Economic Update: Knowledge, Class and Economics

Summary

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Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Episode: Knowledge, Class and Economics

Date: January 18, 2018
Guest: Dr. Richard McIntyre

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Overview

In this episode, host Richard D. Wolff examines pressing issues at the intersection of economics, social inequality, and systemic structure. The first half highlights recent research on workplace discrimination, globalization, inequality, and the economics of immigration and race. In the second half, Wolff welcomes Dr. Richard McIntyre to discuss their new co-edited book, "Knowledge, Class and Economics: Marxism Without Guarantees." The pair explore the relevance of class analysis and Marxism today, contemporary academic limitations, and the promise of democratic workplaces such as worker co-ops.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Workplace Discrimination and Hierarchy

[00:10–06:15]

• Wolff opens by discussing new research from Pew Research Center on discrimination, emphasizing the ongoing reality of workplace gender and racial bias.
  • “Men much, much, much less frequently experienced or noticed discrimination. Women, ... much, much more.” — Wolff [01:10]
• Explains how vertical workplace structures (with hierarchies of power) allow discrimination to persist; those at the top set the tone and have disproportional control over hiring, firing, and promotion.
  • Memorable quote:
    “If those at the top prefer men to women, you get the result. If they prefer whites to blacks... our research through the Pew organization shows us.” — Wolff [03:44]
• Advocates for democratizing the workplace: horizontal, participatory, and collective decision-making reduces the ability of a few to impose their biases.

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2. The Rise of the Chinese Economy

[06:15–15:55]

• Wolff notes that China’s retail market will surpass the US for the first time in 2018: a seismic historic economic shift.
  • “No one comes close to what [China has] accomplished in the last 20 years. No one.” — Wolff [07:42]
• Explains China’s per capita income rise and quadrupled productivity over a decade, contrasting with stagnant American wages post-2008.
• Outlines the consequences: global corporations now orient investments and marketing toward China; Chinese political and economic influence grows, affecting US corporate and political realities.
  • “Last year, in 2016... 17.6 million vehicles were sold in the United States. ... How many vehicles were sold in [China]? 24 million.” — Wolff [14:25]
• Warns that denial in US media and political leadership will not halt these profound shifts.

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3. Inequality: Systemic & Cyclical

[15:55–20:55]

• Discusses a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco paper on global inequality, citing parallels to Piketty’s research.
• Key insight: Capitalism creates widening inequality until it destabilizes itself, produces crisis and upheaval, then is “reformed” temporarily before the cycle resumes.
  • Key quote:
    “The real lesson to be learned is you got to change the system or else you're condemned to... repeat this pattern.” — Wolff [20:41]

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4. The Economics of Immigration

[23:00–27:45]

• Critiques arguments advocating only for highly-educated immigrants, highlighting the US’s history as a nation built by mostly uneducated immigrants.
• Exposes the global inequality inherent in “brain drain”: rich countries benefit from workers educated at the expense of poorer countries.
  • Memorable point:
    “That’s a way of making a rich country, the United States, richer, and the poor countries ... even poorer.” — Wolff [25:30]

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5. Racial & Wealth Inequality in the United States

[27:45–29:11]

• Details disparities: Black median hourly wages are 75% of whites’, household income 60%, and wealth only 10%.
• Public education funding inequity perpetuates racial divides; poor and minority neighborhoods systematically receive worse schools, limiting upward mobility.
  • “We haven't lived up to the so-called promise of America called equal opportunity.” — Wolff [28:34]
• Cites the 1954 Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education): Separate is inherently unequal; reality decades later proves the inequality persists.
  • “One more educational reform is going to be no more successful than all those we've lived through... The system that works this way ... is the problem.” — Wolff [29:09]

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Special Guest Segment: Dr. Richard McIntyre

[29:11–54:40]

Introduction, Book Presentation

[29:11–31:00]

• McIntyre presents Wolff a signed copy of the newly released book, dedicated to Wolff and the late Steve Resnick.

Marxism’s Contemporary Relevance

[31:00–34:43]

• Discusses why the 21st-century context revives interest in Marxism — especially its analysis of exploitation and class.
  • “Reminding people ... about this kind of Marxism that developed over the last 30 or 40 years is quite relevant... not only in [the] economy, but in culture and politics.” — McIntyre [31:05]
• The subtitle “Marxism Without Guarantees” reflects a rejection of dogmatic promises (e.g., simple fixes through nationalization or central planning) that caused past failures.

The Amherst School and Overdetermination

[35:11–38:01]

• Differentiates the Amherst School from other traditions: Avoids claims of possessing absolute truth, instead emphasizes complexity (“overdetermination” — multiple causal factors in social outcomes).
  • “We have partial truths. ... And that part, which Marx emphasized ... was class and the relationship between those who perform surplus labor ... and those who get surplus labor.” — McIntyre [36:11]
• The appeal is in focusing on class as defined by exploitation, not by income or property alone.

Defining Class in Amherst Marxism

[38:01–40:57]

• Class is a social relationship of surplus production and appropriation, not merely a matter of income or property.
  • “This is a very specific way of saying class is about any work situation where one person produces more than he or she gets ... and then shapes how the society works.” — Wolff [39:19]
• Critiques mainstream treatments of inequality that ignore its roots in class relations.

