Marxism (with Dr. Richard Wolff)

hey everybody welcome back to the sisyvis 55 podcast today I'm joined by Dr Dr Richard Wolff um he's a Marxist Economist professor and um I'm gonna let let you introduce yourself uh a little bit more okay I'd be glad to and first of all thank you for the invitation uh I'm glad to do this kind of thing uh the minute you use the word Marxist as I'm sure you know uh all kinds of people get all kinds of weird uh in their heads worrying about what that might mean as if there is a single definition or a single uh attribute or adjective that will explain it all that has never been true Marxism is a very broad intellectual tradition uh it comes from the work of Karl Marx he died in 1883 so we have 150 years since that time Marxism in that 150 years has spread to every country on the face of this Earth it has been interpreted and applied and used by countless people with different economic systems cultural systems religions Economic Development anything that would spread that fast across that enormous range of difference would produce alternative interpretations in other words Marxism is many different things and the minute you have somebody tell you this is what Marxism is my advice to you including if you hear me talk like that is to stop listening because you're not dealing with a person who understands you're dealing with a person who has a partisan agenda and that's a little different so having said that I have an interpretation of Marx that comes from studying Marx I read all of his works I've done it more than once in my life I've learned a great deal I'm grateful to him as I am to Adam Smith David Ricardo and countless other important thinkers who have taught me to be proud as many Americans are that they know nothing about Marxism that they've never picked up a book or an article by him have never studied it is is the equivalent of saying I am a very ignorant person and I'm terribly proud of that fact I mean that would work as a joke but it really wouldn't work in a serious conversation um it's like going out on a camping trip with somebody who proudly tells you I don't use matches I go out there in the woods and I rub the wet sticks together for an hour and a half and I get a spark isn't that wonderful well it has a certain charm but I wouldn't go out on a camping trip with you again I would like to take matches Marx provides matches Marx helps you understand and that's why I recommend to people learn a little bit about it um I became interested in my in Marx's ideas when I went to college I didn't know much about it before uh I could see all around me here in the United States that um there were lots of social problems that weren't getting any better uh Ray what we now refer to as racism sexism income inequality wealth inequality social instability all of those kinds of things were all around me and I saw them I knew everybody else saw them and you know nobody's blind or very few people are um but I also noticed that nobody wanted to talk about these problems and certainly no one wanted to ask The Logical question are these problems part of the system we live in or are they explained in some other way I thought that was a perfectly reasonable question however my professors were frightened when I asked it and eventually someone said you're interested in this system means you're interested in capitalism which is our system and therefore you're you're being critical of capitalism and I said yeah and they said well you might want to read Karl Marx because that's what he did and I did and I became a person who uses that material is it the only material I use of course not but it is very valuable I would recommend it to anyone who finds anything I'm about to sell to say to you uh interesting uh I continued my studies uh I don't mind telling you because some people will be interested uh my education was for 10 years here in the United States I was born in Ohio in the middle of the country the universities I attended for 10 years two semesters a year 20 semesters I studied economics I studied history I studied those kinds of subjects even though I had started out as a mathematician and a biochemist I changed in college um and I did fine in college I went to Ivy League schools so I'm the product of the elite schools in the country Harvard Stanford and Yale those the only schools I ever attended I had my PhD in economics from Yale and I've been a professor of Economics most of my adult life and half a dozen different universities I also founded an organization called democracy at work who has two objectives number one to show that it is the capitalist system that is the problem we have to face and that however hard it is to do that trying to fix this system it's a little too late uh and it's too little to get at those problems and then to use marxian as well as other ideas to shape an agenda for how we can do better than capitalism and just as human society figured out how to do better than slavery and how it figured out how to do better than feudalism it is perfectly reasonable rational and appropriate for us to ask whether and how we can do better than capitalism and for that question to be answered Marxism and marxian Theory are a big valuable asset thank you that was a that was probably one of the most thorough uh answers to uh uh too long no no no that's perfect because usually a lot of guests they just sometimes they'll just say no you've already said everything that I was gonna say so that was great um so uh there's one question that's gonna kind of uh maybe rest on certain assumptions I have about Marxism that might be incorrect and I'd be interested