A serious education in the world today without marks is an admission that what you’re studying and how you study is governed more by your fear than by your brain or your intellectual curiosity it’s pathetic hello this is Robinson aart here with pins the podcat who was quite
The mischievous little pod Imp in this episode and the introduction to Robinson’s podcast number 154 and actually a new T-shirt with uh pins the podcat and blazed right on it but I’ll get to that later but this episode is with Richard wolf who is Professor ameritus of Economics at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at the new school where he works on economics in the mark IST tradition and this is Richard’s second appearance on the show and I loved it just as much as the first because Beyond being extremely knowledgeable Richard is extremely quick and entertaining which makes these
Conversations with him very fun in our last episode together which was 127 I believe we focused on Richard’s often marks inspired criticisms of cap ISM but in this episode I tried to stay focused as much as possible on Marx himself and his views and answering some of the criticisms common critic common
Criticisms powerful criticisms of the same so in that Spirit we began with a trific summary that I had I played no Parton of Marx’s life and thought and influences before getting to the myths and misconceptions about his views such as the role his writings didn’t play in the political structures of communist
Russia and China as well as some criticisms especially the often cited failures and flaws of 20th century communism you should keep up with Richard on his website at Rd wolf and that’s with2 fs.com and then his own show economic update and then I’m going to displace the podcat for one moment
And I realize how ironic it is to hawk or Mong uh a shirt for profit but to support the show on a podcast about Marxism but here’s the third shirt in Robinson’s fashion Empire which you can find on Robinson fashion empire.com and it is says Robinson’s podast
With pins the podcat and I am R riding on the podcast’s back so I hope you like the shirt I’m really happy with it and comments likes subscriptions reviews all those things are extraordinarily helpful this is my second time talking with Richard and the direction we took was
Informed by the comments on the episode so I’m sure if I have my way we will talk many more times in the future but I would love to hear what you liked what you didn’t like what you’d like to hear from in future installments so now without any further Ado I hope you
Enjoyed this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it Richard there were two general threads that came out of the the comments on our last episode other than how much people liked it and the first is that for whatever reason even though you just mentioned to me you would you might clean up your language everyone loved when you
Swore and the other was the request that we get deeper into Mark and perhaps some criticism of his theories and your views but just to start off since the man himself has become more of a legend than a real person and his views I think have been really twisted as
Well just who was Carl Marx and what sort of world did he live in to motivate his writings okay um well let’s start with the basics he was born in U 1818 and he died in 1883 so he was literally and quintessentially a man of the 19th
Century uh when he’s born uh Europe is in the early throws of a transition out of feudalism I mean that was well along into capitalism but he grew up at a time when the implications of the American and French revolutions were really beginning to wash over Europe and being
Born um at the juncture between France and Germany uh they were coming from the West moving east across Europe and he was caught up as a young man in the excitement of a new world that he was already part of and growing into and born into feudalism was more and more a memory
Deeply impressed a thousand years of feudalism left its traces and still does but for Marx it was a new world and to understand his mentality he was um the CH he was a middle class kid we would nowadays say he was born to people who were literate he was born to people
Who um not only expected but supported that he would go to a university which a very small part of the population at that point even imagined let alone did so he was in the he wasn’t super rich or anything like that but he was a comfortable middle class we might say uh
Kind of family went to the school took it all very seriously his father was what was called in in the German French German area where he comes from a free thinker that was very very very important in Europe at that time it meant that you had broken from religion both from
Catholicism and from protestantism the the Lutheran explosion of the church or or if you came out of the Jewish tradition that the Orthodoxy and the taking religions seriously was something people were proud no longer to do and there was a community sizable one growing quickly of what were
Called in German free thinker literally freeth thinkers um and the father was part of that and the son grew up into that um so he was not part of a a a religious background to give you an idea of what shaped the man the young man it
Was you know the music of Beethoven try try to imagine these triumphant symphonies in which people are breaking into a great new world uh if you’re familiar for example with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a coral symphony that includes a whole huge chorus that that ends that Symphony with an Ode to Joy
Uh in which you know a new world is being born in which human beings will treat each other with respect with equality Marx took dreadfully seriously as a young man as many in his generation did the slogans of the French Revolution which he deeply admired Lial you know Liberty equality
Brotherhood um in fact that last part of the Beethoven 9th Symphony um is all about Brotherhood and what what all that will mean so he enters the world of intellect you know he becomes a teenager and a young man um caught up in the notion that capitalism the successor system after
Feudalism uh was us ing in as it had promised to do and by that I mean everybody from you know Thomas Jefferson on over to Danton and Rob spier and uh all of the great ideologues you might call them of the end of feudalism when the United States breaks away from
Britain governed by a feudal leftover King George III they do not they talk about it but they do not have a kingdom here as an independent Breakaway they were breaking away not only from the British Empire but from feudalism from monarchy the institutions of feudalism in order to have a new free different
Society and and markx took all of that very seriously and felt himself and wanted to be part of that the problem was for him that as he went through the university and for those of you who don’t know he studied philosophy he went all the way up to the
Writing of a doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy epicus uh was his subject and so forth um and his first job was as a young uh what we would here call an assistant professor in a German University teaching philosophy okay and he was headed on to be that his greatest influence besides
The French Revolution the American experiment as he could judge it from afar was the German philosopher who was the dominant influence in the universities of Germany at that time a man named Hegel who had developed a kind of peak of German philosophy building on the great tradition that goes from
Emmanuel Kant through shelling to fish to hego as a kind of dominant influence as it has been both in those who follow it and in those who react against it really ever since there are very powerful hegelian influences in in postmodernism in existentialism in literally every movement of philosophy since that time
And Marx was one of the students and that his closest friends intellectually and his colleagues were likewise students of Hegel okay so that that’s where he is the problem arises as he begins to be an adult thinking philosophy Professor he begins to look around he’s interested in the world around him he’s
Not the Ivory Tower kind of Professor if I can make that distinction his interests go beyond his specialty they go beyond the universe of the university to a larger society and there he discovers and again long story short because we don’t have all the time we could take for this
