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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, those we face, those coming down the road, and those confronting our children and the next generation. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life with the hope that I can bring to bear what I've learned to make more sense out of the surrounding economic events than the most major media seem able to do. So let's jump right in. One of the most important documents of the last few weeks was a paper, a pamphlet actually issued by Oxfam International. Oxfam is the most widely used and respected institution based in Great Britain that studies global inequality, has been doing it for years. In January of 2018, they issued a document entitled RA reward work, not Wealth. Basically, it makes the case for exactly what its title says. But in so doing, it talks about the latest research it has either done or commissioned on global inequality, including the attitudes of people toward global inequality. So I want to bring you some of what they found because it is crucial to understanding how the capitalist system that governs the world today, both in the so called advanced part of the world and in the so called less developed part. If you want to make an assessment of the capitalist system, take a look at its results. It's a logical way to proceed. So here are some of them. Last year, that's 2017, saw the biggest increase in the number of billionaires in history. One more billionaire was added to the list every two days. There are now, and this may come as a surprise to you, 2,043 billionaires in the world. Nine out of ten of them are men. These billionaires, these 2,043 individuals in a population on this planet of 7 billion individuals, 2,000, that's 0.0000001% of the population. Their wealth last year increased by a total of $762 billion. That is the value of their stocks and bonds and land holdings went up by $762 billion by every known calculation of the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty. That amount of money is more than you need to eradicate extreme poverty on this planet. Let me drive this point home to you. The richest 2,043 people on the earth became richer over the last year by an amount of money larger than what would have been necessary to bring hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. Usually calculated as people living on less than $1.90 per day for food, clothing, shelter and everything else. What kind of a society would be organized in such a way as to make the trouble 2,043 richest people on the planet, $762 billion richer, when that's more than the money needed to eradicate extreme poverty for their fellow citizens, for their fellow human beings. This is a system that can't solve that problem. That makes the problem worse year after year. Meanwhile, some statistics I've given you in the past continue to be true and reaffirmed by Oxfam's research. The richest 1% on this planet own more wealth than the other 99% combined. The richest 1%, this happened in 2016, went over half, that is, the richest 1% own more than half. The other 99% fight over the remaining half. What Oxfam also did last year, and what I also want to report to you, is they Interviewed, they surveyed 70,000 people in 10 countries. Population of those countries represent one quarter of the world's population. So. So they did this survey in countries that together account for a quarter of the people on this planet. Over three quarters of the people they surveyed either agree or strongly agree that the gap between rich and poor in their country is too large. The numbers range from 58% in the Netherlands believe that to 92% in Nigeria believe that. Two thirds of the respondents in the 10 countries think that the gap between rich and poor needs to be addressed urgently or very urgently. So what have we got? A wildly unequal distribution of wealth and income in the world and a vast majority of the people who are against it. And nonetheless, it gets worse, not better, with each passing year. What the majority thinks is unable in this culture and in this economy to be translated into corrective action. Overwhelming majorities want something which doesn't happen. The opposite happens, which means that those at the top not only have the wealth in their hands, but have bought the political system to make sure it isn't responsive to what the majority of people would want. This means that the consequences of capitalism are not only gross inequality, but also the political corruption that prevents that problem from being addressed, even though the majority of people want it to be in a peculiar way. Much of the rest of today's economic updates will operate a little bit to illustrate what the summary that Oxfam has produced allowed me to just tell you about. So let's begin. Let me introduce to you the owner of a store you may have encountered, if not personally, well through the Internet. The store in question is called Victoria's Secret. It is a famous store that sells lingerie and all Kinds of underwear and so forth. The owner is a billionaire, one of the 2043 I just told you about. His name is Leslie Wechsner. W E x N E r. He is 78 years of age, and he is worth apparently $7 billion. That is, he owns $7 billion worth of. Well, I'm going to tell you about some of the things he owns, but I presume most of it is stocks and bonds, because that's what most of the wealthy hold, most of their wealth in those forms. But Mr. Wexner lives. Well, perhaps most famous is a huge mansion in Britain. Mansions in Britain have their own name. This one is called Fox Coat. F O X C O T E. Cost him, apparently $30 million. It is referred to in the press as a gentleman's shooting estate. In October, helicopters came in, and apparently the shooting was done from the helicopter. What kind of sport you might want to call this? I leave to your judgment and your imagination. Mr. Wexner also owns a $47 million mansion outside of Columbus, Ohio. Likewise one of the largest yachts ever built built in the world. He owns it. In 1997, he got some more publicity when he paid $16.5 million for a 1954 Ferrari automobile. But he's in litigation fighting with the former owner or the auction house that sold it to him and so forth. Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to understand that the people who are billionaires are only billionaires because the rest of us enable them to be billionaires, the people who go in and spend large amounts of money on the products of Victoria Secret. When you buy that highly priced piece of clothing, you're feeding the billionaire. Mr. Wexner, you're paying for that yacht and that mansion every time you shop thereand I don't mean to pick on Victoria's Secretalthough I do get a bit of a kick out of it, because I could do the same thing with all the other billionaires, all of whom are in that position, because you and I pay the money that flows into their pockets. You might think that if we pay the money, we would have some say about how that money is used, but not in a capitalist system. They can use it, and Mr. Wexner has done it in the way I've just summarized. My next economic update takes me once again to. To the issue of immigration. I don't mean to harp on it, but it is something that keeps being in the News. Why? Because Mr. Trump and the Republicans think they have a politically viable way to impress people. So now let's do the numbers to see whether there's any truth in it. The population of the United States is 325 million people, roughly. So if we want to talk about the economic well being of the American people, we're talking about the economic well being, the job holders who are roughly half of that population. How many undocumented immigrants are there? And those are the only ones that are being talked about when there's all this talk about stopping immigration or reversing immigration or expelling undocumented immigrants. Best guess of the United States government, 11.8 million. So let's be clear then, right? We're talking, when we talk about immigration, undocumented immigration, about 11, let's round it off. 12 million people in a population of 325 million people. Here. Here's a hot flash for all of nothing about that 11.8 million, no matter what happens to them or what is done to them is going to fundamentally alter the economic situation of the American people. Lots of attention to expelling these 700,000 or closing off the border to these million. You're not talking about things that are going to change the problems of the American people, the economic problems. The whole focus on immigration is fake, is phony. It's a way to distract Americans from the economic problems. They do have serious ones that affect tens of millions of families in this country that are not going to be affected one way or the other in any significant degree by anything that is done to the immigrants. So even if you are the kind of American who conveniently forgets that the whole country is a country of immigrants precisely because you wiped out the people who were here when the immigrants first came, and even if you're the kind of American who doesn't care about what it means to expel people at the bottom of the economic ladder who have already suffered from poverty and lack of education and poor housing and all the rest, and you want them to be the butt of your action to fix an economy, fixing it on the backs of those most already impoverished by it. If you don't have any moral problems with that, no ethical problems with that. Here's the remaining argument the reasoning an economist would give you. It's not the issue, friends. Jobs are the issue. Automation is the issue. Unequal distribution of wages and profits is the issue. Our whole capitalist system is the issue. Immigrants aren't the issue. It's as if you told me that the house was on fire and I told you, take a little nail file and try to work on a corner of the wood at the base of the house. You'd scream at me and say, that's not going to solve the problem of a house on fire. We need a lot of water. We need other things. But filing the corner of a piece of wood? You're crazy. My response as an economist to the discussion of immigration, to seeing Mr. Trump and the Republican leaders and the Democratic leaders arguing and fighting over the is to see a system whose job it is to distract the mass of people suffering from it, from the system itself. Nobody's questioning the system. We're fighting over immigrants. It is a terrible misunderstanding of what's going on that makes all of that possible. Before I go on to other updates, let me remind you, as we always do, to make use of our websites, rdwolff with two f's. Com and democracyatwork. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info through those websites, you can communicate to us what you like and don't like about the program, what you would like us to cover. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can show us ways we can be more useful to you. For those of you that listen to this program as a radio program or as a podcast, let me remind you that you can also see it as a television program. The easiest way to do that, go to patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate and you can watch this program as a television program. These are all ways of partnering with us. Making us reach more people is something you can help us do and something we ask you to do as well as invite you to do. The websites are the key way to do that and they're available to you at no charge ever. 24 7. Continuing on our story, after the tax cut bill was passed in December of last year, a great deal of noise was spent saying how this was, in the words of our president, a middle class tax cut and so forth? I wanted to do some research to basically answer the question. Is the tax cut that was passed by Mr. Trump and the Republicans something that will really transform America's people, fix the middle class, rebuild the middle class, save the middle class, transform its economic situation? So let me tell you the research I did and the results I found. First, I made use of research done by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan, very good, very well qualified research outfit, and they sat down and did a study of how each level of household in America would be affected by the tax cut. Let me give you just a Small flavor of what they said. If you earn less than $25,000 a year, so you are among the poorer folks in America, the tax cut will save you. Get ready, because it's really going to change your life. If you earn less than 25,000, the tax cut will save you $60. That's right. You heard me, $60. If you earn between $25,049,000 a year, it will save you $360. If you earn between 49 and $86,000 a year, it will Save you $930. That's most Americans right there. So most Americans are going to save between 60 and $900. I understand $900 is a significant amount of money for a lot of people. It's not going to transform your life. It's what you save in the entire year, not per week, not per month. That's what you save across 2018 by virtue of that fact. Now, if you are a millionaire, if you earn over. I'll use this number because you might find it interesting. If you earn over $3.4 million a year, here's how much you will save by the tax cut in 2018. Ready? Here we go. $193,380. Let me do that again. If you earn over $3.4 million, you will save nearly $200,000 on your tax. That's a lot of money. In order to save a lot of money, you already have to have a lot of money. That's how this system always works. Nothing new has happened in this tax cut for the vast majority of Americans. What you save in taxes or will not fundamentally change your situation at all. This wasn't a tax cut for you, but it was a tax cut for the really rich. They will now have an extra $200,000. Not you. It was not a tax cut for you. It was a tax cut at your expense. Because you have to remember that when they cut all those taxes that don't have to be paid, particularly not by rich people, the next step is to say the government not getting all that money from people will not be able to fund a whole lot of programs for school kids, for road maintenance, for college educations, we're going to have a season of cutting because there isn't enough money, because they cut taxes above all on the rich. So you're going to not get the benefit of the tax cut, but you are likely going to pay the cost of the tax cut, which is in a reduction in the quality and the quantity of public services in the United States, which middle and lower income people rely on more than the folks at the top. You want a tax cut for the middle class, then give it to the middle class. We don't do that in America. We say we do it, but we don't do it. In case you're wondering, we have actually a case study that proves all this. Back in 2012, a person like Trump, a man named Sam Brownback, became the governor of Kansas. And he did in Kansas what Mr. Trump has now done. He cut taxes on the rich and he cut taxes on corporations, promising it would really explode the economy of Kansas. It didn't do anything of the sort. Kansas went downward. Its unemployment got worse than the rest of America in a way it hadn't before. There was no explosion of jobs. None of it. So bad is it that in the last session of the Kansas legislature, they, they put back in the very taxes that they had cut out under Mr. Brownback. And he was dispatched off as an ambassador to someplace abroad. I can't remember the name of the country. He's gone. Gone from Kansas, gone from the United States. A disaster. Because it didn't work in Kansas. It's of course logical that the same kind of politicians will now do it in the country as a whole. Next update. Many of you have no doubt watched with horror the public trial of a doctor who worked on Olympic athletes in the United States, particularly young women, who was also for a long time, a professor of medical sciences at Michigan State University. He has been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail. He has had to listen to 150 or maybe more young women testify as to what he did to them over 20 or 30 years of being the official doctor for the USA Gymnastics that organizes our Olympics competitors, and likewise his activities at Michigan State. In recent weeks, the president of Michigan State University, other officials there, and likewise the entire board of USA Gymnastics, quit. And they quit because of a rising chorus of anger and bitterness, not just from the women who suffered the sexual abuse, the sexual assaults over all those years, not even from just from their families, their friends, their communities, but from the general public. And I want to say to you a word about that, because there's an economic lesson in all of this. Here's the if you organize a teaching institution, a university such as Michigan State, a good big state university, if you organize it as a school, it behaves in one way. If you organize it as a business, it behaves in a different way. A business depends on customers. It is afraid to reveal any of its shortcomings to its customers lest they go someplace else. It's afraid to admit to its shareholders or those who control it that it did bad things for fear they will invest somewhere else. Businesses tend to hide the illegal, the immoral that they do because it's in their interest to do