in picking those apart but from my understanding one of the kind of main ways in which Marx looks at different systems is that they all have a kind of inherent contradictions um that eventually can lead to uh like new systems taking place so I think he looks at like slavery to feudalism to uh like capitalism and um capitalism appears to uh be very good at kind of adapting to these contradictions um for better or worse and for a certain subset of people it benefits them uh and like such as the capitalists and for a lot of other people it seems to not do so well for them but I'm I'm thinking I think you brought up in an interview one time like the the crisis in like the 70s where um consumers no longer had enough money to spend in order to uh generate profits for capitalists um and so to kind of adjust to this whereas other systems might eventually like fall uh under this issue the capitalists kind of introduced like debt and Cat and credit so consumers could still spend things without having um much of anything and uh so so I think there's like maybe an economic argument about how it adjusts to these contradictions but also like I'd like to kind of talk about kind of the cultural aspect of that with with the idea of capitalist realism um where it seems to kind of profit off of uh cultural critic critiques of its own system like we have a lot of media nowadays it's really I think left-leaning um and critical of capitalism but is also ironically still part of the system in one way um so if you want to pull apart any any assumptions made there uh or if you kind of have an answer of how Marxism could uh potentially see a a post-capitalist world where these contradictions eventually don't figure themselves out um I'd love to hear that sure um let me do two things let me talk a little bit in general but I'm going to use examples from right now to make it as clear and as concrete for people um as I possibly can and using examples from now is relying on the fact that we all know a little bit at least about things that are going on now so first you're absolutely right Marx was a student a student of the German philosophy Professor uh George Hagel the greatest philosopher in Germany arguably period ever but certainly one of the great a handful of people that were dominating the 19th and 20th centuries of Western thought of German thought and well beyond Germany Hegel is the the champion if you like of contradiction everything exists says Hegel in contradiction or to use the language in which uh average people have been able to figure this idea out too the good is always wrapped up in the bad and vice versa that everything has its good side and its bad side uh it's a naive or an ignorant person who only sees the one side doesn't understand that the other side is there too that the feelings we have the thoughts we have are full of contradictions as we are and you can again see it in common language uh I love that person yeah well there are moments when you hate them and instead of being frightened when you have a feeling of hatred towards someone you love you will be better off if you understand that that's a contradiction that's called part of life and you have to come to terms with the contradiction not imagine yourself able to ever get to a place where you only have the one and you never have the other it's like a young person uh who's who's frustrated at being single and begins to imagine if only I could find a partner and get married well then my problems will be over no says the wise marriage counselor when you're single you have one set of problems when you get married you have a different set it's perfectly reasonable for you to prefer one set to another but to imagine that if you give up being single to become married you won't have any problems is to misunderstand the contradictions that are part of life and vice versa if you're married and you're frustrated and then you get divorced because you think if only I'm out of this marriage it's the same mistake and it's a tragic mistake because it can really do a number on the quality of your life and if you're not careful for all of it so Marx is in no way unique by saying what's true for everything else that it's contradictory is true for the economic systems we organize we're not God we're people and when we organize ways of dealing with life we don't do it in some brilliant way that has no contradictions if even that were possible we're just human being we can't see everything that's coming down the pike we can't handle and cope with everything that happens to us that's not and so the institutions that we construct have their problems have their flaws have their weaknesses we can either be honest and face that see them and try to navigate through those or we can pretend that there's a way out of being in a contradictory system to come into a system that has no contradiction that's exactly as likely as deciding if only you marry Ms wonderful or Mr Wonderful well then it'll be happiness for the rest of your life this is a naive approach and adults should have kind of outgrown that long ago here we go now with the economics economic systems mean a very simple thing it's how people organize the production and the distribution of goods and services that's it it's not complicated it's not all weird or technical it's that's what economic studies how we go about producing the food clothing shelter and so on that we need to live our lives how do we produce them and how do we distribute them the Assumption of distribution means we're usually talking about human communities if we were talking about an individual we wouldn't say production