Mainstream Economics and Ignorance of Marxism

[40:57–47:40]

• Observes that, decades after the Cold War, most professional US economists are unfamiliar—even uninterested—in the range of Marxist scholarship.
  • “They remain in a kind of self-induced isolation from all of that, as if the Cold War weren't over...” — Wolff [41:19]
• Career incentives and insularity in academia discourage engagement with Marxian theory.
  • “So I don't think there's a willful ignorance. It's almost an unconscious thing that flows from a certain weird professional sociology.” — McIntyre [42:13]
• Ideas occasionally get adopted without attribution to Marx (“The Reserve Army of Labor” becomes a Stiglitz paper on unemployment).

Institutional Renewal on the Left

[46:19–47:40]

• Institutions begun in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Rethinking Marxism, Monthly Review) provide a revived base and continuity for new generations.
  • “This time is a little different and there’s more of a base to work from.” — McIntyre [47:40]

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Worker Co-ops, Cuba, and Socialism for the 21st Century

[47:40–54:40]

• Explores the connection between class analysis and the push for worker cooperatives.
  • “The workplace in the United States, for the most part, is a dictatorship, and that’s where people spend a good amount of their time. ... There might as well be a sign there that says, check your democratic rights at the door.” — McIntyre [50:34]
• Discusses Cuba’s economic transition, moving away from total statist ownership to embrace more micro-level, democratically run enterprises, including co-ops.
  • “What they don’t want, they’re not 100% sure what they do want... there is an element in Cuban society that is going for that more micro approach to socialism and very consciously saying, we’re trying to create a socialism for the 21st century.” — McIntyre [53:05]
• Interactions with broader co-op and social economy movements in Latin America (Brazil, Uruguay) and growing experiments in the US and France.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On workplace hierarchy and discrimination:
  “If you organize the workplace vertically... that’s a very unhealthy arrangement.” — Wolff [02:15]

• On China’s rise:
  “The Chinese economy is the ascendant economy in the world. No one comes close...” — Wolff [07:42]

• On the cycles of capitalism and reform:
  “Reforms, adjustments to the taxes, minimum wages, all these things don’t solve the problem. The problem is a system which generates inequality over and over again...” — Wolff [20:50]

• On the Amherst school’s approach to Marxism:
  “We have partial truths. ... And that part, which Marx emphasized ... was class and the relationship between those who perform surplus labor ... and those who get surplus labor.” — McIntyre [36:11]

• On the reality of workplaces:
  “The workplace in the United States, for the most part, is a dictatorship ... There might as well be a sign there that says, check your democratic rights at the door.” — McIntyre [50:34]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Workplace discrimination and hierarchy: [00:10–06:15]
• China’s economic rise: [06:15–15:55]
• Global and US inequality: [15:55–20:55]
• Immigration economics: [23:00–27:45]
• Racial wealth disparity: [27:45–29:11]
• Introduction of Dr. Richard McIntyre: [29:11]
• The new Marxism, “without guarantees”: [31:00–34:43]
• The Amherst School and class analysis: [35:11–40:57]
• Economics academia and Marxist neglect: [40:57–47:40]
• Worker co-ops and Cuba’s transition: [47:40–54:40]

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Tone and Language Notes

Wolff and McIntyre speak with clarity, urgency, and a didactic—yet accessible—style. They blend historical reflection with critical analysis, employing both technical and everyday language to make their arguments widely understandable.

