#295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism

Richard Wolff is a Marxist philosopher and economist. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Skiff: https://skiff.org/lex to get early access – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium – Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit EPISODE LINKS: Richard’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/profwolff Richard’s Website: https://www.rdwolff.com Contending Economic Theories (book): https://amzn.to/3HykPwT Understanding Marxism (book): https://amzn.to/39qpm8b Understanding Socialism (book): https://amzn.to/3Og9XG3 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:12) – Marxism (15:41) – Communism (50:47) – Human nature (1:03:03) – Economics (1:09:54) – Capitalism (1:42:18) – Governments and corporations (1:53:13) – Stalinism (2:07:12) – Nazis (2:14:08) – Socialism vs Marxism (2:21:48) – Bernie Sanders and AOC (2:38:49) – Cultural Marxism (2:45:49) – Darkest moments (2:51:18) – Advice for young people (2:53:37) – Mortality (2:57:28) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Richard Wolff, one of the top Marxist economists and philosophers in the world. This is a heavy topic, in general and for me personally, given my family history in the Soviet Union, in Russia, and in Ukraine. Today, the words Marxism, socialism, and communism are used to attack and to divide, much more than to understand and to learn. With this podcast, I seek the latter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx, as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries. And in general, we need to both steel man and to consider seriously

• 0:46Lex Fridman?

  the ideas we demonize, and to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant and at times, dangerous. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Skiff for email, Indeed for hiring, Onnit for supplements, Blinkist for nonfiction, and Linode for cloud computing. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

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• 2:11Lex Fridman?

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• 2:29Lex Fridman?

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• 3:15Lex Fridman?

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• 4:00Lex Fridman?

  I start thinking through it. I start thinking through a design. And then you realize, no, that doesn't work for this reason, for that reason, for this reason, and so on. And then you have to stay in that failure, hold, and make sure mentally that you're correct in your evaluation. Backtrack and see, can we sneak around the reason that this doesn't work? So that, that can be really exhausting type of thinking. And for that, sometimes I will take an AlphaBrain to be a super rocket launcher boost for the mind. You can get up to 10% off AlphaBrain at lexfridman.com/onnit.

• 4:39Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Blinkist. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I can recommend a bunch of books from there. Some of the biggest, best nonfiction books ever are on there. Sapiens: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Beginning of Infinity by David Dutch, and the list goes on and on and on. I use it for three things. One, I use it to pick the books I'm going to read that I haven't read yet. Two, I use it to summarize books I just don't think I'll have time to ever get to, but they're part of our public discourse. So it's important to get at least a bit of a sense of what's going on.

• 5:24Lex Fridman?

  And finally, the books I've already read to review those books because the insights, the quick insights in Blinkist are better than anything I've ever seen anywhere. You can get a free 7 day trial and 25% off a Blinkist Premium Membership at blinkist.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Linode. It just brings a smile to my face. It's Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome compute infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale whatever applications you build faster and easier. This is both for small personal projects and huge systems. Lower cost than AWS, but more importantly to me is the simplicity, quality of the customer service with real humans, 24/7, 365.

• 6:09Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of competitors that can list, all of which I've considered, all of which I've used in the past. Linode is the best. It's the sexiest. It's the most reliable. It delivers on what a compute infrastructure should deliver on. Easy to use, easy to monitor, reliable, scalable, all that kind of stuff. And like I said, great customer service. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. That's their motto. It's a good motto. Visit linode.com/lex and click on the create free account button to get started with 100 bucks in free credit. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Richard Wolff.

• 7:12Lex Fridman?

  Let's start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all. What is Marxism? What are the defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition that takes its founding inspiration from the works of Karl Marx. But because these ideas that he put forward spread as fast as they did and as globally as they did, literally, it's 140 years since Marx died. And in that time, his ideas have become major types of thinking in every country on the earth.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  If you know much about the great ideas of human history, that's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time. And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity, is that the Marxian ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories, and economic conditions. So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently, in different places, at different times. And therefore Marxism, as a kind of first flush definition, is the totality of all

• 8:49Speaker 01

  of these very different ways of coming to terms with it. For the first roughly 40, 50 years, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism. Marx himself, that's all he really did. He never wrote a book about communism. He never wrote a book really about socialism either. His comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed. What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism. And that's what Marxism was, more or less, in its first 40 or 50 years.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Um, the only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks. In eighteen seventy-one, there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany, and then the result was something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian society. And Marx's people, people influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune, in the leadership of the

• 10:11Speaker 01

  commune. And Marx wasn't that far away. He was in London. These things were happening in Paris. You know, that's an easy transport even then. And for a short time, very short, Marxism had a different quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize society differently. Before, that had only been implicit. Now it became explicit. What is the leadership of the Paris Commune going to do? And why? And in what order? And in other words, governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted

• 10:56Speaker 01

  a few weeks, the French army regrouped, and under the leadership of people who were very opposed to Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed a large number of the Communards, as they were called, and deported them to islands in the Pacific that were part of the French Empire at the time. The really big change happens in Russia in nineteen seventeen. Now you have a group of Marxists, Lenin, Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again, a war, like in France.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Uh, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation because it is the government that loses World War One, has to withdraw, as you know, uh, Brest-Litovsk and all of that, and the government collapses and the army revolts. And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, um, splits, under the pressures of all of this, into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions. Lenin, Trotsky and the others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story

• 12:20Speaker 01

  short, he's in exile. Uh, his position, Lenin's position makes him, gets him deported because he says Russian workers should not be killing German workers. I mean, this is a war of capitalists who are dividing the world up into colonies and Russian working people have no, should not kill and should not die for such a thing. As you can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out. Interestingly, in the United States, the comparable leader at that time of the Socialist Party here, as you know, there was no Communist Party at this point, that comes later, um, the head of the Socialist Party, a very important American figure named

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Eugene Victor Debs, makes exactly the same argument to the, the Americans should not fight in the war. Uh, he's in the, he has nothing to do with Lenin. I don't even know if they knew of each other, but, uh, he does it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States. By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well, really very well, remarkable. Um, and he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you, if you see the link, um, although he had much more courage politically than, than Bernie has.

• 13:38Lex Fridman?

  Absolutely interesting. I'd love to return to that link maybe later.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:42Lex Fridman?

  History rhymes.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yes, the complicated story. Anyway, what, the importance in terms of Marxism is that now... This seizure of power by a group of Marxists, that is, a group of people inspired by Marx, developing what you might call a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians too, but a Russian interpretation. This now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism into a plan, at least, what are you gonna do in the Soviet Union? And a lot of this was then trial and error. Marx never laid any of this out.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if he had, because it was 50 years earlier in another country, et cetera. So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens and more later in China, and Cuba, and Vietnam, and Korea, and so on, is that you have kind of a bifurcation. Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism. But another part of it becomes a set, and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative, post-capitalist society ought to look like, how it ought to work.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  And there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion. And I would say that that's still where it is, that you have a tradition now that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism, notion of the alternative, and then a variety of each of those. And that would be the framework in which I would answer, that's what Marxism is about. Its basic idea, if you had to have one, is that human society can do better than capitalism, and it ought to try.

• 15:39Lex Fridman?

  And then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Fine.

• 15:45Lex Fridman?

  So we'll look at the critique of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back, what do you think Marx would say if he just looked at the different implementations of the ideas of Marxism throughout the 20th century? Were his ideas that were implicit were made explicit?

• 16:05Lex Fridman?

  Would, uh, would he shake his head? Would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations? Like, what do you, how do you think he would analyze it?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Well, he had a great sense of humor. I don't know if you've had a chance to take a look at his writing, but he had an extraordinary sense of humor. So my guess is he would deploy his humor in answering this question, too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of the interpretations of his work, and he's very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could erase the connection between those things and the lineage they claim from him, which he would. Uh, there's a German word, I don't know if these, if you speak the other languages.

• 16:48Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  There's a wonderful German word called verzichte, and it's stronger than the word refuse. It's if, if you want to refuse something, but with real, strong emphasis. That is verzichte darauf is a German way of saying, I, I don't want anything to do with that. And he would talk then, you know, in philosophical terms, because remember, he was a student of philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest. He would wax philosophical and say, you know, that, that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having a child. You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person and will find his or her own way.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  And these ideas, once they're out there, go their own way.

• 17:36Lex Fridman?

  And as you said, there's a particular way that this idea spread, the speed at which it spread throughout the world made it even less able to be sort of stabilized.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:46Lex Fridman?

  And connected back to the origins of where the idea came from.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians after the revolution, because they occupied a position for a while, not very long, but they occupied a position for a while in which I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these people criticizing capitalism for a long time, even the Marxists ever since mid-century. And these were the first guys who pulled it off. They made it. And so that there was a kind of presumption around the world. Their interpretation must be kind of the right one because, look, they did it. And so for a while, they could enunciate their interpretation.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  And it came to be widely grasped as something which, by the way, gets called in the literature official Marxism. The very idea that you would put that adjective in front of Marxism or Soviet Marxism or Russian Mar-- there were these words that where the adjective was meant to somehow say, kind of, this is the canon. You can depart from it, but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing. And by the 1960s, it was already dispar-- it was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of...

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And the irony is, particularly here in the United States, where the taboo against Marxism kicks in right after World War II, is so total in this country that I, for example, through most of my adult life, have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time simply explaining to American audiences that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism, which wasn't the canon before 1917 and hasn't been since at least the 1960s. But they don't know. It's not that they're stupid and it's not that they're ignorant.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  It's that, well, ignorance maybe, but I mean, it's not a mental problem. It's the taboo, shut it down. And so all of the reopening that in a way recaptures what went before and develops it in new direction, they just don't know.