and distribution because the the person who makes it is also the person who consumes it so the distributions kind of taken care of so we're talking about communities in communities we typically have a division of labor we don't all do all the time asks some of us raise chickens some of us fake bread some of us make pots and pans and so on so we produce things and then we have to arrange to distribute them because I can't live on pots and pans I make them but I need food so I go to the food producers and I say hey how about you give me some of the food you produce I'll give you some of the pots and pans and we'll be helping each this is that's human beings organizing this in the last two or three or four thousand years most of the people of the world organized things quite differently from the way they had done before what do I mean earlier and there are names for this tribal economic systems Village economic systems there's a lot of terms but basically think in terms if you're an American think in terms of the indigenous people here the Native Americans in their tribes whether it's the Iroquois tribe or the Mohawk Tribe they coined things like it takes a village to raise a child in other words they did things in common collectively they lived in small enough groups that they could get together all of them and decide together who does what and who distributes what to whom sometimes they had the chief kind of supervise it sometimes they had a Council of Elders and they would kind of keep it all together sometimes they would meet and in a very Democratic way everybody having one vote to work out how this should be done that era gave way to the last four or five thousand years where economic systems have been different here comes Marx because the Marx figured it out of what I'm about to say and I owe that to him I don't say it with pride or no Pride I'm just intellectually honest I'm telling you where I got it so you understand if you're interested there's a lot more there with a lot more detail than I'm have the time to give you at this point okay so here we go uh slavery the first of those big ones is slavery slave is very interesting economic system it divides people into two groups that's how it organizes the production and distribution of goods and services one group is very small they're called Masters and the other group very large they're called slaves interestingly the Masters own the slaves the slaves are property like a cow or a horse or a piece of furniture very interesting the slaves do the bulk of the work when they are finished producing goods and services all of the goods and services they've produced belong to the Masters ipso facto as fast as they're produced why because the slave who made it is also the property of the Masters so the Masters then take a portion take a portion of what the slaves have produced and give it back to the slaves food clothing shelter why because they want the slaves to do tomorrow the same work that they did today and next week and next month and next year and in order for your slave system to survive you have to make it possible for the slave not to die tomorrow or next week or next month so what do this Masters get they get the leftover they get what the slaves produced that was not given back to the slaves for their own consumption Marx gave a name to that extra produced by the slaves that they don't get back for their own consumption in the English translation the word is Surplus and surplus simply means the difference between what the workers produce and what the workers themselves consume the extra the leftover the more that's a German word for it the way he did it okay and this is a very interesting system it works for thousands of years in various parts of the country it exists in parts of the world to this day we allow some people to own buy and sell other people in case you're not familiar with it special laws had to be passed here in the United States to allow professional sports teams to buy and sell players from one to the other that's slavery that had to be passed why because the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution Outlaws slavery if you ever read that Amendment and I would urge you to do it you will notice there's only two sentences so it won't take you very long like 10 seconds in the 13th Amendment and that's still the law it says slavery is outlawed in the United States except in prisons wow the United States allowed slavery to this day to exist in prisons the Constitution specifically does that why you would want to subject a person in jail to slavery I leave to your imagination but slavery existed for a long time here's some of the biggest contradictions of slavery slaves die what are you going to do then the system is based on the provision of replacements for the slaves how are you going to get that the slaves may not reproduce you may separate husbands and wives very common in many slaveries they may not want to have children if the children are going to be slaves and treated that way as well you may have to go into the special behavior of breeding human beings the state of Virginia became the place in the United States that existed by breeding slaves for the rest of the slave South that's part of our history well that may not work out real well that's a contradiction of the system it may not be able to reproduce what will it do then well it might have a breeding program or it might start running around the world snatching people from wherever it can find them to keep the system going by replenish and that may involve Wars in other parts of the world it may involve expenses that the system doesn't