that. The behavior of the people who run Michigan State University is the behavior of people in a business. It turns out that the police department of Michigan State University received something on the order of 100 complaints from young athletes at the university about this same doctor that Nasser. Some of them were pursued, some of them weren't. Nothing ever happened. The administration failed to take the most minimal protections. How in the world did you not have a major investigation after a hundred complaints? What is the possibility that you didn't know, that's not serious, that you didn't care? I'm not willing to assume that about these people. I don't think they're monsters. But they are caught up in a system that rewards them for keeping it quiet, for hushing it up, for not letting anyone know. And when you do that, you don't expose the problem and you don't solve the problem. You subordinate the solving of the problem to the keeping up of your income, your money, your profits. Long ago, we made major universities into businesses that sell sports, that sell events, that sell all kinds of things. They even sell positions in their schools. That's not healthy. And one of the prices you pay when you mix business with education is you get business type results. Hiding, dissimulating, making money even at the expense of the most basic kinds of human care for one another. Michigan State stands exposed. But these problems are not unique to Michigan State. They affect the entire universe of higher education and other institutions. Being businesslike has always been a very mixed bag. We've come to the end of economic updates. First half hour. Please stay with us. I think you'll find the second half hour today as interesting, if not more. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. Well, we're going to do something a little bit different from what we usually do because I want to dedicate today's program to a bicentennial to something that happened 200 years ago this year, particularly, to be precise, 18, 18. 200 years ago. Something which for many years was taboo to talk about in the United States. But I'm happy to tell you, as you probably know, that that taboo is lifting. So what is it that happened in 1818? Karl Marx was born, an important figure in the history of the world whose 200th anniversary of his birth is worth thinking about. What did Mr. Marx do? What impact has it had on the world? Is it still relevant? And if so, how? Before I jump in, though, let me talk a little bit about that taboo I just mentioned earlier. In American history, before the Second World War, there were pretty often discussions about Marx, Marxism and the influence of Marx's work and what exactly he said and didn't say. Scholars debated it, political activists debated it. But after World War II, politics in America changed particularly. We went from being the ally of the Soviet Union in World War II, fighting, fighting against the Germans and the Japanese, the Nazis and the Japanese. We went from there to declaring the Soviet Union our number one enemy. The Soviet Union was a country that celebrated Karl Marx, that said, it derived its strategies and legitimacy from Karl Marx's writings. And so with the Soviet Union as the great enemy, Marxism became the great enemy and Karl Marx became the evil inspirer of the great enemy. And this led Americans particularly to turn away from the works of Karl Marx and many of the Marxists that followed him, that were inspired by him, both Americans and non Americans, turn away from them and turn away from even reading the material, declaring it so terrible, so evil, so noxious, that the best thing was not to crack open the book, not to engage the ideas, to dismiss it. And so it was starting in the late 1940s and basically up to the present. It's beginning to break up in the last 10 years, but just beginning. But for most of the last half century, reading, studying, thinking about the works of Karl Marx was a taboo in the United States, and the vast majority of people did not do it. Moreover, they were helped because the journalists in America, the politicians in the America, in the American system, and the academicians, the teachers and the professors paid no attention to it, didn't teach it in the class, if it even came up in the class, it was dismissed in a cursory way with no engagement, often by a teacher who had no familiarity himself or herself with it and couldn't have engaged it in a serious way because they had never done so as students themselves. As I say, it's beginning to break up now, but I want to assert that it was always a mistake to behave this way. Even if you think the Soviet Union is your great enemy, that's not a reason not to study what inspires its behavior, it's a reason to study it all the more. You want to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, even if you hate what they stand for. And Then there's always the possibility that if a major part of the world, let's say Russia and China, are inspired by Karl Marx as they are, and if it turns out that Russia is the largest country by geography in the world and the People's Republic of China is the largest country by population, so you have the largest geographic entity and the largest population, that's enough of a reason to study. What inspires them to do otherwise isn't a sign of political sophistication. It's a sign of abject fear mingled with ignorance. And that's not a good idea anywhere, ever. So I'm not going to participate. I haven't for most of my life. So to be honest with you, it's old hat for me by now. I want to talk to you about Mr. Marx. And yes, it's because I think we can learn from what the fellow had to say. And there in no way am I unique because Mr. Marx's ideas and writings have been translated into every