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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Before we begin today, I want to thank you once again for all of those that have supported us financially. It has been a very important source of support and enabled us to do a number of things this last year to start and to build a new growing substack, to produce a successful series of educational courses and classes, and to begin several book projects. And those books will be published in the year to come as they get completed. Our first end of the year fundraiser is still underway and we're still quite a ways from reaching our goal. And that is necessary to ensure that we can deliver to you all all that we have planned for the coming year. If you haven't yet, then permit us to ask you now to go to our website, democracyatwork.info donate and give whatever you can to help make this possible. 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Today's program is my attempt to present to you something I already presented in one place where you, if you're likely most of our audience, were not present. And I'm going to tell you about it because it is itself a sign of the social acceptance of the kind of work we do compared to what would have been the case 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years ago, on December 2nd, by invitation from the Political Union at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, I participated in a debate of sorts. The Political Union is an association of politically interested students At Yale, who divide themselves up into a left wing caucus, a right wing caucus, and actually several of those. And in between, in the middle, if you like, independent caucus, people interested in political debate and the topic I was asked to present on a topic decided by them, by the way, quote, Marx was right, that was the title. And I was to defend that proposition in front of a group of students who could then ask questions, make counter arguments and so on. Yale University on December 2. So I want to tell you about how I made the case that Marx was right. Now, of course, Marx wasn't right about everything. No one ever is, and he wasn't either. I'm going to talk therefore about what Marx was right about. Maybe on another occasion we can have a conversation about what Marx didn't get right that came up at Yale, and if I had time, I would have included it here. But it is far less important since people get that message growing up in the United States for sure. Whereas the message about what Marx was right about is more difficult to come by. So here we go. I began by reminding my audience that socialism is now much more a part of their lives than it has been for any generation over the last 70 years. Yes, friends, in 1945 we had not only the end of World War II, but and not only the death of a beloved President Franklin Roosevelt, the only president to be reelected three times in American history. But we also had the beginning of the Cold War, the sudden decision by the people who run this country that the Soviet Union should no longer be an ally, which is what it had been during World War II, until an ally of the United States. No, it should become the arch enemy. The need for an arch enemy is a very basic part of American history. Well over the last 10 or 15 years, that demonization of socialism, communism, Marxism, associated with the Soviet Union, which was the super demon, all of that has suddenly begun to crumble. Bernie Sanders begins the process in many ways by running for president. Occupy Wall street had even earlier begun to change all of that. Then Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and some of her associates won seats in Congress. Bernie ran again. And then of course, the big one of recent weeks, the victory of Zoran Mamdani to be the next mayor in the city of New York, a self identified Muslim socialist. And I don't want to leave out Katie Wilson, the newly elected and self identified socialist mayor of Seattle. In Washington, many more are coming down the pike inspired by those I just listed. Now, why does that make Marx right? Because Marx was not only an early advocate of socialism. But Marx was also, in the proliferation of his writings, many volumes of books, many articles, speeches, a prolific, luckily for us, writer. He was also the foundational intellect of the socialist movement, if you like. He's like Adam Smith or David Ricardo for conventional economics, what used to be called classical economics, Freud in psychology and so on. Marx, is that the foundational intellectual basis. But beyond that, Marx was right to put his finger on the issues he raised in that book that I'm going to summarize in a moment. That book called Capital. Three volumes. That book spoke about the problem of modern society as being its economic system, called capitalism. And how right was Marx to pinpoint that? Well, let me tell you, it's 150 years since Marx died. Historically, that's not a very long time. 150 years. And during that time, Marxist Capital has been translated into every language on the face of this earth. In many cases more than once or twice. There are several English editions of Capital, for example, spread to every country. Every country on earth has Marxist discussion groups, Marxist political parties, Marxist newspapers, Marxist magazines, Marxist scholarly associations, trade unions. I could go on. Not every country has all of them, but every country has one or more of them. That's an extraordinary adoption of a set of ideas by people of different economic, colonial, cultural, historical backgrounds. This is, by comparison, a much faster, much more comprehensive spread across the globe than, for example, Islam or Christianity were. There are places where one or the other of those is not present, not allowed, been persecuted. Certainly socialists have also, but their ideas have been meaningful to everybody on this planet. Marx was right about that. He thought that would happen. He found in capitalism the ironic contradiction that it was a system that would in fact spread globally like no other system ever had. He was right about that, too, but that it would take with it its own criticism of itself. It would spread the criticism of itself along with itself. And Marx was right about that too. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Marx's pudding has been eaten everywhere and is being eaten now as I speak to you, in every corner of the continents of this planet. But in our own country, in the United States, it was repressed over the last 70 years, since 1945. Marxism, the writings of Marx, the teachings of Marx, the ideas of Marx, as well as the socialism he advocated, the communism, which is another form of these ideas. They have been repressed as part of the Cold War demonization of the Soviet Union as the great enemy. I'm going to give you a personal example. I was a student at Harvard as an Undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford University where I got a Master's degree. And then I went to Yale University where I got two more master's degrees and my PhD in economics. Why am I telling you this? Simple reason. That was a total of 10 years of my life. Two semesters per year, 20 semesters in three of arguably the better universities in the United States. I majored in history and economics. Those were my focal studies. One semester I had a teacher out of 20 who assigned us a few words of Karl Marx. At Yale, where I got my PhD in economics, not one word. Marx is the greatest critic of capitalism. We have the foundation of the most developed critical studies of capitalism that are available. The libraries are full of all the work Marxists have done across the world in a critique. We got nothing. Zilch. When I raised my hands in my classes at Yale and asked a question that touched on Marx, my teachers either said, sorry, I don't know much about that, which was true, or they said it wasn't relevant, which was the dishonest way of admitting they didn't know much about it. They couldn't teach us because they didn't know. And they didn't know for the same reason they couldn't be taught by their teachers. It is childish not to teach people about a major part of what it is they're trying to learn. Adam Smith and David Ricardo and most of the people I was asked to read were celebrants of capitalism. They loved it. I was never given a chance to learn the critical perspective. That's not free speech. That's not free intellectual inquiry. That is repression. And it's only now lifting off of the American consciousness. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Please stay with us as we continue demonstrating how and why Marx was right. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition, linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your Copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. We were talking about my appearance at Yale University early in December to defend the proposition of the Yale Political Union. Marx was right. I want to now summarize, dangerous as that always is what it is that Marx's basic idea was so that it can become part of the national conversation. And here it is. Every act of production of goods and services in a capitalist economy. The goods and services we all depend on to lead our lives. The food, the clothing, the shelter, the transportation, education, medical care, all of it. If you look closely at the production, here's how it A group of people get together in an office, a store, a factory, and by complicated coordination of work, they transform raw material, say lumber and glue, into a finished product, let's call it a chair. And then they sell that and get the money. And what do they do with the money? They use a portion of the money to replace the lumber and the glue and the hammers and the nails that go into production that have been used up. They use another part of the revenue they get from selling chairs to pay the workers their salary. And then there's a residue. It's called a profit. Sometimes it's called a surplus. It's what's left over when you've sold the chair, taken care of, replacing tools and equipment, used up, taking care of, paying the workers. It's what it's the part that goes to the capitalist, the owner, the entrepreneur, the person who's running the business. And of course, the people who are running the business have every interest in minimizing what they spend on tools, equipment and raw material and minimizing what they pay their workers. Because the more they minimize those things, the more they'll maximize what's left over which goes to them. And to whom do these people give the leftover the profits? Well, of course they give it mostly to themselves. That's why we have rich people and not so rich people and poor people. If you're a worker, you get a wage. If you're a capitalist, you get your cut of the profit. If businesses run to maximize profitsand that's what the economics profession says it should be, well, then the system is run to benefit the profit earners, not the others. The profit earners are 3% of our people. That's what the US Census Department says the capitalists are. The other 97% are the ones who are not the objects of how this system works. Capitalism makes the capitalists rich. And we all know, as Marx shows us the results, the capitalists want capitalism to spread. They want to get more and more workers working to produce what is left over for them. They are expansion. They don't care what the cost of expansion is. That's their income. They squeeze the worker every chance. They long hours, lousy pay, no breaks, minimal condition. You know the story, you're already living it. And then the capitalists who've become very wealthy by getting the profits and having the whole system focus on maximum profits for them, they understand they're surrounded by a sea of people that are not rich. And they worry about those people's envy and bitterness. So they don't want to let those people have the vote. They fought against it. The workers finally got it. When America begins as independent countries, only a minority are allowed to vote. You should know that workers had to fight everywhere. And once workers had to vote. Now the capitalists said they're the majority, 97%. We're three. We better control the politics. So