• 20:16Lex Fridman?

  Nevertheless, it's a serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit. The Russians, the Soviets at the beginning of the 20th century made a serious attempt at saying, okay, beyond the critique of capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this? And so in that sense, not at a high level, but at a detailed level, it's interesting to look at those particular schools, maybe.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Right, because for example, let me just take your point one step further. You really cannot understand the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese and the others, because each of them is a kind of response, let's call it, to the way the Soviets did it. Are you gonna do it that way? Well, yes and no is the answer. This we will do that way, but that we're not gonna do. And the differences are huge, but you could find a thread, I can do that for you if you want, in which all of them are in a way reacting.

• 21:23Lex Fridman?

  To the originals?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so.

• 21:26Lex Fridman?

  Like maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  There's something like that.

• 21:33Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools of that Soviet Marxism? So we got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even let's expand out to Maoism. So maybe I could speak to sort of Leninism. And then please tell me if I'm saying dumb things. There's a, I think for Lenin, there was an idea that there could be a small sort of vanguard party, like a small controlling entity that's like wise and is able to do the central planning decisions. Then for Stalinism, one interesting, so Stalin's implementation of all of this,

• 22:15Lex Fridman?

  one interesting characteristic is to move away from the international aspect of the ideal of Marxism to make it all about nation, nationalism, the strength of nation. And then, so Maoism is, it's different in that it's focused on agriculture, on rural.

• 22:37Lex Fridman?

  And then Trotskyism, I don't know, except that it's anti-Stalin. I mean, I don't even know if there's unique sort of philosophical elements there. Anyway, can you maybe from those or something else, speak to different, unique elements that are interesting to think about about implementation of Marxism in the real world?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Probably the best way to get in the into this is to describe something that happened in Marxism that then shapes the answer to your question.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  In the early days of Marx's writings, and you know, he, his life spans the 19th century. He's born in 1818, dies in 1883. So literally, he lives the 19th century. And you might, I mean, to make things simple, you might look at the first half of the first two thirds of his life as overwhelmingly gathering together the precursors to his own work. Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that partly because he didn't work a regular job and partly because he was an exile in London, most of his adult life. He worked in the library. I mean, he had a lot of time. He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were manufacturers.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  And you might say the first half to two thirds of his life are about the critique of capitalism. And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work, Western Europe, more or less, was interested in. That's what they wanted. And he gave that to them. He wasn't the only one, but he was very, very effective at it.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  By the last third of his life. He and the other producers of a anti-capitalist movement, people like the Chartists in England, that's a whole nother movement. The anarchists of various kinds, like Prudhomme in France, or Kropotkin, or Bakunin in Russia, and so on. You put all these together, and there was a shift in what the audience, let's call it a mixture of militant, working-class people on the one hand, and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other. They now wanted a different question.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  They were persuaded by the analysis. They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would like to do better than. And the question became, how do we do this? Not anymore, should we, why should we? Could we maybe fix capitalism? No, they had gotten to the point, the system has to be fundamentally changed. But they got, they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say, well, what will that new system looks like? They didn't go that way. What they did was ask the question, how could we get beyond capitalism? It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured people's minds, people's daily lives, and so on.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  And the focus of the conversation became, this was already by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism whereby we would get beyond. And again, make a long story short. The conversation focused on seizing the government. See, before that, it wasn't that, the government was not a major interest. If you read Marx's Capital, the great work of his maturity, three volumes, there's almost nothing in the state. He mentions it, but he's interested in the details of how capitalism works. Factory by factory, store by store, office. What's the structure?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  The government's secondary for him.

• 26:41Lex Fridman?

  But there's also humans within that capitalist system of there's the working class.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:46Lex Fridman?

  It's about the class struggle.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  That's what he's interested in each, in the work. Think of it almost mechanically like the workplace. In the workplace, there are some people who do this and other people who do that. And they accept this division of authority and they accept this division of what's going on here. Particularly because he believed that the core economic objective of capitalism was to maximize something called profit, which his analysis located right there in the workings of the enterprise. And not, the government was not the key factor here.

• 27:22Lex Fridman?

  And he was looking at ideas of value.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:24Lex Fridman?

  How much is the, how much value does the labor of the individual workers provide? And that means how do we reward the workers in an ethical way? So those are the questions of.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Well, we'll get.

• 27:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, okay, okay. But the government is not part of that picture.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  That's right. So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when this begins, but it's, it really gets going after he dies. Is this debate among Marxists about the role of the state? They all agree, nearly all of them agree that you have to get the state. The working class has to get the state because they see the state as the ultimate guarantor of capitalism. When things get really out of hand, the capitalist calls the police or he calls the army or both of them. And so the government is, in a sense, this key institution,

• 28:27Speaker 01

  captured in Marxist lang, Marxist language by the bourgeoisie, by the, by the other side, the capitalists.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And yet vulnerable because of suffrage. If suffrage is universal or nearly so. If everybody gets a vote, which in a way capitalism brings to bear. Part of its rejection of feudalism in the French American Revolution is to create a place where elected represented. So the government being subject to suffrage creates the notion, aha. Here's how we're going. We have to seize the state. And then the that gets agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how to do it. One side says you go with the election. You you you mobilize the voter.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  That gets to be called reformism within Marxism. And the other side is revolution. Don't do that. This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged. You can't get there. They've long ago learned how to manipulate parliaments. They buy the politicians and all that. And therefore, revolution is going to be the way to do it. Revolution gets a very big boost because the Russians, they did it that way. They didn't do. I mean, they fought in the Duma in the in the parliament, but they didn't. And that this focus on the state, I would argue,

• 30:02Speaker 01

  goes way beyond what the debaters at the time. And if you're interested in the great names, there was a great theorist of the the role of the state in a reformist strategy to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important. His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, two other huge figures in Marxism at the time. And they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate. By the way, that debate still goes on.

• 30:37Lex Fridman?

  Reformism versus revolution?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Uh huh. And in in terms, not all that different. I mean, it's adjusted to history, but in terms that are different.

• 30:46Lex Fridman?

  Can you comment on where you lean in terms of the mechanism of progress? Reformation versus?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  I'd rather tell you the historical story.

• 30:56Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Over and over and over again, in most cases, the reformists have always won. Because revolution is frightening, is scary, is dangerous. And so, most of the time, when you get to the point where it's even a relevant discussion, not a abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have won. I mean, and I'll give you an example from the United States. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, you had an extraordinary shift to the left in the United States, the greatest shift to the left in the country's history, before or since, nothing like it.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Suddenly, you created a vast left wing, composed of the labor movement, which went crazy in the 1930s. We organized more people into unions in the 1930s than at any time before or any time since. It is the explosion. And at the same time, the explosion of two socialist parties and the Communist Party that became very powerful, and they all worked together, creating a very powerful leftist presence in this country. They debated in a strategically real way, reform or revolution.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  The reformers were the union people, by and large, and the communists were the revolutionaries, by and large, because they were affiliated with the Communist International, with Russia and all of that. And in between, you might say, the two socialist parties, one that was Trotskyist in inspiration, and the other one, more moderate Western European kind of socialism. And they had this intense debate. And they ended up, the reformists won that debate. There was no revolution in the 1930s here, but there was. A reform that achieved unspeakably great successes, which is why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does

• 33:00Speaker 01

  because it achieved in a few years in 1930s, starting around 1932, 3, social security in this country, we had never had that before. That's the same one we have now. Unemployment insurance never existed before that you have till today. Minimum wage for the first time, still have that today. And a federal program of employment that hired 15 million people. I mean, these were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working class.

• 33:29Lex Fridman?

  So that's the 30s and the 40s.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  30s, not much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s. And here's the best part. It was paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. So when people today say, well, you can tax the corporate. The joke is, I have to teach American history to Americans because it has been erased from consciousness.

• 33:53Lex Fridman?

  We'll return to that. But first, let's take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th century with the Russians.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Right, with the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this. Everybody was right, the state is crucial. We were right, we were the revolutionaries. We seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state and socialism is when the working class captures the state, either by reform or revolution, and then uses its power over the state to make the transition from capitalism to the better thing we're going toward. And again, make a long story short, in the interest of time. What happens, which is not unusual in human history, is that the means.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Becomes the end. In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear before he, you know, he doesn't live very long. He dies in 23, so he's only in power from 17, he's dead at 22. By that time, he has his brain trouble. Not 1923, by the way, not at age 23. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For listening. 1923, yeah, he's only there for four or five years. Uh, he's very clear. He even says, I've done work on that, I've published, so I mean, I know this stuff. He says in a famous speech, let's not fool ourselves. We have captured the state, but we don't have socialism. We have to create that, we have to move towards that.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Um, with Stalin, you know, Lenin dies and there's a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky loses the fight, he's exiled, he goes to Mexico. Stalin is now alone in power, does all the things he's famous or infamous for. Um, and by the end of the twenties, Stalin makes a decision. I mean, not in the thought that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that they do the following. They declare that they are socialism. In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the state. Not when the state capture has enabled you to do X, Y, Z, other things.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  No, no, the state itself, once you have it, is socialism. So when a socialist captures the state, that's socialism? Exactly. And that's exactly right. And I feel like that's definitionally confusing. Well, it shouldn't be because I give you an example. Yeah. If you go to many parts of the United States today and you ask people, what's socialism? They'll tell you, they'll look you right in the face and they'll say, the post office. And you, you know, when I first heard this as a young man, you know, what? The post office? It took me a while to understand. The post office, Amtrak, the Tennessee va-

• 36:53Speaker 01

  All the examples in the United States where the government runs something. This is socialism. See, capitalism is if the government doesn't run it. If a private individual who's not a government official runs it, well, then it's capitalism. If the government takes it, then it's socialism.