Um he discovers that what capitalism promised in slogans like Liberty equality fraternity and let’s add from the American Revolution democracy to put all those together that capitalism promised that with the end of feudalism and the arrival of this new capitalist system they would deliver to the human
Race what he had for so long wanted Liberty equality fraternity and democracy a better world and he looked around and he drew a conclusion tentative at first but then AC course across his life it became deeper and richer but it was the same conclusion and that was that
Capitalism had failed to deliver the promises made on its behalf by those revolutionaries who finished feudalism and ushered in capitalism that the system had betrayed its own own Founders not not that unusual in human history but Marx was the great thinker who made that determination if you like
In a very profound way both early in his life and then across the the fullness of it as I’ll show you in the next few minutes if there’s time for me to do that um and so you might say he began to shift his interest from philosophy to what we would nowadays
Call political economy why because in his thinking he wasn’t interested once he had determined that capitalism had betrayed its Origins had failed to deliver on its Grand Social social progress promises his next logical question he’s a philosopher is why did this happened why did he didn’t he he didn’t toy with
Superficial noise he didn’t look for the bad people who did the terrible thing of undoing the promise that’s a kind of cheap politics he he never did that he he wanted as a philosopher to ask the question what happened he he he didn’t question that Jefferson was sincere or
That um uh the philosophers of the French Revolution both before the Revolution During the Revolution and after they were genuinely committed to Liberty equality fraternity they were moved by those objectives they thought they were doing that so what went wrong he said and to answer that question he
Began to read and think beyond the confines of the Greek philosophy he had mastered as a PhD student and he found himself drawn into the literatures of History sociology we would call it that now didn’t have those names that history did but sociology comes later but we would nowadays that’s what he was
Reading and he encountered two two things that particularly struck him the Revolutionary literature of the French you know for all of the Europeans to this day there’s a revolutionary impulse in France that is an absolute draw for the European and for Beyond Europe those who are familiar
With it that’s you know the French to this day have the yellow vest the rich the French to this day have an enormously powerful socialist and communist population they’re on the street at the drop of a hat they care about their political life in the way that other European countries
Look to as a model although rarely achieve and marks early on noticed this too you know if you read Russo or voler or dero and remember Marx is an intellectual he reads a great deal he’s caught up in French Revolutionary literature the other literature he discovers is germine to his quest again
To understand why the transition from feudalism to capitalism could not or would not deliver on its Promises of Liberty equality fraternity and democracy he discovers British political economy so those become his three great influences German Philosophy from Hegel French Revolutionary politics and British economics or British political economy and above all
Adam Smith and David Ricardo because those are the great thinkers of economics coms uh just before him lit you know a few years I don’t remember exactly when David Ricardo died but my guess is he died Marx was born before Ricardo died okay so there’s a continuity
There and so that was Marx’s Quest and what he began to do was to try to understand how to get an answer and in the interest of time what I’m going to do is to tell you what he found his answer was developed across the the fullness of his Works which I’ll
Summarize in a moment his answer was capitalism betrayed its promise not because of an external phenomena that held capitalism back or that constricted its functioning no capitalism betrayed its promises because internal to capitalism are the mechanisms that block Liberty fraternity and equality from happening capitalism is the problem it’s
Not the Liberation it’s the problem and that problem is buried right in the core of what’s unque unque about it as a system and in Marx’s mature work culminating in the great work of his life which is called thus capital or Capital um and again that’s a three
Volume work Marx himself only wrote the first volume the second and third volumes were notebooks that he kept that were assembled and edited by others later even though they still appear under his name uh his partner uh his intellectual partner uh Frederick angles basically put together their second and
One of their great students a German Marxist named Carl kowsky put together the third volume um but in that work and and other works of his mature years he explained what it was about C capitalism that frustrated the achievement of Liberty equality and fraternity and I don’t mind telling you
Very simply that the because you can simplify it since he’s done all the hard work of figuring it out the answer was that even though capitalism broke From Slavery because doesn’t allow people to own each other or anything like that and capitalism broke away from feudalism because it blew up the Lord’s surf
Relationship that had governed Europe for a thousand years it broke from them wanted to break from them achieved a break from them but what it didn’t understand was that by erecting in their place a relationship in the workplace in the Enterprise in the factory or the office or the store an employer employee
Dichotomy you were replicating the Lord in the surf the master and the slave but with a new name employer employee and in that relationship was the blockage that precluded Liberty equality and frat it’s a very sophisticated argument very carefully worked out enormous ously filled with evidence examples logical
Connections this is the finest kind of intellectual analytical work if you’ve never read through it if you’ve never had anyone take you through it you can’t possibly understand it and to substitute a dismissive a notion only shows you’re childish it will be a little bit like having a quick dismissal of other great
Works like hegel’s philosophy or St Augustine’s confessions or Einstein’s discoveries or anything else the quick easy dismissal tells us only about you not about the work you are purporting to dismiss a serious education in the world today without marks is an admission that what you’re studying and how you study is governed
More by your fear than by your brain or your intellectual curiosity it’s pathetic in the literal meaning of the term that for the last 70 years here in the United States and let me remind you I was born in Ohio I’ve lived all my life in the United States I’ve worked
All my life in the United States I’m talking to you right now from New York City it’s only been fear otherwise known as the Cold War and its Legacy that have led the intellectual community and the universities to be as hostile as and dismissive and fundamentally ignorant about what Marx
Achieved it’s childish we live in a capitalist world and those of us of my age have done so all our lives Marx was and Remains the most profound critic of that system that we have to live in a system and refus to engage in the work of the most important serious
Critic reflects on you not on not on the Marxism and when I say to you as I I will as I will now that those works of Marx have spread to every country on this planet he died in 1883 that means roughly a 150 years less since his death
His work his ideas have spread on a scale few intellectual movements have in the history of the human race you’d have to go back to Muhammad or others to talk about a body of work that spreads that fast over the whole globe every country country on Earth has Marxist journals Marxist organizations
