Capitalism vs. Socialism: A Soho Forum Debate

Capitalism is unstable, capitalism is unequal, and capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic. I want people to make their own choices about how they live their lives, the professions they lead, where they want to work, and what they do. And capitalism offers that potential. Slavery it did it with masters and slaves, feudalism did it with lords and serfs, capitalism does it with employers and employees. Capitalism, private property, is necessary although not sufficient to a free and open society. Please come up to the stage debaters two young men in the prime of their lives, Richard Wolff, who will be who will be defending the proposition socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom equality and prosperity. Gene Epstein will be taking the negative on that. Each candidate, the way this will work is that each debater will have 17 and a half minutes, and that last thirty seconds when it comes you'll understand why it's there, but each of them will have 17 minutes and 30 seconds to lay out an initial case. They'll do five minutes each of rebuttal. I'm gonna beat them up a little bit with a moderators prerogative on some questions, then we're gonna open it up to 30 minutes or more of audience Q&A. Five minutes each of closing statements—seven and a half and again those 30 seconds, you know this is where the world changes in those 30 seconds, and then we will take another vote, and we'll see who is the big winner. Gene could you please—and if you haven't voted yet, you've got about five seconds to go. Please make a vote. Either vote for the proposition, against it, or undecided. You need to vote now in order to vote later. And without further ado let's have Richard Wolff come up and explain to us why socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity. Richard Wolff you have the stage. Thank you all for coming I assume that socialism is the reason that you came either for it or against it and I hope that the things I have to say will make some sense of it for you I did want to comment on the notion that Reason magazine is free and that the understanding Marxism book costs money and I want to urge you not to invert from the price what the values of these things are that would be a mistake it would be confusing the price with the value and for those of you that know something about socialist theory that's something you want to avoid okay socialism preferable to capitalism my basic argument is that's a very low bar that's not asking much and I want to make that case as strongly as I know how but I have a problem in the very beginning as I always do traveling around this country talking about this and that is we are like bears in this country coming out of a hibernation about seventy years of it since 1945 when everything changed from in a society in which socialists communists Marxists occupied all the normal positions in society as teachers and workers and bureaucrats and unionists when we had a new deal that celebrated many of the objectives socialists have always supported it is across the United States had a big picture over the war the clerk's office where you bought stamps and there was Uncle Sam with his hat arm and arm with Uncle Joe which stood for Joseph Stalin after that there was not so surprisingly a terrible reaction the business community and the right-wing in America was horrified that for the 1930s we had had a program of raising taxes on corporations and the rich in order to fund the creation for the first time in American history of Social Security unemployment compensation the first minimum wage and a public employment project that hired fifteen million people the rich had to pay and the mass of the Americans got the benefits this was so horrific it freaked out the forerunners of the Koch brothers and then an alliance with the Soviet Union finished off whoever wasn't freaked out already and so in 1945 everything had to be undone New Deal coalition for those of you who remember your history socialists communists the CIO unions representing tens of millions of American workers they're the ones that made all that happen they are the ones that made Roosevelt do all those things and they had to be defeated and they were the way you break up a coalition is you find the weakest link or what you can make out to be the weakest link and suddenly communists and socialists who had been the militants making the 1930s the greatest unionization period in American history they never had anything like it before we've never had anything like it since communists had to be transformed and likewise socialists from the great allies in the war from the great Vanguard of social programs in the 30s they became agents of a foreign power likely to be interested in strangling your cat and they had to be driven out of a unions at nineteen forty-seven taft-hartley driven out of their teaching jobs driven out of the consciousness of the American people who were terrorized about being interested in those things as they have mostly been in the last 40 50 60 70 years a personal note when I went to college as a young person I was interested in learning about Marxism and I asked my teachers in the university what course can I take to learn about Marxism half my teachers explained to me there isn't any nobody here knows anything about it the other half said oh we know about it but we're way too scared we're not going to teach you anything about it in my undergraduate and my graduate years and I majored in economics I'm an economics professor here's a fact no one ever in any economics course assigned me one word of Karl Marx is that because he had nothing to teach us don't be silly they were just afraid 75 years of fear there's nothing smart and nothing excusable in any of that oh and let me mention since it might be of some interest to you the three schools I attended were Harvard Stanford and Yale and if they don't have the courage what can you expect from Eastern Kentucky so I have a problem to talk to you about socialism because unless you are a very unusual American and there are some or a foreigner because the situation is different abroad you don't know much about socialism or what you do know is 75 years out of date because it's changed a lot as I'm going to point out to you as I go through the argument ok let's do it socialists disagree they always have from the beginning socialism is a product of capitalism it always was there was no socialism before capitalism came into being why because capitalism in the French and American revolutions made a big fat promise when it asked people to leave the feudalism that existed before and shift over to capitalism it made the promise as in the French Revolution that capitalism would bring with it liberty equality fraternity and let's add democracy and prosperity socialism is the movement that recognizes that what capitalism promised liberty equality fraternity and democracy wasn't delivered and never was and the socialism is a movement which if it has anything in common among its different tendencies is a notion that we can do better than capitalism it's a yearning to do better it's the kind of yearning slaves had to go beyond slavery or serfs to go beyond feudalism employees and the people who empathize with them figure we can go better and do better than capitalism that's what socialism is beyond that socialists agree about three four floors failures of capitalism and again briefly to go through them but they're three capitalism is unstable capitalism is unequal and capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic let me briefly explain unstable every 47 years in every capitalist country on average there's an economic downturn not due to nature and not due to war just built into the system it's called the business cycle because it always comes back millions of people lose work businesses go out of business a crazy crash you know what it's like if you pick up the financial press you know we're waiting for the next one to hit this year or next mr. Trump's biggest worry about being reelected is that it'll happen too soon he worries as we all do it's an unstable system that's crazy to live in a Sun stable system if you live with a roommate as unstable as capitalism you would have moved out long ago what an amazing thing to accept a system that every four to seven years threatens millions of people with unemployment lost income interrupted vacation interrupted education lost mortgage you name it then let's do the next one inequality Oxfam in England keeps track of these things and the latest number from them summarizes it all the 80 or 90 richest people in the United States together excuse me in the world have more wealth than the bottom half of the population three and a half billion people that's the achievement of capitalism that kind of distribution if you took away half the wealth of those eighty to a hundred people guess what they'd still be the richest people in the world only you'd now have a vast amount of money to deal with the sickness the lack of education the absence of water the insufficiency of food of the vast majority of people what an achievement such inequality and now finally the lack of democracy the part of it you probably know and thought about is the buying of our political process on display every day everywhere you all see it you all know it but here's a part of the lack of democracy you might not have thought about long ago we got rid of kings queens we decided we didn't need somebody sitting at the top of society telling us all what to do so that we would all be or let's call it subjects that's what they called us so we got rid of the kings and queens and we said no you know we can we run this in a different way this political system we can all get together we can periodically vote and take steps and collectively make the decisions that used to be in the hands of the kings and the queens how interesting we democratized at least a little the politics and what we didn't do was to democratize the economics so what do we have inside each enterprise a little king an owner a manager a Board of Directors a king in his Court who run everything will make all the key decisions what to produce how to produce where to produce and what to do with the profits everybody in the enterprise helps to produce if it's too difficult for you to hear me out then it's a sign that I'm getting to you thanks we're good please keep going please please hear a professor wolf please respect professor wolf we don't have democracy in our workplaces we never did the commitment to democracy is verbal in this society limited to that voting activity where we live but not where we work and as adults that's where we spend most of our time going to work being at work and recuperating from work in the workplace no democracy at all we do what we're told what we produce belongs to somebody else and we have no say over what they do with it how this is organized what the technology is and socialists therefore have said my god we can do better than capitalism and that's what they want and that's what they agree on but here's where the disagreements how do you go about it what do you do and we have a benefit socialists do today we have some experiments that were made in the 20th