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Summary for New Listeners

This episode is a primer on how economic structures intersect with discrimination, globalization, and inequality. It exposes the persistence of discrimination in vertically organized workplaces, the transformative moment of China’s economic ascendance, and the cyclical nature of inequality under capitalism. In a substantive conversation, Wolff and McIntyre reveal how revived, nuanced forms of Marxist class analysis remain crucial for understanding not just the broader economy but also the possibilities for democratized workplaces and genuine social change in the 21st century.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts, hours, our children's and what's coming down the road in an economy increasingly unstable. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. And I hope that that has prepared me well to offer you these economic updates about what's happening in the economy around us. Let me begin with a topic that gets a lot of attention these days, but where there is some new research to report. It has to do with discrimination in the workplace. Discrimination of men against women, discrimination of white people against people of color, and so on. If you thought that problem was behind us, you're mistaken. Obviously, in recent weeks and months we've had more and more information about that, particularly gender based discrimination. The Pew organization, which does wonderful research and polling, has just completed a new report and it came out just shortly after a very famous situation developed at the Google Corporation in which one of their employees, James Damore, was effectively fired because he publicly opposed steps being taken inside the Google Corporation to deal with gender discrimination against women. Pew decided to ask thousands of men and women about their own personal experiences. Have you seen or experienced discrimination that you could clearly identify as such? And the results were extraordinary and clear. Men much, much, much less frequently experienced or noticed discrimination. Women, I'm talking about gender discrimination here. Much, much more. They complained about it, they described it, they detailed it. It is a reality. It has been a reality for a long time. And the sexual harassment and sexual assaults are only the most extreme forms of what is a kind of generalized problem of discrimination. I don't have much to add to what is being said publicly, and I don't want to waste your time. So let me only offer one other way of thinking about that. If you organize the workplace vertically, by that I mean some people at the top have an enormous amount of power, and the vast majority of people underneath them have little or no power. And what I mean by power is those at the top have the power to hire and to fire and to promote, whereas the vast majority live with the results. They are either hired or not, fired or not, promoted or not. What this means is those at the top have extraordinary control over everybody else whose income, whose job, whose future, whose career depends on it. That's a very unhealthy arrangement. Why? Because whatever peculiarities exist in the minds and hearts of the few at the top will now shape the entire work experience, will shape who gets hired and not who has an income, who has a career or not. In the recent exposure of sexual harassment and sexual assault, we could see dramatically how that kind of power allowed those who possess it to get services from those who do not. That are disgusting, and there's no other word to describe it. But even if you don't have that kind of disgusting consequence, you do have the consequence of discrimination. If those at the top prefer men to women, you get the result. If they prefer whites to blacks for whatever reason, you get the results that our research through the Pew organization shows us. Here's an argument that flows from that. Don't organize the workplace vertically. Organize it horizontally. What do I mean? Make it democratic. Make the decisions to hire and fire something that has to be engaged by a lot of people so that even if a few are racist or sexist or have any other kind of discriminatory commitment in their lives, it will be a lot less easy for them to impose that on everybody underneath them than is now the case, because there'll be more people involved in participating in and able to raise questions about discrimination at the workplace. Not changing the way you organize it may be part of the reason why this kind of discrimination has been around for so long and has resisted other efforts to do away with it. The next update has to do with the Chinese economy. Look, I have to be honest with all of you in a way that the media in this country tend not to be. The Chinese economy is the ascendant economy in the world. No one comes close to what they've accomplished in the last 20 years. No one. And no more powerful a change in the world economy is emerging than what is coming from the People's Republic of China. And one of the ways to show that to you is to share with you some statistics that very recently came out that drive the point home. 2018, the year we are now beginning, will show all the statistics show it that for the first time, retail sales in the People's Republic of China, retail sales, that means everything sold in the way of food, clothing, shelter in the stores where people buy. Retail sales in China will equal or surpass the those in the United States, which used to be number one, which had been number one in total value of sales for more years than most of us have been alive. That is no longer the case. That is a historical change of enormous importance. Why? Well, the reasons are so many, you don't know where to start. It means that companies producing for the retail market, which most companies do, are now going to look upon China as at least as important as the United States. For their survival, for their profits, for their growth. And since the growth path of China is much faster than that in the United States, the years ahead will only make the difference greater. The Chinese economy will become more important to the producers of food, clothing and shelter. Their profits will become more dependent on keeping their markets in China, which means accommodating to the Chinese demands for how you do business there, accommodating Chinese political objectives, domestic and foreign. If you want to understand why Mr. Trump, like his predecessors, has had to qualify his noisy protestations about the Chinese, it's because the economic reality of their importance is making every American corporation selling in China, and that's most of our big corporations, the allies of China. Why? Because they don't want to disturb the relationships with a country that has become this important. Let me give you an idea of some of the implications of all of this. First, why has the Chinese economy zoomed up so that it's as big in terms of retail sales as the United States? Well, let me just give you the last 10 years, 2008 to 2018. This has been a time of difficulty. Global capitalism crashed in 2008. The last 10 years will be. They already are being called a lost decade because the wages of Americans went nowhere over those 10 years. We're not earning that much more today than we did 10 years ago. On average, the super rich have done fine, but everybody else, not at all. We've documented that, as have others for many, many months. But over the last year, in the Chinese economy, which was also hit by the crash in 2008, their response has been completely different. And there's no nice way to say this, infinitely more successful. The per capita income in China 10 years ago was roughly $2,000 a year. The per capita income in China today is roughly $88,000 per person per year. The Chinese economy has quadrupled its productivity in that time. The United States, nothing remotely like that. That's why the lines are converging and that's why the Chinese are taking off. It means that an American company is now more likely to advertise in China than in the United States because. Because it's a more important economy for them. They're going to hire Chinese graphic designers. They're going to hire talent in China to help them figure out how to do what advertisers have to do in a retail environment. They're going to hire people to work with the public. They're going to what? They're going to endow university chairs in Chinese universities to get their products and their companies known in the academic world. They're going to be doing in China more and more of what they used to do in the United States. The world economy is changing, and mostly here in the United States, what we have in coping with that is denial, the pretense that this isn't happening and that it won't have all kinds of consequences. Let me drive the point home with a couple of more statistics. Last year, in 2016, the last year for which we have data, 17.6 million vehicles were sold in the United States. That's a lot of vehicles. 17.6. Keep that in your mind. How many vehicles were sold in the People's Republic of China in 2016? 24. Let me do that again. 17.5 million vehicles sold in the United States in 2016. 24 million in China. Which is the more important market for the automobile companies now and into the indefinite future. China. For American car companies who currently sell one out of five cars sold in China sold by an American company producing there. That is their future. That is their future. They are going to be working very hard to make sure that the United States government, whether it's Mr. Trump or anybody else, doesn't mess with that future, because it's the survival of these car companies that is at stake. Multiply that by all the other industries in a similar situation and you begin to understand that whatever the diplomats and the politicians do, the underlying economic dependence of American corporations on the enormous Chinese economy will shape what happens in the years ahead. A lot more than most Americans are led to believe by a media that prefers denial over facing these realities. The next update has to do with a research paper just released by the Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco. It covers 16 countries and does the kind of research that Thomas Piketty is famous for. Here's the research and the results of that research, and you can get this paper by going to the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nber and looking for it. It's a recent paper and it has to do with inequality. And here's what the paper Capitalism as a system produces ever worsening inequality. It does that across all 16 countries that the Federal Reserve paper studied and over many, many decades. Here is the pattern repeated everywhere. Capitalism produces widening inequality. Eventually the inequality becomes so extreme that there is a kind of explosion. The mass of people who are more and more falling behind won't tolerate it anymore. Partly because they are falling behind. They can't buy the output of this economy, which therefore suffers a crash. Partly, the mass of people are