Marxist theoretical political movements and on and on and on and I’m not even going to talk because of our limited time about the governments like for example the People’s Republic of China which make marks their intellectual or theoretical founder in some sense you know so it it’s it it’s really kind of
Remarkable that one has to and and I mean no way criticizing you’re posing me that questions you should you absolutely should but there’s also a sadness that you should because it should be you know the common awareness not that you agree with him of course not you don’t read Augustine or Thomas Aquin
Or Albert Einstein or Sigman Freud in order to become a student who repeats it you want to think about you want to interrogate it you want to integrate it with the rest of your formation as a thinking person because you don’t want to be denied that you don’t want to have
That absent from the resources you bring to the contributions you make to do that with Marx is childish self-indulgently self-destructive it it weakens the quality of American intellectual life and it always has and if you’re wondering since I’m a product of the United States why I have the interest and have
Done the reading and can talk to you about any of the work Marx and marxists have done it’s because I figured that out kind of early in my life I was lucky I had some adults when I was young who gave me some reason to be
Interested in this but I have to tell you in all honesty as a person who went through the Elite Education of the United States I went to Harvard as an undergraduate I went to Stanford uh in between and I finished at Yale it’s like a
Joke and I had 10 years two semesters a year 20 semesters in one of them a teacher gave me some Marxism to read in the other 19 it my teachers at those three institutions behaved as if Marx wasn’t there extraordinary and what the historians will look back on this
Bizarre behavior with the kind of critical appropri that it deserves all right is that a reasonable overview or would you want me to talk about something else having to do with no that was that was an absolutely terrific overview and agree or disagree with Marx I agree entirely with you that
He must be studied attempted to be understood and not necessarily agreed with but this is something that I’m trying to remedy both for myself and others and then just to recapitulate a bit and then put some questions and ideas on the table uh for you to weave together so first the recapitulation I
Mean he was a consummate intellectual man of the 19th century shaped by the transition from feudalism to capitalism and then the consequences of the French Revolution tion Liberty equality and fraternity an American democracy uh but they didn’t come to fruition the consequences in the form of uh capitalism did not produce what the
Revolutions promised so I think we’re on the same page there but prior to the critique of capitalism I’d like to start with his understanding of historical and economical development Economic Development and I’ll begin with a quote or two that I came across in in one of your pamphlets
So Mark said that the this is a really strong claim that the mode of production of material life determines the social political and intellectual life process in general and this leads me to ask just about the the theory of historical materialism but again this this other
Point that I wanted to add to this that he also said the history of all hitherto existing Society is the history of class struggles and and this this goes in hand hand in hand with the the prior quote but what I wanted to add to it was that you mentioned already that Marx’s
Writing is filled with evidence with examples with logic but one of the biggest criticisms of Marx stems from I think it’s inherited from popper who says that his his theories just they’re not falsifiable literally any Economic Development could be sort of Twisted to to fit his theories and I was
Wondering just how you respond to this cluster of of thoughts good um before I begin let me respond to one thing you said just because I don’t want to leave uh an impression that might come otherwise okay I stressed Marx’s contributions his writings his thinking his philosophical Journey if you like
But Marx was unlike other intellectuals because especially important here in the United States he did not spend his life in the university in his early job he got involved with local workers in the German City where his university was located and to make a long story short he got fired from his university
Position because he wrote about and supported workers who were beginning to struggle against their employers which was also how he got into economics trying to understand why those workers were in that position and for the rest of his life he was a political activist not a university Professor he met with
Social movements particularly then the labor movement and then later on the early forerunners of the Socialist Party in Germany because the Socialist Party in Germany in the second half of the 19th century was the most developed and Powerful Socialist Party anywhere on Earth at that time partly because of his
Writings but in turn they shaped him as well as he shaped them and he organized helped organize likeminded people for for example in the 1860s he organized uh the intern what was called then the international working men’s association later called the first International in which marxists they didn’t call themselves that then but
People he felt compatible with his own thinking from many European countries and later on including also the United States and so on got together and not only did they get together to have conferences and debates but they organized campaigns to give you an idea in 1870 Marx is in his prime they were
Instrumental in helping to produce what was called the Paris commune arguably the earliest takeover of a government by self-conscious ious socialists up until the 1870 they had been a critical perspective within capitalism but in for a few months in 18771 they got to take over the City of
Paris and they ran it and there we had for the first time the word socialism with a new meaning it’s not a critique of capitalism it is is an alternative to it which was a whole new idea and the whole history of socialism and of Marxism ever since
1870 has been among other things navigating the complex differences and tensions between a movement socialism that is a critical perspective on capitalism versus a movement about socialism that sees it as an alternative social organization to capitalism those are different projects and different the linked but they’re quite different and navigating that
Difference is partly due to Marx himself in his life having a one foot in the intellectual academic theoretical world and another foot in concrete practical activism he actively ADV advised the leaders of the Paris commune what to do what not to do and so caught up in that
And many of us who have learned from Marx have replicated this one foot in the one one foot in the other so for example I’ve been a professor of Economics all my life I do that now but I also ran for mayor of the City of New Haven Connecticut I’ve been an active
Politician too and I didn’t find this a d you know a diversion I didn’t do it as a amusement I did it out of the Assumption which was proven true that I could learn a great deal about my theory by getting practically involved and vice versa the isolation of theorists in the
University does their Theory no good at all okay now the criticisms well he had skin in the game though that that’s an important point that that that I think is a nice summary all right the critics of Marx are as old as Marx the critics of Marxism are as old as
Marxism by the way the critics of capitalism are just as old as capitalism and if you want a guarantee of the future of socialism and Marxism here’s what it is as long as we got capitalism it’s going to do what it has always done which is to provoke the
Critics we won’t soon have another marks that’s a tall order but we’ve had a lot of folks get pretty close and more of them are coming I can assure you all right so the critics have always done a variety uh of things so let’s go through
You know two or three of them does Marx emphasize class struggle yes does Marx want to stress the role of the material reality you know the the hard Facts of Life feeding yourself clothing yourself Sheltering yourself as being somehow more important than the ideological that in German uh barold breast captured this by