find itself able to raise as you go further and further afield if I had time I could work it out eventually the system's contradictions can become unresolvable most systems that last for a while like slavery work out ways to overcome their contradictions but they discover very quickly that the way you overcome a contradiction always sets in motion new contradict that never stops you don't ever get free even if you resolve one you have another one again my my metaphor you get you overcome certain contradictions of being single right after a certain point going to that bar drinking too much and going home with someone you can't even remember the next day loses its attractiveness and you want something else well you can resolve that by getting married but if you don't think that that's going to create new contradictions then you're very naive but a system can continue for a long time going through those steps when slavery finally comes to an end it's usually because enough tensions and difficulties have accumulated that couldn't be overcome that got kicked down the road or got pushed into a corner or got imposed on a subgroup of the population but at a certain point the accumulation Marx's idea of contradictions becomes more than the system can handle and at that point it blows up typically it blows up when the slaves say that's it we're done we're not doing this anymore and we've noticed something there's a lot of us and there's a relatively small number of you Masters and out of that difference we can make a revolution and you're going to be gone let me remind everyone here in the United States at least where I'm sitting that in the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln he announced as of today slavery is outlawed that meant that he said to the people of the South the white people who were the Masters your property that you spent money to buy the slave is now free you just lost your property and nobody is going to compensate you for it you are to use a technical term screwed you're done system over the American South still hasn't gotten over the experience that's why white supremacy comes back in all of its hideousness over and over again you didn't work out those contradictions you exploded them and that's not a way even if you pretend that these issues go away okay then we have feudalism I'm gonna be briefer now there you have however something very similar a small group of people at the top they're called the Lords of the land and then a mass of people who do the work they're called the serfs and that system is full of contradictions and it has to work them out give you an example the surface given a piece of land by the Lord you work on the land three days a week Mr surf I'm letting you work that land you can have chickens and a cow and uh and whatever you produce the Monday Tuesday Wednesday on your piece of land you get to keep that's for you Thursday Friday Saturday you come to work on my land I'm the right the Lord's land and whatever you produce Thursday Friday and Saturday I get to keep and on Sunday you go home and you go to church where a person in a special outfit will tell you that this is the way God wants the world to be that lasts in Europe from 500 A.D to 1500 A Thousand Years lots of its contradictions were solved let me give you an example of one of the contradictions just to give you an idea this system doesn't work if the surf has children which most serfs did well what do you do you're going to take that piece of land suppose you had five children you're going to take that piece of land cut it up into five parts give each kid a fifth that won't work because a fifth of the land is not enough for Monday Tuesday Wednesday's labor to provide enough food clothing and shelter so the system has a contradiction that's fundamental it creates a feudal family creates the children and then can't feed them so how did they resolve it they developed a tradition called The Law of primogeniture here's what the law says all land of of surf passes to the eldest son he gets it all the Second Son any daughters you get nothing wow what you you resolve the contradiction now we we know exactly how it's going to continue but you have really created a new one namely what in the world are the girls and the second third and fourth Sons if they're there what is going to happen to them they have to go into the clergy and become a monk or a nun or a priest or they go into the army have nothing to do with making the land they go in they have to find or they become a merchant or they become an outlaw like Robin Hood in the woods they have to find and they do and that in turn sets in more contradictions but the system lasts for a thousand years until the accumulation of contradictions Blows the system up and you know what happens the serfs pick up their swords pick up their their sides and they marched to the house of the Lord and they cut his head off and they burned the house down you can see it in the French Revolution if you want a dramatic uh example you get rid of the few United States 1776 declares war on King George III a feudal King in England and it doesn't establish a king here no more feudalism we don't want it we're done with it no serfs no Lords none of them now we have capitalism and Marx's genius was to figure out that capitalism had not broken from the traditions of slavery and feudalism it thought it had it wanted to it promised in both the American and French revolutions that we were going to build a society of Liberty equality fraternity and democracy that was promised by George Washington Thomas Jefferson Rob Spear and all the others but they didn't