century Russia China Cuba and so on and we learned from those experiments what works and what doesn't what should be pursued and what should be set aside and so the new socialism and if you're not aware of it that has to go back to what I said at the beginning you haven't been keeping up which is hard to do in a society which makes socialism a taboo what has happened to socialism is a refocusing of itself it's not interested so much in the state doing things that achieved rapid rates of economic growth true enough but it also left too much power in the hands of too few people and that has to be addressed and dealt with which socialists have been doing and the new focus a new focus of socialism is to do something at the workplace that was never done to go beyond capitalism in the organization of the workplace to democratize the workplace to make where we spend most of our adult lives at work a place where democracy reigns where all the people who work in an enterprise participate in making the decisions of what to produce how to produce where to produce and what to do with the profits because if they all together made those decisions we wouldn't give some people a hundred and fifty billion dollars and other people have to borrow money to get their kid through college we wouldn't have the inequality we certainly wouldn't allow the irrationality of every four to seven year instability everybody together would choose a technology that isn't dangerous to the health of all of us at the workplace we could go beyond the capitalism but we have to have the courage to do what was not yet done not in Roosevelt's New Deal and not in Russia or China either the transformation at the base of society into a Democrat eyes workplace that's the new direction of socialism that's where socialism will be in 21st century that we are now entering it's a new and a different socialism it has learned from its own earlier experiences and experiments two little footnotes capitalism did not emerge out of feudalism all finished in one swell foop did it if you know the history you'll know that capitalism started in this town in that town in that village in that area often it didn't last more than a few weeks or a few months sometimes a few years and then it was crushed by feudalism and they had to figure out how to survive and they had to get together it took centuries socialism isn't born all at once either it makes its early experiments it had won in the Paris Commune in 1870 and then it had some other experiments in the 20th century that I've mentioned and just like with capitalism you learn from your experiments how to make it better next time how to correct the mistakes you made in the project that has animated socialists from the beginning we can do better than capitalism and there is no reason that the human progress that took us beyond ancient villages and tribes and slavery and feudalism should imagine itself to have stopped at this point every other system was born evolved and died capitalism we know was born and evolved I'll leave it to your inference as to what it is doing now thank you right thank you Richard Wolffe follow him follow him on Twitter at at Richard D wolf with two EPs and now taking the opposite side is Jean Epstein follow him at Gina at Jean Soho for him Jean Upstate what is he by the way there are seats up front for people who are in the back and I want to apologize to professor Wolff for that outburst that was very brewed we don't run the Scylla forum that way and and thank you for professor Wolff for being gracious about that well let me start it is a pleasure to share a stage with Richard Wolff who I consider my alter ego in a parallel universe we both came of age as socialists in my case from age 1 since my mother was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and I have our FBI file to prove it you could always tell who the FBI agents were in the party because they were the only ones who paid their dues on time Richard Richard paid his dues by getting an economics PhD at Yale followed by a career advocating socialism I paid my dues by evolving into a different kind of radical a bleeding-heart freedom-loving advocate of capitalism I believe that even the deeply flawed capitalism we have now heavily distorted by a government interference on behalf of the powerful is preferable by far to Richard's socialism in promoting freedom prosperity and equality Richard bears a very heavy burden of proof because his socialism has never existed he repudiates my mother's Soviet Union my mother's favorite Cuba he has indeed called these systems state capitalist I'm glad he's learned from their mistakes since their mistakes has in fact of course cost the blood of tens of millions of innocent people he wants the economy as he explains in his book democracy at work a cure for capitalism he wants the economy reorganized around workers self-directed enterprises in which employees owned and democratically run companies and keep the broadly defined profits or surplus that normally go to the employers I fully support what Richard calls employees becoming their own employers so long as people freely choose that arrangement Richard thinks such firms are a substitute for capitalism but there are actually just another option that capitalism offers nothing about the system of practicing of protecting property rights of firms in a free market dictates how these firms must be structured Richard himself has written about the quote varying kinds and degrees of democracy in the workplace which already exist based on these cases he observes quote workplace democracy responds to deep needs and desires unquote but these deep needs and desires seem to run only skin-deep Richard has written that in today's worker owned enterprises quote it might be legally possible for worker owners to transform the enterprise so that they become not only owners but also collectively directors however he concedes that has very rarely happened well no doubt it very rarely happens because workers very rarely want it to happen but the move to workers self-directed enterprises can happen in the capitalist system if workers do want it to happen start with the fact that the bottom half of the population accounts for one third of all consumer spending the bottom four fifths for nearly two-thirds give adding up to trillions of dollars per year on the investment side there's over a trillion dollars in labor union pension funds domestically and an estimated forty 40 trillion a worldwide held by living in pension funds all this financial firepower could be marshaled to make workers self-directed enterprises the dominant mode of production and it would be true to the 1960s view that radical change must be implemented by the same people who seek to be the embodiment of that radical change but being willing of workers to follow the Marxist playbook is as old as Marxism itself around 1980 democratic socialists like Michael Harrington and Tom Hayden advocated a bottom-up socialism similar to Richards but they acknowledged that without the coercive power of government worker owned enterprises quote are almost impossible to get off the ground as two of them wrote Richard might argue that it's okay to use government power to try to jumpstart workers self-directed firms since government often rigs the game anyway but a Marxist like Richard should be deeply troubled by the old contradiction of radical change from below being being implemented by the force of government from above and beyond that he would use government to socialize finance and the allocation of labor that's why he and I are taking opposite sides in this debate he advocates a full-blown form of socialism that will put freedom prosperity and equality under siege just like the old socialism's did but let's go all the way with Richard and assume that a socialist political party wins at the ballot box with two-thirds of the electorate voting for its candidates since two-thirds is normally interpreted in politics as a mandate the government makes Richards socialism a reality but voting for a radical idea in a voting booth is very different from a full and active commitment to that idea so let's not assume that the 2/3 have anticipated the real consequences of what they voted for Richard writes that apart from doing our assigned jobs workers would each be quote democratically and collectively given fully equal participation in decision-making over their own enterprise and over the broad economy unquote he adds somewhat ominously quote no one could work without engaging in both roles there will be a need for financing under Richard socialism both to create new worker owned companies and to provide funds for enterprises that want to expand they quote obvious alternative writes Richard to the existing sources of finance is quote socialized banking consisting of quote workers self workers self-directed enterprises where workers and communities affected by bank policies together direct and operate banks so Richard would shut down the nearly fifty billion raised annually through crowdfunding and the several hundred billion raised through various forms of venture capital and Finance is not the only function he would relegate to the power of politics he also proposes a quote specialized agency that would quote always know from constant monitoring monitoring which existing enterprises need more laborers which have registered the wish to commence new production all the relevant skill and experience requirements and where effective laborers and enterprises are located unquote he adds that the agencies reports would be submitted to all workers to aid them in making their decisions notice that he's talking about knowledge of the relevant skill and experience of 160 million workers in the US across hundreds of thousands of firms that's information the specialized agency will quote always know from constant monitoring from my work experience I can tell Richard that those constant monitors who keep coming around will be the butt of jokes and the information they come away with will be superficial when it isn't totally misleading so in Richards world will be recorded to our assigned jobs attend meetings about company matters and vote on the outcomes will also have to pour over the reports of the labor allocation financial agencies and then discuss their recommendations with many others and vote on those outcomes I submit that only in a dystopian nightmare can most of us imagine ourselves spending our waking hours in this way is since the vote of any of us any one of us can hardly determine the outcome anyway Richard approvingly uses the 1960s term participatory democracy in which we each get to participate actively in democratic decision-making in a 1970 book called after the revolution sociologist Robert Dowell explained the arithmetic --all unworkability of this idea if each attendee at a meeting were given just ten minutes to address the issue of being voted on it would take ten hours to move on to the next issue provided there were only 60 people at the meeting but let's take this leap and assume the participatory democracy would be functional many firms seeking to expand their operations will have to borrow funds from their democratically run financial agencies while also applying to