Freedom, Capitalism, and America's Missing Revolution

Summary

The Money with Katie Show

Episode: Freedom, Capitalism, and America's Missing Revolution
Host: Katie Gatti Tassin
Guest: Andrew Hartman (Professor of History, Illinois State University)
Date: November 26, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the influence of Karl Marx on American economic, political, and cultural life—both historically and in contemporary discourse. Host Katie Gatti Tassin speaks with historian Andrew Hartman, whose recent book "Karl Marx in America" challenges listeners to reconsider the role of Marx’s ideas in shaping both the nation's self-concept and the persistent tension between freedom, labor, and capitalism. Together, they delve into Marx’s biography, his observations on America, class consciousness, the impact of industrialization, racism, and gender, and how these factors continue to influence modern American society and personal finance attitudes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Was Karl Marx and Why Does He Still Matter?

[05:10 – 13:40]

• Hartman positions Marx as a philosopher of freedom, underlining why his ideas resonate in America, a country obsessed with freedom.
• Marx’s Biography:
  • Born in Prussia (1818), early radical journalist, exiled across Europe.
  • Eventually settles in London, lives in poverty, supported by Friedrich Engels (who managed his father’s Manchester factory).
  • Marx’s work for the New York Tribune as a European correspondent, provided in-depth commentary on US events.
• Quote:

  “Marx offered a philosophy of freedom that was largely missing from American political discourse... in a capitalist society... most people have to sell their labor in order to survive.” — Andrew Hartman [05:10]

• Marx viewed American freedom as incomplete, particularly for those lacking autonomy over their work and bodies.

2. The Unrecognized American Relevance of Marx

[13:40 – 22:01]

• Americans often elevate thinkers like Jefferson, Madison, and Adam Smith, yet rarely include Marx.
  • Marx, more than Enlightenment philosophers, explains dynamics central to modern American life: the transformation wrought by capitalism and industrialization.
• Smith’s "Wealth of Nations" critiqued state-centered mercantilism, but Marx’s critique addressed what capitalism had become—factory-driven and global.
• Quote:

  “Smith was mostly writing about... the mercantilist system... But the Industrial Revolution had not yet taken place... That’s the Industrial Revolution that Marx was writing about.” — Andrew Hartman [16:29]

3. Marx’s Unique Observations about the United States

[22:01 – 27:51]

• Marx’s early fascination: America might be the first to socialism due to political democracy and lack of aristocracy.
• Tocqueville’s warning (that democracy might lead to wealth redistribution) was, to Marx, a promising sign.
• Over time, Marx recognized how westward expansion ("the lid on the pressure cooker" [25:57]) and the centrality of private property stymied class conflict and revolution in America.
• Racial and geographic divisions (e.g., the frontier) allowed the elite to diffuse labor unrest.

4. The "Gospel of Success" and American Industrialization

[27:51 – 33:20]

• Shift from rural, self-directed labor to regimented factory work was traumatic for new industrial workers.
• "Gospel of Success" emerges as a top-down ideology:

  “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps... emerges [from elites] in the mid to late 19th century... it’s about being virtuous, not drinking, not being lazy.” — Andrew Hartman [31:25]

• Factory discipline required a cultural campaign to normalize industrial capitalism—leading to deeply American attitudes around work ethic, personal responsibility, and self-reliance.

5. The Corporation and Capitalist Evolution

[33:20 – 38:39]

• Corporations became dominant economic actors just before Marx’s death.
• Marx’s paradoxical view:
  • Capitalism/corporations necessary for progress—they aggregate workers for class consciousness.
  • Transition logic: If workers collectively recognized their role, they could socialize ownership.
• On public company structure:

  “It’s a pretty savvy way to distribute ownership... but 90% belongs to 10% of the people.” — Katie [36:46]

• Ongoing leftist and Marxist debates about reforming—versus abolishing—corporations, especially in an age of shareholder primacy and climate crisis.

6. "Working Class": Who Is It, Really?

[38:39 – 46:05]

• US conception: "Working class" often used as code for white, blue-collar, rural/conservative populations; often politicized without meaningful advocacy.
• Marxist conception:

  “Class is not an identity. It’s a relationship... Do you own the means of production? ... If you have to sell your labor... then you're working class.” — Andrew Hartman [40:49]

• Most Americans are “working class” by this relationship, but US culture and politics have historically avoided fostering class consciousness.
• The shift to "middle class" rhetoric in the 20th century blurred class relations further.

7. Professional Managerial Class (PMC) and Modern Class Dynamics

[46:05 – 49:20]

• The Ehrenreichs’ "professional managerial class" concept captures a privileged stratum of workers (e.g., professionals, intellectuals) who may serve or resist capitalist interests.
• Debate intensified post-2008, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders era—young PMCs facing precarity began shifting left.

8. FDR, the New Deal, and the Limits of Reform

[49:20 – 56:39]

• FDR as both "class traitor" and "savior of capitalism."

  “He becomes, both a class traitor and capitalism’s savior.” — Andrew Hartman [50:00]

• The New Deal brought state intervention, labor rights, and social safety nets—but didn’t threaten capital’s dominant position.
• Expansion of social democracy (as in Scandinavia) is preferable to US capitalism, but still subject to rollback by capital unless deeper power changes occur.

9. Reform, Revolution, and the Persistence of Inequality

[56:39 – 63:10]

• Even the most egalitarian reforms (social democracy, New Deal) are vulnerable unless capital is fundamentally dethroned.
  • Capital naturally seeks to consolidate political power and undermine gains for labor.
• Socialist aspiration: Not utopia, but “fixing” the root imbalance—though perpetual struggle is acknowledged.
• Hartman counters "human nature" arguments as ahistorical, emphasizing humanity’s malleability and history’s variation.

  “Humans have been on planet Earth probably for about 300,000 years... Most of human life has been in [non-hierarchical] situations.” — Andrew Hartman [61:25]

10. Marxism vs. Neoliberalism: Production or Consumption?

[65:32 – 72:37]

• Neoliberal economies focus on consumption and consumer "freedom"; Marxist theory centers on systems of production and labor exploitation.
• Keynesian economics prioritized demand and redistribution to maintain stability—which helped in mid-20th century, but failed to tackle labor exploitation.
• Quote:

  “Keynes is not the answer if you want socialism... The labor theory of value still matters... ultimately, in a capitalist economy... capital can only be accumulated by exploiting labor.” — Andrew Hartman [71:15]

11. Race, Gender, and the Vexed History of American Socialism

[72:37 – 81:16]

• Race:
  • Marx recognized—but perhaps underestimated—how racism divided workers, hindering solidarity and revolution.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the "psychological wages of whiteness" explains why white workers often aligned with elites rather than Black workers, undermining class unity.

  “White workers came to be more concerned with staying above Black workers than challenging the ruling class.” — Andrew Hartman [74:16]

• Gender:
  • Marx/Engels had limited analysis of women's oppression; Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” is foundational for Marxist feminism.
  • 20th-century thinkers like Angela Davis extended Marxism to seriously include gender and unpaid labor.