mark says looking around in the 19th century when he lived do we have Liberty equality and fraternity you must be kidding Marx was writing at the time that Charles Dickens was writing his novels take a look at Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or A Tale of Two Cities and you'll see a society that wouldn't in a million years be described as Liberty equality fraternity and democracy it was a society written by extremes of wealth and poverty and all of the violence needed to keep that kind of assistive going and so Mark said to himself this was his life's work what happened here where were those wonderful Promises of Liberty equality fraternity and democracy Marx admired the French Revolution he admired the American Revolution he said but something went terribly wrong here Thomas Jefferson was an honest sincere man he believed he was going to create a new world so did all the revolutionaries that's what they were committed to well here's the problem said Marx and this is what he wrote in his work thus capital and the other writings of his capitalism made a mistake it didn't understand that if you want to get Liberty equality fraternity and democracy you cannot create an economic system in which a tiny group of people run the show make all the money make all the rules you can't have Masters doing that to Slaves you can't have Lords doing that to serfs and here comes the punch line you can't have employers doing that to employees that system capitalism which does not have ownership of some people by others which does not have Lords and Serfs it has a deal I'll pay you a wage you come and work for me it's still a tiny group of people the owners of businesses the boards of directors of corporations in short the employer class lording it over the mass of people who are employees employers represent between one and three percent of the American population employees are eighty percent depending on how you count there's no contest one is the majority the other one is that tiny minority but the tiny minority in capitalism the employers sit in the dominant position they decide what gets produced they decide what technology gets utilized they decide where production happens and they decide what to do with this Surplus the amount of goods produced over and above what you have to give to the employees so they stay alive and can work that says Marx is the root of the problem you didn't change that you changed the form of it from slavery and feudalism to capitalism you substituted a labor market where there was none before slavery is not a market slavery is I I mean you sell those slaves but you don't sell the work that the slaves do in capitalism you're not allowed to sell people but you are allowed to sell the work that they can do so capitalism changed the form of the unequal relationship between the two partners of capitalism but it didn't change the reality of a society split that way does capitalism have contradictions of course it does I'll give you a simple example um that that and I can use a a common uh situation uh to do that every capitalist being driven by the desire to maximize profit because that's what they learn in business school every decision you make should look at the bottom line the thing you are focused on if you produce more profit you are successful if your profits shrink you are a failure that's the way this system is set up okay so every employer is constantly trying to do and I'll use the language economize on labor costs here's what that means replace a worker with a machine replace an expensive worker with a cheaper one you know an immigrant or move your production out of the United States to China or India or Brazil where you can pay people a lot less all of those things economize on labor costs and so they do that to improve their profits what they don't understand is the contradiction here's the contradiction the less you pay workers though because you've replaced them with a machine or you've replaced them with a cheaper worker or you've moved out of the country the less workers in your own country will have the money to pay for the products you want to sell them you so what you're gaining by Saving on labor costs you're going to lose by being unable to sell your output that's a contradiction of this system there is no way out of that is there a temporary fix yeah but if you think that's the end of your problem you're going to make a mistake what's the temporary fix in our culture answer Consumer Debt you enable the workers to continue to buy even though you've screwed them out of their wages why because you give them a credit card here Jack here Mary by the American dream like you were hoping to do but now you're doing it with debt as your debt keeps Rising on an income that isn't going up it's no longer a question of whether it's just a question of when this contradiction because it is going to come and bite you in the rear end 2008 it bit Us in the rear end and we had the second worst collapse of capitalism in its history the worst one was the Great Depression of the 1930s but the second one was the 2008-910 collect we're still not really out of it wow so is that a solution to the contradiction yeah they can keep spending even though you're not giving any money but we have a new one dead and so that we have a population anxiety ridden because of their debts because they know if they lose their job they will not be able to make the mortgage payment the car payment or any of the other things they're living on borrowed time your generation the young people accumulating debts to go to college never has a bachelor's degree been less valuable to get