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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, our own, those looming down the road, those of our kids. 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 go over these economic changes all around us as we do that each week. Let me jump right in by giving a shout out to the City of New York where this program is produced. The City of New York has taken remarkable steps in this last week or so, and you should know about them. New York City is the first in the nation to do what I'm about to describe two things. One, it has gone into court to sue the five major oil companies in the world for lying about climate change and fossil fuels and damaging the city of New York by doing so. And the second thing they did was to declare in New York that they are going to divest the city's pension funds by getting rid of selling $5 billion worth of the shares of those fossil fuel companies that they are also suing. By the way, the New York City pension fund, which has $189 billion in it, is invested in 190 fossil fuel companies whose shares they are going to sell. Well, let's first mention who the companies are so we all know. BP or British Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell. They are being sued for billions. And what is the point? Well, nothing says it better than to read the statement of Mayor Bill de Blasio when he announced these steps taken by the City of New York and I New York City is standing up for future generations by becoming the first major US City to divest our pension funds from fossil fuels. At the same time, we're bringing the fight against climate change straight to the fossil fuel companies that knew about its effects and intentionally misled the public to protect them, their profits. As climate change continues to worsen, it's up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient. Here's what they plan to use the money for that they get from suing the oil companies for damaging new they want to repair all the facilities that have been damaged by higher temperatures, by higher levels of seawater, by the storms like Sandy and others that were generated by the climate changes caused by fossil fuel burning over all these years. They want to make New York City resilient. They want to protect it from the consequences in the future of the damage to the climate already done. Here is a city proactively moving to deal with this problem. Not another conference, not another report, not another well meaning meeting of politicians to say they are concerned. And for heaven's sake, not another meeting with these companies hearing about how committed they are to doing something which the city of New York has now shouted them out for not doing at all. This is action taken by people at the local level when the state and federal levels have let us down in this area so badly. My next update has to do with consumer debt in the United States. It has been rising very, very fast since 2013, indeed to the degree that there's been a so called recovery in our economy. And that's wildly exaggerated as I try to point out nearly every week, but to the degree that there's been some recovery, it has been highly dependent once again on debt, on the rapidly rising debt since 2013, which is about when this recovery is said to have gotten underway. Which means that the well being of the American economy, to whatever degree it has been reproduced, has become again debt dependent. It now the total consumer debt exceeds its previous high in 2008, just when our economy crashed. Let me say that to you again, that total consumer debt just went over at the end of 2017, just went over where it was when the economy crashed in 2018. Now it is true that there is less outstanding credit per family now than there was then, even though the total of credit is larger. We do have more families than we did 10 years ago in this country. But most of the reason that the debt per family is lower is not because families haven't taken on too much debt they have, but it's because we wiped out the debt of the most indebted. They were declared bankrupts and got out of being counted in that way. And so they're not there. And so the overall results look a little bit better because we're not counting the worst of them. But the bottom line is, and this has been documented particularly by the Federal Reserve bank of New York, that we now have fast rising consumer debt. It's rising most quickly for credit cards, secondly for auto loans, third for student loans, and finally for mortgages, since Americans can't buy houses the way they once did. The mortgage indebtedness isn't going up as fast as the other forms. But Americans are relying on debt at a rising, accelerating rate. And given what that meant 10 years ago, it would be foolish not to understand that this is an important economic reality now. The third economic Update takes us back to Greece. What is happening in Greece, as always, is important on this program because it is an advance notice of what is happening elsewhere in Europe. What will be happening in those parts of Europe where it hasn't happened before and likewise for the United States. That's why we talk about Greece. So what has happened to Greece now? Well, once again, there are massive strikes and demonstrations across that little country. You might be astonished, as I was, to read that since the crash of 2008, 2008, there have been, count them, no less than 50 general strikes in Greece. The people have been active in that country desperately trying to stop something. What? Wage cuts, service cuts, that is public services cuts in their pension, selling off state property to both domestic and foreign corporations and auctioning off the property of those whose debts were so big that they had to basically fold the tent and sell off everything that they own. The damage done to the