The way if you’re familiar with bre he was a Marxist many of the people that Americans particularly intellectuals admire and follow get sanitized by The Peculiar mentality of Americans so that you appreciate them cleansed of their Marxism as if the Marxism wasn’t part of it bear told BR is arguably one of the
Greatest um writers of of theater in the last century or two he’s a Marxist always was committed to Marxism from the beginning and he has wonderful lines one of them in German in English first you have to eat something then we can discuss Morality In other words the profundity of real life
Shapes the thinking material facts first yeah materialism determines ideas not the other way around or we must turn Hegel on his head the idea being Hegel thought ideas of the spirit is what’s real and it’s shapes our delusion about material reality which is governed it’s not so
Far from Christian ideas that in the beginning God made everything a spiritual entity produced the material reality we all live in US included so why does Mark stress it the answer and Marx gives this answer himself part of the reason that kind kind of a criticism survives is that the
People who make it are so unfamiliar with Marx’s work that it doesn’t seem to Dawn on them that this criticism that they’ve just figured out might have been figured out by others before them and some of those others might have confronted either Marx or marxists after him with that idea and gotten some
Response so that the before you throw the criticism out again avoid being embarrassed by having someone like me for example have to explain to you painfully that Marx himself responded to that criticism you don’t have to agree with him but don’t quite present your criticism as if it
Were this sharp new insight when it’s an old dull and dead Insight all right here we go Marx responds by saying literally almost in these words angles and I my partner and I may be appropriately criticized for having overstressed the material relative to the ideal let us explain to you why we did
That we didn’t do it because the Mater IAL is more important than the ideal that idea is silly we did it because we live in a culture that overstates the reverse and to push back against the idealism that governs the the religious kind God made the world or the secular kind hegel’s effort
At a reasonable way to think of the world as fundamentally spirit so we overstressed the other side to kind of balance the conversation but we don’t believe in the one is more important than the other that’s an empty debate for us it has no content that we can
Grasp we think that the idea shapes the material and vice versa in a continuous process of mutual transformation and for that comp complex idea they borrowed the old world dialectic we understand that the different aspects of Life shape each other and constantly change each other other so that a
Changes B which therefore Alters how B impacts a thereby changing a which thereby Alters how it affects b in a continuous process which is not only dialectical but which constitutes what we as human beings call history change the only thing that doesn’t change marks once quipped is the process
Of change itself and then quickly corrected but change too changes how it works over time so the notion that that you know they made one the dominant over the other misunderstands what he got from Hegel which is where that dialectic idea comes from yes he overstressed it to say the
History of you know human history is the history of class struggle why would you put your focus on class like that because it’s more important than other things no as a Marxist which I am and happily say so I can assure you I focus on class
Analysis if you’ve read any of my books or my articles you’ll see that do I think class is more important than other aspects of life not at all in fact it makes no sense to me class is part of life so is eating drinking dancing praying wondering dreaming and a million other
Things I can’t talk about a million other things I would become incoherent to you and to me so I focus on some things like class in my case but not because it’s more important you know in order for me to argue that class is more important or for you to argue that
Anything else is you’d have to show me how what you’re focusing on is more important than everything else you’ve never done that that’s not doable because you can’t do it and I can’t either so we focus on particular things for the reasons that shape Our Lives
So I focus on class like Marx because in my education in the society I live in which here in the United States is yours too it is a lost denied marginalized reality and I don’t like that and I think terrible social consequences flow from that so I focus on class and I find
Marx really interesting cuz he helps me do that but I it’s not that class is more important that’s a silly are it’s like asking me what color is Thursday that doesn’t work folks there is no correct answer to that question which is the more important factor shaping the world is Another
Empty question you can’t do that nobody ever has if you’re persuaded that something is more important than something else the important thing for you to ask is why you believe that but to say I’m going to prove it I’m going to show you can’t do that or
To say the same thing another way and this is the answer to Carl popper when you explain why you focus on I don’t know love or race or Pol politics or class you will make use of ways of thinking that help get you to that point but those are always play ways of
Thinking that started somewhere and where you start isn’t a place that you can prove you should start at because the only way you can explain to me why you start at a a certain place is to use the analytic that you developed from the place you started at and that would be
Proving something by reference to itself and if you ever had a logic class you got a problem here or to say the same thing in English we all start from certain places we have to start somewhere and if we don’t like the place we start we can start somewhere else but
The notion that some of us start in the right place because it’s the right place to start that’s pure Dogma there’s no basis for that wherever you start I can ask you why you start there wherever you start I can say you know you could start somewhere else
That’s always true you could people do marxists start with class you don’t have to the interesting question is why would you equally interesting why wouldn’t you you got to start somewhere most of us you know where we start where our parents and our environment tell us it’s
Appropriate to start and that’s okay but that’s not some Beyond discourse place that’s the honest answer I am what I am because of the the autobiography I could take your time to present to you as to why I did that call poer criticism in that way is
Useless so two things Marx’s emphasis on class struggles you interpret as uh an emphasis for pragmatic purposes and then the emphasis of the importance of material facts over ideal facts is just to push back against the various forms of idealism that were prominent at the time but one one
Criticism that I hear all the time is well the first thing that happens when you mention Marx to a non-marxist is something like this Marx is the biggest failure of Academia or econom economics because because he’s directly responsible for the deaths of Millions with the catastrophic failures of the
Soviet Union China Cambodia and so on and because I’m not educated about Marx one of the biggest surprises for me that came from reading your work is that I had not realized that Marx never said much about what should happen after capitalism he was more concerned with the just
Criticizing capitalism and if this is true then I think that’s a huge misconception because lots of anti-marxist hold him personally accountable for Stalin the Communist Chinese genocides and so on as if he directly like wrote up their socioeconomic policies yeah let me respond I mean I
Agree with you I won’t go over saying it Marx never wrote a book about communism he never wrote a book about socialism uh the one title that has the word socialism in it uh a pamphlet really more than a book was called socialism utopian versus scientific a a
