Richard Wolff (0:20)

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's show is a little different from what we normally do. It's a presentation of Karl Marx's analysis of classes. Why? Because it is extraordinarily pertinent and insightful for us here now. In 2025, Marx made a major contribution and we're the losers if we don't learn from it, just as is true with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other great thinkers in the history of economics and of the other related topics we deal with. And so I am devoting today's program to showing what a remarkable contribution Mark's made and how and why we need it and to use it. Now, I don't want to forget to remind you that Charlie Fabian, our volunteer, is available to take any suggestions you have for improvements on this program and you can reach him. As always, charlie.info438mail.com I want to also remind you about two books. Normally I only remind you about one, Understanding Capitalism, the one that we released last year, at the end of last year. But there's an earlier book which is particularly appropriate for what we're going to be doing today, which is called Understanding Marxism. It's part of a three book series that we produced, Understanding Marxism, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Capitalism, all of which are available at our website, democracyatwork.info books. Okay, now let's go and see why and how Marx is useful to us here and now. Marx begins by reminding us that the history of the human race is a history the early centuries of which had us living in a remarkably similar way in, in Europe, in North America, in Asia, Africa, Latin America and so on. We lived in small groups, tribes, villages, kinship arrangements of one kind or another. And what was remarkable about that is that they were roughly egalitarian. There weren't enormous differences within these groups between the rich and the poor or between the powerful and the powerless. It didn't work like that. Notions like it takes a village to raise a child reflect a wholly different way of thinking about what is an appropriate way for people to live together. Then in what we call modern history, something happened that changed all of that. In one system called slavery, we make a fundamental distinction within groups of people living together. The distinction, these individuals are masters, those individuals are slaves. Wow, that's very, very different. In that situation, some people literally own other people as property, something which in earlier human history was unthinkable. And Marx's, like many, many people, not so thrilled about what happened in modern history with slavery, or for that matter, what happened after slavery with feudalism, in which some people were lords and other people were serfs, or with capitalism, when some people are employers and others are employees, that these are societies ripped apart by enormous differences which Marx understood as undesirable. Like many, many other people, Marx had a better feeling about the, well, let's use modern language, the democratic community, a community characterized by an equal distribution of wealth and income, more or less, and an equal distribution of political power, where the key word came to be democracy. One person, one vote. Notice these are hunkerings of people after an early pre modern existence which is buried deep in our unconsciousness. So it turns out, and Marx is very interested, that in slavery there were always movements of people who said, this is no good, we don't want slavery. We want to free the slave from being in that situation. And likewise, we have always had in feudal societies people who said, we don't want lords and serfs, we want everybody to be more or less equal. We don't want big divisions of wealth and we don't want big divisions of power. And guess what? In capitalism, the same thing, the majority of people. And that goes right down to the latest Gallup poll in 2024. The majority of Americans don't like the gap between rich and poor in this society. They don't know how bad it is. But what they want is a lot less inequality than what we have. Less inequality in terms of wealth and less inequality in terms of real political power. So Marx is in line with the majority of people, and always has been, who have been very dissatisfied, unhappy with the conditions of slavery, feudalism and capitalism. But of course, we must remember that while the majority of people weren't happy, not at all, and remembered like Marx did, how it used to be before we had these divisions, these divisions were attractive to the people at the top. The masters didn't fight to get rid of slavery, and the lords didn't fight to get rid of feudalism. And the capitalists surely aren't fighting to get rid of capitalism. No, no, they all understood that they had a big job to do to hold on to the system that privileged them. They had to overcome the mass's dissatisfaction, dislike, disinterest in those systems. So they worked very hard. They established institutions, how to persuade, how to frighten, how to, how to bully the mass of people and to try to do all of that at the same time to get them to Believe you have to have it this way. It's hopeless to try to change it. You can't fight city hall. The rich will always be there, on and on and on, and often for long periods of time. This worked. They got the mass of people to live with it. Oh, yes. Occasionally there'd be an explosion. We ended up calling them revolutions where the mass of people would, at least for a time, have less inequality of wealth and income, less inequality, inequality of political power. You know, we had some of that in the 1930s in this country. If you look at the distribution of wealth and income in this country, we