  “Engels was a much better feminist than Marx was.” — Andrew Hartman [80:47]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On American class:

  “Almost all of us are the working class. And it actually gives us agency as a group of people... to overcome our situation.” — Andrew Hartman [00:23, 40:49]

• On the New Deal’s dual legacy:

  “The reforms made life better for lots of working people, and they also ensured that American capitalism would persist in some fashion.” — Andrew Hartman [54:00]

• On corporations:

  “We don’t want to destroy the corporation... They allow us a sort of like easy route to socializing ownership, socializing the means of production.” — Andrew Hartman [36:20]

• On race and class:

  “The working class could not be divided along race, ethnic, national, gender... As long as the working class is branded in a black skin, it'll never be free.” — Andrew Hartman, referencing Marx [26:20]

• On socialism and human nature:

  “Life will always be a struggle, but it doesn’t have to be this much of a struggle.” — Andrew Hartman [60:06]

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Important Timestamps

• 05:10 — Marx as a philosopher of freedom and the American obsession with liberty
• 13:40 — Marx vs. Enlightenment thinkers in US history
• 22:01 — Why Marx thought socialism might happen first in America
• 27:51 — The rise of the "gospel of success" and its function
• 33:20 — Emergence, purpose, and future of the corporation
• 40:49 — How Marxists define "working class" vs. the American political use
• 46:05 — Introduction and analysis of the professional managerial class (PMC)
• 50:00 — FDR, the New Deal, and the fate of American capitalism
• 56:39 — The case for going beyond reform/social democracy
• 65:32 — Marxism versus neoliberalism: production, consumption, and labor value
• 72:37 — Race, gender, and the barriers to solidarity and revolution

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Tone and Style

The conversation is intellectually rigorous but accessible, blending historical analysis, economic theory, and personal anecdotes. Both Katie and Hartman use humor and self-awareness to open up complex ideas to a broad audience, often referencing contemporary political debates, podcast culture, and even viral memes.

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Conclusion

This wide-ranging discussion presents Marx not as a relic of radical politics, but as a thinker whose insights into work, freedom, and capital continue to illuminate the contradictions and struggles at the heart of American society. Listeners come away with a deeper understanding of what class means, why American attitudes toward capitalism and labor are so uniquely loaded, and how race and gender remain enduring—and essential—challenges to building solidarity. The episode offers a compelling invitation to see personal finance and economic systems through a richer, more critical historical lens.

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Next Episode Preview:
Katie will interview a neoclassical economist to explore the opposite end of economic thought—specifically, how to end low-wage work in America.

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(End of summary)

Transcript

[A]

This episode is brought to you by Diet Coke. You know that moment when you just need to hit pause and refresh. An ice cold Diet Coke isn't just a break. It's your chance to catch your breath and savor a moment that's all about you. Always refreshing, still the same great taste. Diet Coke make time for you time.

[B]

For Marx and for Marxists, class is not an identity, it's a relationship. It's how you as a person relate to the means of production. Do you own the means of production? Then you're not working class. But do you have to sell your labor in order to survive? Do you have to sell your labor and work for somebody who owns the means of production? Then you're working class. And it's kind of as simple as that. To my perspective, what the advantage of that conception of the working class is that it doesn't have this sort of like coded thing that we do in America and that is, oh, the working class, well, that's white people who used to work in factories or mines who are like disgruntled and conservative now. Or as Obama said, these are the people who cling to their guns and religion. Right? So it doesn't have that sort of like coded cultural terminology or baggage. It's not a victim ideology because almost all of us are the working class and it actually gives us agency as a group of people, as most people, to overcome our situation.

[A]

Welcome back to the Money with Katie show. I'm Katie Gattytassan and today I'm doing a solid for my college self who did not take advantage of her access to history classes because she was too drunk to see straight for approximately all four years. And I'm gonna interview a history professor. Andrew Hartman is a professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of a few different books, including one called A War for the Soul of A History of the Culture wars which hit my to be read list so fast it left skid Marks and Education and the Cold the Battle for the American School. But he's here with me today because of a third book published just this year about how the philosopher Karl Marx has influenced the development of the United States and the country's self concept for the last 150 years. We got a comment on a recent episode that nodded to red scare culture in the US and it occurred to me that it might be illuminating to talk to a historic historian who has studied that exact question in order to write a 500 page tome. How did we get like this? So today's episode Is partly philosophical, part history lesson. There's some theory in there and part me just asking the questions I've always wanted to ask an expert in the role of Marxism and how history was shaped. I know people across the political spectrum, from conservatives to libertarians to liberals to leftists listen to this show and Karl Marx is a historical figure and philosopher whose name has become a bad word for basically everyone except for the leftists. So hang in there. But it is undeniable that this is a person, this is a thinker who has had a tremendous impact on our history. And I am thrilled with how this conversation turned out. I think you're gonna learn a lot and I don't know, I had a lot of fun, so I hope you do too. Andrew, welcome to the Money with Katie show. Very excited you're here. A lot of what I'm going to be doing today is just quoting you to you and going. Tell me more about that. As a teaser, your book Karl Marx in America actually inspired an essay that I wrote a couple of months ago where I connected the fundamentals of the financial independence retire early movement to Marxist philosophy. And the reason that I did it was because of one singular line in the book where you write quote, for Marx, freedom required that people have independence over their work, over their time, over their bodies. Since most people in capitalist society lack such self rule and must sell their labor to survive, capitalism is incompatible with freedom. So as a reader I read that and I think, man, if I stripped that of any of its political economy flavor, that line would be right at home in a book about financial independence. So this was really a huge aha moment for me in understanding why I found theories about class and freedom and labor and in a bigger way, power, so compelling. So feel free to answer this however you would like to, but who was Karl Marx?

[B]

Yes. So the Karl Marx that I know, that I've spent years studying, that I wrote about in terms of how Americans thought about. Karl Marx was indeed a philosopher of freedom. And I argue that's one of the reasons why Marx has maintained viability and relevance across the last 170 some odd years of US history. And that is that Americans are obsessed with freedom. This is a long standing obsession going back to the Declaration of Independence. Of course, how we define freedom varies across time, across context, by person. But Marx offered a philosophy of freedom that was largely missing from American political discourse. And that is we in a capitalist society spend so much of our time at work, most people have to sell their labor in order to survive and they have to spend a great chunk of their lives working in order to survive, in order to put food on the table and. And while at work, most people don't have freedom, the type of freedom that really, truly is meaningful in terms of autonomy. And this is like a key aspect of Marx's philosophy across his lifespan. So Marx, of course, is a German, was born in Prussia prior to it becoming Germany. He was born in 1818 and spent his young life in poetry and philosophy. Got a PhD in Philosophy and was really intrigued by sort of long standing or ancient Greek and Roman philosophies of democracy and how people can be free and wrote a dissertation on this. But he was really, as a young man interested in becoming a journalist. And he edited a newspaper in the Rhineland, in his home city of Trier, where he got into some hot water because he was a radical from a very young age. He was like looking around him and seeing a lot of unfreedom. Now, Prussia was ruled by an autocrat, by an autocratic monarch. At the time, there was no such thing as democracy. So that was one challenge for Marx. But in addition to that, he was looking around and this is kind of like early stages of capitalist development in Prussia. And what accompanied early stages of capitalism, starting in the English countryside and then sort of spanning their way across the globe, was the enclosures of the land. So feudalism, say what you will, not a great system in terms of like autonomy and freedom, but people did have access to the land they could grow their own food on, on the land, like public land. They could raise animals on land that was like something that they had. And Marx in the Rhineland was noticing that peasants who had long collected wood on public lands were no longer able to, that there were laws created against that. It's one of the first articles he wrote in his newspaper that got the attention of the authorities. So Marx then spends a good chunk of his life living in exile, first in Paris, where he does a lot of writing, meets a lot of really interesting philosophers, including utopian socialists. Then the Prussian police chase him out of Paris. He ends up in Brussels, Belgium. The Prussian police again chase him out of Belgium. But this is right on the cusp of the 1848 revolutions. And by then, his good friend Frederick Engels. This is right in the time period where they're writing the communist manifesto of 1848. This becomes their most famous text in which they present in very poetic sort of pamphlet form their theory or their philosophy of capitalism and how it sort of emerges from history and how communism will come out of capitalism. But there they go, back to Prussia. Marx takes up editorship of a newspaper again and they become revolutionaries. In the 1840s, 48 revolutions, the radicals lose that revolution and again Marx is in exile. He goes to London where he spends the rest of his life living in exile until his death in 1883. It was a pretty tough existence. Living as a German exile in London, he was constantly impoverished. Marx had six children, but three of them died of a young age of the diseases that were typical of poor people living in urban settings in the 19th century. Tuberculosis. This is the time period when he becomes obsessed with political economy and spends a great deal of his life at the British Museum reading room reading everything from Adam Smith to David Ricardo to just like all kinds of statistical analyses of the British factory system. And it's in that time, over the course of many decades, that he develops his sort of long standing theory of capitalism, which comes out in the first volume of Capital 1867. At the same time, throughout the 1850s, he was a journalist writing for the New York Tribune. And this is an aspect of Marx's life that I, I've discovered in talking about my book that most people are wholly unaware of. Like what he wrote for an American newspaper. Indeed that was his main source of income in the 1850s, in addition to gifts he got from his good friend Engels, who was running his dad's factory in Manchester.