Short book you can call it released in the middle of the 19th century was mostly written by angles but Marx had some play in it but it was a critique of different kinds of socialism it wasn’t about a quote socialist economy as I say the only effort at a
Socialist economy that happened in Marx’s Lifetime and did get his attention was the Paris commune but that was a socialist society that lasted I don’t remember exactly but somewhere on the order of three or four months in Paris and then it was overthrown by the returning French army under Napoleon you
Know the the nephew and Grandson of Napoleon anyway uh so yeah holding Marx responsible would be roughly as follows from the year let’s say 1500 to 1800 there were countless Wars between Christians of one kind or another and either other Christians Protestant versus Catholic for example or if you go
Back a little early Wars of Christians against Muslims the so-called Crusades and so on the Leading Armies of these Christians took their inspiration they said so from the Bible from the utterances as best we can get them of Jesus Christ among others as as recorded in the
Bible so I should what conclude that I shouldn’t be a Christian because millions of people were killed cuz they were in the Crusades and in the Hundred Years War 30 Years War all the wars of Protestants and Catholics which shape modern Europe were all done in the name of
Christianity are you going to blame the Christians it’s bizarre the worst war in the history of the world so far in terms of the sheer Brut ality deaths is the first world war tens of millions of people combatants and civilians were killed these were Wars by countries that were chrisan all of
Them on all sides there were no appreciable marxists in those days and they didn’t have any power though those that were might have called themselves that so what should I say capitalism kills Millions here’s another one for the last I don’t know eight centuries the world has been beset by something called
Colonialism huge portions of the world Asia Africa Latin America were invaded taken over and run by white Christian people whether you’re talking about India or Africa or you name it in the course of that tens of millions probably more like hundreds of millions of people died directly or indirectly because of
What these Christian people did should I say Christianity has on its hands the blood of uh I mean I could do that there is some sort of Link here but Marxism or socialism have no special standing in this kind of argument there’s nothing unique did the killings
In Russia or elsewhere done by people who saluted Marx show that there’s some link yeah there’s some link just like I did between Christian ity or the writings of Jesus Christ etc etc in colonialism World War I or for that matter World War II let’s remember World
War II every combatant country with one exception was capitalist the one exception the Soviet Union they weren’t but they were not the only player in World War II remember was mostly about the United States Britain and Western Europe against Germany Italy and Japan so all of those countries are capitalist country so
Capitalism the era of capitalism has been by far the bloodiest I would tend to connect that dot to the other dot so I find it always this bizarre logic in which you find a link between Marxism in Russia Stalin and all that and terrible things that happened
There it seems to me very reasonable to say hey terrible things happened there why did they what is the link between the terrible things that happened and the ideological framework of that Society perfectly reasonable question I wrote a book in my life called class thean history which
Tries to explain how and why in the Soviet Union Union those things happen I think that’s a reasonable demand to put on anybody Marxist or not but then to play the game as if these Horrors were something done by the people you don’t like or don’t agree
With whereas you are sitting in the beautiful clean vanilla chair explaining this that’s disgusting that’s that that’s beyond that doesn’t need a reputation that needs to be ridiculed I don’t want to offend anyone on the other hand I’m trying as politely as I can to
Say that is a cheap shot that tells us more about you than it does you know there’s a um there’s a fellow named Jordan Peterson you may know him he goes around repeating this and what I love about he’s not unique but I like the way he
Does it because he does it as if it’s a settled matter it’s that style of a argument in which in order to make your case you act as if everybody in the world understands this thing you’re about to repeat so that your opponent should feel not just that you are in
Disagreement but the whole univer but everybody knows the minute you hear that from anybody mark non-marxist you should reach for your wallet before that guy gets his hand in it because this is a hustle and not a it’s not serious kind of uh debate it is entirely anti- paparian in
A sense I mean the capitalist governments as you said they’re also responsible for unimaginable death and destruction yet the critics I was referring to totally neglect this evidence and focus on Russia China Etc as if these were the only instances of crimes against humanity yeah it’s you know it’s
Really it’s beyond words and especially you know both China and Russia their socialist governments which leave loads to be desired I’m a Critic of them I’ve written I mean all of that but put that aside both of those socialist societies as they Define themselves came out of revolutions against
Unbearable social conditions all of which seems to be forgotten if you’re interested in where the Chinese Communist Revolution comes from there’s an American missionary a woman named Pearl Buck who wrote a famous novel 50 years ago or however when it was called The Good Earth just read how China was before the revolution
The the the deaths every day the the misery for centuries that’s what the Revolution was against you want that Revolution which had some violence in its unraveling and many injustices no doubt but where are you coming from with this bizar from on Height’s declaration the minute you talk to folks you discovered
They have no idea where this R Russian Revolution came from where this Chinese Revol why do you think people have revolutions because things are going real well uh-uh it’s when they’re not and then you have to wonder well what does that mean gee well it turns out it
Means lots of suffering for a long time for many people now the whole numerical calculus of who heard how many people when becomes fuzzy and your invocation of this fuzziness as if it weren’t fuzzy as if all the bad news was over here and there was nothing
Else to worry about to think about again that reflects on you not on the situation you’re talking about so anyway so granted that Marx did not Advocate some particular post capitalist form of economic or political organization I mean the question arises though just how we should inter interpret the failures
Of many of the attempted purported instantiations of his theories and I’m wondering if what you’re suggesting is that much of the suffering should be attributed to the conditions of what came before but I’m also wondering if any aspects of these no no no no I I
Didn’t say that and I don’t want to be understood as oh okay clarify that please Sor no I think it’s a lapse it’s it’s a cheap shot it’s not valid and it involves erasing other kinds of history that would make what you’re saying ridiculous so you avoid recognizing so
That’s out no I think there are failures the word is a little messy but okay there are failures in the Soviet Union and there are failures in the People’s Republic of China or for that matter North Korea Cuba Vietnam or any of the other countries that nowadays wait
Richard just to make sure that I understand you were saying that as opposed to attributing the the suffering that happened in these regimes to what happened in the past what you were just saying is that we can’t act as if this was what happened in these regimes was
The only bad thing I mean things were terrible uh prior to the Communist revolutions too no yeah but that was a secondary point my major point was if you want to play the game of counting deaths then count them everywhere yeah okay great that that was the m stop this