• 37:16Lex Fridman?

  So what is wrong with that reasoning? So the idea, I think-

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Well, there's nothing wrong with, it's a way of looking at the world. It's just got nothing to do with Marx.

• 37:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's Marx, there's Marxism. Let's try to pull this apart. So what role, uh, does central planning have in Marxism? So Marxism is concerned with this class struggle, with respecting the working class.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:49Lex Fridman?

  What is the connection between that struggle and central planning that is often- Central planning is often associated with Marxism.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:58Lex Fridman?

  So a centralized power doing-

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Russia did that.

• 38:02Lex Fridman?

  Allocation. So that's a, that's, that has to do with a very specific set of implementations initiated by the Soviet Union.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Has nothing to do with Marx.

• 38:11Lex Fridman?

  How else can you do-

• 38:12Speaker 01

  I don't think you can find-

• 38:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Anywhere in Marx's writing, anything about central planning or any other kind of planning.

• 38:20Lex Fridman?

  Again, fundamentally, then Marx's, Marx's work, it has to do with, um, with factories, with workers, with the bourgeoisie, with the- and, and the, uh, the, the exploitation of, of the working class.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:37Lex Fridman?

  You still have to take that leap. What is beyond capitalism?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Right. So maybe we should turn to that, focus on that.

• 38:45Lex Fridman?

  Okay, yes. What, okay, we've already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism. How else can we go beyond capitalism?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Let me push you a little further. They didn't succeed, in my judgment, as a Marxist. And I'm now going to tell you why they didn't succeed. Because they didn't understand as well as they could have or should have. What Marx was trying to do. I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circumstances. This is not a critique of them. But it's a different way of understanding what's going on. All right, so I'll give you an example. Most of my adult life, I have taught Marxian economics. I'm a professor of economics. I've been that all my life. I'm a graduate of American universities.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  As it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities. That's another conversation you and I can have. So I went to Harvard, then I went to Stanford and I finished at Yale. I'm like a poster boy for elite education. They tried very hard. By the way, I had, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League. 20 semesters, one after the other, no break. In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned a word about Marxism. That is, no critique of capitalism was offered to me ever, with one except one professor in Stanford.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  In the one semester I studied with him, he gave me plenty to read, but nobody else.

• 40:26Lex Fridman?

  So that's really interesting. You've mentioned that in the past and that's very true, which makes you a very interesting figure. To hold your ground intellectually through this idea space where just people don't really even talk about it.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 40:44Lex Fridman?

  Perhaps we can discuss historically why that is, but nevertheless, that's the case. So Marxian economics, did Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Dismissive. The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal. For giving an example, the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many years the canonical book, it isn't quite anymore, was a book authored by a professor of economics at MIT named Paul Samuelson. And people kind of, you know, a whole generation or two were trained on his textbook. If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree. And, you know, and the tree is Adam Smith and David Ricardo at the, at the root. And then the, the different branches of it. He's trying to give you an idea as a student of how the thing developed.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  And it's a tree and everybody on it is a bourgeois. And then there's this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of starts heading back down. That's Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete, because he's not a complete faker. But beyond that, no, there was no. Nothing in the book gives you two paragraphs of an approach. But that's Cold War. I mean, that, that's really, that's really neat to hear that. That's the craziness. Yeah, that's the Cold War in this country. My professors were afraid. Anyway, let me get to the, to the core of it, what I think will help. Marx was interested in the relationship of people in the process of production.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  That he's interested in the factory, the office, the store. What goes on? And by that he means what are the relationships among the people that come together in a workplace? And what he analyzes is that there is something going on there that has not been adequately understood and that has not been adequately addressed as an object needing transformation. And what does he mean? The answer is exploitation, which he defines mathematically in the following way.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Whenever in a society, any society, you organize people, adults, not the children, not the sick, but, you know, healthy adults. In the following way, a big block of them, a clear majority, work. That is, they use their brains and their muscles to transform nature. A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, whatever. In, in every human community, Marx argues, there are the people who do that work. But they always produce more chairs, more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume. Whatever their standard of living, doesn't have to be low, can be medium, can be high.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  But they always produce more than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx, when he writes this, uses the German word meh, M E H R, which is the English equivalent of more. It's the more. That more got badly translated into the word surplus. Shouldn't have been, but it was. By, by the way, by German and English people doing the translations. What's the difference between more and surplus? Is there a nuanced? Yeah, because surplus has a notion of it's discretionary, it's sort of extra. He's not taking a, he's not making a judgment that it's extra. It's a simple math equation. Yes, very simple. One minus the other.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yes, X minus Y. X is, X is the total output. Y is the consumption by the producer. Therefore, X minus Y equals S, the surplus. Exactly, exactly. Now Marx argues, the que, the minute you understand this, you will ask the following question. Who gets the surplus? Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it? And Marx's answer is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society. How is that organized? For example, who gets it?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  What are they asked, if anything, to do with it in re, in exchange for getting it? What's their social role? For example, here we go now. If you get this, and you get the core of it anyway. Um, and I don't charge much.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  The workers themselves could get it.

• 45:35Lex Fridman?

  Or at least less than lawyers.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Right, that's right.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  The workers themselves could get it.

• 45:40Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism. Communism would would be if the workers who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it.

• 45:55Lex Fridman?

  So this has to do not just with who gets it, but more importantly, who gets to decide who gets it?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Well, who gets it and who gets to decide what to do with it?

• 46:04Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it. So then the logic, this is the logic of the word sequence. It's produced, it's Marx uses the word appropriated, in other words, whose property? Who who gets to decide, if you like, what happens? All that property ever meant is who gets to decide and who's excluded.

• 46:28Lex Fridman?

  That's a clean definition of communism for him.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Right. And that's the, by the way, it's not just clean, it's the only one.

• 46:35Lex Fridman?

  So what's, can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Easy, becomes very easy to, exploitation exists if and when the surplus that's produced is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced it. Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the lord gets. Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced it,

• 47:23Speaker 01

  which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle. I use a metaphor, simple metaphorical story. You have two children, let's assume, and you take them to Central Park a few blocks from here. It's a nice day and the children are playing and in comes one of those men with an ice cream truck comes by. Dingalingalingaling, your children see the ice cream, daddy, get me an ice cream. So you walk over, you take some money and you get two ice cream cones and you give them to one of the children. The other one begins to scream and yell and howl. Obviously, what's the issue?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  And you realize you've just made a terrible mistake. So you order the one you gave the two ice cream cones to. Give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it is. And that that's how you solve the problem. Until a psychologist comes along and says, you know, you didn't fix it by what you just did. You should never have done that in the first place.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  My response, so you understand. All of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic, political, cultural. These are all giving the ice cream cone back to the kid. You should you should never do this in the first place.

• 48:50Lex Fridman?

  The reallocation of resources creates bitterness in the populace.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Look at our we've this country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my life. And I've lived here all my life and I've worked here all my life. It's tearing itself apart and it's tearing itself apart. Basically, over the redivision, the redistribution of wealth, having so badly distributed in the first. But that's all in Marx. And notice, as I explained to you, what is going on in this tension filled production scene in the office, the factory, the store? I don't have to say a word about the government. I'm not interested in the government. The government's really a very secondary matter to this core question. And here comes the big point.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  If you make a revolution and all you do is remove the private exploiter and substitute a government official without changing the relationship. You you can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you're not getting the point of the Marxism. The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation per se. You got to change the organization of the workplace. So there isn't a group that makes all the decisions and gets the surplus vis a vis another one that produces it. If you do that, you will destroy the whole project. You will, not only will you not achieve what you set out to get,

• 50:22Speaker 01

  but you'll so misunderstand it that you, the Germans again have a phrase, es geht schief, it goes crooked. It, it doesn't go right. The project gets off the rails because it can't, uh, it can't understand either what its objective should have been. And therefore it doesn't understand how and why it's missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped for.

• 50:46Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's a lot of fascinating questions here. So one, one is,

• 50:52Lex Fridman?

  to what degree, so there's human nature. To what degree does communism, uh, a lack of exploitation of the working class naturally emerge? If you leave two people together in a room and come back a year later, if you leave five people together in a room, if you leave a hundred people and a thousand people, it seems that humans form hierarchies naturally. So the, the clever, the charismatic, uh, the sexy, the, the muscular, the powerful, whatever you define that, uh, starts, start, you know, becoming a leader and start to do, um, maybe exploitation in a non-negative sense, a more generic sense,

• 51:37Lex Fridman?

  starts to become an employer, not in a capitalist sense, but just as a human. Here, you go do this and in exchange I will give you this. Just becomes the leadership role, right? Uh, so the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice. The, the idea sort of of communism would be nice to, um,

• 51:57Speaker 01

  It's nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice because of human nature.

• 52:01Lex Fridman?