well being of the Greek household and family is staggering. It exceeds anything that has happened elsewhere in Europe to date. The latest strikes are about the latest action and the latest action tells a big story. The latest action is a law, like all these laws imposed on the Greeks by the Europeans as a condition for getting the loans without which Greece could not continue as a society. In other words, they've made the Greeks dependent on foreign loans. And the foreign loans will not be given unless the Greeks take the steps that the European Community, the European Central bank, the European Commission and so on, the IMF impose on them. The latest one is to increase the number of people in a union that have to vote in favor of a strike before you can have a legal strike. Okay? It doesn't take genius to understand that every single step imposed on the Greeks since the crash of 2008 have increased the power and wealth of the rich at the expense of the mass of people, increased the power of capital and diminished the power of labor. Every single one. What is going on here is a foretaste of what's to come. The Greek business community wasn't strong enough to get these things done. The mass of the Greek people organized in communists, socialist parties and in very powerful trade unions, simply made it impossible for the Greek capitalists to impose this kind of austerity on the Greek people. It had to be done by something more, more powerful than the Greek capitalist class. And so it was. The entire European capitalist class organized into the imf, the European Union and the European Central bank together bailed Greece out of the crisis with loans, made Greece dependent on these loans because they did not have A what? A crisis inside Greece. A fundamental change of the Greek economy to try to rebuild it on a better footing. No, no, no, they didn't do any of that. Instead they solved the problem by borrowing from the Europeans who lent to them, knowing full well that by making them dependent on European loans, the Europeans could dictate the conditions for doling out lo bits and pieces of these loans. And the conditions were to reorganize the Greek economy, not to go beyond capitalism, but to go backwards to a harsher and more unequal capitalism, far beyond what the Greek capitalists could ever have imposed on the Greek people. So now the Greek capitalists can sit there saying, our hands are tied. It's those Europeans without whom we can survive, we who are insisting that we do that. And who's doing it in Greece is just as important as what's being done. The who is the Syriza Party. The Syriza Party is a left wing party. It prided itself on being more left wing than the old Greek socialist party had been before it. And here's what that means, that the word socialist, the meaning of socialist, the meaning of left wing is being transformed in Greece. It's no longer a political movement that stands against capitalism. It's no longer a political movement that is a criticism of capitalism is an advocacy of a fundamentally different system. The socialists have become the party that institutes what the capitalist wants, that makes it happen. When the old parties can't do the job anymore because they've lost the support of the people, in comes someone who says, I can do a different and better job cashing in on what socialism used to mean, getting into power and then turning out in the most cynical way you could imagine, to be more of the same old, same old, maybe even worse. The reason this is important to understand is that it's a harbinger of what is scheduled for the rest of Europe and North America as capitalism shifts its ascendancy to Asia, particularly to China. And that makes that the growing society. What it's leaving behind is the West. And as the west has to constrict itself, the question is, who gets constricted? The 10% at the top or everybody else? And you know the answer. Before I tell you the name of the game of those at the top is to make sure that the adjustment to a declining Western capitalism is foisted off on the rest of the people. Greece is leading the way, and that's why it's important to pay attention. Before I go on with the remaining economic updates, let me remind you As I often do, we maintain two websites and they are available for your use. They're available without charge and they're available 24 hours, seven days a week. The first one is democracyatwork. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second one is rdwolf with two Fs.com both of these websites allow you to communicate to us what you like and don't like about the program, what you'd like to see us do make use of it. Both websites allow you to follow us with a click of your mouse on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Both websites provide you with material you can use and share with other people with a complete archive of these programs, for example. So make use of these websites, partner with us, be part of the process of bringing this information and these kinds of analysis to the people who need your friends, your relatives, your co workers. That's part of what this project is all about. And let me say a word to those of you that listen to this program on the radio. If you would like to see the television version, because we do this simultaneously, radio and TV is an easy way for you to look at the television program. Anytime you want. You go to a website called patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate that's the name of the program. And you can see this program anytime you like in that way. So let me return then to our updates. The next update has to do with a British corporation, Carillion, I hope is the right spelling. Carillion Corporation. It's a 200 year old company, employs 43,000 workers. That makes it a very big company. Out of those 43,000, 20,000, a little less than half are in