B (19:09)

Thanks Rick. I'm a huge admirer of your show and everything you do, so it's an honor. It's definitely both of them. In order to organize and struggle, to collectively think of alternatives and put them into practice, we need to re see our economy. And this is why action and theory go together for a better future. You can't really acknowledge how much our capitalist economy is truly oppressive and unsustainable. If you don't start problematizing what our mainstream media and our economic colleagues like to just obscure by taking for granted. So the Capital Order, for example, is really a name that tries to label what is normally invisible to say we are in an economy that is not spontaneous, not eternal. And we need to point the finger as to what really matters, which is the fact that the political order that oppresses us and is leading to suicide in terms of humanity is really upheld constantly by. By our capitalist elite through forceful state intervention. The idea is that actually the market would not exist without this forceful state intervention to protect the two pillars of our capitalist system. Private command over investment on one end. So keep encasing and de risking and incentivizing private investors while maintaining intact the other pillar, which is wage labor. And no one better than you has explained it. Wage labor is based on that economic coercion that is usually made invisible by the idea that we're all actually free. Wage labor is actually the epitome of unfreedom because it's based on the fact that we have no alternative but to go sell our capacity to work for a wage that is definitely lower than the value we produce. And this happens only because our governments, our policymakers, keep increasing that market dependence, but by taking away from us the very basics we need to survive in a dignified way. So what Trump is doing in terms of cutting health care, cutting subsidies for food and so on is not an exception. It's just the acceleration of what capitalism requires, which is the increasing disciplining of a population, because otherwise we would all be thriving to construct a different economic system. And this is something those at the top fear very much.

A (21:59)

Yeah, it's. You know, I'm reminded, listening to you, the way in which the media act, as though if we have an inflation which we periodically have and are threatened with again, now that what we have to do is, quote, unquote, tighten our belts by cutting food programs and education programs, whereas the people who sit at the top of this society have no idea what you're talking about. They don't have any belt tightening. They are living the same luxury in the same restaurant, in the same fancy hotel that they always did that you have a peculiar notion that an economic system run by the people I just described are the ones who don't suffer when the way they run it works out badly. Oh, then they punish the workers who they would not let participate in making the decisions that brought them into the mess in the first place. It's an extraordinary. It leads me to ask you in the kind of way that poses the question of your book, your new book, a famous person, I don't remember, who once said it was more difficult for him to get people to imagine the end of capitalism than it was to imagine the end of our planet that so deeply ingrained are ways of thinking that hide so much that that's what has to be broken. Which if that's true, means your book is what we need.

B (23:39)

We need new categories, Rick, and you and I have been working on this. We need new categories that are actually able to see the reality around us. People feel it, they're pissed off, but they are not exposed to those concepts that could help empower their own struggles. And this is the point, for example, austerity is not about virtuous economies to live within our means because clearly austerity is very expensive and austerity increases the debt rather than curing it. Just to, for an example, what's happening right now with the so called big beautiful bill in the next year. So in 2027 alone, those making over a million dollars will enjoy a collective tax break of $114 billion. While other Americans really struggle. We know homelessness has soared. Even the official statistics that we know are gross under understatement tell us that there are over 118,000 extra homeless people in 2025. So clearly something is wrong. But the types of economics that circulates is not the economics that allows us to point the finger as to what needs to be understood in order to act. And I just want to make clear, and this I take enormous inspiration from you, Rick, and your past work since you were young. The idea is here is not that we as academics, like you know, see the crystal ball and tell other people how the world is. It's actually quite the opposite. It's, I think through participation in the struggles that this theory can emerge. And in my way, I'm really trying to relearn how knowledge is produced because we are exposed to the idea that knowledge is only produced from the top. And what actually is the truth is that people that came up with interesting theory, theories that can really break with this mental trap that makes us think that capitalism is inevitable, have done so because they have been exposed and participated in the real world of economics that people feel and live in every single day. So with the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation, and you've been a very big supporter of what we do here in Tulsa, that's really what's happening, is that we're reversing the hierarchy. Knowledge is actually coming out an assembly space in which people are trying to organize in a horizontal way that is anti capitalist. And it's hard. It's hard, but it exposes what needs to be done much better than just taking a class at some Ivy League. And you know better than me about that.