  Because of human nature. That's, thank you. So what, what can we say about leveraging human nature to achieve some of these ends?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  There's so many ways of responding, like, in no particular order. Here, here are some of them. Um, the history of the human race, as best I can tell, is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society arise.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  And as they do, they rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they are socially disruptive and unacceptable. The argument isn't really then, is there a need or an instinct? Is there some human nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is, this has to be repressed, or else we don't have a society. You know, and Freud helps us to understand that that repression is going on all the time, and it has consequences. It's not a finished project. You repress it, it's gone. It doesn't work like that. So, for example, when you get a bunch of people together at some point,

• 53:18Speaker 01

  they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to want the other person or persons to disappear, to be dead, to be gone. But we don't permit you to do that. We just don't. Every economic system that has ever existed has included people who defend it on the grounds that it is the only system consistent with human nature, and that every effort to go beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you endless documents of every tribal society I've ever studied,

• 54:01Speaker 01

  every anthropological community that has ever been studied, slavery wherever it's existed. I can show you endless documents in which the defenders of those systems, not all of them, of course, but many defenders, used that argument. To naturalize a system is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going, to counter the argument that every system is born, every system evolves, and then every system dies. And therefore capitalism, since it was born, and since it's been developing, we all know what the next stage of capitalism is.

• 54:41Lex Fridman?

  We can infer. If what you're saying-

• 54:44Speaker 01

  The burden is on the people who think it isn't gonna die.

• 54:47Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so it doesn't mean they're wrong, but what you're saying is if we look at history, you're deeply suspicious of the argument, this is going against human nature because we keep using that for basically everything, including toxic relationship, toxic systems,

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 55:01Lex Fridman?

  destructive systems. That said, well, let me just ask a million different questions.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 55:08Lex Fridman?

  So, one, what about the, the argument that sort of the employer, the capitalist, takes on risk? So, the, yeah, versus the employee who's just there doing the labor. The, the capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk. What's, uh, are they not, in sort of aggregating this organization and taking this giant effort, hiring a lot of people, aren't they taking on risk that this is going to be a giant failure?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  So first of all, there's risk. Almost in everything you undertake, any project that begins now and ends in the future, it takes a risk that between now and that future, something's gonna happen that makes it not work out. I mean, I got into a cab before I came here today in order to do this with you.

• 56:00Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  I took a risk. I could, the cab could have been in an accident, lightning could have hit us, a bear could have eaten my left foot, who the hell knows?

• 56:08Lex Fridman?

  But shouldn't I reward you for the risk you took?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  No, hold it a second. Let's do this step by step. So, everybody's taking a risk. I always found it wonderful, you talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk. Let's go with the worker in the, with the capitalist. That worker, he moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to take that job. He had, he made a decision to have children. They are teenagers, they're now in school at a time when their friendships are crucial to their development. You're gonna yank him out of the school because his job is gone? He took an enormous risk.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  To do that job every day, to forestall all the other things he could have done. He was taking a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next month, next year. He bought a house, which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's now stuck. He has to make a monthly payment. If you make a mistake, you capitalist, he's the one who's gonna. You're a capitalist, you got a lot of money, otherwise you wouldn't be in that position. You've got, you've got a cushion. He doesn't. If you investigate, you'll see that in every business I've ever been in. And I've been involved in a lot of them.

• 57:30Lex Fridman?

  So you think, you think it's possible to actually measure risk? Or is your basic argument is there's risk involved in a, in a lot of, both the working class and the bourgeoisie, the capitalists?

• 57:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 57:39Lex Fridman?

  And it's very difficult.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  The worker would never come and say, because he's been taught right. Um, I want this payment, a wage for the work I do. And I want this page, this payment for the risk I take.

• 57:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's some level of communication like that. You, you, you have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs, but that's probably built into the salary. All those kinds of things you, you understand, but you're not incorporating the full spectrum of risk.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  You don't, you don't believe that. This country is now being literally transformed from below by an army of workers who work at Amazon, uh, fast food joints. You know what their complaint is? It's killing us. We get paid shit and it's killing us. There is no relationship, except in the minds of the defenders of capitalism, between the ugliness, the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one hand and the wage. Let me give you just a couple of examples. Because this is my, this is my job, this is my life, what I do. All right. The median income of a childcare worker in the United States right now, as we speak,

• 58:54Speaker 01

  is $11.22 an hour, median. So 50% make less, 50% make more. The median income for a car park attendant.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Is several dollars per hour higher than that? What does the car park attendant do? He stares at your car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it. Maybe he parks it and he moves it around to get it in and out. By any measure that I know of, that makes any rational sense, being in charge of toddlers, two, three, four-year-olds, who are at the key moment of mental formation, the first five years, to do, to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who watches your car? Come on, I know how to explain it. Gender explained, all kinds of issues.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  The car park people are males and the childcare people are females. And that, that in our culture is a very big marker of what, but the one who said, only the economics professor, nobody else, says this stuff. Because in economic, I don't know if you are familiar with our profession, but we have something which we call marginal product. This is a, this is a fantasy. I was a mathematician before I became an economist. I loved mathematics. I specialized in mathematics. So I know mathematics pretty well. What economists do is silly, is childish, but they think it's mathematics. Or it's just, it isn't.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  But think for a minute, what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal product of a factor of production, like a worker? In the textbook, when it's taught, I've taught this stuff. I hold my nose, but I teach it. Then I explain to students, what I've just taught you is horseshit, but I, first I teach it.

• 1:00:57Lex Fridman?

  What is the marginal product? It might be useful to say.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  The notion is, if you take away one worker, right now, from the pile, what will be the diminution of the output? That's the marginal product of that worker.

• 1:01:11Lex Fridman?

  Measured by?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  The amount of the output that diminishes.

• 1:01:16Lex Fridman?

  Output of the raw product, of the product.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Usually in real terms, so physical, not the value. You could do a value, but it's really more the physical you're at.

• 1:01:26Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there is a transformation thing I'd love to talk to you about, about value. It's so interesting.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that. But I just want to get to the Hegel, who was Marx's teacher, has a famous line. You can't step in this, in the same river twice. And the argument is you and the river have changed between the first and the second time. So it's a different you and it's a different river. You can choose not to pay attention to that. Just you can't claim you're not doing that. You can't claim that you can actually do that because you can't. There is no way to do that.

• 1:02:05Lex Fridman?

  So the, the, the meaning that you can't just remove a worker and have a clean mathematical calculation of the effect that it has on the output.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  That's right, because too many other things are going on. Too many things are changing and you cannot assume, much as you want to, that the outcome on the output side is uniquely determined by the change you made on the input side. Can't do that.

• 1:02:30Lex Fridman?

  Even in the, even in the average, it's not going to work out.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  You can take, look, mathematics is full of abstractions. You can abstract, you can say, as, as we do in economics, keteris paribus, you know? Everything else held constant, but you have to know what you just did. You held everything constant. You know why you do that? Because you can't do that in the real world. That's not possible. You better account for that. Otherwise, you're mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted from to get the abstraction.

• 1:03:02Lex Fridman?

  As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiment or an actual experiment of removing every single economist from the world, would we be better off or worse off?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Much better off.

• 1:03:13Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Economics, and I'm one, you know, I'm, I'm talking about myself. See, economics.

• 1:03:19Lex Fridman?

  We're going to ship, ship all the economists to Mars and see how well it works off.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  No, but the serious part of this is that economics.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  You know, it's really about capitalism. Economics as a discipline is born with capital. There was no such thing. When I teach, I teach courses at the university, for example, called History of Economic Thought. Right? And I begin the students with Aristotle and Plato. And I say, you know, they talked about really interesting things. But they never called it economics. There was no, it made no sense to people to abstract something as central to daily life as economics broadly defined. It made no sense. That's a creation much, much later. That's capitalism that did that, created the feeling. So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them particular passages.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  By the way, footnote, because your audience will like it. Plato and Aristotle talked about markets because they lived at a time in ancient Greece when market relations were beginning to intrude upon these societies. So they were both interested in this phenomena that we're not just producing goods and then distributing among us. We're doing it in a quid pro quo. You know, I'll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange. And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason. They destroy social cohesion. They destroy community. They make some people rich and other people poor.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  And they set us against each other, and it's terrible. And here's what, that's they agreed on that. Here's what they disagreed on. One of them said, okay, there can be no markets. That was Plato. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no, no. Too late for that. The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in amongst us would be too devastating. So we can't do that. But what we can do is control it, regulate it, get from the market what it does reasonably well, and prevent it from doing the destructive things it does so badly.

• 1:05:39Lex Fridman?

  So fundamentally, the destructive thing of a market is it's the engine of capitalism. And so it creates exploitation of the worker.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  It facilitates, I wouldn't say that's too.

• 1:05:50Lex Fridman?

  Facilitate.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Facilitates it, and it is an institution that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible danger to community.

• 1:05:59Lex Fridman?

  Is there?

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, is a way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world. Look, the medieval Catholic Church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  You know, and this was that God said, if there's a person who needs to borrow from you, then that's a person in need. And the good Christian thing to do is to help him.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  To demand an interest payment rather than to help your fellow man is, God hates you for that. That's a sin. Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes.

• 1:06:40Lex Fridman?

  But would Jesus be crying when you try to scale that system? So that has to do with the intimate human interaction. The idea of markets is you're able

• 1:06:53Lex Fridman?

  to create a system that involves thousands, millions of humans. And there'd be some level of safe, self-regulating fairness.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  There might be, but it's hard to imagine that charging interest would be the way to do that.

• 1:07:12Lex Fridman?