[A]

Whoa, that's kind of a fun. He was running a factory that his dad owned. I didn't know that. That's really interesting.

[B]

Yeah. Ingalls is the classic class trader, a member of the bourgeoisie who hated the bourgeoisie and wanted a communist revolution. And Ingalls, like, even though he owned a factory and had lots of workers in that factory, or he ran a factory his father owned, he was very friendly with his workers. And in fact he dated Irish woman who was a factory worker. This was kind of the love of his life. And he gave a lot of his money to Marx to keep Marx and his family afloat because Marx was constantly writing and not earning much income except as I mentioned, with his job at the New York Tribune. So during the 1848 revolutions, Charles Dana, who was one of the editors of the Tribune, this is the newspaper that was published by Horace Greeley. Horace Greeley being a Republican, the New York Tribune, it was called the World Tribune at the time, was the most read newspaper in the world.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Everybody who was anybody who joined the Republican party across the north and across the western United states in the 1850s read this newspaper, including Abraham Lincoln. So Dana goes to Europe in search of somebody who he thinks could be a good European correspondent for the newspaper. And everyone tells him he has to meet this guy Marx. So he does. They meet, they have a good conversation. But of course, this is in the midst of the Revolutions of 1848. It was kind of tough for Marx to commit to this new job. But eventually, by 1851, he does commit to this new job. And during the course of the 1850s, writes over 500 articles for the New York Tribune, mostly about. These are long articles, kind of Marx working out his ideas in real time, mostly about European politics, but also about the US But Marx constantly paid attention to the United States because of this job, because he had a lot of comrades who had emigrated to the United states after the 1848 revolutions. And he kept up correspondence with them. He was always intrigued about the United States because the United States was to his mind, quite different from Europe, quite exciting. He at various points believed that the United States was going to be home to the first sort of home to the socialist revolution because capitalism was so well developed in the United States. This passion really takes off during the Civil War and Marx writes extensively about the Civil War. You can pick up a collection of the published writings of Marx and Engels on the Civil War and they're quite illuminating. And again, this isn't reading Marx's well worked out philosophy. It's reading Marx's analysis in real time of events that are happening on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

[A]

I'm thinking about that. Karl Marx is a meme where it's like when you got staff, stand up for your newspaper, newspaper job at 10, but Revolution at 12. He's like trying to balance these conflicting commitments. I want to get into the America of it all, how he relates to America, because you open the book by saying, quote, to read Marx is to wrestle with the world made by capitalism. That world includes America, especially America. Citizens and scholars of the United States have long taken for granted the formative influence of the nation's founding philosopher, philosophers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Historians have also highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, John Locke and Tom Paine. But Marx is rarely considered alongside such luminaries. Yet he pointed to our modern world in ways none of the others did, because capitalism is arguably the most important feature of modern American life. What do you mean by that?

[B]

So these other philosophers, important in their own right. I don't mean to diminish the importance of these Other thinkers, Enlightenment philosophers. But the way in which Americans have always sort of interpreted the relationship of Enlightenment thought to our existence as Americans to our political system has been they gave us a theory of democracy and a theory of society, in the case of Tom Paine, a theory of freedom, a theory of protest that the founders then put into action and that we've been sort of working out over the last 250 years. But the thing that to me is really missing is even though Adam Smith wrote about capitalism, he wasn't in wealth of nations writing about a capitalism that came to exist in the early parts of the Industrial Revolution, which is when Marx was writing. Capitalism had been so transformed by then that Marx had, to my mind, sort of pinpointed some key aspects about capitalism that have been crucial to shaping US History ever since the Industrial Revolution.

[A]

So Adam Smith, wealth of nations was 1776.

[B]

Yeah, right. It's the timing of that's incredible.

[A]

I know, it's, it's kismet. So almost, you know, it'll be 250 years old next year. And I know that Smith is sort of considered like the father of capitalism. But what you're saying is that by the time Marx was writing about capitalism, the industrialization process had really transformed the system that Smith had written about.

[B]

Yeah, right. So Smith was mostly writing about wealth of nations was mostly a philosophical critique of the mercantilist system that had been in place for centuries that had governed trade between nations. Crown and state had controlled all trade, even through like state owned corporations like the British East India Company.

[A]

Oh, interesting. Okay. So he was critiquing a system where all transactions were like, mediated by the state. So he was taking it to the other. He was arguing for the free markets as a preferable to that arrangement.

[B]

Right. So he famously coins the invisible hand term as like a preferable conception of market behavior than state controlled behavior. And wealth of nations is a remarkable book and it's actually quite critical of many aspects of capitalism that the celebrants of Adam Smith later in the US and elsewhere would admire. But the Industrial Revolution had not yet taken place. The Industrial Revolution, which means the movement of production labor into factories, the sort of conglomeration of production into mass factories really starts in Britain in the 1830s and by the time you get to the 1860s and 1870s, it's really taken off in the United States. That's the Industrial Revolution that Marx was writing about, that Marx conceptualized. And that's a much more sort of, to me important aspect of capitalism that has defined American life for most Americans ever since the Industrial Revolution. And that's not something that these other Enlightenment thinkers, they didn't live to see and they weren't writing about. So I think sometimes our political discourse is impoverished across American history to the degree that it doesn't reckon with the sort of like class struggle within Industrial Revolution, which is what was the key to Marx's theory.