the democratically run run labor allocation agency for more workers and these democratically run agencies will be ruled by the vote of the majority but to pick up on an objection raised by Atlantic magazine journalist Conor freeters Dorf we might ask how easy will it be to get the democratically run finance and labor allocation agencies to support the expansion plans of firms that produce muslim prayer rugs and quran's and the building of new mosques freeters Dorf goes on to ask would you prefer a socialist society in which birth control is available if and only if a majority of workers exercising their democratic control a sense or would you prefer a society in which private businesses can produce birth control in part because individuals possess economic rights as producers and consumers the preferences of a majority of people around them be damned unquote freedom self question applies to the related issue of freedom of speech and press would you prefer a socialist society in which dissenting journalism is available if and only if a majority of workers exercising their democratic agrees or would you prefer a society in which private enterprises can produce dissenting journalism the preferences of a majority of people around them be damned so at best our freedoms would be circumscribed by the tyranny of the majority but we don't have to press this decisive objection since the overwhelming likelihood is that elected representatives and their appointees will have most of the real power there won't be enough hours in the day for us to even be aware of the thousands of decisions being made each day on our behalf special interests will form around these centres of power and as Friedrich I act accurately predicted about conventional socialism the worst will get on top because power-hungry people are mainly the ones who end up on top our most beloved living ex President Barack Obama was called by the New York Times journalist James risen quote the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation unquote as left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out Obama used the archaic 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more journalists including James risen than all previous presidents combined so freedom of speech and press is a fragile thing constantly being Assent assaulted on all sides and especially by government if you magnify the reach and power of government under Richards plan politicians in power can stifle dissent by stealthily denying funds and labor to enterprises that put out information that government doesn't want published now take the issue of prosperity take the force that brings prosperity innovation or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction Richard thinks that as long as people can be offered another job they'll agree to giving up their current job to allow creative destruction to happen but since people naturally resist change efforts at major or even minor change would likely be thwarted by special interests reluctant reluctant to give up their established positions imagine the response if Steve Jobs sought funding for a smartphone that would also replace a flashlight a watch a camera a compass a calculator a recorder CD player and GPS navigator threatening the industries that turn out those products the pattern of obstruction will be emboldened by the malla by the knowledge that most new ideas fail and few succeed in a big way anyway policies toward imports could make Donald Trump look like a free trader Wednesday when consumers voted with their dollars to buy Japanese cars because the cars were better made and lasted longer there was a market in place that made it hard to stop the imports but in a politicized environment the threatened industries would find it easy to prevent the foreigners from selling us the cars the planners will have a perfect excuse for rejecting any project or proposals they don't like the economic reality of scarcity by yesterday I mean the fact that what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is so they can reject proposals they don't like on the reasonable grounds that the resources are simply not available so freedom and prosperity would both be under siege in Richards system of socialism on inequality as Noam Chomsky has pointed out you can find income equality in a prison where power is quite unequal and political power will be more unequal than even under a flawed system of capitalism the floor system we have is preferable by far to what Richard proposes in terms of freedom prosperity and equality because we have so many avenues of private funding dis dissident publications like the intercept Jacobin magazine Reason magazine books like by Richard Wolff and a debate series like the solo forum can persist because we have private funding and reasonably functionally consumer in capital markets innovation that brings prosperity can persist and even flourish and on income inequality the turned toward capitalism in countries like China and India has lifted hundreds of millions out of grinding poverty and is therefore meant a narrowing of income inequality globally but I began by saying this is a flawed system riddled with with crony capitalism Richard mentioned the instability of the US economy indeed it is unstable I read Richards analysis and as far as I can understand he believes that the Great Recession was triggered by the fact that the consumer was tapped out the consumers could no longer afford what they were buying well if he looks at the data he'll find that just before the recession happened consumer spending continued to rise that was in the fourth quarter of 2007 what he ignores what he ignores was the crony capitalist policy of government through the Federal Reserve that brought that awful event so I I'm Jean Epstein and I'm here to recruit you yes we have yes we had a flaw at capitalism but in order to make it a better capitalism we have to do a lot of radical things including including reining in the power of the Federal Reserve that does indeed cause a bank banking cart cartel and brings instability in this economy maybe we can talk more about those things later on thank you very much all right Thank You Jean I've seen the debate is joined now we're going to have five minutes of rebuttal each gentleman I'll suggest that you say seated and use hand microphones you want to go to the podium okay we can we cannot keep these guys down so we won't try Richard you have your option I just want to remind people of a couple things one is remember that the proposition the resolution under debate is socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom equality and prosperity follow Richard Wolff at Richard d Wolfe with two F's follow Jean Epstein Jean sohe form follow me at Nick Gillespie follow the sohe form at the so a forum follow Reason magazine at reason Richard Wolff please you have five minutes to rebut listening to gene makes me realize that a book that you write is a little bit like a child that you have you think it's yours and then you watch as it becomes its own thing and is understood by other people in ways you never imagined I cannot recognize 3/4 of what he said it sounded to me like quotes of somebody I didn't even want to meet I'm not proposing a kind of socialism I don't believe in looking into the future and telling you what the society ought to be people who tell you the future are usually found in carnivals you pay them a little bit of money they tell you who you'll be sleeping with in two weeks and you giggle if you actually take seriously what they've proposed you need help I'm not proposing what a socialism would look like number one I'm talking about how you get beyond what we have because like in all societies you are either satisfied with the way things are or you're looking for how to make them better if there's a genius in the United States it's been that we've been willing in many areas to do better but there's a taboo when it comes to economics represented by what gene said that you really shouldn't look at that because it's only going to get worse those nasty politicians will do all the terrible things that should make you stay with what you have oh yes tinker with the Federal Reserve or here but don't change the fundamentals where did that come from where did the economic system get a pass we debate about family life we debate education we debate our transportation system but debate the fundamental structure of capitalism which is not about markets and not about the government but how you organize the production and distribution of the goods and services without which you cannot live slavery did it with masters and slaves feudalism did it with lords and serfs capitalism does it with employers and employees and the whole purpose of my book and the work that we do and the New Directions of socialism is to question and transform that no more group of employers telling us all what to do and employees living in that undemocratic workplace and the whole notion of controlling the government so it doesn't oppress you in all the ways that Jean likes to enumerate is to create a social force at the base of society that could possibly prevent that and making the mass of people in the workplace have the final say and power over what that workplace does means you don't have a small group of people in a government cutting a deal with a small group of people called employers at the expense of a large group of people called employees that's the transformation at the base of society that will mark the 21st century's socialism so that all the old arguments against the social isms of the passed arguments predicated on what's wrong with the government and the overwhelming power of the government they're not relevant anymore because the thrust of socialism is at the base of society not at the level of government there's a reason Karl Marx wrote no books about the state and endlessly studied the production and distribution of goods and services because that's the core of the economy he wanted to take us beyond and that's the problem we have we have let that go as if there's something necessary or holy or sacrosanct about that way of organizing production so we all take it for granted we shouldn't we never should have the impulse to democracy ought to have been applied in the workplace and as for the arguments gee you wouldn't want to go to all those meetings those were the arguments of the Kings we don't need democracy the mass of people haven't the time or the interest or the intellect or the educate or the training or the come on we ought to recognize those kinds of arguments against change for what they are they're fearful so we're going to stay with what we have the capitalism that we have producing the very humorous takes on mr. Trump or mr. Johnson in England as the expressions of a system spinning out of control in part because we don't face that the basic organization of production has been given a free pass and is what's holding us back thank you thank you Richard gene please you've got five minutes well Richard wrote a book called democracy at work a cure for capitalism it was published seven years ago I read it quite recently Richard probably hasn't read it very recently that's where at least commendably commendably he's written a