  I wonder what, so I guess.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Suppose, suppose you were interested in having, suppose you took as your problem, we have a set of funds that can be loaned out.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  People don't want to consume it. They're ready to lend it. Okay. To whom should they lend it? Well, we could say in our society, we're going to run this the way professors in institutions like MIT work this. They write up a project. They send the project in to some government office. Where it is looked at against other projects. And this office in the government decides we're going to fund this one. And that one because they're more needed in our society. We we're in greater need of solving this problem than that problem.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  And so we're going to lend money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here. Because we're going to. But instead, what we do is who can pay the highest interest rate? Who what what do you do it? Why? Why? What ethics would justify you do it? It's like a market in general. Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage. It's one basic way to understand it. And so if if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word shortage means, has no other meaning. If the demand is greater than the supply. OK, now you got a problem. You can't satisfy all the demanders. Because you don't have enough supply. You have a shortage.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  OK, now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people who have a lot of money to bid up the price of whatever's short. And that solves your problem because as the price goes up, the poor people can't. They drop out. They can't buy the thing at the exalted price. So you've got a way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people with the most money. At this point, most human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn against it. Because it contradicts their Christian, Judaic, Islamic, all of them would say, what? You know what that means? It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  While the poor person has no milk for their five children. There it is. You want a market? Why?

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  Though the fundamental thing that seems unfair, there's the resulting inequality. Now.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Or death.

• 1:09:48Lex Fridman?

  Or death. Well, that's the ultimate inequality.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 1:09:52Lex Fridman?

  What about? And we're going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics to the sort of debate type of thing.

• 1:10:02Lex Fridman?

  What about sort of the lifting ties raise all boats? Meaning, if we look at the 20th century.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:10Lex Fridman?

  A lot of people, maybe you disagree with this, but they attribute a lot of the innovation and the average improvement in the quality of life to capitalism.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:23Lex Fridman?

  To inventions and innovation, to engineering and science developments that resulted from competition and all those kinds of forces. So not looking at the individual unfairness of exploitation as it's specifically defined, but just observing historically, looking at 20th century, we came up with a lot of cool stuff that seemed to have made life easier and better on average. What do you say to that?

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  I have several responses to that, but I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's going on there. But let me give you the arguments so that you can hear them and then you can evaluate them, as can anybody who's listening or watching. Marx was a student of Hegel, and one of Hegel's central arguments was that everything that exists, exists, quote, "in contradiction." In simple English, there's a good and bad side, if you like, to everything. And you won't understand it unless you accept that proposition and start looking for the good things that are the other side of the bad ones and the bad things that are the

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  other side of the good ones, et cetera.

• 1:11:42Lex Fridman?

  That's the dialectic.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And Marx, very attentive to that, explicitly agrees with this on many occasions and applies it, of course, to the central object of his research, capitalism. So this is not a simple-minded fellow who's telling you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this system achieved or accomplished. And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological dynamism of the system, which Marx takes to be profound because, you know, he lived at the time when major breakthroughs in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement in the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people, Marx now comes back and says, oh, wait a minute here. Number one, capitalism as a system has been mostly represented by capitalists, which makes a certain sense. And those capitalists, with very few exceptions, some, but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the lives of the mass of people.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What that means is replace a worker with a machine, move the production from expensive US to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants from other parts of the world because they will work for less money than the folks that you have here at home. Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for for decades over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning to right now. The reason we have a minimum wage, which was past nineteen, middle of the nineteen thirties, when it was proposed, it was blocked by capitalists.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  They got together, they don't want, and today, just a factoid for you, the last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States, federal minimum wage, was in two thousand and nine, when it was set at the lofty sum of seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, which you cannot live on. Over the last twelve years or so, whatever it is now, eleven, twelve, thirteen years since then, we have had an increase in the price level in this country every year. And in the last year, eight and a half percent. During that time that the prices went up, the minimum wage was never raised. What?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  This is a time of stock market boom, of growing inequality. This is a system. You know.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  The nerve of the defender of capitalists, who wants now to get credit for the improvement in the standard of life of the workers that was fought by every generation. You know, it takes your breath away. It's an argument, whoa. But I take my hat off if I had one, because that is one of the only ways to justify this system. Long ago, let me get at the heart of it. Long ago, capitalism could have overcome hunger, could have overcome disease, could have, I mean, way beyond what we have now. But it didn't.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  And that's the worst moral condemnation imaginable. How do you justify that when you could, you didn't? Look, I, let me get at it another way, because this may, it may interest you anyway. The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically dynamic. It is. And along the way, it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better, no question. But the notion that the the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is somehow built into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous...

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  And I can give you, because you do math, you'll understand it. Think of it this way. Imagine a production process in which you have a hundred dollars that the capitalist has to lay out for tools, equipment, and raw materials. And a hundred dollars that he has to lay out for workers, hire the workers. And he puts them all together, and he has an output. And let's say the output is a hundred units of something at one of the prices, and that's his revenue.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  And when he, when he takes his product and sells it and gets the revenue, let's say the revenue is, it doesn't really matter, it's 120, for lack of a better word. And he ta- uh, 220, sorry. And he takes 100 of it and replaces the tools, equipment and raw materials he used up, another 100 to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other 20 is his profit, and he puts that aside. Now along comes a technological breakthrough. A machine, a new machine. And the new machine is so effective, you can get the same out, the same number of units of output with half the workers.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  So you don't need to spend 100 on workers, you only need to spend 50. You can do it with half the workers. And so the capitalist goes to the workers, by the way, this happens every day, and he says to half of them, "You're fired. Don't come back Monday morning, I don't need you." It's nothing personal, it's, "I got a machine." Why does he do that? Because the 50, he now no longer has to spend on labor, because he doesn't need half of them, he keeps. Everything else is the same, the machine, everything else is, this is just to make their math easy. So he, he keeps as his own profit the 50 that before he paid for those workers. Yeah. Right?

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Because when he sells it for 220, that 50, he don't have to give to the next job because he has a new machine. So that's what he does. The technology leads. He's happy. He's become more profitable. He's got an extra 50, which is why he buys the machine. The workers are screwed. Half of them just lost their job, have to go home to their husband and wife, tell them, "I don't have a job anymore, I didn't do anything wrong. The guy was nice enough to say, 'There was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn't need it, you know?'" So I'm, I'm completely screwed here. I don't know what I'm gonna do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage, my children's education, or whatever else he's got going for himself.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  All right, now, now the point. There was, of course, an alternative path. The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same that you did before, for half a day's work.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  You would have got the same output, same revenue, same profit as before. But the gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day of the lives of these workers. The majority of workers would have been really helped by this technology. But instead, they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle of more money. You want to support a system like this?

• 1:19:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, to go back to Hegel.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:50Lex Fridman?

  The good and the bad.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:52Lex Fridman?

  So you just listed the bad, and you also first listed the good, the technological innovation of this kind of system. The question is, the alternative, whatever, as we try to sneak up to ideas of what the alternative might look like.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:06Lex Fridman?

  What are the good and the bad of the alternative? So you just kind of, as a opposite, by contrast, showed that, well, a nice alternative is you work less, get paid the same, you have more leisure time.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:21Lex Fridman?

  Opportunity to pursue other.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Interests.

• 1:20:26Lex Fridman?

  Other interests, the creative interests, family.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:29Lex Fridman?

  Flourish as a human being, basically strengthen and embolden the basic humanity that's under all of us. Yes, but then, what cost does that have on the deadline-fueled, competition-fueled machine of technological innovation? That is the positive side of capitalism.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Slows it down.

• 1:20:57Lex Fridman?

  It slows it down. And the question is, which is more important for the flourishing of humanity?

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  I agree with that. And I'd love there to be a democratic mechanism. So let's discuss it, let's debate it, and then let's decide what mixture, because it's not either or. The mathic problem I gave you is either or. We could mix it, you could have. A third less of a working day instead of a half less. And then the other part would be extra profit for our employer, et cetera, et cetera. So let's have a democratic discussion of what is the mix between the positive and we have no such thing. All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only we know what they do.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  They always choose the one that maximizes their profit because that's what they were told to do in business school where I've taught. So we, not only is it an undemocratic decision, but it's lopsided to boot. So we don't have the opportunity, but I would love for us to be good Hegelian Marxists and say, let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision that we can. We'll make mistakes, but we'll all make them together. It won't be one of us making a dictatorial decision. You know, Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not as a notion of how government is done.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, not Marx, Lenin did that, not as a notion of how a government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is. The dictatorship of these key decisions is not made by some sitting council. It's made by each little capitalist in his, her relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is why Marx focused his analysis on that point. And by the way, I can sketch for you right now, so it doesn't lurk in the background, what the alternative is. Yeah, let's go there. Okay, it goes right back to what I said earlier. The workers themselves, the collection of employees together appropriate their own surplus

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of whether or not to buy a machine and whether or not.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  To use the machine and the savings it might allow to be handled by more leisure for themselves, or as a fund for new developments in technology, or new products, or whatever they want. And you know, this, this is an old idea in human, Marx loved that. Toward the end of his life, he, he started reading extensively in anthropology. And one of the reasons he did that toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering that in this society and that, including here in the United States, that there were

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  examples of people who organized their production in precisely this way, as a collective democratic community in which everybody had an equal voice. So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output we all helped to produce. So let's do it in, you know, in this country where democracy is a value nearly everybody subscribes to. Think about it this way, the stunning contradiction

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  that there is a place in our society where democracy has never been allowed to enter. The workplace. In the workplace, a tiny group of people, unaccountable to the rest of them, the employer, whether that's an individual, a family, a partnership, or a corporate board of directors, tiny group of people controls economically a vast mass of employees. Those employees don't elect those people, have no, nothing, there is no accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable. And this society

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor matter of producing everything in a, in a way that is the direct, it's autocratic.

• 1:25:29Lex Fridman?

  So to push back on a few things. So one is the idea of this society calling itself democratic is that the government is elected democratically and the government is able to pressure the workplace through the process of regulation. You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know, minimum wage, all those kinds of things. That's the one idea. The other is there is a natural force within the capitalist, when there's no monopolies, of competition being the accountability. So if you're a shitty boss, the employee in the capitalist system has the freedom to move to another company, work for a better boss.