[A]

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[B]

Yeah, so Marx read a lot and thought about the United States, which, again, is not something that most people, even scholars, are aware of. Early on in his studies about the United States, he was reading these travelogues. So, like, this was like a common genre of book to write in the. The 19th century, or even going back to the 18th century. Europeans, usually rich aristocrats, would travel to the United States and write a book about their travels and their discussions with people in the United States, just their observations. The most famous, of course, is Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. De Tocqueville was a conservative, aristocratic French dude who hated democracy. And so it wasn't just the sort of, like, the fact that at that point all white men could vote. That was considered a radical thing, but that they had sort of like, they had a role in the sort of political culture, they had a role in society that Tocqueville did not like. And so it was kind of like a warning to his fellow aristocrats in Europe some keen insights. And Marx took those keen insights and kind of turned them on their head and said, whereas Tocqueville was greatly concerned that because you're giving working people, regular people, the right to vote, that they were going to vote in representatives who were going to redistribute wealth and take away the property from the rich. Yeah, right. Marx is like, that could happen. And that's great. And so maybe the United States, because of this, political democracy, is the place where socialism will first happen. And he was looking to some of the political parties that were developing in the 1830s, like the working Men's Party in New York and Philadelphia, as kind of like a key indicator. He grew skeptical quite quickly after that when he recognized that political democracy was quite easily manipulated, because when it came to it, private property was protected so vehemently in the United States, which allowed the rich to accumulate more and more wealth, and the rich were able to manipulate the political system. He recognized that very early on. And so. So he had pretty keen insights into the fact that the bourgeoisie, which was his term for capitalists, or the capitalist Class had a great deal of power in the United States and were much more advanced in their attitudes towards capitalism because there was no aristocracy in the United States kind of holding them back. And so he thought that whereas that gave them a lot more power over the whole system, things were progressing at a much more rapid clip because Marx preferred capitalism to feudalism, because he thought that that was going to sort of progress or develop the means of production so that the working class would also develop their own class consciousness, which would lead to socialism. He just thought things were happening much more rapidly in the United States and that maybe in the United States, because there was going to be this large industrial working class was going to be the place where socialism would come before. Before we. I mean, yeah, we laugh. Right. But before we kind of laugh at that prediction. There were many times during his life where he had qualifications to this. He grew more circumsp effect. He recognized that as Americans had the capacity to move westward. So in Europe, when the cities got kind of clogged up with people and working class people got quite radical. And that's when revolutions happened. In the United States, you didn't see this. If cities got clogged up with immigrants and overcrowded, people would just move westward. And lots of American historians and theorists over the last century or longer have pointed to this frontier during the 19th century that, well, it depends what side of the sort of ledger you're on. But either you sort of thought about the west as sort of leading to more democracy or leading away from socialism.

[A]

Oh, that's so fascinating. The geography itself enabling that. The lid on the pressure cooker to let off the steam.

[B]

Yep. So for Marx, that was like, well, we're gonna. That sucks. We're gonna have to wait for socialism, because until the entire continent fills up.

[A]

Until they've reached the PA can overpopulate to the point that they have nowhere else to go.

[B]

Yeah. And he assumed that was gonna happen. He was right. It maybe took longer than he thought because, you know, he lived in a time period when immigration from Europe to the United States was massive and constant. Right. And then so, like, on top of that, he also recognized that slavery was a problem. Right. And that's why he was so fascinated by the Civil War, slavery and racism. His theory of socialism was predicated on the. On a notion of working class solidarity. Like the entire working would come together to overthrow capitalism and create a new and better society. The working class could not be divided along race, ethnic, national, gender. Like, the working class could not be divided. Like he hated slavery from a sort of like, moral position. He was deeply opposed to it in and of itself. But he also argued that the working class could never organize appropriately, get enough power until slavery was abolished. And he famously wrote in Capitol that as long as the working class is branded in a black skin, it'll never be free. I'm paraphrasing. And so he recognized that there's at least two things that historians have pointed to as well since Marx that have prevented socialism in the United States. So Marx was both hopeful, optimistic about the US and fascinated by the US as were lots of Europeans in the 19th century. But then he, he grew deeply skeptical because of some pretty important barriers to socialism.

[A]

Very relatable. Yeah, I want to come back to the working class and racism in the United States. But on industrialization, that shift in the US Feels like a critical period for shaping the consciousness that persists today about work in America. So another quote. The gospel of success was a byproduct of a rapidly expanding industrial economy. Immense growth required lots of factories, but it also required lots of workers. There were plenty of workers, but most of them were rural pre industrial folk unconditioned to working 6 days per week, 12 hours per day under highly regulated conditions. Such workers were uninterested in becoming yoked to the time clock. They knew from experience there was more to life than grueling labor under the watchful eyes of the boss. And they were quick to criticize the industrial order as inferior to the agrarian one. Acutely aware of alternatives, many of these workers willingly took action. Between 1880 and 1900, there were nearly 37,000 strikes in the United States states. The gospel of success was impeccably designed for battling with working class intransigence. So tell me more about this gospel of success. What do you mean?

[B]

So I think this is really important. And whenever I'm teaching my US History students about this period in US History, I'm trying to convey to them how radically foreign it was to have to go into a factory every day and work in very regimented conditions. Not only foreign, but miserable. Right. And so it's again, to repeat myself, it's not as if, like being a peasant in sicily in the 19th century was like some utopian existence. But when these people were sort of pushed off the land and immigrated to the United States and were thrown into factories, it seemed much worse to them. Same, for example, with, like, these people who had moved out west in search of, you know, whether they were immigrants or not, in search of just independence of the ability they would hope to sort of have a little chunk of land and grow their own food and maybe make a little profit on the side. When that was increasingly foreclosed upon in the late 19th century, as increasingly corporations and the rich monopolized the land and people were again, in order to survive, they had to sell their labor, which often meant going into some sort of factory like conditions. That was an extremely foreign existence for them, an unpleasant existence for them. And so this top down, elite driven ideology begins to be at work in the sort of like mid to late 19th century as the sort of need for labor arises in an industrial system. And this is like the classic Americana ideology. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and this is when it emerges. And again, it's elite driven. So like you had a bunch of people who either got rich traveling around the country, being influencers, early influencers, giving speeches about the need to. This is how you can be successful.

[A]

Dale Carnegie.

[B]

Yeah, like this goes way back right into the 19th century. And it included, for example, Chester Arthur, it included a president, it included, like Andrew Carnegie after he got rich and became one of the titans of industry or robber barons. He then wrote a book called the Gospel of Wealth in which he's trying to sell this ideology about how you too can do what I do. And it's about discipline, it's about being virtuous, it's about not drinking, it's about not being lazy. The same sort of ideology that just sort of has infused American culture for a very long time. It's about not sitting around eating avocado toast. So, you know, you had these people who, they were used to an existence in which they could take two hour lunches, take a nap, drink some beer. They were used to.

[A]

That sounds pretty nice.

[B]

Yeah, they were used to an existence in which they could take like, like lots of days off around festivals or various holidays. The industrial existence was not that. So a new ideology emerges that just is pushing people to have what we now know as maybe the Protestant work ethic.

[A]

Well, when I think about the factories, we don't. This is actually kind of a political lightning rod today that, like, there aren't really many factories left in the United States. We sent them all elsewhere and sent other people to do that unpleasant factory work. But there are still a lot of American corporations. And in the same way that the factory used to be the location for or recipient of all of that capitalist angst, it feels like the corporation now has sort of usurped that symbolically as like the source of pain. What Did Marx think of American corporations when he was still alive? How did he think about these, these monolithic entities?

[B]

Yeah, so the corporation really in the United States emerges as like the center of economic power in the late 19th century. So kind of right before Marx died in 1883, he wrote a little bit about this. His whole conceptualization of capitalism is that it's a necessary sort of human development to ridiculous the world of these sort of like long standing reactionary traditions. But also it's necessary because it brings workers together under conditions in which they're going to recognize their common interests and they're going to develop a class consciousness and they're also going to recognize that sort of the way in which they're working together, they don't need their bosses.

[A]

Interesting. Can I clarify something then?

[B]

Yeah, of course, of course.

[A]

So is it fair to say that Karl Marx saw capitalism as a necessary transition period to something better? And what you're telling me is that he saw corporations specifically as important in that transition because they allowed people to work closely together and realize that like the layers of hierarchy of management and supervisors, et cetera, were not actually necessary them to do their jobs?