Game in which you think you’ve achieved something by pointing to them and their bad story their bad facts their Horrors unfortunately the horrors are all over the place and you’re not coming from a place that is clean and viewing a place that is dirty that’s a convenient way to advance your political agenda
But it holds no water okay let me in order to understand how to go about talking about stalinism or deaths or any other negative quality you have to kind of ask yourself what this reference is which I get too socialism has failed what are you talking about let me give you an example
Of why this makes no sense if you were and there are studies that can back me up if you want them if you were to ask the majority of the people on this planet at any time over the last 75 years what’s the number one priority of your Society the answer
Would be we want to stop being poor we want to stop being the way most of the people in Asia Africa AFC and Latin America are which is without huge portions of what people in the United States take for granted food clothing shelter education Transportation all of that okay
So the highest priority is to develop your economy and your Society so that average people are healthy can live a reasonable long time get a good education have their health care taken care Etc okay now let me put on my hat as an economist right over the last 40
Years from the 1980s to the present one country in the world has grown faster than all others no one’s close and they were the largest country on this planet they went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to now challenging the United States it’s
The People’s Republic of China in terms of the highest priority those people had in their poverty situation a hundred years ago socialism is the best thing that could have happened to them and they know it and their regime is very solid and very secure because of it real
Wages in China over those last 40 years have quadrupled a real wage is when you adjust the money a person gets as pay for their work in terms of the prices they have to pay when they use the money so the real wage measures how much can
You really get to consume from whatever your wage is over the 40-year period the wages average real wage in the United States went up about 10 15% let me do that again the real wages in America on average went up 10 to 15% over 40 years the real wages in the
People’s Republic of China over the last 40 years went up 400% do you think there’s a difference here who’s failing what are you talking about by the way I’m not endorsing China Chinese Society are they full of criticism do they have flaws absolutely but to make believe that goes
Into the kind of logic you’re talking about is based on a carefully cultivated ignorance it’s just ignorant they have no idea what happened in China nor do they care they need to affirm one is good and one is bad childish it’s really childish by the way in the 20th century
The most spectacular economic growth was achieved by the Soviet Union in 1917 at the time of their Revolution they were the one of the poorest backwaters of Europe anyone who had ever traveled there chronically I mean there was no the 5% of the people were literate everybody was a peasant in the country
There were no roads there was no electricity all of that kind of stuff and within 70 years and despite two world wars fought on Russia’s uh surface on its land they were the number one contestant of the United States okay does that mean the Soviet Union was wonderful of course
Not but when you use the word failure what’s your standard what’s your metric where do you come from with this you know you know what this is this is just hostility which by the way may be justified I’ll never know but what’s coming at me is noise junk silly stuff
That that you kind of ought to be ashamed is coming out of your mouth I don’t mean you personally but someone who says that sort of stuff it’s it really it’s really kind of childish by the way today the world economy let me just be very topical with you for a moment
The world economy today is different from what it was 10 years ago let alone 20 or 40 after World War II the United States dominated the world economy United States was as marxists like to say hegemonic economically this is a footnote had gmany as a cal as a concept to govern
All this that’s a concept that was developed in its modern form by a Marxist an Italian Marxist named Antonio grami who was imprisoned by musolini and basically killed in prison but he was the leading Marxist Italy the most important Marxist theorist ever produced in Italy and it’s produced a lot of
Them grami developed while he was in prison books you can get Columbia University press in the United States has a complete collection of I think a dozen volumes of the writings while in prison of Antonio grami by the way footnote because you want to people will find this
Interesting the edited volumes of Mr gromi were uh the volumes were edited by um a man named Buddha jij who was a professor passed away he was a professor of literature at Notre Dame University in Indiana Joseph Budaj he had a son named Peter Budaj uhoh Peter Budaj a spokesperson for the Biden
Regime comes from a family whose father dedicated a major part of his life to the translation and publication of the works of Antonio grami who was for a while the head of the Italian Communist party here in the United States you’ll find people who know and use the work of
Grami including the concept of hemony having carefully avoided learning where it comes from what context it works within what intellectual tradition it depends on etc etc etc the influence of Marxism is everywhere and one of the reasons people don’t understand it is because often the
People who have it in them find it is necessary in this strange country to hide it give you another example cuz there’s a certain twinkle in your ey that suggests I should go further with this kamla Harris is the vice president she has a father named Donald
Harris he’s a Marxist Economist that I have worked with much in my life he used to be a professor at Stanford one of the few marxists that Stanford dared bring into its framework but who admits what the complicated right let me go back to to where I
Was so if your metric is economic growth in a society that says that’s our number one priority then socialism isn’t a failure or you have to qualify that somehow you can’t say socialism a failure as if somehow this makes any sense because I just gave you a framework within which
It’s wrong it just makes no sense at all so I wanted to jump to the current Global situation the United States was dominant from 1945 to around 2015 then it’s over why do I say that because the world economy today is no longer dominated by the United States and its few major
Allies nowadays the United States and its few major allies are known as the G7 you’ll see headlines in newspapers about the G7 the G7 is United States Britain France Germany and Italy Japan and Canada that’s that that used to be the United States its allies dominate the world economy
They don’t anymore there’s a second block it has a name you haven’t seen it very often yet but you will it’s called The Bricks BR I CS if you pay attention to such things you’ll know that that stands for Brazil Russia India China and South Africa those five nations China and its
Allies they recently they added six more countries so it’s now an 11 country block if you add up the size of an economy and the the number we use in economics for that is called the GDP stands for gross domestic product it’s a it’s a rough count of the total
Quantity of goods and services your economy produces in a calendar year well if you add up all the gdps of all the countries in the G7 us and its allies it adds up to about 29% of the total output of goods and services in the world today
And if you do the same for the bricks it adds up to 33% you notice something is different the bricks is a bigger economic unit we’ve not had that before the the lines crossed in 2020 and since then since that part of the world is growing much faster than this part
So by what standard again is the so socialist world of failure well what what are you talking talking about do you perhaps mean Health Care no that doesn’t work out so well they have mostly universal health care in those socialist countries what about education no they’re pretty good on that civil