became much less unequal in the Great depression of the 1930s. But as soon as that depression was over, by 1945, we. We resumed the kind of capitalism that creates ever greater inequality until we get to the crazy stage we're in now with the Elon Musks and the Jeffrey Bezos having wealth beyond what ancient pharaohs were able to produce with their slave societies. And Marx therefore says to himself, here's the why has it been that unequal societies replaced the egalitarian ones of premodern human history? Why have the upsurges to bring us back to egalitarian democratic social systems? Why have they been periodic? Why did they never last very long? What's the problem here? How can the revolutionary effort as old as mankind, how do we explain that it hasn't succeeded? And he gave the answer because there's something in society, in a slave society, in a feudal society, and in our capitalist society today that constantly produces and reproduces inequality, an antidemocratic political life. And we have to figure out what. What that is, because if we can stop it or fix it or change it, then our drive to egalitarianism, to democracy, can and will succeed. The revolution we make will become permanent, not just temporary. And so Marx set himself that task. Figure it out. What's the problem? And here comes his in every society, every society, there is a system of production has to be. Human beings cannot live for very long on nuts and berries and running around the woods collecting them. Human societies early on and throughout the millennia have been reliant on producing more and more of what they come to depend on. They produce their own food, they produce their own shelter, they produce their own clothing and on and on. And Marx's insight is in the act of production, inequality is born and maintained and deepened so that the efforts of good people to go in a direction of equality and fraternity and. And justice and democracy are frustrated. At best, they achieve them, but they don't last. The way you organize production is the way modern society has frustrated the effort to produce liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. Slogans of the French and American revolutions that produced capitalism in that part of the world. So in the second half of today's show, I'm going to show you exactly how Marxist class analysis solves the problem. If you're interested in equality and democracy, this second half will be particularly interesting for. For you. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Friends, as you know, any project like this takes money, and we don't want to bore you or burden you. On the other hand, you, our audience, are the source of our funding, and we wouldn't have it any other way. If you can, please consider making a donation. It will be enormously appreciated. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. Well, we're going to now examine Marx's idea of the importance of production. It's how we organize production of the goods and services we all depend on. There we'll find the secret to how we can finally get liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy as the best of our people have always struggled for. Every society, Marx says of human beings, involves setting some of those people to work to use their brains and their muscles to transform something they find in nature so that is better and more useful to human beings to discover in nature the thing we call a sheep. In order to figure out which humans did that, you can cut the hair off of a sheep, and it is transformable by human labor into wool. And wool can keep us warm at night, wool can clothe our bodies during the day, etcetera, etcetera. Learning how to transform lightning into electricity. Learning how to transform. Fill in the blank, okay? Every society that we know of, human society carries out the production of more or less of its needs when the society does it. It, however, also makes a second decision. It decides what portion of the people in the community will be assigned the task of using their brains and muscles to carry out production, and what portion of the community will not have to do that. Now, it starts with communities that want to pass on their community to their children. Because, you see, children, especially in the early years of their lives, are consumers who literally cannot produce. They're too small, they're too weak, they're too uncoordinated, their brains and muscles, etc. So one of the first things we notice is society saying that the people who produce must always produce more than they themselves consume in order what to leave over an extra A surplus that can be used for Example, to feed the children. Otherwise you won't have children becoming adults. They will die. So societies understand that we have to organize who does what, who bakes the bread, who makes the shirts, who cooks the meals, who, who, who. But we also have to do it in such a way that we produce a surplus that those who work, not everybody, the children, for example, don't must produce a surplus. They must produce more than they themselves consume in order to sustain others. And now you can see how Marx begins to think we might also, and that's what slavery begins, have a situation where we say some people, not just children, some adults are going to be free from using their brains and muscles to produce the food, the clothing, the shelter we all depend on. And who are they in slavery? We know, you know, the masters, they don't have to. They can live in the great house, consume wonderful meals, wear fantastic outfits, and live the life of Riley because other people are producing so much that we can feed and clothe and shelter them, the slaves, and still have such an enormous surplus that we can take