angry and bitter at the Inequality being imposed on them. By the way this system works, then you have a short period of time of upheaval to deal with the crash and to deal with mass resentment about inequality. And for a few years, the inequality shrinks. It is kind of stopped for a while and even reversed. But because the changes made in these periods of contraction are marginal, are merely reforms of the basic system, as soon as the crisis passes, capitalism resumes what its march to ever greater inequality. And then the whole thing is repeated in the last hundred years in the United States, we had that leading up to the Great Depression of 1929. From 1929 to 1945, depression and war, inequality shrank as soon as the war was over. As soon as we were done with that period, capitalism resumed, produced another rising inequality until it all crashed in 2008. Sound familiar? It's the same story everywhere. And what's the point and the punchline? We, we, the people who live in capitalism, have tried to reform the system. With each of these rising inequalities, we've tried to take steps to stop it. With each of the crashes that reverse the inequality, we thought we had achieved it. Until the next upswing of capitalism returns us to the kind of inequality we're living with now. The message here is reforms, adjustments to the taxes, minimum wages, all these things don't solve the problem. The problem is a system which generates inequality over and over again, punctuated by very difficult crashes, the great 1930s crash, and the last 10 years of a lost decade. The real lesson to be learned is you got to change the system or else you're condemned to. To repeat this pattern documented by the Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco's latest research. Before continuing, let me remind you, as I often like to do, that we maintain two websites where we provide all kinds of extra material of the sort that we do on this program. Those websites are available to you without any charge whatsoever. 24, 7. Please make use of them. They are our way of partnering with you to extend the reach of this program and indeed the reach of everything we do. The first website is democracyatwork. All one word, democracyatwork.info the second website is rdwolff with two Fs. Democracyatwork.info rdwolffwith two Fs.com those websites allow you to communicate to us what you'd like to see on the program, allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These are real useful websites. Make use of them. That's why they're there. And for Those of you that listen to this program on the radio but might be interested in seeing it as a television program since it is both, let me urge you to go to patreon.com P A T R E O-N patreon.com economicupdate the name of this program that will allow you to see this program as a television program whenever you wish. These are ways we have developed to reach further to share this information with more folks. Help us do that. Partner with us. We invite you, we urge you the next update has to do with immigration, a burning topic, never more so than these days as the Trump administration tries to deflect people's upset about the economic and political realities of our society by acting as though getting rid of immigrants is going to solve much. So let's talk a little bit about immigrants. First of all, this notion which I need to deal with, that we ought to have immigrants that are highly educated rather than immigrants that are not. Let's go into that. Number one, it's bizarre coming from Mr. Trump, who wants to make America great again. Because if America was great because that's what it means to make it great again, then it had to do that greatness with a flow of immigrants the likes of which no other country on earth has ever had. So when we were great, it was. We were a country of immigrants. And guess what? From the beginning, the overwhelming majority of immigrants had no formal education whatsoever. They were uneducated people. And it took the United States to show the world that you may be uneducated in some ways, but. But you have lots of ingenuity, lots of skill, lots of commitment, and lots of hard work that can make a country great. What in the world is the lesson you draw from that? It's not the one you hear in the newspaper, but there's another economics of immigration I want to drive home. Let's suppose the United States were successful in getting educated people to come into the United States. Let's go over what that means. The country in which you are born and in which you go to school spends a great deal of money providing you with an education. It is very expensive to have schools, hire teachers, provide learning materials, etc, etc. What in the world do you think we're doing to the rest of the world if we outsource the costs of education to every other country in the world and then say, when you get to be 21 years of age, or 25 or 30, then, then you come to the United States, the other country bears all the costs of giving you Productivity. And the United States gets the benefit of all the productivity you provide when you work. That's a way of making a rich country, the United States, richer, and the poor countries from which these educated people come, even poorer. They have to bear the costs of the education, and they don't get the benefit because the person leaves. That's a real serious problem, and it has been a serious problem for a long time. To act as though there's no cost to the rest of the world means that you're going to make the inequality in the world between rich and poor countries worse by this sort of immigration. Take everybody. Otherwise you haven't learned the lessons of history and you're not doing the world right now any good whatsoever. Inequality between men and women we've talked about. Let's talk about the inequality between black and white. I know a lot of people don't like to hear this, but every now and then it's really good. Let me give you the results of all the statistics that have been done for 2016, the last year for which we have it. I'm going to compare black and white. Three statistics, real simple. What's the ratio between what white people earn and black people earn in their jobs? Median hourly wage, 50% people get more. 50% people get less. But it's a good way to compare. Black people get 75% of what white people? Median hourly wage. Okay, now let's move to the household. What's the median household income when you put together what husband and wife or partners are both earning now, already we're Starting to shrink 60% African American median household is 60% of the white one. But now we get to median family net worth. How much property, how much wealth does the family, the average family, the median family, have? And remember why the wealth of a family is important. If you have a sudden illness, if you have a sudden accident, if something in life happens that costs a bunch of money or that interrupts your work so you don't earn income for a while, you turn to your savings, your wealth, to see you through a hard period. In 2016, the median family net worth of a black family in America, we was 10% of a white family's. White families had 10 times more wealth to turn to if something unfortunate happened to them in their job, in their health, in their personal life, with a divorce or whatever it might be. This is a capitalism that has not overcome inequality. It's a system that discriminates. It's a system that systematically puts African American people at a disadvantage. There's no way out of that. And one of the consequences is in a way, my last update for today, one of the consequences of that inequality. And this has to do with a report issued in January 2018 by the United States Civil Rights Commission, a government body in Washington. And it talks about the name of this report, Public education Funding Inequity. And basically, here's what this report that students from ethnic. That's a nice way of saying not white students from ethnic and poor neighborhoods. Guess what they get. Poor schools, poor education, low spending per pupil. In other words, we haven't lived up to the so called promise of America called equal opportunity. We haven't given people from poor backgrounds, from poor families, people who have 10% of the net worth that white people have. We haven't given them a way out by giving them decent schools. It's not that we haven't given them extra schooling which would help get things equal. We haven't even given them equal schooling which couldn't have been expected to undo the other inequalities. No, we've done worse than that. We've provided them, according to this report, poorer schools, poorer quality educations than we have provided to the white folks in this society. In other words, American capitalism, criticized in the past for the racial inequality that has been so bad a problem in our society has not only not solved that problem, but here we are half a century after the famous 1954 education decision of the Supreme Court that said separate and equal is not possible, that if you're separate, you're going to be unequal. That was wise of the Supreme Court. Then 50 years later, we see how wise it was. This is a system that can look nowhere else to explain the racial tensions, the racial inequality, the racial conflicts that beset us as a nation doesn't have to look anywhere else but to the economic system we have. It has failed to overcome that inequality. It has failed even to live up to the commitments its leaders have made to remedy the discrimination, the inequality, to live up to what its own Supreme Court said was the law of the land, at the very least, give equal education to the unequally treated people in our society. This system didn't succeed. And one more educational reform is going to be no more successful than than all those we've lived through over the last half century. The system that works this way, that thwarts and frustrates all these reforms is the problem. You've got to change a system, give everybody a decent job so that we don't have the inequalities to begin with, and the rest can begin to be addressed. We have a long way to go, but denying the systemic problem is no way forward. We've reached the end of the first half of today's program. Please stay with us. We will be right back after a short interlude. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic update. Well, I am very pleased today to welcome to the microphones an old friend, a former student, and now for many years a very valued colleague. He is Dr. Richard McIntyre. He's a professor of economics and chair of the Economics Department at the University of Rhode Island. He is co director of the University of Rhode island and in Cuba program and held the Chair of the Americas at the University of REN2 in France in the spring of 2017. He is the author of Are Worker Rights, Human rights, published in 2008, and co editor of the book We're Going to Talk about today, Knowledge, Class and Marxism Without Guarantees, a book published in 2018. He's also the author of many academic and popular articles across a range of topics in political economy. So, Rick, if I can call you.