a good job than it is today and yet never has it cost more than it does today that's a contradiction you're you're Hocking yourself into life of a debt to get a degree that hardly matters anymore this is ridiculous you know what this is doing this is accumulating contradictions contradictions for the credit card user contradictions for the indebted college student and I could easily go on so the question is for capitalism only how close are we to the point where the accumulation of contradictions produces the explosion every system we've had in the history of the world every economic system has been born has evolved and changed over time and then passed away there is no reason to believe capitalism will have a different history we know capitalism was born we know capitalism has evolved and therefore friends the next step is for capitalism to die it's not a question of whether it's just a question of when and I would submit to you that we are a lot closer to the wind than most Americans and indeed most people in the world are willing or able to admit or to face here's some of the signs the level of divisiveness in our culture is becoming toxic we don't talk to each other we live in our respective silos we listen to these podcasts those people listen to those podcasts we don't vote for the same people we don't think the same world out there exists that way our morals our culture are ripping us apart that's one sign we're noticing that the natural environment is being dispoiled by capitalism its use of fossil fuels its attitude towards nature as to make it serve our purposes very different from the way older societies understood themselves to be living with nature not dominating nature that's causing us to realize we better change our ways or else we're going to literally kill ourselves these are this recognition that comes when you realize one way of living one way of being is coming to an end we can't tolerate it anymore we're now having crazy Wars one right after the other the United States is at war with Russia in Ukraine the United States is a big powerful country that invaded small poor country Korea Vietnam Afghanistan Iraq who the hell are you to tell the Russians you must not invade a small country what are you talking about I by the way agreed a big country should never invade a small country but I also live in the world where this is going on all the time and that means you're asking the rest of the world to join you in a monstrous hypocrisy and you shouldn't be surprised when large numbers of them say I'm not doing that I'm not doing that you know we've had a series of Empires the Roman Empire the Greek end guy the Persian Empire the Ottoman Empire the British Empire and over the last 75 years or more the American Empire but the American Empire is now declining it's getting ready for the next Empire which is called China and everybody who pays attention knows it and the United States is trying to slow that down to stop it to reverse it just like Great Britain tried to slow down the United States the ex-colony that was challenging Britain war in 1776 War again in 1812 the British tried to squelch it it failed it usually does by the time the the Imperial power understands how threatened it is it's too late and Britain ended up realizing it couldn't stop it so it became the Ally of it so the United States has Britain as its Colony role reversal guess what's coming the Chinese know this history they know it perfectly well they know that they can now produce everything the United States does probably cheaper often better and there's nothing stopping them short of a nuclear war in which we all disappear there's nothing you can do and that's so irrational that one can presume Americans are not going to do something quite that stupid but the second best thing is to fight little proxy wars like in the Ukraine and we're not going to win that one either those days are over those Wars are not gonna be the way Afghanistan was and we lost that one and Iraq was and we lost that one and Vietnam was and we lost noticed something the Empire is losing the wars that's another sign it's over okay the last part of your question where do we go well the lesson in everything I've just said is the answer to the question you've got to finally face that an economic system that puts a small group of people at the top with all the economic power and wealth they can accumulate puts the rest of the society at their Mercy bitter angry denied frustrated and this is a recipe sooner or later for the accumulation of too many contradictions for the system to manage therefore the answer is clear we need an economic system that doesn't produce two groups of people a small one at the top and an immense one at the bottom this we don't want slavery we don't want feudalism and we don't want capitalism either because they share that fatal flaw therefore where are we going the answer is not have the government do it something that is a stale old irrelevant waste of time we've spent the last century debating more government less government more from private Enterprise more pub stop it doesn't matter whether it's private or public if a small group of people are telling a large group of people how to live and what to do whether the small group or private individuals or the small group or state officials who the hell cares that's what we've learned in the last century what has to change is the organization of the production and distribution in a summary we have to and this I say to Americans because I think you can understand it we have to democratize the enterprise we have to change Enterprises so we're not a small group