whole book a book by the way that Karl Marx never did write about the socialism that he wants and I quoted copiously from that book in my initial talk if Richard is now going to say oh well you know that book it's a chun-yan forget that book just you know try to recognize that socialism is preferable to some of the crap that goes on now then we'd have to say Richard we've been hearing that for over a century you know from socialists then we had the Soviet Union this Stalin and we had in mouth we had we've had a lot of mess from your socialism you got to be a little bit more specific before we get the least bit interested in something that has been so disastrous for humankind so I want to get Richard back on the straight and narrow and take him seriously that he's proposing something with a nuts and bolts definition workers self-directed into and the embarrassing thing for Richard as it was for Marxist right back to the time of Marx is that they're selling something that workers don't seem to want we we had socialism in Israel we had 5% of the other the other country who really was socialist I trust that Richard would agree that the kibbutzim of Israel were five percent of them live really worst socialist in a true sense the bottom up cents and that's what I'm proposing now of course what also happened to Israel as Richard probably knows as you probably know is that those kid would seem just fell apart they don't exist anymore people lose interest in it but again what we are saying we libertarians are saying go for it workers self-directed enterprises you do have coops Richard Richard in another mood say hey look you've got coops it speaks to to were to needs and desires and indeed maybe it does then go for it but then let's build it from the ground up just like I'm proposing and then we have a system of capitalism do I want to keep the flawed system of capitalism the system that fights that the political system that protects the powerful no capitalism is a system of profit and loss profits encourage risk-taking losses encourage proves that prudence that's the system now we abrogate that for the counter crony capitalist system that's what brought about the housing bubble that caused the Great Recession the week I'm quoting Noam Chomsky a guy I also like by the way even though he's a socialist we we to to a to great extent we privatize profits and we socialized losses that's what the Federal Reserve does that's what it's all about do I want to sit back and like in a system by God no we have a crony capitalist system by the way that shafts people of limited means most of all that defends the rich and powerful and there have been victories against it we we used to have an airline cartel prepped protected by the Civil Aeronautics Board then somebody noticed that where the CA B didn't dominate a flight between LA and San Francisco in the same state cost half what it cost to fly from Washington to Boston or Washington DC rather to Boston same distance twice as expensive because of government so then they abolished the CA via the CA B and they and and there was competition in the airlines and that was a huge victory for middle-income people so victories can be one of Richard I want to recruit you to change this system of capitalism if you'll excuse the expression that my socialist uncle Abe used to use as a but I use it as a contraction for crony capitalism we need more capital some yet not less we need to change things Richard could join us or he could focus on building his workers self-directed enterprises from the ground up building on top of the co-op movement the employee ownership movement which by the way already gets tax breaks that I don't necessarily object to that already gets those breaks go for it turn everybody onto worker self-directed enterprises and they're perfectly compatible it's just like being in business for yourself that's all it is it's a great idea it hasn't really caught on but maybe it has potential I welcome it thanks very much right Thank You Jean Epson and Richard Wolffe we're now ready to do the audience Q&A we have a couple of microphones set up please walk up to them I am going to be I realize that each of you probably on some level view the other as a Nazi I am going to be which is wrong on both counts but I'm gonna be a Nazi I'm gonna ask you to state a question we don't want to hear a lot of speeches we want to hear questions direct them to either or both people debaters so let's go and we're gonna start right now go first question hello my name is I'm from Germany native German and it took me 35 years and winning the green card Audrey for learning what libertarianism is I studied social science and okay thank you what's it I would like to know from mr. wolf why he thinks that it was not possible for me to learn about libertarianism and to many of the majority even though I studied social science and taught it for several years at high school yeah I'm not 38 years old and it took me moving here but you learn it obviously before you you learned about Marxism before you even left high school because if you if you know about the term when you start studying I would say it was much easier for you to find out about the other side than me okay that studied social science and thank you hearted okay thank you Richard please use a microphone hold one up and I I guess the it should be on could you can you hear me yes okay so the question was basically all in BS on the idea that you couldn't learn about Marxism and the question was that I really could or that you want to know why okay so he took a long time he said you took a very short time libertarianism is harder to learn about that Marxism and I never indicated the number of years it took me to learn Marxism okay Richard can I uh can I uh I'm sorry it took you a long time if that helps do you do you feel like there is not a free flow of information in in contemporary America I think that it blows my mind that you could even say that okay all right thanks okay let me explain economics departments which is what I know around the United States is where you might learn Marxian economics you have to go first of all the vast majority of economics departments in the United States have no person in them who knows of or teaches a course in Marxian economics number one they don't have them at all number two the vast majority subscribe to a basic kind of mainstream economics that's called neoclassical economics which is the dominant tradition there is a small dissenting group that are called Keynesian economics because of something that happened in the Great Depression and the new development of a critical perspective that has nothing to do with socialism the there's tremendous fights between the neoclassical who are the majority and the Keynesian who are minority one of the very few things the two groups can get together on is excluding Marxists that's the way the American economic system works and since it's the economic economics departments of our universities that train the politicians who deal with economics the journalists who do economics and and the people in the top of reaches of business you have a solid kind of mask if you like of uniformity in which the kinds of things that a Marxist economist talks about or bizarre for them not because of their complexity or their newness but because they have no experience whatsoever in dealing with these things and that has been true for the entirety of my experience in the American academic environment where I've been a professor all my life it is a it is a systematic exclusion of the kinds of ideas that I represent that makes students to this day not encounter it or if they have a lot of fortitude to have little study groups on the side at their own expense to learn this kind of material because this country remains afraid of dealing with that kind of thinking and that kind of tradition even though the literature for it is massive okay thank you Richard and and wait Jean I'm sorry hold on can i Richard can I ask does it complicate that scenario at all that we have at least one major candidate for president Bernie Sanders who identifies as socialist and has a large turnout I mean the idea that socialism is somehow suppressed seems like a reach to be quite honest Bernie Sanders is the first candidate in 75 years not to disown that title as part of the requirement not to commit political suicide and you want me in the first time in 2016 that he dared do it breaking that blue I'm supposed to pretend that the one person so far done it in 75 years undoes what I just said you got to be kidding okay and Richard I look forward to the first time a major party candidate actually explicitly as libertarian Jean do you have a comment I agree with Richard yes yes it's on yeah I agree with Richard that that there's a lot of mind rot in in in the academic departments on economics most of them most of these economists basically want to run the world they want to pretend that economics is a branch of mathematics it's it's a waste of time for the most part in the age of the Internet don't let school get in the way of your education there's no excuse not to inform yourself about a whole range of things including Austrian economics with which I identify or Marxist economics with which Richard identifies the Internet offers just an incredible amount lectures from Richard Wolff himself on the Internet I appear regularly on part of the problem Dave Smith's show so you want to catch that to learn economics the the intelligent way that whatever you really learn you teach yourself anyway don't write school get in the way thank you and there's it might uh it might be interesting we're gonna go to the next question to think there's by my count I think there's two Marxist economics departments in the country there's one at Notre Dame and one at UMass Amherst there's about two Austrian programs of now maybe three so we're as Dave Smith pointed out we're all losers in this room we have that in common we're in the same club okay question let me just briefly correct it there was at Notre Dame a department that program was destroyed about eight or nine years ago and doesn't exist and the program at University of Massachusetts where I taught has ejected most of the Marxist that were there there were half a dozen and so it is now really better described as a Keynesian or left-wing Keynesian program thank you there is no Marxist department in the United States there are only scattered old one you're in there get those workers building up from the ground let's go ok question sir no preamble no we don't care where you're from for all strangers here it's the French Foreign Legion just ask the question this question is for Richard in there 100% capitalist society laissez-faire capitalist arty burners there's no federal reserve you would be well within your rights to be a socialist all you need to do is band together with other socialists and form your own community whereas if I want to be a capitalist in a social society I would be forbidden from doing so why why do you want to force everyone to be a socialist why not let the capitalist be capitalist let the socialist be socialist everyone's happening thank you which first of all in whatever socialist societies you're referring to and the major one in