[B]

That, you can call me that.

[A]

Welcome to the program.

[B]

Thanks, Rick.

[A]

I want to talk about this new book, Knowledge, Class and Economics. It's a compendium of, I think, 30, if I remember, 30 writers who are talking about Marxian theory and Marxism in general and talking about its relevance today. So I want to begin by asking you, is this an unusual thing or is there something about the world that is making Marxism relevant again today?

[B]

Well, before we do that, Rick, before I answer you, I just want to actually give you a copy of this book because Ted Burzak and Rob Garden and I, the editors, dedicated this book to you and the late Steve Resnick. And we've signed it for Steve and Rick, our teachers, comrades and friends. And we mean that really wholeheartedly. So this is really for you.

[A]

Thank you very much. Let me just say a word about it. This book is a remarkable way for people to get in to what's Marxism today, the new directions, the new ways that it is thinking about the world, the new contributions it has to make. I'm really very moved that it was dedicated to Steve Resnik and I, who worked very hard for many years at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst to develop, to preserve and to develop this tradition of thought. And for those of you interested, again, Knowledge, Class and Economics, it's available in bookstores and in any of the Internet distributors. Take a look if you're interested, in where Marxism is today. So let's go Back, Rick? Sure. Tell me about what you think is the context in which this book emerges.