• 1:26:11Lex Fridman?

  So that that creates pressure on the employers and the bosses. That's at least the idea that you, there's two boundaries of you not misbehaving. One is the law, so regulatory regulations passed by the government, democratic. And the second is because there's always alternatives in theory, then that puts pressure on everyone to behave well because you can always leave.

• 1:26:39Lex Fridman?

  So, I mean, that's kinds of accountability. But what you're saying is that does not result in a significant enough accountability where the employer that avoids exploitation of the worker.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms. And let me respond to that and then on the counter argument.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  First, competition.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  Here again, we have to be Hegelians just a little. Competition destroys itself. It doesn't need any out. The whole point of competition is to beat the other guy. If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better quality or a lower price, or maybe both, then I win because the customers will come to me because my price is lower or my quality is better and they'll leave the other guy, he'll go out of business. Now let's follow. When he goes out of business, because I've won the competition, he fires his workers.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  I hire them because I'm now going to be able to serve a market. He can't serve anymore. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy the used equipment. I'm gonna, and thereby many become few. Monopoly is the product of competition. It's not the antithesis, it's the product.

• 1:28:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, let's see.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  That's where it comes from.

• 1:28:05Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's another, there's another element to the system where there's always a new guy that comes in.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  There isn't, there isn't.

• 1:28:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's the, that's the dream. The entrepreneurial spirit of a free, you know, of, of the, of the United States, for example, of a capitalist system is you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build up a business that takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car, Ford, GM, which is what, you know, you look at Tesla, for example, right? That's the American dream. One of the many ideals of the American dream is you can

• 1:28:46Lex Fridman?

  move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:51Lex Fridman?

  And.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  It can happen.

• 1:28:54Lex Fridman?

  It can happen, but you're.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  You know what that's like, that's like, you can win the lottery.

• 1:28:58Lex Fridman?

  No, that's not quite. No, the lottery is complete luck. Here you can work your ass off if you have a good idea.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  The odds are better in the lottery.

• 1:29:06Lex Fridman?

  That's not, that's not true. There's a lot of new businesses.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  How many Teslas do you, do you know?

• 1:29:12Lex Fridman?

  Tesla's a really bad example because the car company, the automotive sector is so difficult to, they operate at such a thin margin of profit that they're probably a good example of like capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of lack of innovation because, you know.

• 1:29:34Lex Fridman?

  That's a very complicated industry because of the supply chain.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  There's so much. Come on, they have their uniquenesses, you're quite right. But so does every other industry. The one thing that's common is that many become few. What you can also have is when you have a few, they jack up the price. They make an enormous profit. And in the irony of capitalism, Marx would love this. They begin to incentivize people to break into this industry. Cause the few remaining are making a wild amount of profit because they are a few. And can jiggle the market to make it work like that for them. So the reason every, every small capitalist is trying to build market share. That's a polite way, polite way of saying they want to become a monopolist.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Or to be more exact, an oligopolist, one of a handful of firms that dominates. That's what they're there for.

• 1:30:29Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, to push back a little bit also, because that's could be, this is a question also. Do you think we're in danger of oversimplifying capitalism? That completely removes the basic decency of human beings. So if you give me a choice to press, to press a button. To get rid of the competition and that, but that's going to lead to a lot of suffering. There's a lot of people at the heads of companies that won't press that button. That it's not in the calculation is not just money. It's human well being too. So like.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  You think?

• 1:31:08Lex Fridman?

  I, yes.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  You and I don't live in the same place then.

• 1:31:13Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying that the forces of capitalism take over the minds of the people at the top.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 1:31:19Lex Fridman?

  And then they cease being human.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:31:23Lex Fridman?

  The basic.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  I wouldn't go, I would.

• 1:31:25Lex Fridman?

  Depending on your model of humans. But they, they, they lose track of the better angels of their nature. And they just become cogs in the machine, but they're just happen to be the cog.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  I would put it differently, that the system is so set up. It's a little bit like natural selection. The guys who may, I could say the women too, it doesn't matter. The people who make it up through the layers of the bureaucracy and get to the top in these things. Have had to do things along the way that become selective. If they can't stand it because they have that human quality and there are people like, I've known them. They're the ones running an Airbnb in Vermont. They went there and they said, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to treat people like that. I'm going to make a lovely place in Vermont with my husband or my wife or whatever. And I'm going to be, you know, enjoying the people that come by and be a decent human. Of course, of course.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  But the system selects the firm, you know, if you don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up, you're toast there anyway. The rest of the people who vote for you are going to kick you out. You can tell them all day long what a lovely person you are. Then they're going to look at you and wonder what happened to you? How did you even get this far with the lovely person horseshit?

• 1:32:42Lex Fridman?

  It's not, okay, okay, okay, okay. It's not necessarily just lovely person. So maybe my, I'll just say my bias is the people I know are, especially at the top of companies or in the tech sector where innovation is such a big part of it. So I think a lot of the things we're talking about is when there's not much innovation in the system. So.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  Innovation usually comes, in the history of capitalism, innovation comes in spurts. There's the electric period, the chemistry period, the nuclear period. There's now, whatever you want to call it, the artificial intelligence or robotics or computer. It doesn't, it comes and then there's a flurry as everything is reorganized around whatever the newest technology is. And then you have a period where you can get excited about that. And the very rich people who come to the top can talk endlessly, as they always do, about innovation. But again, you know, it really is, this is a recurring kind of debate and a recurring kind of issue.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  For me, how do I put this in a way that, you know, I don't mean to offend.

• 1:34:02Lex Fridman?

  Please, please.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I don't, I don't want to, but.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  The problem with capitalism is, and maybe you'll like this, the problem with capitalism is not that it is the one thing that's consistent with human nature, that's what its defenders would like to have us believe, but if anything, I would argue the opposite, that it is such a contradiction to parts of our nature, not other parts, that it can never quite make it. There's always going to be the people who don't go along with it, people you're talking about, who do quit along the way, or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  by god knows what hook or what crook that they did it, but most of them go, and you know why? Because their humanity is contradicted by what it is they're being asked to do. I mean, the corporate sector this year, just to give you an idea, CEOs are jacking up their wage package. They're already out of whack. I mean, the average CEO pay is now 3, 300 times what the average worker pay is, but they're jacking it up even more. Why? Because that's what's happening in their universe. That's what, they're all doing it, and they have to do, each one of them justifies that

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  I have to do that, otherwise I'd lose my guide to the next one, which of course is true, but is no comfort for the mass of people who aren't CEOs, for whom this argument is very exciting. So, they're doing that at a time when the American people can't cope. They've just gone through the COVID disaster, they've gone through the worst, second worst economic crash of capitalism in our history.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  After two years of this one-two punch, they got an inflation, a third punch, and we are now predicting rising interest rates and a recession at the end of the year or early next year. You can't do this to a working class. When this was done to the German working class in the 1920s, Hitler was the result. You keep doing that in this country, we're already watching it, you're gonna get that too. You're already getting bits and pieces. You can't keep doing this. So there's a quiet suffering amidst the working class that's growing. Taking out on. That can turn to anger. Some little 18-year-old kid who has to go three hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  What? And it happens every day in this country, every day. So that anger rises up in those little ways now and then bigger, bigger, bigger potentially. By the way, there's one more thing on the rationality, and this goes to Elon Musk.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  If you're interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year. The number was just released yesterday, 49,000. Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country. They use up an enormous amount of energy. They, they use up enormous amount of resources.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  There is a way to make transportation much more rational, and we've known it for decades. It's called mass transportation. It's a really beautifully maintained, crystal clear, clean, frequent system of buses, trains, street trolleys, vans. It could easily be done in this society.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  In fact, I once did a project that I estimated cost $30 billion. That's less than we're sending to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it. A public transit system where? Everywhere in this country, all the major metro. This country's overwhelmingly metropolitan area. Well, it surely has to be more than 30 billion, but, but. Well, it was a few years ago. Sure, but you're saying it's not. But I'm using a lot of it. That's insane. Right, it's not crazy stuff. It's a reasonable number. Right, right. Hey, listen, but there's a, and we'll. Let me just finish the point. Sure, yes. Okay, so I'm trying to be rational here.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do, if it's got a lot to do with fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use of the fossil fuel, particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass transit. We don't, we're doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing.

• 1:38:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's, you know, on, you could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit because it's going to be reusable vehicles. It will end, in theory, car ownership. So you just have a more kind of distributed public transit.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  If it happens, but you know that that's a side effect. His major goal, and the major goal of the other companies that are busy squeezing to get his share of the pie smaller, so they have some, Ford General Motors, Toyota, all of them are making electric cars now. So what they've done is they've replaced the individual car with fossil fuel with another individual car.

• 1:39:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  That's fucking nuts. What are you doing?

• 1:39:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's one of the things they're doing, but automation is also another one. But on the Elon side, there's also hilarity named Boring Company,

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:41Lex Fridman?

  which is working on tunnels, which is actually expanding the flexibility you might have to start playing with ideas of public transit, I think. Listen, I'm now partially living in Austin, Texas, that I don't know if they know what a public transit system is, period.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:00Lex Fridman?

  There's F-150 pickup trucks.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Lex Fridman?

  There, well, there's, this is an interesting, so.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  The older, by the way, footnote, the older this city, the more likely it has public transportation.

• 1:40:14Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  Boston is the best example.

• 1:40:16Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  You, have you been, yeah, well, you.