[B]

Yes, that's exactly it. Now he didn't talk too much about corporations because again, this was really pretty nascent. Yes, exactly. But you can sort of get kernels of this in Marxist thought. But he, I mean, he was looking around, he was studying the development of capitalism carefully in the UK and US and Germany and elsewhere. And he just believed that it was going to become a global system. He was right there. He believed that it was going to overtake all feudal or traditional societies pretty much right there. And he believed that it was going to bring workers together in terms of development in such a way that they were going to, it was going to socialize production. And so what he thought that the transition from capitalism to socialism might be is when the workers recognized they didn't need the bosses, they didn't need ownership, it would also socialize ownership. And that would be the sort of key, sort of transitional piece towards socialism. So after Marx died, so really we're Talking like late 19th, early 20th century, the corporation becomes a major problem in American life. It's the reason why you get a populist movement because these bank and railroad corporations were destroying the life of small farmers across the country. It's the reason why you get the sort of early emergence of a labor movement with the Knights of Labor. And then the AFL and Marxists in this time period are looking at the corporation and their argument Was we don't want to destroy the corporation. So they kind of were at odds with the populists who wanted to destroy corporate power.

[A]

Oh, fascinating.

[B]

The populace wanted to destroy corporate power so that they could have sort of like their own regional capitalist power, like a small capitalism as opposed to a big capitalism. The Marxists said we sort of embrace big capitalism. We just appropriate it. We take it over the corporations or socializing production. And they're going to allow us a sort of like easy route to socializing ownership, socializing the means of production.

[A]

I was thinking about this the other day just how, if pressed, I think I could make a case for the way in which publicly traded companies are set up, where the ownership is divided into a bunch of tiny shares that can then be bundled together and diversified. That that's actually a quite elegant way to distribute ownership of an economy and all the reward and risk within it to a lot of people. But that the key issue with it is that something like 90% of it belongs to 10% of the people, but distributed more evenly. Like you could make the case that it's a pretty savvy way to distribute ownership of an incredibly complex system.

[B]

Yeah, and I think it's a debate that continues on the left especially, I guess I would say, in the context of global warming, because corporations are a serious sort of impediment to, well, a whole host of things, but in particular to doing something positive in terms of stemming global warming. And this is especially true since I guess what you would consider the shareholders revolution, in which shareholders got control through CEOs of corporations, so that short term profit became the only really significant motivating factor for corporations. And so there's like lots of environmentalists on the left who just think we have to destroy these things. But then there are others, more Marxist minded socialists. Like there's a book by Bhaskar Sunkara called the Socialist Manifesto, which I recommend to people in terms of just like thinking around creative ways of how we can get to a better society. He's kind of tried to work out what worker ownership of corporations might look like and how we could get there and how that might help us transform society.

[A]

I want to come back to the role of the working class in all of this because I think that's inextricable from ideas like worker ownership. I'm interested in your perspective of the narrative role or function that the working class plays in American consciousness. I was listening the other day to a podcast called Know youw Enemy. It was an older episode from 2019 called Working Class conservatism. And it jumped out at me for the way in which it essentially looked at the quote, unquote, working class as functioning like shorthand in the US for a sort of permanently bottom or lower tier segment of society. And that because that is our conception of it, and you pair that with the Protestant work ethic ideal, there is a dignity that we assign to it sometimes, like those who are in these hollowed out manufacturing towns. But there's also in many ways an association with failure. And so the podcast episode was co hosted and then had a guess where two of the three people had grown up in working class conservative families and essentially noted that, that their conservatism was really rooted in this idea that as a belief system, conservatism is more likely to emphasize your personal agency and your ability to improve your life. Whereas the left historically has focused on how systems impact oppressed groups of people, or how systems or structures might victimize people in society. And that having agency or getting your due in a just world is a far more compelling idea if you are trying to improve your life or you're unhappy with your current station in life. So this idea of the working class and how it kind of becomes a little bit of a political football, like both sides will speak to it, neither side really is ever actually doing anything to meaningfully help it. From a Marxist lens, what is the working class? And who is in the working class?

[B]

Yeah, that's the key question when you're thinking about the difference between a Marxist conception of capitalism and how historically we've come to think about capitalism in the United States. Because one of the reasons why the working class as a concept or as a term has become, as you describe it, as a political football is because especially across the 20th century, Americans have not had sort of class consciousness of the Marxist sort of sort. For Marx and for Marxists, class is not an identity. That's it's just simply not an identity. It's a relationship. It's how you as a person relate to the means of production. Do you own the means of production? Then you're not working class. But do you have to sell your labor in order to survive? Do you have to like sell your labor and work for somebody who owns the means of production than your working class? And it's kind of as simple as that. And what that. To my perspective, the advantage of that conception of the working class is that it doesn't have this sort of coded thing that we do in America, and that is, oh, the working class. Well, that's white people who used to work in factories or mines who are disgruntled and conservative now. Or as Obama said, these are the people who cling to their guns and religion. Right. So it doesn't have that sort of like coded cultural terminology or baggage. It also doesn't mean that the working class, it's not a victim ideology because almost all of us are the working class. And it actually gives us agency as a group of people, as most people, to overcome our situation if we recognize our position relative to those who own the means of production, those who own the things that are required to live, to produce. That's the Marxist conception. But of course, across American history, because it's been very difficult to develop a Marxist class consciousness in the United States for a whole host of reasons, the working class hasn't sort of taken on that meaning. And so oftentimes it's like an identity, it's a sort of sensibility. And I think you're right that it's like a notion that okay, we have dignity, we're as individuals and we need to be sort of like self reliant and work our way out of our situation, have agency in that we're not victims. And then on the other hand, you have this especially in the 20th century, rather than focusing on the working class because again, that seems like a sort of like if we want to move out of a way of thinking about class, most Americans became middle class in the 20th century. And it's a way to sort of like de emphasize the class relationship, to de emphasize capitalism. If most Americans are middle class, we can kind of appeal to the mass in the middle as politicians. And so you still get politicians on left and right who talk about the middle class rather than the working class. Even though as far as I can tell, whatever the middle class is, it hardly exists anymore.

[A]

Back to this conversation with Andrew after a quick break. Let's talk microplastics. Years ago, Caraway founder and CEO Jordan Nathan accidentally overheated a non stick PTFE coated pan and got sick. Realizing that over 70% of cooking in baking pans sold in America are coated with the same harmful ptfe, Jordan set out to launch a non toxic cookware alternative. You've probably seen Caraway's fan favorite cookware set online and now you can outfit your entire kitchen with Caraway's products. Caraway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It can save you up to $190 versus buying the items individually. Plus plus if you visit CarawayHome.comMWK. you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com MWK Caraway non toxic Cookware Made Modern. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman's X Bank USA Salt Lake City branch terms and more at applecard.com. You brought up the 20th century and and I think that it sounds like the highest level interpretation here is capital. Class owns the means of production. Working class is anybody who trades their labor and their time for a wage. What do you think about the Ehrenreichs addendum of the professional managerial class?

[B]

Talk about a lightning rod. There was a moment about 10 years ago when that was all about the discourse.

[A]

Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what it means or what that original theory was, and then kind of how you assimilate it or maybe reject it as part of the broader theory.

[B]

So if we think about class in the Marxist sense as a relationship, which I do, then that would mean that most of us are in the working class. But if we embrace that, we have to recognize the obvious fact that not all workers are created equally.

[A]

Right? For example, I have a fake job. Yeah, I talk into a microphone for money.