[B]

Well, we thought and think that this is a moment when reminding people, telling them for the first time about this kind of Marxism that developed over the last 30 or 40 years is quite relevant on a variety of fronts in the world today, not only in economy, but in culture and politics. And that Marxism is alive in this sense of not rejecting Marx in any way, but not repeating some of the old stories that got Marxism into trouble in the 20th century. So we subtitled it Marxism Without Guarantees. And the reason we did that is some of the things that got Marxism in trouble were the guarantees that were made by Marxists to the public and to themselves that if you did A, B and C, a wonderful world would result and you had to do those A, B and C nationalized property, central planning of the economy. And those things caused a lot of social pain, pain to a lot of people and obscured what we think we is really still quite relevant in Marx, which is his analysis of the way society is organized around exploitation and around some people doing work that other people benefit from. And that is all over Marx in capital. And it's still today the most well developed theory of exploitation and class that we know of. So this is what we wanted to bring to the table.

[A]

Now a few questions occasioned by this. Is this resurgence of the relevance and the interest in Marxism, is this something peculiar to the United States or would you say it is more widespread?

[B]

I don't think it's peculiar to the United States. I mean, I did spend a good amount of time in France, you know, every year really, but this 2017 especially, and there's a certain resurgence in France after a long time in France, as you know, in which to say the word Marx was to be peculiar, certainly in Cuba, where I also spent some time, there is active engagement with the Marxian tradition, especially with Antonio Gramsci in the United States. It's, it's interesting. I mean, there is a resurgence of interest and then there isn't in academia. Marx is certainly different. Students wake up, they pay attention. I've never heard this before. Why didn't anybody ever tell me this? But Marx is also hard. And we live in kind of the Homer Simpson world of if it's hard, don't do it Right on top of that, what's happened in academia was a commodification of, of education. Now education is something that people buy and the lingering pressure from the economic crisis which is still around, students are almost think they're going to a vocational school when they go to university. So the immediate question of how does this relate to me getting a job is more prevalent maybe than it used to be. So this interest in Marx, at least in academia, is tempered by fear, really, on two levels. Fear about the economy and fear that Marx is still somehow dangerous.

[A]

Funny, you might think it could cut the other way too, that the very fear about your future might make you more open, in a sense, to an economics that is critical of the way things are.

[B]

Well, I think that.

[A]

I think that you're saying that that's there too.

[B]

That's absolutely the case. And so what. What I see in the students that I have as juniors and seniors, they get a little bit angry that they haven't seen this before. And why was I told all these lies, which I now begin to understand are not really true. They're just a position, at least in the way that I teach Marxism. So there definitely is an interest among some students and not all.

[A]

Okay. This approach you define as the Amherst School.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

For the benefit of those listening and watching, can you give us a thumbnail notion of how the Amherst School is different from other strains of Marxism? And that also explain a little bit why it attracted you, why this book is. Calls itself a particular kind or interpretation of Marxism.

[B]

Well, I can tell you why it attracted me. You know, I grew up as a Catholic, and one of the things that always drove me nuts about the Catholic church was the Catholic Church was always right. They always knew there was a right answer. And, you know, when I became active as a youth on the left politically, I found the same thing that left wing people thought, we have the right answer and it's found in Marxism or whatever might be the methodology of the day. And this just drove me absolutely bananas. And what you and Steve and Altazair and others began to do in the 1970s was to move away from that. To move away from. We somehow have the purchase on absolute truth. We have partial truths. We can see a part of what's going on. And that part, which Marx emphasized and you picked up on and Steve picked up on, was class and the relationship between those who perform surplus labor who produce more value than they receive, and those who get surplus labor who receive something that they don't produce. And that at that time, and if you remember back that far, we're dating ourselves now, deindustrialization was happening in the United States. And I was really interested in the devastation of communities that was brought about by this process and this way of thinking, rejecting absolute truth and focusing on class seemed to me to be a way in to this kind of social analysis, this rejection of absolute truth. You and Steve, following Altazir, called over determination that any situation is the product of many, many different factors. And we just choose to look at some of them, all of us, because that's the best that we can do. And so that was attractive to me personally. And as you well know, it produced over the course of the 70s and 80s and 90s and into the 21st century at UMass and elsewhere, a very, very large body of work. The journal Rethinking Marxism, many, many books and dissertations, influenced many political movements around the world. So why not be attracted to this?

[A]

Tell me about the notion of class. Tell all of us who are listening and watching, what does this school mean when it uses that term?

[B]

Well, class is a relationship between, on the one hand, as I've already said, people who are exploited as slaves, as feudal peasants, as workers in a capitalist society, they produce for somebody else who receives that for essentially doing nothing. Then there's a second relationship in which those people who receive all that surplus, in whatever form it is, have to think about, well, how can I keep this game going? And they then take portions of that surplus and pay different groups in society, bankers or the state or the police, to make sure they stay in that position of receiving that surplus. This is the focus of the class analysis that this group does. And it's been elaborated and is elaborated in many, many contexts in the book, in China, in many, many articles about the United States, Europe, the Global South. So it's quite a flexible and quite an interesting way to look at social change.