the world today is the People's Republic of China that uses that name they are busily encouraging people to form and develop capitalist enterprises so the premise of your question is is wrong number one number two I never said and would not argue that in a society that is in transition as I believe capitalism is there are all kinds of spaces for them to be enterprises organized in the old traditional capitalist way and enterprises organized as worker cooperatives in the new direction I would expect that kind of coexistence to continue to be filled with tensions and difficulties much as capitalist enterprises began in feudalism and existed in a tense relationship until the transition happened further so my presumption is there will be coexisting different structures in whatever name you give to these societies in transition look in in line with the Jones question again under capitalism property rights of firms are protected so if there's a worker co-op owned democratically by the workers and they're all directing it their property rights will be protected if it catches on and the entire economy is worker coops I say that's great that sounds terrific I'll run your own enterprise some of the other things richard proposes which would be the iron fist to the state having to do with finance that I object to however it was an article in the National Review well under William F Buckley the right-winger welcoming worker ownership I know that article well because I wrote it and so again we're not arguing about that what Richard doesn't really want to do I know for example he likes jeremy corbyn's idea another kind of top-down plan where you can sneaked up this kind of thing through the back door go for it there are co-ops they'll already exist so in line with whether gentlemen said we already have what you're talking about we have worker coops we have a huge blend and if it tilts toward more worker ship wonderful okay next question please sir hi my question is for Richard as well one of the core tenants of libertarianism and capitalism or true capitalism is the non-aggression principle so my question for you is do you think that socialism intrinsically violates the non-aggression principle and if so how can you explain how committing aggression leads to greater freedom and equality do you want to do a quick description of the definition of the non-aggression okay all right you want me to yeah sure so the non-aggression principle is the principle that you're essentially allowed to do whatever you want as long as you do not commit violent you do not initiate violence against another person okay I believe Jean Richard okay oh gosh me too answering please thank you Nick this is Jean Epstein of one-man show look what's Richards answer Richards answer is well you know you're free to starve you know under capitalism you know if you don't work you don't get a job you're gonna starve you know I mean that's so that's aggression you know so what again you know forgive me but you know you're coming out at Richard left from left field because he's gonna say that that clearly the capital system commits aggression because you're gonna starve unless you get a job and and then of course we have a lot of answers to that somehow rather well the starvation tends to happen in socialist countries not in this country but I think I got Richard fired up he's gonna answer you now you're famous stop I just jumped yes the this remarkable tendency in a frightened society to assign starvation or deaths I it's the only place in American culture we're counting dead people seems to be way to make an argument Jean mentioned it before now it's starving people before he mentioned the disasters of socialism where millions died what an interesting argument we're going to count millions dead well what is it that capitalism's history shows us the worst two wars in human history world war 1 & 2 these were products of competition among capitalist economies weren't they 400 years of colonialism destroying two-thirds of the world were products of capitalist accumulation and competition what kind of jerk what what kind of money finish what kind of mentality picks a few examples of admittedly horrible things that deserve to be criticized but a comparison of death counts the first book I ever wrote and published Yale University Press was called the economics of colonialism it studied what Britain did in Kenya Britain arrived in Kenya in night in 1895 and set up the East Africa Protectorate and 30 years later 1931 the Depression hit I studied what happened in Kenya at that time when the British arrived they did a census 4 million people in 1930 they did another census two and a half million people British colonialism killed millions of people in one small country multiply that if you want to do the death count analysis which I find bizarre you're in very shaky ground attacking socialism on the basis of capitalism and the same kind of cherry-picking of your examples came with Gene and kibbutzim in in Israel to work a co-op sometimes fail of course they do do capitalist enterprises sometimes fail you bet they do all the time this what is this strange remote kind of choosing your example let me give you a counter example in 1956 a group of workers we a Catholic priests in the north of Spain in a little town called Mondragon made a worker co-op the priest led them six workers 1956 today something called the Mondragon cooperative corporation has over a hundred thousand workers it's the biggest worker co-op on the planet it is a great success at the seventh largest corporation in Spain it is a successful worker co-op two American corporations pay the Mondragon Corporation to have their scientists working alongside the scientists in this worker co-op and the name of the two American corporations is General Motors and Microsoft they understand what those worker coops can do even if people here have to pick an example where it didn't work out it's as if I said well capitalism just look at the Ford Edsel make two quick comments to be discounted again again I like what Richard just said again go for it I only mentioned the kibbutz scene because obviously the kibbutzim were a well-known socialist phenomenon it didn't work out Mondragon did I was a part I was very interested in the worker ownership movement in the 1980s ironically by the way when I was senior economist in the New York Stock Exchange I was going to all the meetings we were hearing they loved Mondragon all the time in the 1980s thirty years have passed and we don't have a mondo con in the US so I encouraged Richard to go for it build it capitalism will love it why not so again I'm not trying to discourage Richard about going for it I'm just saying that he has the means to do it he can start that revolution right away within the context of capitalism with respect to the body-count point the only point that's being made in this case and again I honestly apologize to Richard for backing him in the core in a sense that he seems to be now defending the state capitalism the objective he wrote a whole book collaborated in a whole book in which he condemned the Soviet Union as state capitalist so he doesn't really want Fenne those old line social and social isms but the difference in terms of body count is that this was what governments did to their own citizens these famines because they couldn't run the agriculture right the the worst getting on top lunatics sociopaths like Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong and Pol Pot taking over and murdering their own people either through the sin of commission or omission that's the difference oh god of course the body count with respect to war two million people you know killed in Iraq and Vietnam yeah of course our body can't with respect to wars abroad horrible Richard and I completely agree about that we're talking about the body count of governments against their own people under socialism ok that's the bad record we're talking about question sir and by the way if if there are in fact any women in the room it would be nice to hear from you ok scoot up to the front of line sir you've got you've got a man bond that's close enough we're transitioning here yeah I do identify as male and I suspect I will continue to do so I hope that doesn't discipline thank you very much to both of you this has been very thought-provoking I have two short questions primarily Nick what this is Sophie's Choice time pick one of those questions because the other one is not gonna make it is economic growth ever undesirable ie does it ever lead to increase suffering either domestically or abroad and what are we gonna do with AI when it happens in about 20 or 30 years and nobody has jobs very good very good sir okay either of you Richard absolutely we do not prioritize or we ought not if that's your question to prioritize economic growth as if it's a uni-dimensional plus it can be as we learned from ecological sensitivities built up over the last thirty years that it can be a very dangerous and negative phenomena but in a society that allows the decision of what to produce and what to invest in to be done on the basis of a private profit calculation you are hardly in a position to bring in all of those other issues that have to be dealt with I remember in my education I was taught of bizarre language which gives it away that there are we should remember our teachers told us externalities what a wonderful term something that isn't central to what we're dealing with it's an externality only slowly to discover that the externality can be more negative than what's internal is positive capitalism sanctifies the profit motive that socialism alternative has always said profit is one among a whole range of objectives and no decisions should be made based on any one when all the others are equally important to the quality of life I guess then I won't answer the question about artificial intelligence since that was the second question be again obviously to me well it was we'll talk later sir okay it'd be fun to talk about AI but with it look with respect to economic growth again I first of all know this obviously I am an individual I'm a libertarian I don't believe there's anything the least bit sacred about economic growth if people do if people are basically by the way if we all decided that would prefer to work 20 hours a week then that labor leisure choice would begin to prevail capitalists would only get us to work for them we'd be willing to only work part-time and we'd say well it will work for a little bit less so that it's advantageous to deploy to employ two of us for 20 hours a week rather than one person for 40 so then we would have a diminution of resources we would have a shrinkage of the economy wonderful why not if people only want to work 20 hours a week then we don't have we can compete we can compete I'd perhaps and want to explain to Richard because the simple math is that if if full-time workers get to $20 an hour then then we'll just work for $18 part-time look at two of us for less so therefore we can opt for living less we make those choices all the time I you know what what's a what's a Jewish lawyer kiddo couldn't get into Medical School well I'm Jewish I didn't become a lawyer or a doctor I chose to be a sloppy-ass journalist