B (29:43)

Thank you for having me.

A (29:45)

Okay, let's get right to the key thing that I wanted to have you talk to us about. What does Marxism and Marxian political economy in particular, what does it offer to a society like ours today? Why is this something you study, you teach, your students, want to learn what's going on with Marxism?

B (30:12)

Beginnings are very important to Marx. So where one begins sets up an awful lot of what you are able to see from that vantage point. And I, in recent years, like to begin my discussions of Marxism by quoting a statement Marx makes in Capital, Volume one on his main aim in this work. In fact, it might be the only time that Marx is so explicit in giving us the main aim of a book that follows. And what he says there is, quote, my main aim in this work is to lay bare the law of motion of modern society. Now, let me repeat that because that's obviously not easy to grasp all at once. My main aim in this work is to lay bare the law of motion of modern society. Now, the modern society he's talking about is obviously capitalism. And laying bare this society, not explaining the society, but laying bare the society, has to do with giving you the bigger picture. And that bigger picture he is summarizing as a quote, law of motion. Now, I should say up front that he often, in using the word law, follows it by saying every law is a tendency. So we're not talking about always, but rather most of the time and of greatest importance, something of that sort. And this laying bare this whole can only be done in a way which leaves out the particulars. He believes that what you have to get across from. In talking about how our society works, you have to get across some sense of the system, what is the kind of system that capitalism consists of. And only after you get that out and more or less understood can you move on to break it up and talk about particular parts of that system, like alienation, like exploitation, like historical materialism, a whole number of things that are generally referred to as Marxist theories. But the theories don't come first and lead you to an understanding of the bigger picture. It goes the other way around. Now, that other way around, how much can you say about it if you don't introduce, you haven't introduced yet, and Marx beliefs can't introduce yet the particular things which are referred to as the theories of Marx. What you can say is that everything is a relation. These relations are interconnected and they're also evolving over time through their interconnections. And though I think a lot of people have no trouble saying, yeah, yeah, things are connected, that's no surprise. And of course, things seem to change, but when they actually deal with any problem, they focus on the bits and pieces of that problem. And they generally treat it as static and unchanging. And things then change because something bumps into it. Okay, so Marx really tries to think in terms of relations which are at the same time, processes at the same time.

A (33:54)

Everything is changing all the time.

B (33:56)

Everything is changing all the time. Now, with this approach, we then see that Marx is going to the. Because he then has to break up because then he has too much to deal with. You can't possibly move from there directly into explaining things because if everything's connected, where do you stop? But what he does is he has a way of focusing on. Now we're focusing on things all the time with all five of our senses, so it shouldn't be treated, as it often is, as a mystery. How does Marx break it up? Well, the way we all break up that. That part of what is in front of us in terms of what we're looking, actually looking at or listening to, or so on. And this is the way Marx breaks up the bits and pieces which he then studies in more detail but seeing them, and this is why it's important to start with the whole seeing them from the vantage point of these relations which are evolving. So therefore, the bits and pieces which he can talk about in considerable detail, as you know about any of the, of his many theories in economics or in other spheres, are always seen as related to other things which he doesn't at that moment talk about. That means that it's very hard to talk about Marx's economics without introducing other areas of Marxism. And in fact, you find even, well, in all of his books, it's not just economics, even in the ones which are best known as. As books on Marx's political economy. But you find important things on politics, certainly on politics and the larger society, social society, and also, and maybe especially on ideology, the thinking of people which comes from all sorts of sources other than their life in economics.

A (35:48)

It's always struck me that Marxism, precisely because of all of this interrelatedness, has a hard time in the modern American university, which carves things up. So the economists only do economics and the cultural theorists do their thing, and the historians. For Marx, this not only carves up the real world, but makes the real world unintelligible, because you've basically shied away from the connections which are crucial to understanding what's going on. It's a clear example of how this way of setting up the university, without being conscious of it, pushes people away from a Marxist perspective, because it truncates all those connections.