[B]

Well, I get to teach history to a bunch of adults. And then I, in my free time, I guess, write books. It's not the same as working at a Starbucks, even though I would argue I consider myself a member of the working class through relations. I don't own the means of production, and as such I'm in a union, appropriately so. But of course. So like, I think this really emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Barbara Ironreich, as you said, was kind of the first to coin the term professional managerial class. There was a sort of like strata or a layer of people that existed between most people who had to sell their labor and then the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. Most of the PMC sort of serviced the capitalist class, whether they were their financial advisors, their bankers, their lawyers. The list goes on. But then there's some element of the PMC that kind of rejected the values of the ruling class and consciously aligned with the working class and these were your radical intellectuals, often Marxist intellectuals. It was a way to talk about, I guess what you would call mental labor, cultural labor. And this is a long standing sort of debate in Marxist circles and left wing circles going back to the early 20th century. And that is like what is the role of the intellectual? If you're a Marxist and you think that the working class is where the revolutionary action is because only the working class can sort of stop the gears of capitalism collectively, then what's your role as an intellectual? To me it was just a continuation of that debate. And so I don't think if there is a professional managerial class, in other words, kind of like an elite privileged group of the working class, then I think it's very clear that the pmc, as we are designated, is divided. And lots of the PMC have sort of like served the interest of capital and some of us haven't. I think it became a hot button issue after 2008 financial collapse, during the 2000 and tens in the midst of Occupy Wall street and the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the emergence of democratic socialists of America. I think then it became a hot button issue because it seemed increasingly like lots of young would be PMCs were living increasingly precarious lives and were turning to the left instead of the sort of center or right where they were historically projected to go.

[A]

So it sounds like if we're going back in time again to your history of the late 19th and your early 20th century United States, there was a wave of fairly anti capitalist, anti monopoly, anti robber baron sentiment that peaked in the 1930s during the Great Depression when the consensus was sort of like capitalism failed, it broke, it didn't. This doesn't work. And then enter fdr. Can you speak to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's impact and influence in shaping the direction that this country went next?

[B]

Had I been living in the 1930s, I might have had sort of like a perplexing attitude towards fdr. It depends. Some Marxists thought of him as a working class hero. Some Marxists thought of him as the reason why there wasn't going to be a socialist revolution. When he was elected in 1932. Not just the United States, but the global economy was in greater disarray than ever before. And especially in Europe, but not just Europe. The political responses to that disarray were all over the map and were moving away from liberal democracy as the United States and some European nations had of practiced and celebrated famously, Russia turned to communism with the Bolshevik Revolution. Just as famously, and I would argue more distressingly several Countries in Europe, from Italy to Spain to Germany, were turning to fascism as a solution to not just the economic crisis, but as a solution to the emergence of large working class radical parties, Communist parties. The way to save private power, really save a version of capitalism in Europe was often fascism in the United States. FDR was elected in 1932. The communist movement was getting off the ground. It really sort of hits its stride by 1934, 35, especially in sort of the labor radicalism of that time period. So that's part of it. But there was also sort of the early signs of the emergence of a fascist movement in the United States. So FDR gets elected. The Republican Party, which had been in the White House for the previous 12 years, had essentially failed to deal with this novel economic condition known as the Great Depression. And fdr, who comes from the American elite, there have been few presidents who were as elite as fdr. We're talking a great deal of wealth. He kind of becomes, in a sense, both a class traitor and capitalism's savior.

[A]

Such an interesting paradox.

[B]

I know, isn't it?

[A]

I just want to, like, take a moment with that. A class traitor, but also the savior of American capitalism. Because he was, as I understand it, a reformer who rejected that idea of class consciousness. Correct?

[B]

Yeah. So here's how I think about fdr. And to put my cards on the table, I think he's the greatest president in U.S. history, him and Abraham Lincoln, which goes to show you that like, as a, as a Marxist who is also a socialist, this is maybe the best we could have gotten in that time period. So things are crumbling. There's this kind of sort of laissez faire slash earlier progressive in power with Herbert Hoover. And capitalists are intransigent. The economy's crumbling. Close to a third of the American working population is unemployed. Red lines, shanty towns. Things are distressing. And that was people's attitude at the time. Capitalism has failed. We have to do something radical in order to move out of it. And so FDR to me becomes. He's not a class traitor in the sense that I do think he saved capitalism and saved the sort of American version of democracy as it existed at the time. And he was conscious or he recognized that was what he was doing, that was what needed to be done. A lot of capitalists were intransigent. They weren't willing to change their practices. The capitalists were driving capitalism into the ground. FDR and a group of intellectuals that he surrounded himself with his so called brain trust, they recognized that they had to do something quite radical if they were going to save capitalism. And so they started with the kind of, like, state regulation of capitalism that the United States had never seen before. And then they also, across the 1930s, embraced the radical movements, including the labor movement, including, really communism, and sort of, like, tamed the more militant edges of those movements and brought them into the system. And so, like, for example, in 1935, during the Second New Deal, FDR and the Democratic Congress asked the Wagner act, which is what created the National Labor Relations Board, which, for the first time in U.S. history, the state is now actually neutral in the relationship between capital and labor. It makes labor unions possible. And more than that, it sort of brings labor unions into the government, into the Democratic Party, and it really, for better or worse, neutralizes radicalism. So the reforms were both necessary. The reforms made life better for lots of working people, and they also ensured that American capitalism would persist in some fashion.

[A]

I want to dig a little bit deeper into that. You write, quote, american capitalism, Roosevelt conceded, had the productive capacity to provide every American with a secure and decent life. The problem, though, was that, as configured, it left millions behind. That was true 100 years ago. It's basically still true today. And this is where I think a lot of modern Americans would still align with even Americans who are skeptical perhaps of capitalism. I think the examples that I and others will often point to of countries that are doing a better job than we are in ensuring that people's basic needs are met are social democracies like Norway or Sweden. These are ultimately still capitalist market economies. They just have, you know, basic protections for people. And I think that can be a common piece of pushback that I would love to hear your thoughts on, which is basically, well, why then consider yourself a socialist? Or why pursue a system like socialism? If we can tweak the margins of capitalism and get an outcome like Norway, wouldn't that be better? This is a question that I get frequently. So I'm curious how you. I assume you get it as well. How do you answer that?

[B]

Before I begin, I would just say I would much prefer the system in. You know, I lived in Denmark for a year. I would much prefer that to what we have in the United States. That would would, to me, be remarkable, almost inconceivable. Too much progress to hope for. Yeah, but here's how I would answer that. So the 20th century, to me, is a lesson in why we need to go beyond the New Deal. So the United States, thanks to FDR and the labor movement and lots of Other movements creates a New Deal order in the middle of the 20th century, that. That is the best. It's the closest the United States has ever come to social democracy. It's wholly imperfect for a whole host of reasons I probably don't need to get into. And it doesn't go nearly as far in that time period as the social democracies of Northern Europe. And yet it creates a decent life for lots of working Americans. And it stabilizes the system of capitalism. And really that's the only period in US history where capitalism has really been stable. And it has a lot to do with pretty intense state regulation. And it has a lot to do with the fact that the working class had decent wages for the most part. Not like, sufficient, but I would say decent. Much better than what we had before and much better than what we had after. And it has a lot to do with the fact that. That there wasn't inequality, which just creates pathologies in the whole society. The problem with that as thinking of that as sufficient is that capital remained in power. And because the sort of main prerogative of capital is accumulation, and the best way to accumulate capital is to gain more political power over the working class, there was a constant struggle. And eventually capitalists succeeded, controlling the state once again to the degree that the regulatory system was crushed and labor unions were crushed. This is what we talk about when we talk about neoliberalism. So I guess if we have a system in which capital remains in power, capital will constantly seek out ways to diminish the power of the working class, will constantly seek ways to crush social democracy or the New Deal. And in fact, the social democracies of Scandinavia, even though they're still to this day much, much more robust and preferable than anything we have here, anything the UK has, anything Canada has, and those are both preferable to what we in the US have. From my vantage point, those social democracies are also being diminished by the international pressures of capital because you're still keeping.