Liberties ah good you got one they’re not so good on that that’s a flaw that’s a criticism you may that I’m okay with that I have no problem I don’t expect societies to be perfect I certainly don’t argue that they are I don’t do it for our side I don’t do it
For their side but I don’t permit I can’t if I’m going to be intellectually honest or at least try to be to allow things to be said that are bizarre and now there’s another point I’m not sure you were going to go here but just in case and if
You don’t maybe this is an invitation to think about doing it socialism is not a universally agreed upon idea in other words when anyone says socialism hasn’t worked my first reaction I try to I try to stay calm and cool and collected but my first reaction is
Whoa are you perhaps not aware that from the beginning socialist have not agreed on what the word means they never did they don’t now what one country means by socialism is not identical to what another one does and once you understand that posing the question socialism in the singular is a failure
Becomes nonsensical what do you you mean which one let me is this worth exploring sure sure please all right here’s one example many countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe and I’m thinking here of Sweden Denmark France Germany Italy will be referred to either as socialist economies by some or as social
Democracies a kind of variation on that or as Democratic socialism I mean large numbers of people use those descriptors all the time and here’s what they mean most Industries in those societies that I mentioned those countries remain privately owned and operated on the other hand in those societies the government has has intervened
To control to regulate to tax in in in a pretty intrusive way on what those private Enterprises can do and the reference to them as socialist is a reference to the amount intensity and intrusiveness of the government controls and regulations upon what remain private capitalist Enterprises and that is called often
Scandinavian socialism social democracy and so on when Bernie Sanders Who self-identifies as a socialist gives examples he prefers to use Denmark over and over again publicly so that’s one idea of of socialism now we go to the Soviet Union quite different in a crucial aspect they not only have the government control
Regulate and tax the way they do in Denmark but they go another step the government takes over the Enterprises the government owns and operates the Enterprise not private capitalists and they call that socialism in the Soviet Union USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist republics then we have China which is a
Hybrid China has 40% publicly owned and operated Enterprises 60% private capitalist owned and operated Enterprise and a powerful government regulating both of them they all call China refers to itself as socialism with Chinese characteristics okay which one are you talking about and then there’s a fourth one
Which is rising fast in the world today which is a bit of a criticism of the first three because it argues that those discussions of socialism may not the word may be necessary but they are certain not sufficient socialism to be socialism in this fourth perspective has to have a
Transformation of the workplace the factory the office the store from a top-down hierarchical unequal relationship between employer and employee to a horizontal Democratic organization of the Enterprise something that would look like what we in this country like to call worker Co-op okay which which socialism pre pray tell are you
Criticizing your hostility to socialism is so total and so ignorant that you just lump all of this together and declare it a failure you know that’s childish it it’s reaps of the ignorance you either have because you don’t know what I just said or you really don’t care which does you no compliment
Either it’s extraordinary and you know in another Society or on other topics the people involved in these discussions would not behave this way if I breezily said in the course of such a conversation how boring Shakespeare is that be so someone in the room I hope who would explain to me I mean
Shakespeare wrote a lot of stuff really all of it you don’t then would tell me about the and I’d get embarrassed because I had really spoken stupidly so we don’t allow people in certain areas to talk but the absence of a culture of studying Marxism and talking about it has allowed our
Intellectual Community to babble junk as if they were serious in a way that frankly I find embarrassing I often don’t say anything because you know this is this is having a in-depth conversation with a a brick of cement you know after a while gets boring I don’t by the way I don’t mean
To be aggressive but part of this conversation should be not just the words I say but the tone and the style and the intonation and the facial expressions because they convey a lot of meaning also and you’re a wizard with that I love listening and watching you talk I’m
Sorry for bringing us back to this but I think in addition to everything else we’ve covered if we can nail it down it would be a huge accomplishment but you mentioned Jordan Peters and people like him who take it to be a done deal that socioeconomic organizations purportedly
Inspired by by Marx have been abject total violent failures and you’ve given good reasons to look at how other socioeconomic organizations have fa fared as a foil and but still that the purported Marxist instantiations have succeeded in other metrics but the critic like Jordan Peterson I’m sure
Will still point to the violence at home committed against citizens or other groups and again this happens places like Nazi Germany too but how do you explain these failures in in Russia or China and do any of them point to a falsification of some dimension of Marx’s
Views no I think there are problems with Marxist views all kinds areas he didn’t go into um areas where his arguments are incomplete areas where he made misjudgments that need to be corrected and there’s a vast Marxist literature that does all of that Marxist have not been shy at all of dealing with
All all the criticisms you’ve just made and many many many more I know I’ve gone through a lot of that literature I could you know tell you about it because Marxism spread all over the world the number of interpretations of Marxism Are Legion any idea or body of ideas like
Marxist that spread to every country on Earth in the matter of a hundred years 150 years would mean that these ideas entered vastly different countries in terms of their economics their politics their culture and each of them reading marks would react or interact with the what they’re reading in their own way
Chinese Marxism is not Nigerian Marxism and neither of them look like what the Guatemalans do with it etc etc so the very notion of Socialism or Marxism as having some core solid thing that everybody shares is open to a lot of debate and even if you could
Whittle down what they maybe all have in common I could think pretty quickly I’ll show you they don’t and they haven’t always and therefore they may not tomorrow and I don’t I guess I don’t understand your question what violence exactly are you pointing to done by
Whom so for instance I just did an episode with Norman neyar a historian here at Stanford about the world history of genocide and we talked about in the Chinese Revolution uh for instance there were these huge uh agrarian communes in which people starved by the millions to death
And a large part of this I think if I recall correctly from reading the book because we didn’t really discuss it was the government decided not to distribute food that they had to the poor agricultural workers but to export it because they would get more money or we
Didn’t talk about Cambodia but I recall that the powers that be sort of othered all intellectuals and had them rounded up and murdered this sort of thing did that happen my guess is it probably did I don’t know who this historian is would be singled out for having glasses because they were
Intellectuals yeah you know every social movement every social movement that I’ve ever studied has exhibited moments incidents activities like that right now in Great Britain I’m going to give you different examples there’s a parliamentary commission that has just issued a report literally today or yesterday about the behavior of British