I dropped that so therefore we make those choices all the time it's an individual choice there is nothing sacred about economic growth with respect to diseconomy externalities we are individuals we have individual freedom you can't throw garbage on your neighbor's lawn however my right to move my fist stops at your chin and if a capitalist is polluting your backyard and causing that harm you should sue them so therefore we do need a tort system in order to protect against any individual a choice anything that a firm does or indeed that an individual to us in order to make sure that they don't harm us in the in the process of pursuing their own goals that's the best view answer okay thank you Richard quick quick rebuttal robot I really find it extraordinary this sort of commentary if we would like to work only shorter hours the history of capitalism is the history of the struggle of the mass of working people to reduce the length of the working-day from the 16 hours it was in early capitalism in england to 14 to 12 to 10 to 8 it's been a struggle at every point capital is driving people children as well as adults to work incredible hours workers having to mobilize and fight this is not a matter of the libertarian notion let's just choose that's not the way the world worked it hasn't worked that way in the past and it doesn't work now that's a system that imposed those struggles and all the suffering that went into it until people said no more we won't work that many hours we won't let you have our children when they're six that's the history of capitalism and we're not even counting all the injuries and all the deaths in that game of counting human suffering from a system I suggested Richard read a book by Stanley a leprechaun which is a whole history of the labor markets of the of the capitalist markets and it's got a lot of good facts in it now I believe that one of the things that that Richard should try to answer is and how was there a whole lot of progress why was there so much immense progress by Labor's from them from 1870 to 1925 or indeed he says that wages were rising for decades and the unions are statistically were negligible government was under when that wasn't honest no I want to win with one fact there was a 49 hour work week capitalists have 49 hour work week as of the 1920s as labor as labor got shows the work week fell the work week fell because in order to get workers to work for you to bid for workers their labor law at leisure choice was such that they wanted there is a Marxist myth that there is an inequality no equality between bargaining between laborers and workers well that's relied by about a hundred years of history okay for unions became the least bit of a presence in this economy thank you okay ma'am please question we're currently in an opioid crisis and the World Health Organization ranks our health care system 37th in the world do you think it's still possible for our current system to fix this and how would you using socialism fix us okay Richard I guess take the first whack at that picture one of the charming features of the capitalist system has been the endless effort on the part of virtually all capitalists to try to get more than the normal surplus out of their workers the difference between the value added by a worker and what the employer pays the worker that normal surplus if you like they've always tried to do better by controlling the market or what we used to call monopolization becoming strong enough to jack the price even higher to make more profits and one of the ways you do that is to control a market in this country one the most successful examples is the medical industrial complex for industries that work together the insurers the drug companies the doctors and the hospitals and the producers of medical devices are with it the drugs they've gotten together and they've produced this situation a where we pay more for medical care than any other advanced industrial country and the quality of our healthcare is at best mediocre as the young woman pointed out in our ranking number 37 the solution to the problem in our medical care is not another law another special federal program another stop it is a problem in which you have taken something as important as human health a subjected it to the capitalist profit motive and be allowed that monopoly to function to coordinate its behavior and to rip this society off from A to Z and laugh all the way to the bank first of all we this the solo form in a few months is going to have a debate so forum debate on the opioid crisis I invite Richard to come free ticket for you Richard and a free ticket for the young lady who asked question to that debate basically Richard and I agree about 90% of the way about the medical care system it's a crony capitalist system it has to be unraveled you say your your solution though is not to make it fully socialized but rather to put more market forces in yeah through workers self directed enterprises if indeed that's the way they want to construct it because I'm all for those WS des which is by the way what Richard calls okay very quickly Richard 10 seconds yeah one one theoretical confusion when I talk about mark capitalism I'm talking about arranging production with employers and employees as different people in an endless struggle I'm not talking about markets the confusion between a capitalist organization and a market is something we ought to get beyond slavery had markets remember we bought and sold slaves feudalism had markets the market isn't what's unique about us capitalism is what's unique and that has to do with the organization of production which is why that's what we go after and that's the focus of socialism not some dead old stale debate about whether the government should have more or less influence on the market that's a different subject okay we have a couple of minutes left I want to enforce brutally quick question quick answers let's get to through two or three more of these things sir go ahead Richard can you be more specific about what you're advocating and can you equivocally say that your vision of socialism will or will not be mandated by the state absolutely socialism always understood whatever its moments whatever its aberrations if you really want to understand where that the notion of the state being powerful came in a brief summary of the history in the 19th century socialism basically was born it was the shadow of capitalism it's capitalism self criticism whenever there's capitalism it produces socialism the notion that you're going to get out of capitalism by somehow eliminating socialism reminds me of what Mark Twain said when he read his obituary in the newspaper the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated he wrote the reports of the death of socialism are absurd because capitalism reproduces it so here's my idea we don't need the state because the whole role is to transform the base of society but just like ever every other emerging system like capitalism and feudalism the state it was thought can help the process so the focus of socialists became capture the state either with parliamentary or revolution and then use it to make the transformation what happened in the Soviet Union understandably and in China too was you focused on grabbing the state you managed it you took the state but then that next step that got delayed and posts onde and therein lies the problem whose solution is to transform the base of society which is why there is the focus on the workers becoming their own bosses in the workplace okay thank you quick let's do one maybe two more questions sir hi this is a question for mr. Epstein I was just wondering on our federal domestic tax is the only major way to fund federal spending repeat the questions on our federal domestic tax is the only major way to fund federal spending our federal domestic tax is the only way to tax a way to fund well well empirically no I mean a lot of federal spending is comes from printing money from the Federal Reserve and obviously a lot of federal spending comes from borrowing money okay we have time for one final question we got a couple of kibitzers over here okay ask a quick question no you're not paying for this microphone okay no I don't well you know Reagan Reagan take a hike here to ask a question now yeah please thank you my question is if we're talking about economics how can we have a debate about which system is better and I've been listening and I new gentlemen once the word computers and how that impacts on everything I felt like I was listening to a debate about the mechanical age and I was the bait really was which platitudes are better socialist platitudes or capitalist platitudes could you discuss and incorporate a little bit about how the computers and the electronic age work on the feelings that you have about socialism and the feelings that you have about capitalism okay let's and that thank you very much sir and we're going to boot into the computer age right before we go to the rebuttal we are done with questions so thank you all for standing up you may now sit down Richard why don't you begin with that right this is not the answer you probably want but you're gonna get it anyway you know that's one of the like both capitalism and social what one of one of the remarkable things in this debate between capitalism and socialism is the easy way folks who are rendered uncomfortable by it find another way a tangential argument to focus on as if they can somehow thereby escape these basic system questions you can't every major technological change has led to people doing something which if I were mean-spirited I would call a platitude it's everything is going to be changed by the jet engine everything is gonna be changed by electricity everything is gonna be changed by temas tree everything's gonna be you've finished the technological determinism it used to be called each new invention is going to radically try no it doesn't it changes things for sure but it doesn't alter the basic systemic questions that we're talking about they're not platitudes they're not evasions the focus on the new technology as if it is magically going to lift us out of these problems it's a mirage it has been that through the last 200 years of technical breakthroughs and AI and computers don't change that story thank you may I comment that fat I don't know if there's a syllable of what Richard said that I do not fully agree with us now in fact indeed look we've had a computer age for three decades we have ATMs we have automatic tellers once are infinite and as Richard is indeed is absolutely correct in saying the way we run our economy is the way we run our economy Richard and I we agree we have no debating you know what we're going to let we're gonna stop this phase this was the audience Q&A we now have the people the two debaters Richard Wolffe and Jean Epstein going into their final statements they each have seven and a half minutes and again remember that the proposition the resolution before us is socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom equality and prosperity Richard Wolffe you have seven and a half minutes to seal the deal the first sign that socialism is on its way is that we're having this debate that we have Bernie Sanders running