B (36:34)

Ideology is a very old word, goes back to the Greeks. But Marx has a sense of ideology which focuses on just that. That is, the one is to try to summarize what is crucial in the Marxist view of ideology. It's the separation of what cannot be separated without distortion. And of course, the place where that strikes us, especially people who are professors, strikes us most, is in our departments that we're in, especially in the social sciences. And the worst of these is political science, but. But the others are pretty bad as well. And according to Marxism, they are simply leaving out all sorts of connections, but also the evolution, the history, but also the potential future. Potential future is probably not the right expression, the most likely future, because everything which exists now comes from its preconditions. If those preconditions were not what they were, the present, not just in economics, but in all spheres, would not be most of what they are. But that continues to happen for the future. And as regards the future, we have not only the present, which is the preconditions, which gives us the preconditions of the future. But we have the present's own preconditions in the past. So we have a very big set of preconditions which ranges over hundreds of years, and we see these tendencies unfold over those hundreds of years, and they show not only what is more clearly, because you can see how it happened and why it happened and who made it happen, but you Also get open up to where it seems to be heading. Like the clearest example is with climate change. And in fact, most people who say, hey, things are getting worse and look what's about to happen are thinking dialectically here and it wouldn't make sense not to. But unfortunately, as we people of some importance don't think in terms of where things seem to be heading as a part of what they are. You can't separate what things are from their preconditions and where they seem to be and are most likely to be heading. Okay, now let me introduce something which you raised just now and I know in our discussions is very important to you, the question of what about now, when we know that so much in capital has changed since Marx described it. Now I want to deal with this. And so you tell me when I'm getting close to the end, but before I do that, I'd like to just fill out a little bit of the content of the analysis that Marx made 150 years ago. And a little bit I want to bring forward is the special and for me crucial relationship, very little understood, between Marx's theory of alienation and his dialectics. Because I think that this has been really important in what Marxism is about and it hasn't been well understood at all. Now, alienation, as you know, my first book was on theory of alienation. Alienation starts out as being a set of relationships, of course, like everything else. And the key relations in alienation have to do with the workers relationship to his activity, which is controlled by someone else who hires him, can fire him, decides on his wages, his conditions of work. And secondly, the relationship to the products of that activity, whatever it is, it could include intellectual products as well as material products. And again, someone else takes it over and decides what's to do with it. And the worker, even though he made it, has no right to use it in any way.

A (40:15)

And third, alienation, just so everybody's clear.

B (40:18)

Refers to that relationship, to this complex set of relationships. It's a group of relationships, okay? And I'm listing the four crucial. The relationship between the worker and their activity. All of the relationships really indicate a certain break in the connections, a separation. All of them have to do with the separation between the physical individual and what happens through his activity in terms of relationships that make up all of us, because we're all connected to everyone and everything else. And here are a set of relationships being cut in the middle. Now I mentioned two of them. Relationship to the actor's activity, now the relationship, and then the relationship to the product, and then is the relationship to the capitalist who controls both. And that relationship is one where the capitalists and workers can't treat each other as human beings, really, and certainly not as friends, because each needs something too badly from the other. And so even though they tell each other jokes occasionally and be friendly, they're really trying their best to the worker to get more wages and maybe to get some better safety equipment on the job. And the capitalist is thinking, how many to squeeze this worker to work more and harder to collect more surplus value. And that is crucial. But the capitalist, you see, is alienated as well because he's now cut off from certain relationships with other human beings. Then finally, the last one summarizes the first three, but it introduces potential, given that people, in this case the working class, all kinds of workers in capitalism, are cut off from others and their activity and their products. In this way, they've lost a certain amount of their ability to fulfill their potential as human beings, which depend on many of those relations and others. So they are.

A (42:14)

That's the phrase. They're even alienated from themselves.

B (42:17)