[A]

The underlying incentive system and means of production controlled by a very small number of people. Relatively speaking, any progress that you make is always going to be continuously beat back and you're going to have to fight for it again. So you're kind of always clawing this power back and forth and having to defend it as opposed to it. Sounds like, if I may be so bold, that. That your perspective would be that fixing it once and for all would look like something like socialism, something where power is actually redistributed.

[B]

Yes. And by saying as much I don't like think about some sort of utopian horizon as I don't think of socialism as utopian. Like we're going to fix these problems once and for all and they'll never return. Life will always be a struggle, but it doesn't have to be this much of a struggle. I think, yeah, I think that we can make our conditions so much better for so many people that people will invest in the new society to the degree that they're gonna not allow some small class of elites to claw their way back to power.

[A]

That sort of distinction is important to make because I think for people that are completely unaware of this, which would be most Americans, I would assume there is an assumption, I think that socialist thinking is naive and utopian and assumes that all of the flaws or inherent shortcomings of human nature would never allow for something like that.

[B]

The human nature argument is the one I get the most often. Like if I'm speaking with my father in law. Love the guy, he's a smart guy, he's a well read guy and he read my book and he told me that he likes the book even though he still doesn't like Marx.

[A]

Well, that's a high compliment. That is a high compliment.

[B]

But he always lets me know that capitalism is just a much better fit than anything else, especially socialism with human nature. Right. It sort of like allows human nature to flourish or it matches to human nature. And I just as a historian find that argument, sorry, father in law, absurd because I hate to get all sort of prehistoric, but humans have been on planet Earth probably for about 300,000 years. I don't know the number sort of changes all the time, but it's been a while. Humans only ever settled with agricultural surpluses about 15 to 20,000 years ago. So we're talking about a period of like 250 or more thousand years in which humans lived in small little tribes of hunter gatherers constantly on the move. These tribes did not have hierarchy as we as modern humans understand hierarchy. Their entire sort of understanding of life was so radically different than ours, and yet most of human life has been in that situation. How do we sort of match up most of human life to how we now conceptualize human nature of some sort of, of social Darwinist dog eat dog struggle? I just think human history and human life is so variegated, there's so much there. Marx always argued that yes, there is a human nature, but it changes, it's malleable and it changes alongside historical change. It changes alongside how the human relation to the material means of production changes. I just think that the more history I study, the more of a relativist I become on the question of human nature.

[A]

I could imagine someone pushing back and saying, and because so much of the advancement and development has happened in the last couple of hundred years, how do we know that the hierarchies that were instituted wasn't what enabled that to happen? I also have an adult man in my life who I have these types of conversations with. And that is often what goes. Gets pointed to, is like, well, and once we moved to this capitalist mode of production and instituted all these hierarchies and so on and so forth, then we got all of these wonderful advancements. And so who's to say that that's not what did it?

[B]

Marx would have called this dialectical, which would mean that I know not to get all, which would mean that, you know, one of the reasons why Marx. Marx argued that capitalism was a superior sort of replacement to feudalism is because feudal people lived in a society that wasn't dynamic, lived in a society where these sort of like reactionary traditions governed the way we thought, the way we behaved, the way we lived. And he would have included amongst those reactionary traditions like conservative interpretations of religion, patriarchy, racism. His hope, to the degree that he's. This hasn't fully come to fruition, but his thought was that because capitalism would sort of reduce all of us to sort of this economic cash nexus where all human interaction would be sort of valued upon our relation to a cash system, a market system, a system of wages and production, that these older sort of like hierarchical ways of being would go away. And Marx also marveled at the sort of dynamism of capitalist production, the ability of capitalism to figure out how to supply the whole human population with food. And yet we still had, when I say dialectical, we still have starvation amongst us. So, yes, we've made these advances, but how is this human nature? Why wouldn't it be more natural for us to have this productive capacity and feed everybody?

[A]

Right? So one distinction that feels really important to me between Marxist theory and neoliberal capitalism, which is the dominant regime that we live under now, is that Marxism seems almost exclusively focused on systems of production. So put another way, it focuses all of its efforts on understanding the mechanics of how and why things are made, as opposed to what the neoliberal economists believed, which was that consumption is what really matters and that consumers get to determine what's made because they have freedom of choice to choose what to buy. And so therefore they are the ultimate bosses in the arrangement, not the people who own the means of production. You write, quote, in rejecting Marx's production side economics, John Maynard Keynes rebuffed Marx's labor theory of value. A capitalist economy could maintain profitability and more importantly for Keynes, stability. So long as the products of capitalism had buyers. Labor was not the source of value upon which the whole edifice rested. The circulation of goods and services was ultimately what mattered. The Great Depression seemed to prove Keynes correct. Can we talk about that? Why would the Great Depression, the effects of the Great Depression, appear to have proven Keynes correct and then by extension proven the labor theory of value incorrect?

[B]

Yeah, so I don't think it proves the labor theory of value incorrect, but Keynes, I think, added an interesting component to understanding political economy in the 20th century that the Great Depression brings to the forefront. And that is so one of the problems that policy analysts and economists then, as historians now recognize that led to the Great Depression, is the United States. Productive capacities were greater than ever. And yet because of the inequality built into the system during the 1920s, the sort of most Americans, the working class could no longer afford to buy the products that were being produced. And this sort of created an instability in the system that led to the crash of the economy. Because what always happens when there's great amounts of economic inequality in capitalism is that the, and this is particularly true since the late 19th century, is that the rich, because they have all this gobs of capital, all this gobs of cash, they're looking to reinvest it. And they don't necessarily reinvest it in production at such periods because they can't sell the things they're producing. So they speculate.

[A]

Oh, interesting.

[B]

And that's when you get the sort of emergence of stock market bubbles, real estate bubbles, AI bubbles.

[A]

I was just going to say that is a fascinating lens for thinking about the overvaluation of artificial intelligence right now as being inextricably linked to the amount of wealth inequality and how toppy the market itself is and how this small group of people has so much wealth and they need somewhere to put it.

[B]

We wouldn't have an AI bubble or like a crypto bubble, like these insane sort of like investment bubbles. If society was more equal, because capital could be accumulated by investing money in production of goods that would service the working class or service the whole economy. That was Keynes point. And so rather than focus on the supply side, which is like a libertarian conception, he was much more focused on the demand side. So he would have argued that labor unions were a good thing because it would sort of pump up demand by increasing wages. He argued that in times of depression, the government could flood the economy with cash by just employing people to build things. In the process, you might get some cool things built, like bridges, infrastructure, highways. Yeah, but the most important thing to Keynes was that you're paying people a decent wage to do something productive that would put cash in their pockets, that would allow them to buy the goods being produced. That would sort of like, even out the sort of instability in the market. This is like the basic Keynesian and premise that governed most economic, political economic thought in the middle of the 20th century.

[A]

Do you agree with that?

[B]

I do to an extent. Like, if your goal is to maintain a stable capitalist economy, Keynes is the person to go to.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It ran into serious issues in the 60s and 70s because of inflation that became sort of like, torn away. So the United States was investing so much money, for example, in the Vietnam War, it was driving up inflation. And American workers, because of international competition, were not getting the same boost out of that government funds that they would have been in earlier eras. And so that's what created a sort of problem in the system. So it has to be, like, tightly regulated by people who know what they're doing. And that's tough to do in a context of, like, an American imperialist war overseas. So I buy it. But Keynes is not the answer if you want socialism. Even though conservative libertarian economists hated Keynes and thought of him as a socialist.

