B (27:54)

Pistol shots ring out in a bar room night. Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall. She sees a bartender and a pool of blood cries out my goddess kills em all. Here comes the story of Hurricane, the man the authorities came to for something that he never done put in a prison cell but one time he could have been the champion of the world. Three bodies lying there. This Petty seat and another man named Bello moving around mysteriously. I didn't do what he says and he throws up his hands. I was only robbing the register. I hope you understand. I saw them leaving, he says, and he stops. One of us had better call up the cops. Enzo Petty calls the cops and they arrive on the scene with their red lights flashing in a hot New Jersey night. Meanwhile, far away in another part of town, Reuben Carter and a couple of friends are driving around. Number one contender but a middleweight crown had no idea what kind of shit was about to go down when a cop pulled him over to the side of the road just like the time before and the time before that. In Patterson, that's just the way things go. If you're black, you might as well not show up on the streets unless you wanna drive the heat. Alfred Fellow had a partner and he had a route for the cars. Him and other Dexter Bradley were just there prowling around. He said, I saw too many running out. They look like middleweights jumped into a white car without upstate plates. And Ms. Patty Valentine just nodded her head. Cop said, wait a minute, boys, this one's not there.

A (30:21)

Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this economic update program. Today, this second half is going to be devoted to one huge topic. The topic is socialism. It is something that needs the conversation and it needs discussion and it needs debate. But before I get into it, I have to explain why it needs those things. Basically, I offer two reasons. First, a whole bevy of recent polls here in the United States indicates that particularly younger people, folks age 35 and younger, when asked the question, which do you prefer, capitalism or socialism, are giving an answer that is surprising many across the United States, namely huge numbers. Sometimes majorities are saying they prefer socialism. Well, when you explore that further, and I have done that personally as well as looked at the literature, it turns out that it's probably fair to say that voting that way in a poll is a reflection more of people's dissatisfaction with the capitalism they live in than then it is a clear preference for something else. Because when you talk with large numbers of young people, which I do in my classes as well as in my public speaking, it's quite clear that they're not very clear about what socialism is, what it has been, where it comes from, where it's going. And so in the interest of responding to the growing interest, I want to talk about it on this program. The second reason has to do with the fact that here in the United States, unlike in most other parts of the world, for the last 50 years, there has been a deeply repressive taboo on discussing socialism in a reasonable way. What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? What are its achievements? What are the things it did that we want to avoid? Just the kind of reasonable, balanced assessment that you would give to any topic that seemed to you or me to be important. We haven't been able to do that. We have been in a cold war for most of that time. Our enemy, we were told, was the Soviet Union. It was socialist and therefore it was socialism. And everything having to do with socialism had to be pooh, poohed, put down Denounced as horrific and evil and awful, and as if we were in the middle of a life threatening conflict and had no time or interest in a balanced assessment. We were fighting for our lives, or at least that's what the thought leaders of this country wanted us to believe. And so we didn't have a conversation. They had it everywhere else pretty much, but not here. And so we've had a generation of people unexposed to what socialism is, unaware that over the last 50 years, like everything else, socialism has changed. Capitalism certainly has, and socialism too, but you wouldn't know much about it if you weren't allowed to read the books, to have the teachers who could teach it to you, and to have a national public debate. So in the interests of catching up with 50 lost years, let's talk about socialism and let's do it on this program and hopefully in lots of other venues as well. Well, the first thing that's a bit strange about the word socialism is why we use has, at least for the last century, been the major alternative to capitalism, the major critic of capitalism. In most countries of the world, there are socialist parties who are important and often win the elections and become the governments in those countries. It's been true in virtually every country of Europe, for example, but many other parts of the world as well. So socialism is a regular, normal part of the lives of people in those countries. And there is no evidence to suggest that they're worse off than we are because they've had such a conversation. And a good bit of evidence to the opposite. In any case, why socialism? Why the word social? What we are all part of the society as opposed to a particular economic system called capitalism. Why do that? Why word it that way? I think the answer lies in understanding a little bit more about capitalism, the very thing socialism is critical of, because capitalism hasn't had one meaning either. And capitalism hasn't stayed the same either. So let's go through very briefly how capitalism has been differently understood in the past and also in the present. So, for example, some people see capitalism as a particular way of organizing production, so that some people, we'll call them employers, that's a relatively small group, are in charge. They make all the key decisions of what they're going to produce and how they're going to produce it and where they're going to produce it. And if they make money from doing so, if they produce something that sells well, well, then they decide what to do with the profits. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people who work in the enterprises that employers run are Called employees. They come to work nine to five, five days a week, more or less, do what they're told, and at the end of the day, go home. They leave behind whatever it is they help to produce, because that belongs in a capitalist system to the employer. It belongs to the minority, even though it was produced by the majority. Okay? That's the way capitalism works. And that differentiates it from other systems. Slavery, for example, is a way of organizing production. But there the two key players are masters and slaves. And we know enough about that system to know that it's different from capitalism, because in capitalism, there are no masters and there are no slaves. That's outlawed by law in most capitalist countries, including our own. Likewise, capitalism is different in the way it organizes production from feudalism. There we have lords and serfs. They are not masters and slaves. Nobody owns anybody in feudalism. But it's a different system. Capitalism is employers and employees. And there are other systems. For example, there have been economic systems where everybody is self employed, no employer, employee, because each of us, man and woman, adult, is working on our own for ourselves. That was kind of the vision of America that Thomas Jefferson had in mind in the early days of the United States. It's not what happened, but it is what he preferred. And then there are still other systems. We can call them communal, for lack of a better term. That's when a tribe or a village or an extended family organizes production kind of equally, everybody having a particular role to play and a particular voice in making decisions. Some people call it collectivist, some people call it communal, some people call it communist. It's a variety of terms, but it's clearly different from the employer employee system. So that's basically what capitalism has often been defined at. But it's not the only definition. If you pick up an American newspaper today, you will actually see capitalism defined very differently. It will be defined in terms of markets and private property, or even private enterprises. For these people, the definition they want you to focus on is how goods get distributed by markets, by market exchange. I get some of that because I give you something equivalent, money or some other object, and they want to focus on whether things are owned privately or publicly. I don't want to get into a debate about what the best definition is. I've done that at other times. I just want you to have all of that in your mind. Why? Because it helps me to explain the varieties of terms that socialism has taken. So, for example, some socialists, just to pick up on what we just said, think of socialism as not markets, but Instead government planning and not private enterprise and private property, but instead the public. The government owns the means of production. So for them, they got a nice dichotomy here, a nice split. Capitalism is private enterprise and markets, and socialism is government planning and government owning and operating enterprises. That's neat. And that's kind of the way the debate played out in the 20th century. But the 20th century is over. We are now almost a fifth into the next century. And we need to understand that the interest and the definitions of capitalism and socialism are shifting. And that's part of what this program is about. But let's continue talking about our topic, socialism. Many socialisms, focusing on what capitalists said they were, namely private enterprise and markets, have stressed in their critiques of capitalism that if you leave the economy to private enterprise and markets, you get lots of outcomes that are not good, at least not good for the majority of the people. And that what socialism means, here we go. Is that you bring the government in to correct, to offset, to limit the bad outcomes of leaving the economy to private enterprises and markets. That's why governments have been brought in to regulate industries, to limit industries, to control industries that are privately owned and operated. So for many people, socialism simply means the government is brought in. Many people that I encounter in the United States believe that for them, socialism is when the government limits the wage you pay. You can't pay below a certain minimum wage, or you can't charge an interest rate above a certain amount, or you have to install mechanisms that clean the air that you pump into the atmosphere that we all breathe, and so on. Any government coming in to limit or control private enterprise is seen as socialism. Then the extreme form of that is when the government doesn't just regulate or doesn't just control, the government takes over. Markets are no longer how you distribute goods. The government tells you what to do with the goods after you've produced them, who to pass them to, and who will pass things to you? Government planning, not markets. And then the government doesn't just regulate private enterprises, it literally takes them over, it runs them as government enterprises. And of course, the two great examples that people point to are the Soviet Union and China as people who were communists. That is, their kind of socialism took the full measure of the government coming in. Whereas the kinds of socialisms you had still have in France or Germany or Italy or Scandinavia has the government with a big regulatory role, but not literally taking things over the way they did in Russia and China. So socialism has often meant in the minds of socialists, that they're making for a more humane capitalism, a gentler