• 1:40:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I have a place in Boston.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Boston with the street railway, Boston is your case study of how to do this, because they've been doing it all along. New York's pretty good, too.

• 1:40:28Lex Fridman?

  There's a trade-off. Yeah, New York, I would say, is better than Boston because, so there's, you know, their technology also helps you out to do the public transit better. It's almost like Boston's a little too old, but yes, I get your point. But there is a, the Ford F-150 pickup truck symbolizes something about America. And there is a practical nature to the fact.

• 1:40:54Lex Fridman?

  That in order to do public transit, in order to do some of these things that you're talking about with the working class, there has to be a central planning component, or there has to be a centralized component. And America is very much based on the idea, at least in recent times, I would say from the founding of individualism, of respecting individual freedom. Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas of Marxism to life, you would trample on individual freedoms?

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:41:31Lex Fridman?

  Can you respect both?

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Sure. For me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people who have had that freedom eroded under the capitalism. That's a motive for my Marxism. It was for Marx too. He loved the French Revolution. He loved the liberté, égalité, fraternité, the great three, and then democracy, the American contribution, if you like. He believed in all of that. His critique of capitalism was it promised it and then never delivered it. And the reason you have to go beyond it is because it didn't

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  deliver what it had promised. So for me, it is the fulfillment of a general. But again, I'm a Hegelian Marxist, so if you want. Individualism, for me, is not the way it's set up in this society, some sort of antithesis to the government. I think an immense con has been pulled on the American people. And the con works like this. You know what's bad and what's dangerous and threatens you? It's the government. The government's going to come in and tell you what to do. The government's going to run your life. The government's

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  the problem. There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn like the so-called Great Recession of 2008. Who do they blame? The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed. And what is the media all about? The government. If I were a capitalist, I'd love this. I'd kick the workers by throwing them out of their home, and they don't get angry with me, they get angry with the government. I fire large numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them as a result of having no job and no income. And they get angry at the senator.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  I'm laughing all the way to the bank. This is a genius stroke.

• 1:43:39Lex Fridman?

  In theory, but if you look at government, because you said accountability and the capitalist system has no accountability. There's some pushback I give on the accountability. I think there is some accountability we can discuss in a Hegelian way. There's more accountability for, I would say, that in theory, government is perfectly accountable. That's the whole point of a democratic system, is you vote people in. In practice, there's a giant-growing bureaucracy that is accountable only on the surface. There's two parties that seem to be

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Are the same.

• 1:44:16Lex Fridman?

  Are the same. Media is somehow integrated into making the same two parties that are just wearing different colored shirts to seem like they're very opposed and are arguing and bitterly arguing and calling each other's spouses and these nasty names and all those kinds of things. Okay, but that's government. So who exactly is worse here? Government or companies?

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Well, why are we asking that question? These are twins. Look, what you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats just now, with which I agree. I would say the same thing about corporations and the government. This is the same people, literally.

• 1:44:58Lex Fridman?

  But let's go to Churchill. Which one is worse? Let's go to Churchill, like democracy is the worst form of government, except all the other ones or whatever. So this kind of same idea, which one exactly is worse? Because to me, it seems like

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  Which one between what and what?

• 1:45:14Lex Fridman?

  Government and industry and companies. It's because government is plagued by

• 1:45:23Lex Fridman?

  I will call it corruption because the corruption of bureaucratic paperwork. And then because they're but they're not accountable. There doesn't seem to be a serious accountability.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  Again, we're not see, we're not living on the same planet. The greatest practitioners of central planning are corporations. Elon has an an operation like General Motors, Ford, IBM, or any of the other mega corps. They have to plan. They buy up companies because they don't want to deal in the market. They don't want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs or sell their outputs to somebody they don't control. They want the professor to teach the genius of a market. They hate the market.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  And when they grow to be big, they keep buying whoever they were dealing with before so they could better control them, which requires them then to plan the production and distribution of goods inside rather than buying them in the market. The model of the government is a private corporation. I have spent my life, give you an example, in American universities, big ones, famous ones, not just as a student, but as a professor. I've been at half a dozen schools. I teach there at the new school here, it's another one, right? They all model themselves after businesses. They model their, you can attack the bureaucracy of universities. Good reason, it's a mess.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  But they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing their bureaucracy in a businesslike manner. Uh huh. So you're looking at a difference which isn't there. The government and the private sector are partners. And both of them wouldn't have it any other way. The corporations want that from the government. And the government now knows that to please the corporations is the number one objective they have because that's how they keep their jobs and keep their system going. And so for all practical purposes, this is, this is the same people.

• 1:47:40Lex Fridman?

  But there's important differences that I don't know if they're fundamental or just a consequence of history. But if you have government. They're accountable in a different way than companies. Companies are accountable by, especially if you have a consumer. They're accountable by sort of the consumer spending or not spending their money on whatever the heck the company is selling. The government is accountable by votes. And it seems like government, unlike companies, for most of companies' history, is always too big to fail, meaning it can always just print money. It can always save itself, and that creates a bureaucracy.

• 1:48:25Lex Fridman?

  You rarely pay the cost of having made bad decisions if you're in government. You distribute the blame, and it's very unclear who's responsible for bad decisions. So, bad decisions in government accumulate. So, you become more and more and more inefficient and more and more poor in your decision making in terms of, you said, public transit. Should we build a public transit system in this city or not? That's a difficult decision. That's an interesting decision. I would say it's very often a very good decision. But whoever makes that decision should be accountable for a good or bad decision. And it seems like companies are more accountable.

• 1:49:07Lex Fridman?

  They pay, they feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because it can go bankrupt. They, I mean, there's much more day-to-day pressure to make good engineering decisions. Government doesn't seem to be under the same level of pressure. Do you disagree with that?

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  I disagree with that. Everything in my history pushes me.

• 1:49:32Lex Fridman?

  You may be living, I may be living in a different.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 1:49:37Lex Fridman?

  A planet. Or taking a different sort of drug.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  I won't, I won't mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a very large company here in the United States, here in the New York area. And.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  It involved two brothers and a family who built it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was kind of the dynamo of the family. And he was more responsible than anybody else building it up. But he took care of his brothers. He had a nice feeling about his brothers. So the one brother who could not, you know, without help tie his shoes, became a vice president, got an enormous salary, got a beautiful office in a skyscraper, not that many blocks from where I'm sitting right now.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  And that was the way that family handled that company. And all of his relatives were somewhere in this company doing a variety of whatever. Because, and my experience with this, and because I went to the schools, I told you, all my experiences with that group of people, corporate exec, full of those stories. You know, they made mistake after mistake, which they would tell you about. Didn't undermine their, they were always able to blame somebody else, something else that scraped them through.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  And had they not been able to, they would have been replaced by another person who did the same thing for as long as they could. And they knew it. They would talk about it at family events. That's how I know.

• 1:51:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that-

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  I understand that you want the outside world to look at it this way, but it's not my experience.

• 1:51:39Lex Fridman?

  Interesting. But again, what's, that kind of thing, at the risk of saying human nature again, I wonder what kind of system allows for that more versus, versus less? This is the question of, I would call that, let's put that under the umbrella term of corruption.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:51:59Lex Fridman?

  Which system allows for more corruption?

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  But remember that the way I defined a different system is not more or less government. It's more or less allowing a democratic workplace.

• 1:52:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  Reconfiguring it. What, what happens when everybody-

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  Has a vote when you have to explain what the strategies are, what the alternatives are to a larger number of people than a board of directors or a major shareholders or whoever it is that most companies are responsible to. And now you've got a whole different universe. It's not a small group of people, can't be hidden the way it's normally hidden, most of it, and on and on and on. This is, you know, worker co-ops is what this is called in many parts of the world. So it's not that I'm advocating something that's never been seen before, not at all. The Marxism I understand is to pick from historical precedents, the things that we think will work better.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  And I think if all the people in an enterprise, just to drive the point home, democratically decided, they would never give two or three individuals a hundred million dollars while everybody else can't send their kid to college. Have you ever done that?

• 1:53:13Lex Fridman?

  So just to return, just to address this point about the particular implementation of Marxism, that was the early days

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:23Lex Fridman?

  in the Soviet Union. Why did Stalinism, for example, lead to so much bloodshed, do you think, and human suffering? Is there any elements within the ideas of Marxism that catalyzed the kind of government, the kind of system that led to that bloodshed?

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I think there are many things that led to the bloodshed and to all that Stalin's regimes did. And, you know, I spent 10 years of my life with another economist writing a book about that to try to explain from a Marxist position, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. You might want to take a look at it sometime, but there, I'm going to say a few things now, but all of those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, et cetera, in that, in that work. Let me start with, you know, playing a little bit with Hegel.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the Soviet Union did, but what the rest of the world did. I mean, you had a really interesting move, and I'll give you a parallel from today. The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed. World War I, just it fell apart. The czar and all of that, it couldn't, it couldn't survive. It had already been in trouble. There was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war to Japan. I mean, if you know Russian history, which I assume you do, you'll know that there was

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  a lot leading up to the collapse in 1917. And in some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small, that could seize the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists, you know? Earlier on, with Kerensky, the first government that tried, it wasn't people all that impressed by Marxism. It was people more skeptical and would not have been called Marxist probably by history. They couldn't, they tried, they couldn't. Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year. The rest of the world, though, was horrified.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken this immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism, yes, but still not challenging the power. Now it had the power and in a big country. And they freaked out. If you know American history, this country, the leadership of this country went completely berserk. I mean, we had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before. The twenties were a time of Palmer raids in Boston, the Sacco-Vanzetti trials.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  I mean, really grim hostility. And you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution. The US, Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops. So what you had right away was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. This was, there was a great professor at Princeton, Meyer, I forget his first name, who wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy since 1917, has been obsessed with Russia. Even now, this, this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia,

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  as if Russia still was the Soviet Union, as if people haven't figured out. That was a big change back in 1989 and 90. You know, Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before, or at least they're not Lenin. They may not be so different from some of the other, but in any case.

