And if you're not careful for all of it. So Marx is in no way unique by saying what's true for everything else that it's contradictory is true for the economic systems. We organize. We're not God. We're people. And when we organize ways of dealing with life, we don't do it in some brilliant way that has no contradictions. If even that were possible, we're just human being. We can't see everything that's coming down the pike. We can't handle and cope with everything that happens to us. That's not. And so the institutions that we construct have their problems, have their flaws, have their weaknesses. We can either be honest and face that, see them and try to navigate through those. Or we can pretend that there's a way out of being in a contradictory system to come into a system that has no contradiction. That's exactly as likely as deciding if only you marry Ms. Wonderful or Ms. The Wonderful. Well, then it'll be happiness for the rest of your life. This is a naive approach. An adult should have kind of how grown that long ago. Here we go now with the economics. Economic systems mean a very simple thing. It's how people organize the production and the distribution of goods and services. That's it. It's not complicated. It's not all weird or technical. That's what economics studies. How we go about producing the food, clothing, shelter and so on that we need to live our lives. How do we produce them? And how do we distribute them? The assumption of distribution means we're usually talking about human communities. If we were talking about an individual, we wouldn't say production and distribution because the person who makes it is also the person who consumes it so the distribution is kind of taken care of. So we're talking about communities. In communities, we typically have a division of labor. We don't all do all the tasks. Some of us raise chickens. Some of us bake bread. Some of us make pots and pans and so on. So we produce things and then we have to arrange to distribute them because I can't live on pots and pans. I make them, but I need food. So I go to the food producers and I say, Hey, how about you give me some of the food you produce? I'll give you some of the pots and pans and we'll be helping each. This is that human beings organizing this. In the last two or three or four thousand years, most of the people of the world organized things quite differently from the way they had done before. What do I mean? Earlier, and there are names for this, tribal economic systems, village economic systems, there's a lot of terms, but basically think in terms, if you're an American, think in terms of the indigenous people here, the Native Americans in their tribes, whether it's the Irricoid tribe or the Mohawk tribe, they coined things like it takes a village to raise a child. In other words, they did things in common collectively. They lived in small enough groups that they could get together. All of them and decide together who does what and who distributes what to who. Sometimes they had the chief kind of supervise it. Sometimes they had a council of elders and they would kind of keep it all together. Sometimes they would meet and in a very democratic way, everybody having one vote to work out how this should be done. That era gave way to the last four or five thousand years where economic systems have been different. Here comes Marx because the Marx figured it out of what I'm about to say and I owe that to him. I don't say it with pride or no pride. I'm just intellectually honest. I'm telling you where I got it so you understand if you're interested, there's a lot more there with a lot more detail than I'm have the time to give you at this point. Okay. So here we go. Slavery. The first of those big ones is slavery. Slavery is very interesting economic system. It divides people into two groups. That's how it organizes the production and distribution of goods and services. One group is very small. They're called masters and the other group very large. They're called slaves. Interestingly, the masters own the slaves. The slaves are property like a cow or a horse or a piece of furniture. Very interesting. The slaves do the bulk of the work. When they're finished producing goods and services, all of the goods and services they've produced belong to the masters. It's so facto as fast as they're produced. Why? Because the slave who made it is also the property of the masters. So the masters then take a portion, take a portion of what the slaves have produced and give it back to the slaves. Food clothing shelter. Why? Because they want the slaves to do tomorrow the same work that they did today and next week and next month and next year. And in order for your slave system to survive, you have to make it possible for the slave not to die tomorrow or next week or next month. So what do the masters get? They get the leftover. They get what the slaves produced that was not given back to the slaves for their own consumption. Marx gave a name to that extra produced by the slaves that they don't get back for their own consumption. In the English translation, the word is surplus. And surplus simply means the difference between what the workers produce and what the workers themselves consume. The extra, the leftover, the more, that's a German word for it the way he did it. Okay. And this is a very interesting system. It works for thousands of years in various parts of the country. It exists in parts of the world to this day. We allow some people to own, buy and sell other people. In case you're not familiar with it, special laws had to be passed here in the United States to allow professional sports teams to buy and sell players from one to the other. That's slavery. That had to be passed. Why? Because the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution outlaws slavery. If you ever read that amendment and I would urge you to do it, you will notice it's only two sentences. So it won't take you very long, like 10 seconds. In the 13th Amendment, and that's still the law. It says, slavery is outlawed in the