capitalism. There was a popular phrase in the 20th century, capitalism with a human face. And the idea of the socialists was what we want is the efficiency. They thought capitalism had the privacy and the private property that they thought capitalism had, but with enough government control to minimize the bad results that they were convinced did flow and would flow if you let the economy simply go fully privatized in terms of ownership of property and market exchange. But there were always other socialists who didn't agree, neither with the moderate socialists of Western Europe, for example, nor with the communists of Russia and China. These were people who felt that socialism wasn't just the government doing things. Whether that was more or less wasn't of great interest to them. They felt there was something much more central, much more important that they as socialists focused on. And that had to do with how production was organized. In other words, for them, socialism meant not organizing with employers or employees. In their view, that kind of system, that kind of capitalism shared awful qualities with feudalism and slavery. And the awful qualities were basically that the minority at the top masters, lords, and now employers could and would use their economic power to control the political and cultural life of the society and be fundamentally undemocratic in the workplace where the minority controls master, lord, employer, and therefore also in the broader society using their wealth and power to control the border society so they can stay in control of the enterprises that they dominate. So for these socialists, socialism means an alternative economic system of production. The end of employer versus employee and the substitution of a democratic, socialized ownership and operation of enterprises. That means the workers or the community, or an alliance of workers and residents of a community together democratically own and operate the production in their society. For them, that's socialism. And therefore there's a struggle among socialists between those who think this fundamental change of the organization of production is key and those who think, no, no, let the capitalists run their enterprises, just have the government come in and limit control what they do to get rid of the bad results. Those socialists don't like each other, often debate with each other, and that's fine. They are a different way of interpreting socialism. And there's every right and reason that they should argue and debate. And if you're not familiar with that debate, well, that's about the 50 years we haven't had a conversation. We haven't been able in our society to be free enough to talk openly and honestly about these questions. And so we have to catch up now using the end of the Cold War for that enhancement of our freedom of discussion and debate that we should never have been deprived of in the first place. Now, let me make it real clear what I'm saying here by using examples. I'm going to start with slavery. Slavery is an economic system as has existed for centuries in various parts of the world, including, of course, here in the United States. Wherever slavery arrived, it experienced what every economic slave system has always experienced, any that we've ever had. There were people who loved it and welcomed it, and there were people who were critical of it. The system survived as long as those who loved it were kind of the majority in shaping public opinion and in shaping the society. And if and when those who didn't like it became numerous and became influential, well, then that system began to disappear. Every economic system we have had, the communal, the tribal, the self employment, the slave, the feudal, every one of them was born, evolved over time, and died. The burden is on anyone who's watching or listening to this program to imagine that the latest one, capitalism, had a birth, had an evolution, but unlike every other system, will not die. My guess is it will. And that's just a guess based on what every other system has done. Well, let's go back to slavery. Why am I talking about it? Because slavery had its detractors. Slavery had its critics. Slavery had its dissidents. We know about that because when slavery was ended, both here in the United States, in Britain and Europe and Asia, Africa, Latin America, it was a kind of notion that people had that it was good riddance, that human beings shouldn't be the slaves of one another. So there's a kind of a residue of hostility. So it's easy for me to show you and to explain that slavery always had its critics who eventually helped that system to go on and pass away. But throughout the lives of slave systems, you had again, two kinds of critics. One set of critics said, you know, the slaves should be treated better. They're not being fed properly, they're not being clothed properly. They don't have good places to live. Their families are being wrecked by their owners selling different members of their family to other. We want slaves to be much better treated. You might call these people reformists. They wanted to reform slavery to make it work better. They wanted slavery with a more human face. Then there were others who said to the first group, are you nuts? The problem here isn't how well the master treats the slave. The problem is we shouldn't have slavery. And we must do that. Because if all you do is get the master to Treat the slave a bit better, then what's to prevent the master, the next chance he has, from withdrawing whatever it is you've made him do nicely and going back to what he did before. There's no real security for the slave not to be what a slave is at the mercy of the master. And therefore the issue is free the slave. Those two people, those who wanted to reform slavery and those who wanted to revolt against slavery and make a transition to another system, is the history of the struggle over slavery and a history that we now know