[A]

Anyone to the left of Milton Friedman is a Marxist, as we know.

[B]

Yes, because to me, the labor theory of value still matters in the sense that ultimately, in a capitalist economy, if the goal is the accumulation of capital, which it always is, capital can only be accumulated by exploiting labor capitalists, especially in times of inequality, when it becomes more difficult to exploit, labor will find other ways to invest capital, to sort of hopefully accumulate capital. But ultimately the system will run aground unless you can go back to that sort of original premise. And so Keynes had nothing to say about that necessarily, and he had nothing to say about the fact that fact that labor in a capitalist setting is a condition of exploitation. Marx's whole theory of freedom, to go back to the beginning of our conversation, was we're not free at work when we're being exploited because we don't have sort of control or autonomy over the means of production. We don't have autonomy in the workplace, we don't have freedom in the workplace, and we have to spend so much time at the workplace. Keynes was, to me, A much more sort of technical philosopher, economist. Marx had the technical side to a degree, but that's less interesting to me than his more sort of like philosophical side. How can we be free in a capitalist setting as workers?

[A]

Well, on that note, you mentioned earlier in this conversation that Marx hated slavery and that he was very interested in how that was going in the US and saw it as this impediment to real progress. There were other thinkers who had theories about why that initial fervor wasn't effective in changing anything. This Gilded Age Rage. Gilded. That would be such a good band name, Gilded Age Rage.

[B]

It's a punk band. It is.

[A]

So you quote W.E.B. du Bois during this same time in the 1930s and noted that he believed Marxism had to quote, account for, for the special intensity of American racism if it was to be a workable theory in the United States, class and race mattered. In thinking through capitalism and revolution, racism prevented socialism. I would love to know a little bit more about what you mean by that racism prevented socialism, because I think I know, but I would love to hear you elaborate. And on a related note, it's my understanding that gender and women didn't really factor into much of this. There really wasn't much written in the way of women's role or the role of domestic unpaid labor in what percentage of profits are enabled by the fact that there are women in these workers homes making their lives possible. So take that wherever you want. But I am curious about whether back then or today the role that you think racism and or sexism still plays in preventing progress.

[B]

I'll start with racism. When it comes to racism, Marx knew as much. He knew that racism was a problem preventing the working class solidarity necessary for the type of working class power that he hoped people would build that would lead to socialism. It's one of the reasons he was so opposed to, to slavery and so such a sort of like champion of the Union cause during the Civil War and actually become somewhat of a champion of Abraham Lincoln in the process. But of course, Marx, living in Europe in the 19th century, did not experience or he did not sort of observe firsthand racism in the United states in the 19th century and probably sort of underestimated its sort of role in keeping the American working class divided even after the Civil War. He had great hopes for Reconstruction after the Civil War. And when that failed, he was kind of mystified. He thought it was largely the role of capital in consolidating its power, which was true. But he kind of downplayed or ignored the role of racism in ending reconstruction. So when W.E.B. du Bois, who's one of my favorite thinkers in the 20th century, wrote this book, Black Reconstruction in america, published in 1935, to my mind, still one of the greatest books about US history ever written. He analyzes the Civil War and Reconstruction through a very Marxist lens, but sort of extends the Marxism to include the experience of racism in the American south at the time and why it was that white workers came to be more concerned with staying above black workers than challenging the ruling class in the South. And that's when he uses the terms the psychological wages of whiteness. It felt better to them to at least be above somebody than to think about them as aligned with a working class as a whole against this ruling class. And that again, is to me like one of the problems of developing the right kind of Marxist working class consciousness in an American setting. And why racism has sort of been one of the major impediments to that across time and all the way up until today. Similar dynamics when it comes to gender, of course, going all the way back to Marx. Marx did not himself have a very good politics of gender, certainly not one that we would consider woke by 21st century standards. And I, you know, I don't. I don't use woke the way the right uses woke.

[A]

Well, you know, woke and Marxist are interchangeable.

[B]

I know, right.

[A]

So.

[B]

But these debates were happening in the 19th century in, in the context of, like the International Working Men's association, which had several chapters in the United States. Marx was one of one of the leading figures of this radical socialist organization. The German chapter in the United States had this very sort of like, German working class heroic conception of the family, in which it was the job of the woman to sort of of raise good socialists. Whereas there was an American chapter that included some pretty radical feminist oriented people who believe that, like the Women's Question, as it was known at the time, fighting for women's suffrage, fighting for women's rights, fighting for sexual equality was a part of the struggle. So this is kind of baked into the cake of the history of Marxism in the United states. In the 1960s, a number of feminist theorists emerged who sort of expand upon or even challenge Marx racism in terms of gender, in terms of the household wage. My favorite thinker amongst all of them is Angela Davis. She wrote this classic essay while in prison.

[A]

Damn.

[B]

In 1970. And I analyze it at length in my book in which she's bringing together. She was like a very deeply informed Marxist theorist. She had studied with Herbert Marcuse, who was a member of the Frankfurt School. She was. Was, to my mind, one of the most creative Marxists in the 1960s and 70s. And she wrote about sort of over the course of time, how it was that women became particularly oppressed in a capitalist setting. And how everybody, if they wanted to sort of overcome capitalism, had to conceptualize the relationship between men and women in relation to capitalism. And why it was was that working class men had become patriarchal in a capitalist setting. She built upon a sort of, like, classic notion of a haven and heartless world. Like, being a worker in capitalism meant sort of being partially enslaved for while you're at work. And so at home, men wanted to be sort of like the king of the castle. You know what? It has this long title that includes the word dialectic.

[A]

I'm so curious. Okay, Women in Capitalism. Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.

[B]

That is the.

[A]

Let's go. All right, new reading. Reckless.

[B]

It's a long, complex essay that she wrote in prison. It's just remarkable, but I find it fascinating. And what I like about Du Bois and Davis and people like them, they're not like, rejecting Marxism, they're enhancing it, expanding it to include things that Marx might have either couldn't have known because he was a 19th century European man, or failed to know because he was a 19th century European man.

[A]

Well, I will be linking that essay in the Show Notes after I finish reading it. I remember looking into this last year at some point because I was sort of curious, what did Marx say about women? And. And the only thing that I really found was actually from Angles. And it was a book called the Origin of the Family, Property and State. And basically the primary thesis was that the patriarchy relies on private property rights, that it comes from private property rights. To be able to recognize, like, the unpaid labor of women in some capacity as being tied to these systems, I thought was pretty ahead of their time.

[B]

That book by Engels has become like the sort of like, genesis of a whole host of feminist literature across the 20th century. That is a classic text in the history of Marxist feminism, maybe the first text in the history of Marxist feminism. And Engels wrote that after Marx died. And he wrote it building upon some notes that Marx had taken. Marx was, like, intellectually there, but in terms of a person, in terms of priorities. Engels was a much better feminist than Marx was.

[A]

Well, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending so much time with me today. And thanks for writing an amazing 500 page history. The breadth and depth of your knowledge is just like stunning to me.

[B]

Well, thank you. That's what happens when you think libraries are utopian and you spend all your time there.

[A]

So. So there is a strain of utopian thought here. It's just, it's just contained the library system. Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

That is all for this week. We'll see you next week where I'm going to be talking to a neoclassical economist. So sort of the polar opposite of a Marxist about how to end low wage work forever. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and this episode was produced by me, Katie Gattytossan with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres, Devin Emery's president of Morning Brew Content. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half. The service admit is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.