they went and took their money and bought the politicians. We, we know all about that. Marx did too, and talked about it. The system is very unstable because these workers, these capitalists, may or may not invest their money. It's their freedom, free enterprise. But if they don't invest their money, there are no jobs for the people who depend on them. This is a system of unfairness built into it, injustice built, built into it. Marx was right about something else. He said this system has built into it expansion. These capitalists are always trying to get more workers, build their industry. If they can't get more workers, if they can't sell the output that they're making, they'll charge output, a new kind of output. They'll come up with something else. They'll pay people to invent new things so they can hire people and get the profits. Because the more profit you have, the safer you are, the more politicians you can buy, the more protection you have. So the system grows, Marx pointed out it will produce a world unified economy. It's done that just like Marx said. He was right again. But he said the way it's going to do it is contradictory. It's going to blow itself up even as it grows. Well, how did capitalism grow globally? The colonialism? The early capitalist countries, Britain, Western Europe, North America, Japan became domineering countries who had to carve up Asia, Africa, Latin America to control them. You know, we're seeing it again now with Mr. Trump's new interest in Latin America making the folks down there tremble. They've been here before and Marx said eventually this domination, this capitalist use of Asia, Africa, Latin America simply for the labor you could get there for the raw materials, using them for the wealth of Europe and North America. That's why the world looks the way it does today. Very rich in a few places, very poor in most of the others. We have an inequality in the world that's like what you had in ancient Egypt. Capitalism hasn't freed us from inequality, it's just reorganized an inequality, which Marx said it would. And then he predicted that eventually the colonial territories would say, we're not tolerating this anymore. Marx also said the working class in the capitalist country, they wouldn't tolerate it anymore. Either one of them would make labor unions and fight the battle that way. That's in the advanced countries. Another would make colonial revolutions. You know what shook Asia, Africa and Latin America still does. Bitter, horrible fights between a colonial power trying to control and the people who don't want to be controlled. If you need an example today, try Gaza. See how that fits. Or not. Marx was right about most of these things. He was right that capitalism would be technologically very dynamic. Every capitalist has to worry that he'll be out competed by another one as long as there's competition. So to get a jump on the one who's trying to get a jump on him, they'll compete and they'll develop new technologies, particularly the kind that save on workers. Replace a lot of workers with your machine. Of course that's horrible for the workers, but as Marx kept showing, capitalism is not designed for the workers. That's a mythology it tries to create in the mind of the worker, fearing that if the worker understands what's actually going on, they will be anti system anti capitalists too. Which is indeed what Marxists have tried to cultivate for the last hundred and fifty years with considerable success. China calls itself socialism with Chinese characteristics. A dozen other countries are either led by socialists or call themselves socialist. The one country in Europe that welcomes immigrants from around the world to come to that country and settle is Spain. Right now, no other European country is doing that, just Spain. And who's the leader of Spain? A politician who's a member of the Socialist Party of Spain. And I could go on. Marx was right about a lot. This is a system, Marx said, that carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Might the United States that we're living in now be experiencing through the decline of our empire the decline of our social solidarity as a nation, the bitter divisions wracking the country, the fact that the last half dozen wars that the United States has been involved in the United States has lost. Are these signs of the seeds of your own self destruction that Marx pointed to? Of course Marx made mistakes. Of course Marx didn't see things that were not so visible back then. No one is advocating that Marx was right in some religious way. His work is not a bible of any kind. But it is full of insights into how the world he lived in, the capitalist system he was born into, how it works, and in particular because he was a critic, why it falls short of delivering the liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy its advocates claim it would, but it hasn't. We don't live in an equal or democratic society. Our elections are bought. Our people, half of them don't vote at all. What's the point? The outcomes don't change them in any way that really matters to them. Because when occasionally it looks like it might out come the voters, Marx was right. And by the way, people like Marx are right. They're the critics. If you want to understand anything, you want to look at and read and think about the people who love it and celebrate it, as well we should. But you also look at those who are critical, who think we can do better. When you want to learn about a film or a piece of sculpture or a book, do you only talk to people who love it? Do you only talk to people who are critical? Or do you maybe try to engage with both? Draw your own conclusions, make up your own mind, by all means. But youand remember I was talking to the Yale students, you who are at a point where you're supposed to learn, are you going to tolerate having the whole criticism of capitalism continue to be repressed? You're not allowed. What kind of mental health do you think that can ever produce? It was fun arguing that Marks was right at Yale. I hope you found it of interest as well. And as usual, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.