was eventually decided in favor of the revolutionaries because we don't have slavery hardly at all anymore. Well, now the parallel, the reason I tell you the story about slavery is with capitalism, socialists can be easily divided into those who favor reform and those who want something more. What do the reformers want? They want the government to come in and make for capitalism a more human face. Make sure workers don't get less than a certain amount. Make sure where they work is healthy and safe. Make sure that the tax system does a little bit to prevent extreme inequalities of income. That's what socialists or, or reforming socialists, or what in America is called democratic socialists. That's what they've wanted. They basically okay with capitalism, but they want it to be reformed. And then there are others who say, wait a minute, stop. Even if you get the reforms, if you leave the capitalists in charge, which is what you're basically saying, they can and will try to take back those reforms, and you'll be in an endless struggle. You, you get a few, you lose them, you try again, you lose. What has to be done is to change the organization of production. No more employers and employees. Well, what would be the alternative? Well, we know what it is. With slavery, it was every person is equally free. And in the critique of capitalism of those socialists who want to go beyond reform, the argument is everybody is both an employer and an employee. No more dividing people between the one or the other. It's like saying to the slave, you are now a master, you are now a slave. The words have no meaning anymore. You are free. Nobody owns you, nobody can tell you what to do any more than you can tell them. And it all has to be worked out among free people. Well, the argument of the socialists is no more employer telling the worker what to do, when to do it, how to do it, where to do it, and then taking the results of the worker's work and acting as if it were all yours. No, no, no, no, no. Whatever the different people who participate in Production do. They're all members of a team. They are all equal and. And they equally decide what is to be produced, how it's to be produced, where it's to be produced, and what is to be done with the profits that all of them together have worked to produce. And the short answer for what we call that kind of a system is worker co ops. And it's important to identify this idea of the socialist with the worker co op, because worker co ops are something that an awful lot of people listening or watching this program already know about. It's not some vague, distant foreign thing. It's as American as apple pie, for example. How do I know that? Because there are co ops all over the United states. In every one of the 50 states, in most communities, one or another activity is run as a co op. There are churches that run as a co op. There are grocery stores that run as a co op of the consumers. There are businesses that are already run as worker cooperatives. We talk about some of them on this program. The socialism that existed in the 20th century, the dominant socialism, the socialism identified with Russia and China, Soviet Russia and the People's Republic of China, focused on the big picture, what we might call the macroeconomic perspective of socialism. Government ownership, government planning. We now have a century of experience with that. We see its strengths, and there are some, and we see its weaknesses, and there are plenty of those too. And we've learned, and socialists are learning too. And one of the conclusions drawn more and more by socialists, which is how socialism is changing, has to do with focusing more on the micro level, the level of production, the individual store or office or factory, and saying that's the root of the problem and that's the solution area. Let us transform how, how we work. How adults spend most of their lives five out of seven days a week, most of the adult years of their lives, they're at work in an office, a store or a factory. If that were run democratically, if that were run equally, where everybody has a voice in making all the big decisions, we would change as human beings, the community would change. The vision of socialism, of going doing something better, was always lurking in this idea. This is a way to say, look, it made sense to say to slavery. Whatever you accomplished as a slave society, we can preserve all or most of it and yet do better by making people free. And the end of feudalism came when people said, we can preserve the thousand years of feudal Europe, its achievements technically, culturally, but we can do better by saying nobody is a lord and a serf anymore. None of that. The serfs are freed. That's what the French Revolution did. And so the socialists are now arguing. And the point here is not for you to be persuaded. The point is for you to understand the argument and. And then we can have a debate and discussion and change it. And that's all a healthy society should do. But the socialists of today, the emerging socialism is one that says if we want to overcome the problems capitalism bequeaths us, we hold on to what capitalism achieves, its successes, and there are plenty. But we also recognize its flaws and its failures, and we go to the root of that problem and we change the relationship in production, Employer, employee is too close to master slave and Lord serf. And we have to see it and we have to make the change. Thank you for your attention. I want to thank all of you for being partners, which is what we want all of you to be, to share what we do on this program with others, to point them to the websites. I want to thank a longtime partner of ours, truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. And I want to say, and I mean it, that I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Your time now, baby but after a while gonna be my time My time, babe they ain't gonna change. It.