From themselves. Okay, now, starting with that, let's enter what most people take to be economics, the notion of. Because when most people, including most Marxists, begin to talk about Marx's theory of economics, his political economy, they start with value as the crucial concept. And they don't talk about alienation. But what is value? It's not only exchange value, use value and surplus value, which are three forms of value, but they're forms of a something else, which is called. Called by Marx in a few places. Value in general. What is that value in general? He says, in a few places. And I'll explain why there's so few. In a moment, he explains that value in general is the form that labor takes in this kind of society, the form it takes in all of its products. In other words, value is the general form of labor. Now, it's because it is a general form. It can be broken down into use value, exchange value, and treated in the way that we do treat those forms of value. But it also has other forms. And these other forms exist in the rest of the society. And the way they get there is through. And Marx's expression here is a metamorphosis. Now, people probably recognize the term metamorphosis from the Kafka story where Gregor Samsa wakes up one day, looks in the mirror, and sees a huge cockroach inside his head. He still thinks like and has a memory of Gregor Samsa, but he Looks like a cockroach. So there's a big. An important change of form. But the content is the same. And what happens? Now, metamorphosis is a transfer. It's a word for transfer. It's a transfer of the relations. The relations. Those four relations I specified in alienated labor. Are transfer beyond value. And beyond the three forms. It takes in the economy. Which we listed into the rest of the economy. And it gets there during the process of circulation. And as things circulate, they acquire. They acquire the different forms. Money, capital. All sorts of things which things become in. As movement through the economy. And even wages paid to workers. But in their content. So they look differently. In their content. They contain these alienated forms. Which can. We can generalize what they look like. Because there's a term which captures most of what one wants to convey. In the term of alienated labor. When they appear in these other forms. You can capture that by saying private property. They all become someone else's private property. And are used by someone else to promote their interests. And they are all then turned against the worker. Especially when you can add to the metamorphosis. A little bit of fetishism. Which is another important category that Marx introduces. Which is that the workers. And in fact, most people. Take these forms. Money being the best example. Take these forms of value. Which are themselves forms of alienated labor. The relations of alienated labor. Take these forms as having a certain power as such. In terms of their form as opposed to their content. And allow themselves to be manipulated by the power of private property. Which is, of course, what happens now. Finally, this spreads through the whole of capitalism. And I'm finished with this point in a moment. Spreads through the whole of capitalism. It all becomes full of alienated forms of value. And many of them with a fetishistic side effect on people's thinking. Because the effect then isn't only then. In people being controlled by private property. Also enters their thinking, enters their thinking. They can't think straight about who they are. Who's doing what to whom. And what we can do about it. Because alienation has this effect on ideology. Ideology is the sum of the thinking. And that's all affected by this. But finally, this, which is the basis now you notice. Because I start with alienated labor. And not with value. The basis of the whole understanding of capitalism Starts with alienation. But it also ends with alienation. Because what has happened now at the end of the circulation process. Is the reproduction. If we began with production. At the end there's the reproduction of the very conditions which require more alienated production. We've come full circle. We've come full circle. So now the worker still doesn't have any private property of his known. He still needs to find a job, he still needs to do whatever the capitalist tells him, still needs to give over all his products. He has to do the same thing again and again as he started out doing. And this is how capitalism gets started. This is how it develops in the theory of alienation, and this is how it continues. And the dialectic comes in here because everything I've been describing has to do with using the relationships that people are in and people with their conditions and people with other people and seeing how they unfold over space. That is to say, the whole society becomes affected by this and also across time. Because reproduction occurs after production. We've moved a step toward the present. Which brings me now to my second main topic for today is.

A (48:04)

Well, the.

B (48:05)

Yes, but this was 150 years ago. What about today? And we have. If you give me just a few.

A (48:11)

More minutes, let me just ask you a question before you go, please. I've always been struck that for Marxists, the universality of change, that everything has.

B (48:23)

Been changing, is changing, means that any.

A (48:26)

Analysis of the present to be complete has to specify the changes that are going on and at least to begin to look at where they're going.

B (48:37)

Of course, definitely.

A (48:38)

But if you're a conservative person and you want perhaps desperately to believe that the system you're living in will last forever is the end of history and phrases like that, then you are blocking yourself off from the very question, let alone the answer, of what changes are going on and where do they point. So that Marxism wants to look at the process and where it's going, whereas its enemies, particularly conventional social science, is blocked off from even asking those questions. But by its need to convince itself that everything is okay will stay pretty much the way it is, out of a kind of gut level fear of where it might be going.

B (49:21)

Of course. No, that's perfectly true. And you came in at just the right moment too.

A (49:26)

Okay, so the second point you wanted.

B (49:29)

To get at, and I want to, even before I do that, I noticed, I have to say, if this unusual interpretation of the absolute essential connection between alienation and dialectics is in Marx, why don't most Marxists see it? And the answer to that is a very simple answer. Because he didn't write about it in his best known public works and his best known published works, of course, are Capital and the other volumes of Capital, which edited and published after Marx's death by Engels and Kautsky, after Engels died. And so the question is, well, if they're so important, why did Marx not talk? They're in there. It's not as if they're not there, but very little as compared to the unpublished works. And by that I'm thinking mostly about a book called what became a book called the 1844 Manuscript. 150, 60 pages, and the Grundrisse of published, not unpublished, but written in 1660, 1657, 58, and that, depending on the translation, that's 1,000 pages. And they're full. Both of them are full of discussions of alienation and dialectics and not capital. Now, that's a real mystery, but it's a mystery easy to solve.