language on the face of this planet. There is no country in the world that doesn't have its Marxist professors, its Marxist newspapers, its Marxist trade unions, its Marxist political parties and a whole lot of other Marxist things. And that's because an awful lot of people in the most diverse circumstances have found these writings of enormous interest. In fact, you'd have a hard time finding more than a handful of other examples of such a dispersion of interest. So many people in so many situations finding valuable lessons in what has been written under the influence of Karl Marx. So I don't shrink away from saying I've got something to learn too. I don't even shrink away, as I'm not doing today, from suggesting you too could have something to learn. And I want to help make that possible. So let's talk about Karl Marx. Born as I said, in 1818, died in 1883. So basically this is a man who lives across the 19th century, born near the beginning, dies near the end. He was born in what we would nowadays call a middle class family, an educated father and mother, which in those days a very small number of people had education. He went to the university, I would guess 3, 4% of the population of young people in Germany where he was born went to the university. So already you're talking about a very particular part of the population. Not only did he go to the university, but he went all the way through to a doctoral dissertation, a PhD which was in the field of Greek philosophy. That's what he wrote his dissertation on. He studied all kinds of philosophy. That's what he loved. But as he was going through the university, he began to be touched, as many grad students were, although there were always many who weren't, by the social struggles around him. He wasn't shut off from what was happening in the towns and cities where the universities were located. He began to notice that there were people in the streets fighting for things. There were struggles at the workplace, struggles in the countryside, political. He became interested, as students often do. And then two things happened, more or less at the same time in his life. He got caught up in one of the great revolutionary periods of European history. These were called the Revolutions of 1848. If you study European history, you will learn that there were revolutions in England, in Scandinavia, in Italy, in France, in Germany. Everywhere it was a revolutionary upheaval. He. He got caught up in that because he was a young person at the time. He was in his 20s, late 20s, early 30s, and he began to be critical about the philosophy he had been taught and the philosophy he loved to do and his job as a young philosophy instructor in a university, first real job he got. And he began to study things that were closer to the political upheavals that captured his attention. He studied political science, he studied economics, he studied history. He wanted to understand not just how people thought about the world, but what they did and why they did it. And then he even asked himself the question, why did they think those thoughts rather than other thoughts? What's going on to shape the philosophy he studies? This got him in trouble because as a young student, he sided with the rebels, he sided with the critics, he sided with the people who wanted a better life. He was a radical, or he was becoming one. And what happened to him as a Young Radical, late 20s, early 30s, was what was done by governments who didn't like to see students getting active in those years, particularly not with workers who wanted a better life. They didn't kill them, and they didn't imprison them. It's not what they did. They exiled them, they threw them out of the country. So what the German police did to this young radical, Karl Marx, coming from a very good family with a very big pedigree as a philosopher, they threw him out of Germany, they put him on a train to France, but the German police informed the French police that he was coming. So the French police met him in Paris at the train station and said, you can't stay here either. And they put him on another train that went to Brussels in Belgium. It's only about an hour an hour and a half train ride and he arrived in Brussels. Same thing happened. And they put him on a train, then a boat to London, England, which is where Karl Marx spent the rest of his life as an immigrant in London. He had to learn the English language. He had to learn to write and speak in it. And he had to survive as a refugee, a political refugee in that part of Europe, England, which was open to refugees more than any other part at that time. I mention it because I want everyone to know that Marx spent most of his adult life and wrote all of his mature works as a resident of an English speaking country. English speaking was not alien to him. It became his daily language. Well, what did he do? What did he write? What was the thing that made his work so interesting and so powerful in the world since so that the very word Marx or Marxist to this day in many parts of the United States and elsewhere, frightens people, worries people, makes them anxious, as if something scary or dangerous were in the air. What's this all about? Well, Marx was always a philosopher, always a thinker, and that's really what he did in his life. He didn't participate that much in political activity a little, but mostly giving speeches or writing pamphlets, things like that. And mostly he spent time reading and thinking and writing to understand what was going on and hopefully to share his understanding with others. That's Marx's politics. He was not the leader of any government. He was not the leader of any political party. He didn't stand for election in any country ever, at any time. He was a thinker, a theorist, a writer. He influenced