at that top and a massive group doing the work at the bottom it has to be one person one vote everybody at a workplace one person one vote we decide collectively by majority rule what we produce what technology we use where the production goes and what happens to the wealth we produce how do we we don't give a few people a hundred billion dollars while everybody else can't afford to send their kid to college we don't do that because no rational group Community will ever do that unless it is under extraordinary stress we're going to be a democratically run Society let me make a final point a few centuries ago when the end of feudalism came we decided one of the symbols of feudalism were these Kings the biggest Lord the biggest feudal Lord in an area so I'm the king I'm the biggest one the king okay we said we don't want kings anymore in some of our enthusiasm we separated the head of the king from the rest of his body and that really made them go away we got rid of kings and you know what the king said you mustn't do that because we are what holds Society together we are the only thing that keeps this country going you need a strong leader and we're that not only that we talk to God two or three times a week and and he helps us figure out what's good for all of you you do away with us you're doing away with the only way civilization will continue well we got rid of them and to nobody's surprise civilization kept right on developing in fact we've developed civilization better and further after the Kings than we ever did under the Kings guess what the same applies to the factory and the office and the store if we democratize them we get rid of the CEO we get rid of I don't mean physically get rid of them but those positions are gone and we make it Democratic we should have done that long ago if we had half the commitment to democracy we'd pretend here in the United States to have we would have realized why in the world did we make our political system one person one vote but our economic system not look what's the logic of that most of us as adults spend more time at work than we do having to do with the Civics of our community it's a major place we spend our lives if you believe in democracy why the hell didn't you create it and Institute it there that's what this is about we have to change and if we change the workplace so it's Democratic we'll have a lot greater success in making the rest of the society not just formally Democratic but actually in terms of what it does so that's 21st century that's the fight will capitalism be able to hold on overcome its contradictions deal with the new ones to keep going for this Century or will it blow up and will the next phase be a real opening experiment with a democratized Enterprise by the way in most parts of the world including the United States we already have Democratic Enterprises they're called worker cooperatives people have been thinking about this and working at it for a long time this is not all new this is an attempt to realize that this dream of a democratic workplace like the dream of a democratic political space is very old in The Human Experience it's just a question are we ready to go there yet and if any of what I've just said strikes you as interesting or a new way of thinking about it or worth pushing further don't thank me I am applying Marx's work that's where all of this understanding comes from and that's why I recommend it to you because you can learn a lot from other people absolutely but from Marx as well excluding marks from the curriculum of our institutions of learning is a sign of our immaturity not of some kind of knowledge effect that makes it relevant to exclude a mass a very critical thinking sorry to take so long no no that was a perfectly I think addressed all of my questions and everything and I I understood yeah because I didn't know how much time we had so I'm happy that you were able to I was able I do have to go but yeah yeah could I just ask really quickly and then I'll say goodbye do you personally feel um optimistic or pessimistic about the I'm thinking of Grom cheese like the optimism of the intellect the or no the optimism of the uh the pet the will pessimism of the intellect or something like that the intellect look I am I have learned a great deal from Antonio gramsci I'm grateful to his work and I and I am in this instance too I am basically an optimist I am a person that's why you know most teachers really kind of are because you wouldn't want to put the effort into teaching people if you think it's all going to hell in a ham basket anyway so yeah I think there are ways we can achieve the transition to a better system I identify with the people who thought we could do better than slavery we can do better than feudalism and I say to myself no-brainer we can do better than capitalism the human mind's desire for something that works better that can be done in a shorter amount of time that make us work together as a community better that desire is in enough of us that confronted with danger and risk we can rise to the occasion will we for sure I don't know I get as frustrated and down as other people do but underneath it yeah I'm an optimist I think it's possible great okay well thank you very much for uh coming on the podcast um and I'll link all of your uh resources and and uh wonderful wonderful description and do please give Julieta the link because we will also post and promote this certainly yes okay thank you thank you very much

Channel: Sisyphus 55

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Length: 54min 10sec (3250 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023