the United Kingdom. That company has in fact collapsed. It has been negotiating for bankruptcy. Compulsory liquidation was announced on January 15. It may survive. Still there are negotiations. But there's some important lesson in this collapse of a huge private construction company. First, the United Kingdom government had employed Carillion on 450 projects including the construction and maintenance of hospitals, of schools, of prisons, of defense sites and of high speed railways. The government uses tax money to make all these contracts with Kareliad Corporation. Now the government has promised to pay the salaries to of many of these workers while they work out the financial collapse of this company. All kinds of other companies that provided services and inputs to Karelia are being damaged by the collapse of this large corporation. Why am I telling you this? The answer is. For years we've been hearing that outsourcing activities that the government used to do, the government itself used to build or at least run schools and prisons and defense sites and railways in England. These are outsourced. We were told that turning these over to private enterprises would give us a much more efficient production of these sorts of things and is the logical thing to do. Everybody knows we heard all this. We hear it in the United States just the same. Well, turns out it isn't. So it turns out that one of the biggest beneficiaries of outsourcing to the private sector, what the British government does has been a disaster. This company has failed. This company is leaving tens of thousands of people without work, thousands of companies without revenue. It is a disaster for all of England. And listen now as I quote to you what two observers of it all have to say. The first is the institute of directors, directors of companies. These are the people that are the kind of people that ran that corporation. It has issued a stinging rebuke to karaon's top executives and directors. Wow. Roger barker, head of corporate governance at the institute of directors, was particularly alarmed that the company changed its bonus rules to protect top bosses. Turns out that over the last year, as they were going down into collapse, they gave themselves big bonuses, these directors. Oh, goodness. Maybe nobody thought about what it might mean if you outsource government activity to. To private enterprise, that the private enterprise are just as capable of taking care of themselves at public expense as any politicians ever proved themselves to be. Well, if you didn't think about it, you can think about it now. And here's another. Meg hillyer, chairwoman of the parliamentary public accounts committee, fears that taxpayers face, quote, a raw deal from this collapse. Here's what she. Carilian's collapse raises grave questions about jobs, the delivery of public services, and the way government conducts its business. We as a committee have previously warned of the risks when contractors paid from the public purse become too big to fail. They get a pass. They get too much money. They mess up. Why am I telling you this? Is it because I want you to believe that private isn't good and government is as the way to do business? And the answer is no, that's not what I'm doing. Liberals do that. I'm no liberal. I'm not here to tell you, have the private do it. It's better than the public, because that's silly. But I'm equally aghast at people who say, no, don't have the private do it. Have the public do it. Because putting a bureaucracy of politics in charge is about as smart as putting a bureaucracy that's private in charge, which is what you do when you outsource it to big private corporations. The solution to these problems is not to have vertical controlled companies, neither public nor private. The solution to this kind of failure and corruption is to have many people involved in deciding what happens in a company, not a few, and to therefore also make sure that there are people to sound the alarm when things aren't going well and to make sure that as things go badly, we haven't got a handful of people taking care of themselves at the top while everybody else suffers and the problem gets worse, which is what happens either publicly or privately. Let's not once again go from the public to the private, followed by the private to the public. We've been back and forth this way for decades, and it doesn't solve the problem. That's what the carillon collapse teaches us. One more time. My last update for today is a little different, but it raises so important a question that I wanted to leave the time to develop it with you for a little bit. It has to do with an action taken by the CVS Pharmacy Corporation, one of the largest drugstore chains in the United States, may indeed by now be the largest one. I haven't kept track. There's only three or four, and it's one of the largest ones for sure. CBS was in the news this last week by telling us something. They are no longer, they said, going to be touching up the photographs of women wearing beauty products on their faces and so on. Turns out they touched these things up to make these women look unnaturally flawless in terms of their skin. And just so with their eyebrows, their hair, you know, you really do know what I'm talking about. They're not going to do that. They've had so much protest, particularly from women, that they're not going to be touching up their advertising. Now let's talk about touching up advertising. Why would you do that in the first place? Why would you take a picture? Remember, the pictures that are taken are taken mostly of models. Models are unusually attractive, beautiful, whatever words you want. That's why they're chosen. That's why they're models. So now you have an exceptionally beautiful model of something male, female, doesn't really matter. Why would you then touch it up? Why isn't it sufficient