and he has the name socialist and he doesn't give it up he doesn't turn away Elizabeth Warren who has very similar programs she still feels the need to reassure everybody she likes capitalism Bernie doesn't the reality is up until six years ago my presence on American media scene was so tiny none of you whatever have heard of me I've done more public speaking at the invitation of American audiences in the last four years that I did in the previous 50 yeah the public awareness is to the right because of the last years of neoliberalism and the orange clown I understand that but beneath that is a shift to the left in the United States nothing illustrates it in my mind any better than the remarkable number of times Jean Epstein told you how he agreed with me I don't run away from the label socialist and I don't want to away from the label Marxist either I'm proud of what I've learned from those traditions but I'm also very clear and I really hope I've gotten that across that the way the question for this evening was posed is a problem there is no singular socialism there never was socialism is a large complex tradition of multiple different notions that are often at great odds with one another and have had long and bitter disputes what in the world do you mean by socialism is it that social democracy of Scandinavia and German and Western European countries is it a socialism that China or Russia or Cuba talk about is it the focus on transforming workplaces into worker coops instead of undemocratic hierarchical workplace kingdoms what do you mean when you talk about socialism the very idea of using the singular reflects what I tried to say at the beginning we have to understand we are emerging from a 75 year period in which we didn't learn about it think about it or discuss it or if we did it was in dismissive cursory manner that didn't teach Miko anything it's always been an awkward moment when American tourists go to Europe and discover that in every single European country socialist parties are big important political institutions I won't embarrass you by asking you how many of you know that the government in Portugal today is a coalition of the Portuguese Socialist Party the Portuguese Communist Party and the Portuguese Green Party and that they've been the government for quite a few years now I won't embarrass you the last thing I would say is because of this peculiar fetish Americans about the government as either being something that's gonna save us all which is crazy or which is gonna crush us all which is equally crazy governments do what they do in large part because of the pressure from those who have the position to shape them one of the problems with the liberal in the old British sense or the libertarian if you like is that the argument always starts with the government as if it were a deus ex machina that just has some qualities of things it does without asking the obvious question why does the government do this or that or the next thing we're supposed to believe it's built into the genes of the government that it does certain things the government does what the press pressure of the society and the way it's organized make it do every bit as much as what the government does influences the rest of this society let me conclude by correcting Jean about Jeremy Corbyn because he's the future in terms of what we're talking about the British Labour Party the second party in England by the way a party most of whose members identify as socialists in the British Labour Party there's a commitment they've made and the commitment goes like this when we're elected one of the first laws we'll pass is the following any company organised in Great Britain can continue the way it is as a capitalist enterprise but if it comes to the following decision either shut down or to move out of Great Britain or to sell itself to another company or to go public with a with an IPO issuing shares before it can do that it must give its own workers the right of first refusal that's the law that the workers can buy the company and convert it into a democratically run worker cooperative and when everyone says well where in the world will the workers get the money to do that mr. McDonald the closest advisor mr. Corbyn has smiles and says the government will lend it to them why because for the British people to have freedom of choice between a capitalist undemocratic enterprise on the one hand and a worker co-op democratic enterprise on the other they have to have some experience of what they're like both to buy from and to work in and the only way they can have that experience so they can choose freely between them or what mix they want of them is if there's a sector that they can buy from and work at so we as the leaders of Britain have to create the sector so that the free choice of our people between systems can finally happen that's the role of the government expanding free choice rather than being represented is imposing something in that fearful imagery that we all have as if the government is like those nasty people at the post office who make us wait before they sell us the stamps thank you well I agree with Richard that he and I agree with a about a great deal and I think that's wonderful why do we agree about a great deal because we're both radicals and radical people do see a lot of evil in our current society even though I think Richard basically wants to march in the wrong direction and tonight I've been a little bit troubled that he often times abandons his own book written seven years ago and occasionally lapses into defending the old-style socialism's and into falling back into the mode of saying you know well social does a lot of things let's just do it and again ignoring the fact that we need to focus focus I guess again on the old socialism's well take a controlled experiment Society who the world in history gives us very few East Germany versus West Germany West Germany mainly capitalist East Germany socialist impoverished in East Germany under the font foot of the oven of the stassi's in West Germany capitalist much more affluent much more comfortable in the democratic society North Korea versus South Korea I need an elaborate on the differences there Taiwan and Hong Kong versus most of China until China began to go capitalist so we have the record staring us in the face of the awful failures of these societies so we want to say goodbye to all that they were disastrous then we have the social democracies of Europe maybe that's a waste of time to talk about because they are for most for the most part capitalist anyway but then we side-scan the Scandinavian countries even though Norway is there is a country of 5 million people sitting on a huge oil well basically selling oil to the rest of the world and by the way apparently worsening global warming and the but we wanted to offend Norway in Denmark well let's not cherry pick let's look at the whole range of of economies and the experience in Europe and let's include Portugal Spain Italy Greece where it's gone very badly the average is very very unimpressive they used to talk about euro slicker sclerosis very troubled economies by and large so we want to say goodbye to all that so now again I want to take Richard literally and talk about his workers self-directed enterprises well I imagine when you hear him saying employees becoming their own bosses well you know there are millions of people who are their own bosses I know I didn't make that up Richard didn't make that up form a co-op a family-run business all of those things are possible under socialism and the problem that Richard faces is that by enlarge it hasn't caught on maybe it has hope so now Richard is resorting to cheering on out of desperation out of unfortunately not taking seriously the fact that you want to work there are people by the way who still are fostering a worker democracy oh god I know I met a lot of those people they want to start these firms they want to run it that way they think it's better people are happier doing it wonderful let's do it so now he's now Richard is championing the plan of Jeremy Corbyn where where where the government is going to start lending money on advantageous terms to companies that want to go that wanna go workers self-directed enterprise how advantageous is that going to be Jeremy Corbyn a very ambitious politician who by the way is on record as admiring a lot of hard fisted a strong men like you go shabbos in his and a successor nicolas maduro he might just start giving it away capitalists might start selling these firms to people again Richard is looking for the top-down solution to a bottom-up revolution and I implore him to abandon all that and go to capitalist route with his plans now then finally I tried to take seriously what he wrote book he wants to socialize finance he wants to put it on under a political thumb he wants to he wants to socialize labor allocation he wants to tighten the the government's control over those two sources of enterprise expansion so that dissident publications would suffer but innovation would suffer all of those things would set us back in terms of prosperity and freedom and and again I guess you know I mentioned equality I might ask you the old you know 1020 question would you prefer a society in which the top 1% gets 20% richer and the other 99% the rest of us get 10% richer or would you prefer that's more inequality or would you prefer a society in which the top 20% get poorer and the bottom I know suits me yeah yeah the top 20% get poor and the 99% get 10% poorer we all get poorer but then since the top 1% is getting 20% poor that narrows equality well we want actually because extremes touch and Richard and I believe in individual rights I want people to make their own choices about how they live their lives the professions they lead where they want to work and what they do and capitalism offers that potential but it can indeed evolve we do need to free up the housing markets that which are under the thumb of the crony capitalist we do indeed and that is hurting poor people preventing them from moving into high wage cities like New York and Los and Los Angeles and San Francisco we need to free up the guild systems that make it hard for poor people to get other kinds of jobs the licensing system that protects people that that prevents poor people from moving into better jobs there are a whole lot of radical things we need to do to change our economy but we need to keep keep the fundamental freedoms under capitalism capitalism private property is necessary although not sufficient to a free and open society it's not sufficient because government can always come in and jail you the day after you publish something you don't like just like Obama tried but but it's necessary it's necessary because if you give somebody like Obama some political leader control over your property over the means of production then you make it hard even to function in the first place you make it hard for Richard to sell those books you make it hard for the sole form to operate you make it hard for Jacobin magazine to operate and that's why you have to vote against Richards resolution but Richard does 7 out workers self directed enterprises capitalist and offers it to you Richard I say go for it thanks very much