United States except in prisons. Wow. The United States allowed slavery to this day to exist in prisons. The Constitution specifically does that. Why you would want to subject a person in jail to slavery, I leave to your imagination. But slavery existed for a long time. Here are some of the biggest contradictions of slavery. Slaves die. What are you going to do then? The system is based on the provision of replacements for the slaves. How are you going to get that? The slaves may not reproduce. You may separate husbands and wives, very common in many slavery. They may not want to have children if the children are going to be slaves and treated that way as well. You may have to go into the special behavior of breeding human beings. The state of Virginia became the place in the United States that existed by breeding slaves for the rest of the slave south. That's part of our history. Well, that may not work out real well. That's a contradiction of the system. It may not be able to reproduce. What will it do then? Well, it might have a breeding program or it might start running around the world, snatching people from wherever it can find them to keep the system going by replen- and that may involve wars in other parts of the world. It may involve expenses that the system doesn't find itself able to raise as you go further and further afield. If I had time, I could work it out. Eventually, the system's contradictions can become unresolvable. Most systems that last for a while like slavery work out ways to overcome their contradictions. But they discover very quickly that the way you overcome a contradiction always sets in motion new-contraditions. That never stops. You don't ever get free. Even if you resolve one, you have another one. Again, my metaphor. You overcome certain contradictions of being single. Right? After a certain point, going to that bar, drinking too much, and going home with someone you can't even remember the next day loses its attractiveness. And you want something else. Well, you can resolve that by getting married. But if you don't think that that's going to create new contradictions, then you're very naive. But a system can continue for a long time going through those steps. When slavery finally comes to an end, it's usually because enough tensions and difficulties have accumulated that couldn't be overcome, that got kicked down the road, or got pushed into a corner, or got imposed on a subgroup of the population. But at a certain point, the accumulation marks his idea of contradictions becomes more than the system can handle. And at that point, it blows up. Typically, it blows up when the slaves say, "That's it. We're done. We're not doing this anymore." And we've noticed something. There's a lot of us, and there's a relatively small number of you masters. And out of that difference, we can make a revolution, and you're going to be gone. Let me remind everyone here in the United States, at least, where I'm sitting, that in the emancipation proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln, he announced, "As of today, slavery is outlawed." That meant that he said to the people of the South, "The white people who are the masters." Your property that you spent money to buy, the slave, is now free. You just lost your property, and nobody is going to compensate you for it. You are to use a technical term, "Screwed." You're done. System over. The American South still hasn't gotten over the experience. That's why white supremacy comes back in all of its hideousness over and over again. You didn't work out those contradictions. You exploded them, and that's not a way, even if you pretend that these issues go away. Okay, then we have feudalism. I'm going to be brief for now. There you have, however, something very similar. A small group of people at the top, they're called the lords of the land, and then a mass of people who do the work. They're called the serfs, and that system is full of contradictions, and it has to work them out. Give you an example. The surface given a piece of land by the Lord. You work on the land three days a week, Mr. Serf. I'm letting you work that land. You can have chickens and a cow and whatever you produce the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, on your piece of land, you get to keep. That's for you. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, you come to work on my land. I'm the lords land. And whatever you produce Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I get to keep. And on Sunday, you go home and you go to church where a person in a special outfit will tell you that this is the way God wants the world to be. That lasts in Europe from 500 AD to 1500, a thousand years. Lots of its contradictions were solved. Let me give you an example of one of the contradictions, just to give you an idea. This system doesn't work if the Serf has children, which most Serfs did. Well, what do you do? You're going to take that piece of land. It's both the ad five children. You're going to take that piece of land, cut it up into five parts, give each kid a fifth. That won't work because the fifth of the land is not enough for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday's labor to provide enough food, clothing, and shelter. So the system has a contradiction that's fundamental. It creates a feudal family, creates the children, and then can't feed them. So how did they resolve it? They developed a tradition called the law of primogeniture. Here's what the law says. All land of a Serf passes to the eldest son. He gets it all. The second son, any daughters, you get nothing. Wow. Well, you resolve the contradiction now. We know exactly how it's going to continue, but you have a really created a new one, namely what in the world are the girls and the second, third and fourth sons, if they're there? What is going to happen to them? They have to go into the clergy and become a monk or a nun or a priest. Are they going to the army? Have nothing to do with making the land? They go with they have to find or they become a merchant