Military in the Afghan war that went on 10 years ago and is bringing up for trial the literally dozens and dozens of British soldiers who Mur murdered children what am I supposed to do with this do British soldiers murder children under some circumstances evidently they do had I never known about this report
Which anybody listening to this can Google and find out the details yourself I would have assumed I could find it if I went to work looking for it you know we have our myi Massacre we have our Guantanamo torture Chambers we have and we have every right to point them out
And to talk about them but the leap from that to the notion that one is in a position to do what what do you do with the factuality assuming you can establish it let’s assume there were instances where a government decision was made to export food that might have
Fed starving people why did that happen there’s nothing neither in socialism nor in Marxism that warrants that justifies it proposes it advocate can stop just like there’s nothing in the United States as a society that says go out there and torture go out there and slaughter people no no no no
Stop that you’re drawing an equation in a kind of childish logic in fact officially you’re against all those things does that mean they won’t happen of course not of course not that’s why the British to their credit are willing to say wow we have to even Tony Blair a politician
Whose level of of public lying is really impressive had to at a certain point admit that when he said he knew the American Amic an had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as the premise for invading that country was lying yeah he’s actually yeah I lie and why did I
Lie because then he had an explanation and if you like him enough that was sufficient if you were an enemy you could say see in Britain they they they propose that the politicians lie well no they don’t do do politi Ians lie yeah a lot and they don’t just do it in
One kind of society or another that’s a problem how do you deal in other words there are ways of of coping with these kinds it’s this effort to use such things and you know wow you better have a lot of argumentation which these folks never do
At least not in my experience why I should go with you from a horrible incident where I agree with you it’s horrible to something about the whole society’s structure or makeup look you could say it about early United States when the Europeans come here they systematically commit genocide they take
The indigenous people look today’s Columbus Day or whatever yesterday they take the indigenous people and they slaughter them that pretty clear the Nazis did that with a whole set of categories of people that they wanted off the face of the Earth and they buried them or they gassed them in
Chambers etc etc yeah there are cases but then there are other situations where terrible things happen but you don’t conclude this is quite a genocide you know it’s terrible it’s not an exoneration but you have categorical differences that matter that’s why for me these conversations are the bizarre effort of
People who should know better wanting to hold on to pretty primitive goods and bad stories and so they make up something to rationalize it they find something really bad which may be true and then they’ve got what they want the thing that warrants the wholesale dismissal it as I
Say a very very bizarre nothing again nothing after World Wars 1 and two has been as horribly destructive of human beings as those two events they’re called world wars for a reason and there’s some restraint between Russia on the one hand and the United States and Ukraine on the other
Right now because using nuclear weapons is the next World War that really that’s stupid we aren’t only one country on Earth has used nuclear weapons that’s the United States twice Nagasaki and Hiroshima two two atomic bomb killing hundreds of thousands of does that make the United States a murderous place no
Does it say something about the United States yeah it does we can discuss and we should what it does but a wholesale denunciate no particular people at a particular time made some unspeakable decisions that we have to F we have to take ownership anyone who’s who wants to
Defend the Soviet Union has to own what Stalin did you I got what happened here how was that possible and you know much of socialism after Stalin has been devoted to how do you deal with that problem to make sure it never happens again again Americans like to imagine
They’re the only ones that see this as a problem not true only ignorance keeps that crap going I’ve been to countless conferences around the world where the issue has been how do you make sure that doesn’t happen again how how does socialism take ownership of that
Problem etc etc and if there are in the room marxists who say that’s not a real problem we have they usually get shot down and not pleasantly I I don’t mean physically I mean argumentatively shot down uh because it’s not an acceptable kind of argument none of that is sort of taken into
Account but again that’s the peculiarity of the United States which does not look I’m an economist let me give you to very simple in the United States economics profession in the University there are two basic positions one is called neoclassical economics which is overwhelmingly dominant and a small resistant criticism comes from something
Called Keynesian economics okay and they fight each other and they push each other out of departments and hire their the people they like and endless been going on for many decades one of the few things the neoclassicals and the keynesians agree on is not to hire and not to deal with Marian
Economics what do you do with it well they’ve succeeded marxian economics are very few and very far between these days more of them are coming which I’m very happy about but for a good while I was one of the few and because I went to all the pedigree
Universities you know my name not the others but that’s not because I’m better more important more prolific or anything else it’s only the pedigree because that’s how this system works but I can assure you that all of these these conversations like yours with me and not
Because of your fault or my fault would be very different if we didn’t silence that community and block them from introducing their perspectives into our conversations of all these topic that’s the loss to the American intellectual community and it works at many many levels we will have no conversation about Pete
Buddha jit’s father and it’s not because of anything wrong with Pete or anything wrong with his father it’s just a taboo that keeps all that stuff away sad it’s really it’s a sadness for me it’s and to those of you that are watching you’re losing out on a rich
Wonderful literature not that you’ll agree with all of it who cares but that it will bring you insights that you will like or hate and provoke you in ways that will make you a better thinker about what you focus on than you are without engaging that literature your
Loss and ours because it’s less you can contribute to the rest of us well toward wrapping up with just a couple final thoughts I mean the colonial genocides the Mongol genocide the Crusades even the Neanderthal genocides they’re all distinctly non-marxist and singling out China or Russia or Cambodia is again just
Cherry-picking evidence to support the anti-marxist criticism but I think it was it’s really important that you stress that even a devout Marxist like you doesn’t think of Marx as an infallible God I mean Marxism isn’t evolving family of theories and this goes hand inand with your description of
These different forms of socialism uh but again Richard thank you so much for continuing the conversation with me you you really are such a terrific oror and I I love speaking with you and I’m sorry that my co-host was a bit more disruptive than usual but again thanks
So much no your co-host I thought behaved wonderfully and have no objection at all it’s a pleasure talking to you and I appreciate that you’re open enough to explore these issues really that’s that’s all I’m after thank you very much hold on if you haven’t subscribed like commented or reviewed
That would be so helpful and if you haven’t yet you could also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Robinson Airome
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