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 1,807,962

Rating: 4.802166 out of 5

Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv, Richard Wolff, Gene Epstein, Soho Forum, socialism, capitalism, debate, nick gillespie, john osterhoudt, economics, free market, market socialism, marxism

Id: YJQSuUZdcV4

Length: 98min 45sec (5925 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/shogun333]

I don't really get these sorts of debates.

How is the answer not just:

• East Germany vs. West German
• North Korea vs. South Korea.

Mic drop.

[u/Calv1n321]

As gene and dave said on part of the problem. This guy was supposed to be a contender and just laid down and forfeited the match.

[u/jcizzle1954]

Richard Wolff: blaming socialism for it's death toll is like blaming Ford for the Edsel.

Yeah same thing....idiot. commies are pure evil.

[u/tocano]

In this debate, Wolff makes one of the biggest socialist fallacies that I constantly hear from Socialists. And between Dave, Gene, Pete, etc I've not heard anyone mention it.

At 68:44 he talks about how Capitalism is purely driven by the profit motive (which is itself a big misunderstanding), but then he goes on to say that Socialism, by contrast, says that decisions should not be made without considering all other aspects and elements involved that could affect quality of life.

This is utter nonsense. This is the rainbows and unicorns right here folks.

Socialism as a popular idea has moved from state-ownership of the means of production, to a more grassroots "worker owned means of production". This means things like worker cooperatives and other worker owned organizations where there is no clear hierarchy, no single private owner and instead, the workers govern the operations of the organization themselves.

So essentially, today's Socialism simply says, "Let the majority of all workers make the decisions instead of the elite few."

Advocates of Socialism believe in the FANTASY that if workers get to make the decisions, then all factors like environment, safety, hours worked, production targets, etc will all be considered and carefully balanced. Nonsense.

Instead, imagine a Dunder-Mifflin company where ~65% of employees are office workers, and 35% are mechanical laborers. If, when voting on the budget, the office workers in the organization decide that they would rather spend $2 million on a 5% pay increase then to spend it (as the laborers wish) on upgrading the production equipment to be faster, easier, safer, less polluting, and more energy efficient, then the office workers get their way and the laborers, the environment, etc all get shafted. Socialists merely HOPE that people will be caring enough to put the needs of others/the whole ahead of their own, but I'm not convinced it would. Some would in some circumstances, but not all.

So I suggest socialists take Gene's recommendation. Don't look to enforce their view of socialism by taking over the political realm. Instead, attempt to demonstrate to those stubborn mules of us that don't believe in the viability of the socialist system, that worker owned cooperatives ARE more effective and efficient than traditional proprietorships.

[u/diogovk]

Well, Marx is not taught in Economics because it's been refuted so many times. You can teach about him in like "history of economics", I guess.

Isn't Marxist economics all based in Labor Theory of Value?

[u/car2o0n]

Finally someone takes on Professor Wolff why couldn't it be Peter Schiff ! Can't wait to watch.

[u/deefop]

Can someone give a TL;DW?

[u/honey_badger42069]

What the hell, Gene? That was a slaughter. Should've brought in Hoppe or Murphy to lay down the law (of marginal utility)