or they become an outlaw like Robinhood in the woods. They have to find and they do. And that in turn sets in more contradictions, but the system lasts for a thousand years until the accumulation of contradictions blows the system up. And you know what happens? The Serfs pick up their swords, pick up their their sives and they march to the house of the Lord and they cut his head off and they burn the house down. You can see it in the French Revolution if you want a dramatic example. You get red of the few United States, 1776, declares war on King George III, a feudal king in England. And it doesn't establish a king here. No more feudalism. We don't want it. We're done with it. No Serfs, no Lord's, none of it. Now we have capitalism. And Marx's genius was to figure out that capitalism had not broken from the traditions of slavery and feudalism. It thought it had, it wanted to, it promised in both the American and French revolutions that we were going to build a society of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. That was promised by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Robespierre and all the others. But they didn't. Marx says looking around in the 19th century when he lived, do we have liberty, equality and fraternity? You must be kidding. Marx was writing at the time that Charles Dickens was writing his novels. Take a look at Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or a tale of two cities. And you'll see a society that wouldn't in a million years be described as liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. It was a society written by extremes of wealth and poverty and all of the violence needed to keep that kind of a system going. And so Marx said to himself, this was his life's work. What happened here? Where were those wonderful promises of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy? Marx admired the French Revolution. He admired the American Revolution. He said, but something went terribly wrong here. Thomas Jefferson was an honest, sincere man. He believed he was going to create a new world. So did all the revolutionaries. That's what they were committed to. But here's the problem, said Marx. And this is what he wrote in his work, Das Kapital and the other writings of his. Capitalism made a mistake. It didn't understand that if you want to get liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, you cannot create an economic system in which a tiny group of people run the show, make all the money, make all the rules. You can't have masters doing that to slaves. You can't have lords doing that to serves. And here comes the punchline. You can't have employers doing that to employees. That system, capitalism, which does not have ownership of some people by others, which does not have lords and serfs. It has a deal. I'll pay you a wage. You come and work for me. It's still a tiny group of people, the owners of businesses, the boards of directors of corporations. In short, the employer class, lording it over the mass of people who are employees. Employers represent between 1 and 3% of the American population. Employees are 80%, depending on how you count. There's no contest. One is the majority. The other one is a tiny minority. But the tiny minority in capitalism, the employers sit in the dominant position. They decide what gets produced. They decide what technology gets utilized. They decide where production happens and they decide what to do with the surplus. The amount of goods produced over and above what you have to give to the employees so they stay alive and can work. That says Marx is the root of the problem. You didn't change that. You changed the form of it from slavery and feudalism to capitalism. You substituted a labor market where there was none before. Slavery is not a market. Slavery is, I mean, you sell the slaves, but you don't sell the work that the slaves do. In capitalism, you're not allowed to sell people, but you are allowed to sell the work that they can do. Capitalism changed the form of the unequal relationship between the two partners of capitalism. But it didn't change the reality of a society split that way. Does capitalism have contradictions? Of course it does. I'll give you a simple example that I can use a common situation to do that. Every capitalist being driven by the desire to maximize profit. Because that's what they learn in business school. Every decision you make should look at the bottom line the thing you are focused on. If you produce more profit, you are successful. If your profit shrink, you are a failure. That's the way the system is set up. Okay. So every employer is constantly trying to do, and I'll use the language, economize on labor costs. Here's what that means. Replace a worker with a machine. Replace an expensive worker with a cheaper one. You know, an immigrant or move your production out of the United States to China or India or Brazil where you can pay people a lot less. All of those things economize on labor costs. And so they do that to improve their profits. What they don't understand is the contradiction. Here's the contradiction. The less you pay workers, because you've replaced them with a machine or you've replaced them with a cheaper worker or you've moved out of the country, the less workers in your own country will have the money to pay for the products you want to sell them. You moron. So what you're gaining by saving on labor costs, you're going to lose by being unable to sell your output. There is no way out of that. Is there a temporary fix? Yeah. But if you think that's the end of your problem, you're going to make a mistake. What's the temporary fix in our culture? Answer. Consumer debt. You enable the workers to continue to buy even though you've screwed them out of their wages. Why? Because you give them a credit card. Here, Jack, here, Mary, buy the American dream like you were hoping to do. But now you're doing it with debt. As your debt keeps rising on an income that isn't going up, it's no longer a question of whether it's just a question of when this