people, but that was the limit of what he did. So what were the big questions that moved him? What did he try to learn? What did he try to understand? It begins in a very personal way with Karl Marx. The great thing that excited him as a young man was the French Revolution, the Revolution of 1789. That revolution overthrew feudalism in Europe, particularly in France where it took place. And the slogans of that revolution were absolutely ecstatic for a whole generation of young Europeans. The slogans of that revolution, in case you don't remember, were three. Equality, fraternity and liberty. Liberty of the individual, equality among individuals and solidarity, brotherhood, fraternity among individuals. The French Revolution committed itself to realizing liberty, equality and fraternity in 1789. Remember, Marx is born 30 years after that revolution, reaches his maturity half a century after that revolution. And so here's the big question he asks himself. Do I live here in western Germany or later in Paris or later in London? Do I live In a society that is the realized promise of liberty, equality and fraternity. Did the French Revolution, whose slogans I love and whose slogans my generation embraces, did it achieve what it set out to achieve? Do we have liberty, equality and fraternity? And Marx's unequivocal answer as he looked around the Europe of his time, The Europe of 1848, 1850, 1860, was a resounding no way. For those of you who have ever read the novels of Charles Dickens, remember the descriptions of England that made Dickens famous. Those were descriptions of a society of grotesque inequality. There was no equality. The gap between rich and poor was every day visible in every city and town of Europe. Liberty. How can you be free if your next meal is uncertain for you? Fraternity people, people didn't treat each other as brothers. They treated each other as means to an end, means that you could dispose of whenever you needed to. So then Marx's question became, why? Why did the Revolutions of 1789 in France? And he might have mentioned the American Revolution around that time too. Why did they not realize a society of liberty, equality and fraternity? We could modernize his question by saying, why didn't they achieve the liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy in whose name those revolutions had been made? Might there be, Marx asked himself, something these revolutionaries didn't get, didn't see, didn't understand, that made them fail. He took them at their word. They wanted liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. They made revolutions for that purpose. The Americans overthrew King George III and all that that represented. The French overthrew Louis Quatorze and all the Marie Antoinette and all of that they wanted. Like Jefferson or any of the others, they wanted a new society of liberty, equality. But. But they didn't get, wasn't there in Europe. As Marx reached his maturity, so he asked himself, here's something I can do. Can I figure out, I Marx, what it was that prevented the good society that they all wanted to achieve from being realized. What might it be? And his answer was his life. He devoted himself to answering that question. What was it? What did they miss? What has to happen to realize liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy in the world the way we actually live it? And here's what he came up with. They missed something. They all missed something. And thanks to all the things they figured out, I can figure out what, what they missed. So I'm not a Monday morning quarterback saying, oh, you didn't do it right. Without the things they achieved, I wouldn't be able to figure out where they went wrong. So I'm just part of them figuring out what we have to do that we didn't do first time around. So what was it? And here comes what I think is Marx's number one achievement. And by the way, I should explain here it is early in 2018, we're talking about Marx because it's its 200th birthday and it's an important topic. Later this year, we will have a more developed, a more detailed analysis because it's so important here, in a way, I want to tell you it's coming and to maybe tease you just a little by showing you why it's important to do this. So let's get back. What did Marx achieve? His answer was to say we haven't paid enough attention to production. We look at society. We ask, who's the government? And what do they do? If we're philosophers, we ask, what are the big ideas and how do they shape up in people's minds? And that's all interesting and important to understand society. But we have neglected thought, something we are now paying dearly for. We've neglected the importance of how each society organizes the production of the goods and services without which it cannot live. The food, the clothing, the shelter, the housing, you name it. And I think therein what we've missed is the crucial thing that explains why we haven't been more successful building a society based on liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. Well, what is it about production we missed? It's an organization. It's how we as people get together to produce the goods and services without which we can't live. And then he does it. He says, let me show you what I mean. For much of human history, it's been organized in three, three ways. The first one we call slavery. In that arrangement, one person owns another person, the owned person. The slave does all the work, and whatever the slave produces flows into the hands of the master, the other one. And the master gives some of it back to the slave because he wants to keep this system going. But the rest of it, the surplus, what the slave produces over and above what he gets back, that surplus goes to the master and. And he uses it any way he sees