A (26:20)

Yeah. You know again, an example that listening to you provokes in me when there's an inflation as we've had the cutbacks in all these government programs for the mass of people. Whereas you could get the same effect if you cut back the rate of profit or you cut back the rate of interest. And that would affect a different group of people in a different way. The ability to ask this question. It's like the last time they tried to do something, they all decided, all my colleagues, that you have to raise interest rates. And I remember saying to them, are you crazy? You have too high prices. Now you're going to raise the price of borrowing money. That's more inflation. Why are you doing that? Why don't you have a wage price freeze? That's a different way of controlling an inflation. Works much better, works much faster, but it hurts a different part of the community. Ah, you could even enter this question, who is going to be and why not? If the income tax charges more to people who have the greater capacity to pay, then why don't we solve our economic problems by charging those most able to pay for the solution of those problems? We never even ask the question, let alone do it.

B (27:43)

The point is to go beyond the narrative we hear on the left about oh, it's because someone is greedy, there's selfishness around. If only we would like, you know, perfect and reform the current system, everything would be fine. I think what my scholarship has helped me realize is that there are political limits to what is possible under capitalism. There cannot be social redistribution in a way that actually empowers people under our economic system because this would subvert the very pillars upon the system rests. And this is why increasing interest rates might seem bad immediately for investors, but it's actually great for our economic system because it increases the unemployment rate. And this is the whole point is that unemployment we see as a problem. We need to understand. Unemployment is a solution for our economy. It's a problem for us for the logic of need. It's actually a solution for the logic of profit. And this the Fed and our mainstream economists understand very well. There is, there is a price to be paid. And Duncan Foley, my mentor, really told me, you know, increasing inflation targets is actually about not inflation, sorry, increasing interest rates is not about inflation targeting, it's about rate of exploitation targeting. Increasing interest rate may or may not solve the inflation problem. It usually doesn't, especially one inflation is due to, as you explain always very well, due to the High profit margins. But it does solve for what capitalism needs to be solved, which is the power relation, the subordination of the working classes. So this is very important. In the book, I tried to debunk what appear as universal truths and say, actually under capitalism, given that it's a class system, there's nothing that works for everybody. It works for the classes that represent the logic of profit. And. And it doesn't work for the classes that represent the majority of us. Yet the system operates exactly in this way. So once we understand that imperialism, genocide, the climate catastrophe, this insane violence that is escalating right now that everyone knows about, and the elite themselves can no longer hide or have no idea of how to explain what's going on. Well, this is when we need tools that go back to a tradition that is courageous, to say nothing of this needs to be. We can subvert it. And this is why the system is actually fragile. Because if you look closely, when people do demand resources and get them, they actually escalate their demands and want something better. And this is something, you know. Well, I'm just reading your history of your. I've been lucky enough to be reading the history of your, of your activities when you were Young in the 60s and 70s, and you, you know it well, like the Vietnam mobilization now, you know, it's. We know Martin Luther King is being commemorated today. It was all about anti imperialist, anti capitalist struggles at the end of the day, with people mobilizing it. And this is what hurts the system. And that's why they need to continue convincing us that we are in a natural, spontaneous and fair order. But everyone is realizing this is not the truth anymore.

A (31:00)

You know, before the end of slavery, people couldn't imagine a world in which there weren't masters and slaves. They had to break out of that basic assumption to the unbelievably different idea that we're all equal as human beings. If we could make that transition, then the one you're advocating should be available to us also.

B (31:25)

Yes, and this is what democracy at work does. This is what the free is doing here in town. And what you see is the increase, incredible empowerment and the incredible attraction this different narratives give people. And so the point now is to spread this different framework. And again with the idea that the different framework has to go in hand in hand with experiments on the ground. We're trying here in Tulsa now to push the local administration to try out some participated budgeting. Participated budgets were an idea that came out actually in Porto Alegre in Brazil in the 1980s and had incredible class effects in terms of really empowering those who are usually really oppressed and marginalized in the United States. They have been used before. They've been kind of captured by the system participated budgeting tools in the sense that usually, you know, sometimes they're used to say, hey, see, we are democratic. What do you want? Here's a million dollars that you can kind of like decide on collectively. The rest, the real money is decided by the usual suspects for the usual suspects. So. But I do think that these tools are important because they bring back that sense of agency that so many of us really just needs, need to feel. So first feeling it and understanding it and then trying to actually mobilize it in a more radical sense. Participated budgets, I think, are one of the cures against austerity, and they need to be pushed so as to include also the revenue side, like ask, where does this money come from? Why am I as a worker getting taxed?

A (33:00)

We've run out of time. I wish we weren't. It's the whole horror of the limits that we face. But stay with us. We're going to do this one last point that we prepare for our patreon. So stay with us. We'll be right back. Thank you, Rick, and for all of my audience, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.