contradiction because it is going to come and bite you in the rear end. 2008, it bit us in the rear end. And we had the second worst collapse of capitalism in its history. The worst one was the great depression of the 1930s. But the second one was the 2008, '19, '19, we're still not really out of it. Wow. So is that a solution to the contradiction? Yeah. They can keep spending even though you're not giving money. But we have a new one, debt. And so that we have a population anxiety written because of their debts, because they know if they lose their job, they will not be able to make the mortgage payment, the car payment, or any of the other things they're living on borrowed time. Your generation, the young people accumulating debts to go to college, never has a bachelor's degree been less valuable to get a good job than it is today, and yet never has it cost more than it does today. That's a contradiction. You're you're hawking yourself into life of a debt to get a degree that hardly matters anymore. This is ridiculous. You know what this is doing? This is accumulating contradictions. Contradictions for the credit card user. Contradictions for the indebted college student. And I could easily go on. So the question is for capitalism. Only how close are we to the point where the accumulation of contradictions produces the explosion? Every system we've had in the history of the world, every economic system has been born, has evolved and changed over time, and then passed away. There is no reason to believe capitalism will have a different history. We know capitalism was born, we know capitalism has evolved, and therefore friends the next step is for capitalism to die. It's not a question of whether it's just a question of when. And I would submit to you that we are a lot closer to the when than most Americans and indeed most people in the world are willing or able to admit or to face. Here's some of the signs. The level of divisiveness in our culture is becoming toxic. We don't talk to each other. We live in our respective silos. We listen to these podcasts. Those people listen to those podcasts. We don't vote for the same people. We don't think the same world out there exists that way. Our morals, our culture are ripping us apart. That's one sign. We're noticing that the natural environment is being dispoiled by capitalism. It's use of fossil fuels. It's attitude towards nature as to make it serve our purposes. Very different from the way older societies understood themselves to be living with nature, not dominating nature. That's causing us to realize we better change our ways or else we're going to literally kill ourselves. These are this recognition that comes when you realize one way of living, one way of being is coming to an end. We can't tolerate it anymore. We're now having crazy wars one right after the other. The United States is at war with Russia in Ukraine. The United States is a big powerful country that invaded a small poor country, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Who the hell are you to tell the Russians? You must not invade a small country. What are you talking about? I, by the way, agree a big country should never invade a small country. But I also live in the world where this is going on over time. And that means you're asking the rest of the world to join you in a monstrous hypocrisy. And you shouldn't be surprised when large numbers of them say, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. You know, we've had a series of empires, the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and over the last 75 years or more, the American Empire. But the American Empire is now declining. It's getting ready for the next empire, which is called China. And everybody who pays attention knows it. And the United States is trying to slow that down to stop it, to reverse it. Just like Great Britain tried to slow down the United States, the ex-colony that was challenging Britain, war in 1776, war again in 1812, the British tried to squelch it. It failed. It usually does. By the time the imperial power understands how threatened it is, it's too late. And Britain ended up realizing it couldn't stop it, so it became the ally of it. So the United States has Britain as its colony, role reversal. Guess what's coming? The Chinese know this history. They know it perfectly well. They know that they can now produce everything the United States does. Probably cheaper, often better. And there's nothing stopping them. Short of a nuclear war in which we all disappear, there's nothing you can do. And that's so irrational that one can presume Americans are not going to do something quite that stupid. But the second best thing is to fight little proxy wars like in the Ukraine. And we're not going to win that one either. Those days are over. Those wars are not going to be the way Afghanistan was. And we lost that one. And the Iraq was. And Vietnam was. And we lost. Notice something? The empire is losing the wars. That's another sign. It's over. Okay, the last part of your question. Where do we go? Well, the lesson in everything I've just said is the answer to the question. You've got to finally face that an economic system that puts a small group of people at the top with all the economic power and wealth they can accumulate, puts the rest of the society at their mercy, bitter, angry, denied, frustrated. And this is a recipe sooner or later for the accumulation of too many contradictions for the system to manage. Therefore, the answer is clear. We need an economic system that doesn't produce two groups of people. A small one at the top and an immense one at the bottom. This, we don't want slavery, we don't want feudalism, and we don't want capitalism either because they share that fatal flaw. Therefore, where are we going? The answer is not have the government do it something. That is a still old irrelevant waste of time. We've spent the last century debating more government, less government, more private enterprise, more pop stop. It doesn't matter whether it's private or public. If