that you found a beautiful example of whatever it is you're looking for? Here comes the answer. And if it offends you, then you're offended by the way this system works. This advertising is not about celebrating beauty and it surely is not about making beautiful, more beautiful. Advertising, let's remind ourselves, has a simple basic to sell more stuff. The advertiser is a producer of something and that producer wants to sell more of it. And the way you do that is you advertise the product. How do you get beauty products to be sold more, to be purchased, for example, by women or men, for that example? Here's how you do it. You create an image of beauty that is precisely beyond what a human being can produce. Flawless skin, perfectly shaped eyebrows, unbelievably fluffy hair, or whatever else it is. You make it more by touching it up in the picture than any human can achieve. And then you make a none too subtle appeal look, you say to the individual buyer, you fall short of this, you're not as beautiful as you could be and you should be. But there's a way to solve the problem we've just created for buy our product. Buy this beauty object product, this cream, this lotion, this spray. It will overcome how bad we've made you feel by creating an image of beauty no human being ever achieved. This is a cruelty every woman who has reflected on growing up as a young lady knows about anxieties about are you pretty enough, Are you beautiful enough, Are you attractive enough? Men also increasingly go through this. It's important to understand you're not going through it because it's normal to adolescents or puberty. It isn't. That's normal to capitalism. A system that systematically will use anything and everything in your psychology to play on it, to get you to buy more stuff. If it means suggesting you're not pretty enough or beautiful enough or good looking enough or thin enough or whatever it is, that will be done. You'll be made to feel bad about some dimension of yourself so that you will buy whatever that seller is selling. Capitalism needs to make money by selling and advertising is its way and the social consequences have always been awful. Yes, it's nice that CVS is going to be doing less touch up on its beauty products, but that's a tiny fraction of what the problem of advertising has been and and continues to be. We need to understand that if we're ever going to get out of a society that puts that kind of cruelty out there as a matter of course, every day. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. Thank you so much for being part of it. Please stay with us after a short interlude. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic update. I am very, very glad to tell you that we are going to be joined in this second half by an old friend, Bertel Ullman. He is a professor of politics, or what we call political science in other departments, but he works in the Department of Politics at New York University. There he specializes in Marxism and other schools of socialist theory. His main scholarly books include Marx's Concept of Man in Capitalist Society, Social and Sexual Revolution, Dialectical Investigations, and Dance of the Steps in Marx's Method. His more political works include how to Take an Exam and Remake the World, the Class Struggle Board Game, and the Autobiography that Followed it. Class Struggle is the name of the game, True Confessions of a Marxist businessman. In 2002, he won the first Charles S. McCoy Distinguished Career Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science association, the mainstream association of the political science profession. So I am very glad to welcome Bertell Ullman to Economic Update. Thank you for coming, Bertell.
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Thank you for having me.
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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?
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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.
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Everything is changing all the time.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And third, alienation, just so everybody's clear.
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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.
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That's the phrase. They're even alienated from themselves.
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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.
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Well, the.
- [48:05]
B
Yes, but this was 150 years ago. What about today? And we have. If you give me just a few.
- [48:12]
A
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.
- [48:24]
B
Been changing, is changing, means that any.
- [48:27]
A
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.
- [48:37]
B
Of course, definitely.
- [48:38]
A
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.
- [49:22]
B
Of course. No, that's perfectly true. And you came in at just the right moment too.
- [49:27]
A
Okay, so the second point you wanted.
- [49:29]
B
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.
- [51:00]
A
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.
- [51:10]
B
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.
- [53:48]
A
Well, the irony is we still have that problem. I try to explain to someone, but.
- [53:52]
B
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.
- [54:29]
A
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.
- [54:49]
B
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.
- [56:13]
A
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.
- [56:20]
B
I always keep my students a half an hour after class. You can't do that with your listeners.
- [56:25]
A
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.
- [56:53]
B
Sam.
- [57:18]
A
Sa.