[A]

It's interesting for me, and I always want to underscore that this really is a different way of using class from the usual way that we can read in the newspaper or hear on tv that where class is often used as how much income you earn or how much property you have or even how much power you have over other people, this is really different. This is a very specific way of saying class is about any work situation where one person produces more than he or she gets for doing so that more that surplus goes into somebody else's hand and then shapes how the society works. That's a way of understanding class that is often not taught even. Even by people who talk about class, because they have a very different idea.

[B]

Right. And I think that something is then therefore missing that we can talk about income inequality. And there's been.

[A]

It's an interesting topic.

[B]

Sure. Excellent work produced by Piketty and Stiglitz and others. But to the extent that they don't relate that income inequality to different forms of class exploitation, I think there may be missing a piece. Piketty in particular, by calling his book capital in the 21st century and then demonstrating that he had no understanding of Marx. I mean, despite the very high quality of his work, it's a little peculiar. So yeah, I mean we can still talk about income inequality, we can talk about wealth inequality, but let's also relate it to these processes of exploitation and, and distribution of surplus value and surplus labor. Time.

[A]

Let me take a step back from this particular kind of Marxism to talk about Marxism in general, the different interpretations. One thing that I know many people are struck by is that we date the end of the Cold War roughly 1989, 1990, with the disintegration of Eastern European communist countries, the Soviet Union and so on. And so here we are roughly 30 years later. And correct me if you disagree, but my impression is that the economics profession, the people who call themselves professional economists, whether they teach in the university or work for a corporation or work in the government, have no understanding of Marxism at all. It's not just that they don't understand this approach, this notion of class. They don't know that it's changed. They don't know that there are these different directions. They remain in a kind of self induced isolation from all of that, as if the Cold War weren't over, as if we were still in some sort of battle, that they had to maintain the purity of not knowing what the other side even thinks. How does it appear to you?

[B]

Well, I don't think it's that conscious. I mean there's a certain sociology of the economics profession that they do what they do because it helps them go higher on the professional pecking order. More so than ever now, the so called top 10 schools only hire from each other. So there's this kind of in group thinking that has gotten worse over time. On the other hand, if people can pick up an idea from anywhere and it helps them to advance their career, they will. So you know, there's a certain, especially since 2008, I think there's been some recognition that, well, you know, old Marx, you know, he might have been onto something with this point, but not an interest in the body of work that flowed from Marx. So you know, things have changed a little bit. I mean people are much more data driven now because there's lots of data data. The behavioral economists have changed things a little bit and there's a little More openness. But it's still a very extremely careerist thing. Most of what these people do really have nothing to do with the economy at all. It has to do with the pecking order. And those who are not in that top group, they feel bad about themselves in various ways. And they try to create maybe the 43rd best imitation of MIT or Chicago or Stanford or whatever it might be. So I don't think there's a willful ignorance. It's almost an unconscious thing that flows from a certain weird professional sociology.

[A]

And so it's just not good for the career to be interested in Marx or to write about Marx. And so it never gets engaged with. You don't learn it because it's not functionally useful. Am I hearing you right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know, in certain areas, like development, people still have to contend with this a little bit. In labor, which used to be one of my fields, Marx's ideas about the labor process and the incompleteness of contracts when you hire somebody, those filtered their way in, usually without the word Marx attached. Stiglitz wrote a paper on unemployment as a worker discipline device. Well, you know, there is this thing called the Reserve army of labor that appeared in a book in 1867. So the ideas are picked out individually, often without attribution, for careerist reasons, I think.

[A]

Yeah, you know, it can cut the other way. I remember from my own years as an undergraduate, I was lucky to find a person who taught me Marxian thinking, because where I went to school as an undergraduate, I don't mind saying it went to school at Harvard. There was nobody allowed to teach us any of this at that time. So I found a person outside and he tutored me, basically. So what I did was whenever there was a term paper to write for one of my economics or history courses, I would go and consult with him and say, look, I'd like to use this as an opportunity to learn some more about this Marxism, which I was finding to be interesting. And he was a good professor. He gave me a bunch of articles and books that would give me the Marxist take on such a subject. So I would work that into my paper, and I would get as. And the professor would say, this is so interesting talking to me. And I remember going back, his name was Fritz, the guy who taught me. And I would say, fritz, this is working out. Not only am I learning what I want, but they're giving good grades to Karl Marx, but I get them. So it's Marx, but because I don't say it's Marx. They think these new ideas which were just Marx's are mine and they think they're very interesting. It just reveals the peculiarity of the profession.

[B]

One of the things that's different now though is that I think some of the institutions that were established in the 70s and 80s, including rethinking Marxism, the journal that we both were involved with, have sustained themselves. And some of the older, there were very few of them when I was coming along. But Monthly Review and some of these other older outlets have also revived themselves to some extent. So the last time there was high interest in Marxism in the 70s and early 80s, you and other people and I played a small role in this. Established institutions, journals, magazines, organizations that have survived and that provides a base for people to develop. Now Jacobin, which developed in the last few years in New York City by younger people, I don't know if that comes along without the work that was done in the previous decade. So the American left, and you know the history of the American left better than I do, has been really quite poor at developing institutions and organizations to carry a message across generations. Part of that is repression. I don't want to knock people, but this time is a little different and there's more of a base to work from.