a small group of people are telling a large group of people how to live and what to do, whether the small group of private individuals or the small group of state officials, who the hell cares? That's what we've learned in the last century. What has to change is the organization of the production and distribution. In a summary, we have to, and this I say to Americans because I think you can understand it, we have to democratize the enterprise. We have to change enterprises so we're not a small group at that top and a massive group doing the work at the bottom. It has to be one person, one vote. Everybody at a workplace, one person, one vote. We decide collectively by majority rule. What we produce, what technology we use, where the production goes, and what happens to the wealth we produce. How do we, we don't give a few people a hundred billion dollars while everybody else can't afford to send their kid to college. We don't do that because no rational group community will ever do that unless it is under extraordinary stress. We're going to be a democratically run society. And let me make a final point. A few centuries ago when the end of feudalism came, we decided one of the symbols of feudalism were these kings, the biggest lord, the biggest feudal lord in an area. So I'm the king. I'm the biggest one. The king. Okay, we said we don't want kings anymore. In some of our enthusiasm, we separated the head of the king from the rest of his body and that really made them go away. We got rid of kings. And you know what the king said? You mustn't do that because we are what holds society together. We are the only thing that keeps this country going. You need a strong leader and we're that. Not only that, we talk to God two or three times a week. And he helps us figure out what's good for all of you. You do away with us. You're doing away with the only way civilization will continue. Well, we got rid of them. And to nobody's surprise, civilization kept right on developing. In fact, we've developed civilization better and further after the kings than we ever did under the kings. Guess what? The same applies to the factory and the office and the store. If we democratize them, we get rid of the CEO. We get rid of, I don't mean physically get rid of them, but those positions are gone. And we make a democratic. We should have done that long ago. If we had half the commitment to democracy, we pretend here in the United States to have. We would have realized why in the world did we make our political system one person one vote, but our economic system? Not. Well, what's the logic of that? Most of us as adults spend more time at work than we do having to do with the civics of our community. It's a major place we spend our lives. If you believe in democracy, why the hell didn't you create it and institute it there? That's what this is about. We have to change. And if we change the workplace so it's democratic, we'll have a lot greater success in making the rest of the society not just formally democratic, but actually in terms of what it does. So that's 21st century. That's the fight. Will capitalism be able to hold on? Overcome its contradictions. Deal with the new ones to keep going for this century. Or will it blow up? And will the next phase be a real opening experiment with a democratized enterprise? By the way, in most parts of the world, including the United States, we already have democratic enterprises. They're called worker cooperatives. People have been thinking about this and working at it for a long time. This is not all new. This is an attempt to realize that this dream of a democratic workplace, like the dream of a democratic political space, is very old in the human experience. It's just a question, are we ready to go there yet? And if any of what I've just said strikes you as interesting or a new way of thinking about it or worth pushing further, don't thank me. I am applying Marx's work. That's where all of this understanding comes from. And that's why I recommended to you because you can learn a lot from other people absolutely, but from Marx as well. Excluding Marx from the curriculum of our institutions of learning is a sign of our immaturity, not of some kind of knowledge effect that makes it relevant to exclude a mass of very critical thinking. Sorry to take so long. No, no, that was a perfectly, I think addressed all of my questions and everything. And I understood yet because I didn't know how much time we had. So I'm happy that you were able to. Was I do have to go? Yeah, yeah. Can I just ask really quickly? And then I'll say goodbye. Do you personally feel optimistic or pessimistic about the, I'm thinking of gromchies like the optimism of the intellect, the or know the optimism of the will pessimism of the intellect or something like that. That's the intellect. Look, I am, I have learned a great deal from Antonio Gromchie. I'm grateful to his work and I am in this instance too. I am basically an optimist. I am a person. That's why you know, most teachers really kind of are because you wouldn't want to put the effort into teaching people if you think it's all going to hell in a ambasket anyway. So yeah, I think there are ways we can achieve the transition to a better system. I identify with the people who thought we could do better than slavery, we can do better than feudalism. And I say to myself, no brainer, we can do better than capitalism. The human mind's desire for something that works better, that can be done in a shorter amount of time, that make us work together as a community better. That desire is in enough of us that confronted with danger and risk, we can rise to the occasion. Will we for sure? I don't know. I get as frustrated and down as other people do. But underneath it, yeah, I'm an optimist. I think it's possible. Great. Okay. Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. And I'll link all of your resources and wonderful. And do please give Julia the link because we will also post and promote this. Certainly. Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.