A (50:59)

But first, tell us what dialectics is. Make sure that we are all on the same page with you as to what this central idea of Marxism is, in your view.

B (51:09)

It's a series of interconnected steps. And this is why it can be called. Both can be called a philosophy, because at the beginning it's a philosophy. The first of the steps is. And that's what I refer to, it's a method of doing research, but also a method of clarifying the results of that research for yourself and finally of finding a way to present it so that it'll be understood and appreciated. And then it's also a practice. So I think one can say dialectics is a philosophy, a method and a practice, and that practice is socialist revolution. But we won't be able on this version of our discussion to get into that. But I'd love to. But so far I talked about dialectic as a philosophy, and it's often called in the history of philosophy, because Marx was not the first one to use this approach and the philosophy of internal relations, which he got largely, but not only from Hegel, but also from Spinoza, Leibniz, and even some of the ancient Greeks thought in this way. It has to do with seeing everything as relations and seeing everything not only as relations, but evolving relations so that things are both relations and processes. Now, with that, you then have to break it up, you then have to find ways of using it, and you then have to find ways of getting people to understand what you're talking about. And that brings me back to why alienation and dialectics are not better understood. They're the hardest thing to understand in Marx. And Marx was very concerned to be read in Capital, and he was constantly being told by Engels and some of his other friends and members of his family, Marx, keep it simple, keep it simple. And he knew that he was having trouble clarifying those two very central notions. So low that they're there. But he played them down. And especially for the audience he had in mind, he wanted it to be read. I mean, this is not just a professor looking for getting tenure, right? He wanted to be read by workers who were interested, who could read that. That was an important qualification, but there were many. He wanted to be read by other kinds of socialists and he wanted to be read by the more open minded economists who would be very put off if they saw a discussion of alienation. That's mystical dialectics. What the hell is that? And also, yeah, so these were. So he'd lose his readership. And he already had a problem with an earlier book that he published in.

A (53:47)

Well, the irony is we still have that problem. I try to explain to someone, but.

B (53:52)

He succeeded because he did get more readership. But at the same time he sacrificed a certain amount of what he thought was going to be too difficult. And I think that whereas it was important obviously to get that readership. But it also was the main reason for as much misunderstanding of Marxism by Marxists as well as non Marxists as there is now we come to the modern world. Yes, the world has changed enormously since Marx and it hasn't changed at all. It's a good dialect, good dialect.

A (54:29)

It changed and it didn't change. But it's very fundamental, the old Hegel notion. Something exists and it doesn't exist at the same time. And how do you say that it's changing every minute. It isn't what it was. So at every moment it is. And it is in the process of not being.

B (54:49)

But there's a second sense in which they both exist and don't exist. And that is that there are two capitalisms. There's one capitalism that consists, which is the one he wrote about in his day, consists of the more general characteristics of capitalism that have been there since the transfer from feudalism to capitalism. Capitalism. And those have remained the same. Exploitation, their capital, capitalists being driven by maximizing profits. And a few others. Okay. At the same time a whole number of new things have occurred which have created. One way to look at the interconnection between things is the kind of whirlpool that goes on in terms of how they're moving together, their law of motion. A new whirlpool has gotten started and gets started about every 30 to 50 years with the new developments in capitalism, which exist and create a new kind of whirlpool. So now we have all sorts of things, automation and the various things connected to and these things all have created a second capitalism, which seems which is very important to deal with, but doesn't have any effect on capitalism in general. The first kind of capitalism, which is the bigger context in which the second kind of capitalism must be considered and dealt with.

A (56:12)

You're a good friend, you're a good thinker, but we've run out of time, so this is a good time for us to shift.

B (56:19)

I always keep my students a half an hour after class. You can't do that with your listeners.

A (56:25)

I want to thank Bertel. I I Want to thank truthout.org that independent source of news and analysis that is a partner for us, as always, and to thank you. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.

B (56:52)

Sam.

A (57:18)

Sa.