[A]

Okay, good. Let's switch gear a little bit. Although I would like to ask you a question as we switch. You have been interested in worker co ops. You've been interested in worker co ops in the Cuban economy. But even more generally, before I ask you questions about that, what's the connection between the kind of class analysis that's in this book and that you've talked about the Amherst School on the one hand, and this interest in worker co ops. How did the theory help bring you to your interest in worker co ops?

[B]

Well, I've been interested personally since again back in the 70s and 80s when especially steel workers and other manufacturing workers were trying to buy out the plants that were being closed.

[A]

Remember the Weirton Steel story?

[B]

That's right. And Staughton Lynd was quite involved with Youngstown and most of those failed. Some of them succeeded and failed at the same time. But there was, you know, I had some interest in that and going forward I became involved in other things, some union work, some other things. And I wrote this book called our worker Rights Human Rights. And it was Ted Burzak, one of my co editors in this book in a symposium in Rethinking Marxism who said well you talk about workers right to freedom of association in the workplace. You talk about their right to bargain collectively. Why don't you talk about their right to appropriate their own labor time? And I thought, you know what? That guy is right. And this happened in the context of work done by Julie Graham and Kath Gibson, by Ken Levin, by you and others who were beginning to think about democratically organized workplaces around the notion of surplus. It was really, for me personally, it was really that intervention by Ted that got me thinking about that. I happened to begin to get involved with some people in Cuba and just happened to stumble into becoming friends with Humberto Miranda, who came with me last time I was here. And Umberto is one of the leading people in Havana now trying to think through how not only workplace democracy, but economic democracy is a larger company concept, might play into the restructuring in Cuba. So I think there's now a good body of work in this book and elsewhere, your own work, this radio and television show that's really thinking hard about the fact that the workplace in the United States for the most part, is a dictatorship, and that's where people spend a good amount of their time. And there might as well be a sign there that says, check your democratic rights at the door.

[A]

Leave them outside.

[B]

And leave them outside and don't. You can't even have them there, by the way.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And so I think that this is a message that's being received very well that people understand you don't need a lot of high theory to explain to people the ways in which they don't have any rights when they go to work. And it's quite provocative. So you'll see some of the essays in, in the book deal with this. I just finished a paper on social economy in France, which is a broader category, but includes a growing cooperative movement in France.

[A]

All right, tell us a little bit about the Cuban. Where's that going in your work is. Let me provoke you. Is it true to say something like the that the Cubans followed the Soviet Chinese model, let's say, in which socialism is understood as the state taking over, owning and operating the enterprises, planning the distribution of resources and products, and that that's socialism. The state, in the name of everybody, does all of this. Is it true that Cuba is in a way withdrawing from that strategy and moving instead to thinking of socialism on a more micro level? That is, it's the transformation of the enterprise, of the office, the factory, the store into a democratically collectively run. And that that's what building socialism means. Is something like that going on?

[B]

Well, they're transitioning where they're transitioning to is kind of up for grabs right now. Cuba in the 60s. Before 1968, Cuba was a place where many different experiments were going on. But after 68, with the invasion of the Czech Republic, the Soviets basically said, you get in line with us. And Cuba became probably the most statist economy in the history of the world. By the 1980s, they've been moving away from that for 25 years, but especially in the last seven or eight years, years when Raul Castro said, we've got to change this current system is not working. But they know what they don't want. They're not 100% sure what they do want. So that, for instance, they have allowed for some private enterprise in the restaurant business. They've allowed for the formation of co ops. But there's a nervousness in the party that this could get out of hand and we could go back to a class society. It could be manipulated by people outside. So they stopped last year issuing new permits for urban cooperatives. Now I'm sending nine students down there for the spring semester, so of course I have to visit them and I'll be down there in March and we'll spend some time talking to people and, and trying to figure out where things are right now. There's more space for experimentation when things are reasonably good. And up until a couple years ago, Cuba had a lot of friends in government in Latin America, a lot of good friends. And that provided some basis to try out some new things. Things are a little bit more tense right now. It's not just because of Trump. That doesn't help. So there is an element in Cuban society that is going for that more micro approach to socialism and very consciously saying, we're trying to create a socialism for the 21st century.

[A]

And part of that is a notion that there are new directions in socialism that may not be unrelated to the new directions in Marxism that your book is about.

[B]

They're very closely related and, and they're related to experiments in Brazil, in Uruguay. I'm beginning to think that we have some interesting examples here in the United States to share. It's just that it's a very difficult time.

[A]

I wish we had more time. This is always a problem in a program like this. I hope you found this as interesting as I did. Rick MacIntyre's book with his co editors, Knowledge, Class and Economics. Marxism Without Guarantees is a place where you can become more aware of what these new directions are within Marxism and that will help you in turn understand also the new directions in people who use Marxism to try to figure out how to make the social changes that are so long overdue. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis the that has been a partner with us for these many years, and ask you again to make use of this program of our websites to partner with us in extending the reach of what we do here. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.