care of the children and also a community of adult masters. And then Marx says that's how slavery works. The masters, being in charge, keep down what the slaves get to consume. They make the slaves work as hard as possible, produce as much as possible, but take for themselves the minimum. And they'll sustain a group of people who don't do work and give them big sticks and call them the military, whose job it is to beat up on the slaves, to make sure they work very hard and keep a minimum of. Of what they produce. Why? Because that brings the biggest surplus for the most magnificent life for the master. And it turns out Marx says that getting rid of slavery is possible. We know that there were revolts against slaves wherever they existed and that they eventually succeeded in overthrowing slavery, whether it was in ancient Rome or the American south in the Civil War or many, many other examples. But what they put in place of the slavery, often feudalism, turns out, made people free. No more slaves. In feudalism, the serf wasn't the property of the lord. So it changed. But here's what didn't change. You organized production with a small group of people at the top. Not masters because they're gone, but lords, not slaves because they're gone. Serfs. And guess what? The lords used their wealth that they got from taking the surplus produced by serfs to make the serfs work harder and faster, to make them do so at a lower wage or a lower share of the produce. They did a lot Similar to what the slave masters did. But it's a different system, but one that couldn't realize the dream of the slave which was to be free. The dream of all those who wanted liberty, equality, fraternity, freedom and democracy. And when feudalism blew up because the serfs wouldn't tolerate it anymore, you had a transition to capitalism. No more slave, no more serf, no more master, no more lord. What you had instead was employee, employer. And guess what? The employees found their wages and their income pressed down, just like the slave and the serf. And the employers accumulated incredible wealth, just like the masters and the lords. Why? Because you had a production system in which some people produced a surplus that they delivered to other people. Therein lies the durability of inequality. Those people who get a disproportionate share use it to keep it. Those denied the fruits of their labor find themselves forever compelled to produce surpluses for the other. The working people today have to go to work to live. At work. They produce a surplus. It shows up as the profits of enterprise. The capitalists get the profits. You probably noticed that they get the dividends. Four times a year. An envelope arrives with your dividend. You own shares of this or that capitalist company. You don't do anything there. You don't work there. You just ownership. You're wealthy. And because you're wealthy, you. You get more wealth. Whereas the worker, because they don't have any of that property, because they're not an employer, are stuck with earning enough to kind of keep themselves alive. Why? Because the employer needs them to be alive and working, otherwise they won't get the surplus that they produce. And Marx therefore reaches his momentous conclusion. All human societies are class divided. And by class, he means those who work and produce a surplus versus those who just gather the surplus into their hands. On one side, slaves, serfs and employees like you and me. And on the other hand, masters, lords, and employers, you know, like Elon Musk. And the gap gets wider. Do we sometimes make revolutions? Yes. And we demand equality, fraternity, democracy, liberty. People are demanding it right now, all over the world, right here in the United States, every bit as much. But who's working against it? The employers. They have their political parties, Republican and Democrat, who keep this whole analysis out of the schools, out of the media. Marx has a scary name. Why? He's dead, you know. He can't do much, but his idea is to say, if you don't understand this, you will continue to fail to achieve what most people want, a much more egalitarian, democratic society. Than what we have to get that you have to change the system of of production. You can no longer have a mass of people producing surplus that flows into the hands of a tiny group. Employers in the United States, according to the US census, are 3% of our population. The richest 10% of our people own 80% of the shares of stock of American enterprises. Okay, we know what we got. But to change that, to get equality and democracy, we have to change the system of production. No more factory, office, store run by a tiny handful of people who of course use their power to get rich just like they use their wealth to get power. To keep this system going is to frustrate the desire for liberty, equality and democracy. Or to say the same thing in the words Marx used. The problem is capitalism. The problem is the system that organizes production in this fundamentally wrong headed way. Wrong. Because it is the opposite of egalitarian or democratic. So if you want those things, as most people do, Marx is in the majority. His uniqueness was to figure out that we have to change the production system to get what people like Marx or Thomas Jefferson or Spartacus across the millennia fought for. Their fight was noble. They are our heroes and for the right reasons. But they didn't understand something that Marx figured out. And if we use Marx's insight, we can do better. Which is after all what they would have wanted us to do and what justifies us in making the effort again, knowing this time we can reach the desired result. Thank you for your attention and as always, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.