fit. And at a certain point, the slaves revolt and that system explodes. And then we have another one, and we call that feudalism, Marx teaches. And there we have again a dualistic system. Two players, the serf and the lord. The serf is sort of like a slave, and the lord is sort of like a master. But they don't own each other because it's not slavery. The serf works on the land that the Lord kind of presides over and the serf produces more than the serf keeps, and that more that surplus goes to the Lord who makes beautiful castles and lovely societies for himself. Much of Europe had been slave or serfdom before the capitalist period. And the capitalists develop. And that's a new system. Marx says it's new in the sense it's not slavery, nobody owns anybody, and it's not lord and serf that's all overthrown, but what's put in its place. The hope is by the people who make the capitalist revolutions. The French Revolutionaries of 1789, the American Revolutionaries of 1776, they hoped for liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. What they got though, was a new capitalist system. In their minds, the capitalist system would deliver liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. So they instituted capitalism. And here comes Marx's insight in doing that. They misunderstood that what capitalism is isn't the end, end of the old dualities. Slave, master, serf, lord. It's just a new form of the same thing. The new form is employee and employer. Once again, the employees do all the work, produce all the output. They deliver it to the boss, the employer, he takes a portion of it, gives it back to them. We call that the wage and the salary. The remaining part, the surplus produced by the employee, belongs to the employer, who uses it to organize a society that serves him first and foremost. So Marx's explanation, his breakthrough was we didn't understand that if you want liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, and in the society, you've got to put it in the workplace. You've got to include the production system. Because if you don't, if you leave the production system with a dominant employer and a subordinate employee, it'll be as unequal, unlibberty, undemocratic, as were the slaveries and the feudalisms before. To have a society of equality, liberty, fraternity and democracy, you have to build those in to the production process, to the factory, the office, the store, the workshop. Only then if we all together decide what gets produced and how it gets produced and where it gets produced, and we together, excuse me, decide what to do with the surplus. This extra we produce over and above what we need as workers ourselves, only then will we have created the conditions in the workplace that will allow in the larger society the liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy that we want to be achieved. In other words, Marx's great discovery was the revolution isn't over yet. We haven't done it yet. Is the end of slavery a good thing? For sure. Marx was Always clear about that. Is the overthrow of feudalism a good thing? Yes. But we're not done. We might wish we had been done. We might wish that capitalism had ushered in liberty, equality, fraternity. It hoped it could. The people who made those revolutions hoped it could. But it didn't happen. And we have to ask the question, Marx, why it didn't. And I think I've figured it out. Because we didn't change the organization of production. And what would that mean? It's not that complicated. It means the workplace has to change. No longer do a tiny group of people at the top decide what gets produced, how it gets produced, where it gets produced, and what is done with the profits. No more board of directors of a corporation making all those decisions while the tens of thousands of employees come to work, do their work, go home, watch television, drink beer, and repeat the whole game tomorrow, uh, if you want liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, it begins, it has to begin at the workplace. If you don't do it in the workplace and you try to do it elsewhere in society, you will fail. That's what the history of capitalism shows us. It won't work. You won't get it. And you will have to then convince yourself that you can't do better in the human experience beyond capitalism, which is what all capitalist systems try to convince their we are the best. We are, as far as it goes, we are the best you can do. Look, feudalism, Marx tells us, tried to convince people that the lord and the serf was the best you could do. And before that, the masters tried to convince the slaves it was the best you could do. In the end, history undid them. And Marx is very confident that in the end, as people live under capitalism and watch how it works, its operations, the inequalities it produces, the. The instability of these endless business cycles, the whole unjust system that it spawns isn't the best human beings can do. And then he thinks the same revolutionary spirit that got rid of slavery and got rid of feudalism will turn its criticism upon capitalism and ask, how can we do better than capitalism? And for that, Marx says he thinks he's found the answer. Transform the workplace from a capitalist hierarchical to an egalitarian worker cooperative. It's an extraordinary piece of work. It has had staggering social implications for 150 years. Makes no sense to ignore it. It makes no sense to do anything other than interrogate it for whatever lessons for today it might be able to give us. And that's what we're going to be doing later this year. The 200th bicentennial of Karl Marx's birth. Thank you very much for being with us this week. I hope you found this interesting. I want to thank our partner, Truth out, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam. Sa.