• 1:57:49Speaker 01

  So you had one factor was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation, the global. I mean, Rosa Luxemburg, I mean, I assume you know the, Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin. She's a critic of Lenin's, by the way, but she's a leftist. Hunted down and hacked into bits, killed.

• 1:58:13Lex Fridman?

  So you're attributing some

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  He's surrounded.

• 1:58:17Lex Fridman?

  Some of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world turned away.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  Turned against.

• 1:58:23Lex Fridman?

  Turned against, so you turn against is the better word.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  Very, yeah, I mean, not in order of importance, but it's, it's a very important part of the psychology of being, you know.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  It's what you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence that indeed there was a lot to be afraid of at that time. Nobody had ever done it. Look, you could see the effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at first, that you could have socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous, that socialism was internationalism. Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, Workers of the World Unite, not Workers of Russia Unite, Workers of the... He had to go through a procedure of kind of coming to terms with the fact that the revolution

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  he had in Russia, which was tried in Berlin, was tried in Munich, was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here, they all failed. They all failed. And he's left, "sûr", the French would say, "tout sûr", right? All alone. That's one. The second thing is economic isolation. Russia's a poor country, and it needed what it got before the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans particularly, but others too. Now this was all cut off. And you can see the replay with the sanctions progress. It's, we're gonna do it again, we're gonna do it again, we have to do, we have...

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  The world is different and the sanctions don't work, but they're gonna try them. They're gonna try them. Because it's the history. But that culture was... It's, today is completely different. Russia's a different place today, but Russia has China, and that changes everything. And they don't get that here yet, but they will.

• 2:00:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a very complicated dynamic with China, even with India.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:00:23Lex Fridman?

  But...

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Or Turkey, Brazil.

• 2:00:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Sorry to say, human nature may change at a slower pace than does geopolitical...

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  That has occurred to me as well. I get that point.

• 2:00:35Lex Fridman?

  So is there, can you steel man the case, or consider the case, that there's something about the implementation of Marxism, maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing on the working class and the workers unite, that naturally leads to a formation of a dictatorial force, a dictator, that says, "Let us temporarily..."

• 2:01:01Lex Fridman?

  Give power to this person to manage some of the details of how to run the democracy, of giving voice to the workers so that they get to choose. And then that naturally leads to dictator and there's naturally in human nature, power and absolute power, as the old adage goes, corrupts absolutely. Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marxist ideals, you're going to end up with a dictator? And often, when you give too much power to anyone human, a small number of people, you're going to get into huge amount of trouble.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  You've putched things together there that I would...

• 2:01:40Lex Fridman?

  That's what...

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  I think if you, if you give...

• 2:01:43Lex Fridman?

  Putched is a good word.

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's German. If you, remember, I told you, my mother was born in Germany.

• 2:01:52Lex Fridman?

  And then your dad is French.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he was born in Metz, if you know European. It's a city on the border of France and Germany. If you come from the Alsatians, Alzass in Germany.

• 2:02:05Lex Fridman?

  So they're German speaking French city?

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  You have to do both. It's bilingual because it's been back and forth so many times in medieval days already that it, literally, you go from one store to another. The proprietor here is French and the proprietor there is German, but they all speak both languages because... You don't speak either of them?

• 2:02:26Lex Fridman?

  I speak Russian.

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  Russian, but not German or French.

• 2:02:29Lex Fridman?

  A bit Ukrainian, no, it took French for four years in high school, but I've forgotten all of it. I remember the romance and the spirit of the language, but not the details. I'm sure I can remember.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long period of time. And you do it on many levels of ideology. It is not surprising that it sticks and it stays. And you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution. And you will discover it has a life of its own. And it's gonna take a long time before people don't. If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism. And that it doesn't want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  When there was Zeus and Diana and all the others. And they were very human-like, but instead we have one who is the absolute beginning. And what are you doing? You're teaching people an authority line that comes from the individual. If you have a sequence of kings. If in your feudal manner, the lord sits called the landlord. He has unspeakable power over everything that goes on. And you do this for thousands of years. You can make a Russian revolution in 1917. But if you imagine you've gotten away from all that people assume, without ever thinking about it, you're gonna have trouble.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  Stalin is figured here as the originator of his situation. He wasn't. He didn't never had that power. He may have thought that, but I don't. He's the product. Look, the Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn't that kind of guy. You know, he's a baseball-playing lawyer, that's what he was. But they made him into.

• 2:04:32Lex Fridman?

  So it's not, it's not the system.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  You're the product of history. No, no, no, it was the systems feudalism, the church. It was the structures and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its own rhythm and doesn't take, doesn't follow the calendar of a political revolution.

• 2:04:53Lex Fridman?

  That's the fundamental question. Is there something about communism that creates a mentality that?

• 2:05:01Lex Fridman?

  Enable somebody like Stalin or Mao.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  No, I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what they find familiar, to what seems to make sense, and he's the guy. Look, let me give you an example from American history. The Republican Party has traditionally in this country been the party of private enterprise and minimum government. In comes Trump, runs for office in 2016, is elected, okay? What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most massive government intervention in the worlds of economics that we've had

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  for decades. Nobody says anything. The Republicans cave, and the Democrats largely too. They cave. He can, he can, he can throw a tariff on anything. He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff. That's not what a tariff is. It's not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman course in economics, which everybody knows, everybody who teaches these courses. No, it doesn't matter. He's still calling the shots. What is going on here is that a society has come to a point where it can't

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  solve its problems and it begins what? To tap into older forms and all of the laissez-faire and all of the individualism. And suddenly, the Republican Party is gung-ho, and now they're going to make abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do with your uterus. What? What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power. They're hoping, what? Do they like the government? No. They're desperate. This is not a pro-government, and it wasn't in Russia either. They were in a desperate

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  fix. And so, and he took advantage.

• 2:07:12Lex Fridman?

  So to which degree did, would you say Marx's ideas led to the creation of the...

• 2:07:22Lex Fridman?

  National Socialism Party of German Workers, hence the Nazi Party, the fascist Party in the 30s and the 40s, at the head of whom was Hitler, which I just recently learned he was employee number seven of the party, or whatever, the seventh person to have joined the party and have created one of the most consequential and powerful political parties in the history of the 20th century. What degree did Marx's ideas, Marxism ideas, have to play? It is the National Socialist Party of German Workers.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:02Lex Fridman?

  Workers.

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  National Socialist Party, the National Socialist Party, German Worker Party.

• 2:08:11Lex Fridman?

  Worker Party.

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  National Socialist German Worker Party.

• 2:08:15Lex Fridman?

  So.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  Well, here's the history.

• 2:08:17Lex Fridman?

  Did he care about the workers, or did he just use the workers as a populist message?

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  The only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler was provide him with his stepping stone to power, but it had nothing, no other. He didn't know anything about it, didn't care anything about it, nor did the people around him. Here's the story of what happened there, which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history and the work that I did. The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German Party. It started around 1870, Marx was still alive, some of his own family were leaders, Ferdinand Lasalle and others, his daughters. By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany.

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Nobody understood it, it was overwhelming, it was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution in 1917. Here was a political party that was now in every German city, in every German town, powerful and enjoying its rise up. That's, my family is involved in this, so I mean, I really do know the story. It meant that starting around 1967, 8.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  If you wanted to have any kind of presence in the German working class, you had to use the word socialist. You had to. Otherwise, they wouldn't pay attention. The other parties called themselves Catholic. Germany is divided. The upper two, the northern two thirds is Protestant, the southern third is Catholic. Munich and Bavaria is Catholic and every other part of Germany basically is Protestant. You could be in the Catholic Party, that was the South, or you could be in various conservative, Prussian and other. If you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing, I mean, Germany,

• 2:10:20Speaker 01

  a very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time, you know, Germany was the major competitor to Britain for the empire. The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and US taking over from Britain's empire. So the German working class was it. So, anybody who wanted to approach the working class in whatever way, had to come to terms and be friendly to socialism. Other parties did this too, just like Hitler. They put the word socialist in their party, but they wanted to make it clear that they weren't anything to do with the Soviet Union or anything to do with Marxism. So they put

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  the word Nazional. Nazi is the first four letters of national, Nazional in German, and A Z I is how you spell national in the German. National socialism, but definitely not communists. That's right. They killed communists. They fought communists in the street. They had pitched battles. They literally threatened each other's existence and their life. And the first people that he arrested and put in jail were not Jews and gypsies and all the other people he eventually killed. It was communists. They were the number one, and socialists right behind them. Why? Because up until he takes power, January of 1933,

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  that's when Hitler takes power, the last elections, two of them, in 1932, the socialists and communists, they vote together, 50% of the vote in Germany. So, he appealed to the German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said,

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  The communists and socialists are gonna win.

• 2:12:08Speaker 01

  You are, and you, you're just the capitalist. You have too few people. You need a mass base, and I'm the only one that can do that.

• 2:12:17Lex Fridman?

  So it was just a populist message that he used?

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  That's right. But it was explicitly done as a deal. The, the, the ruling group said to Hindenburg, the old Prussian man, who was in charge of the German government at the time, you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise, he would never have done. He had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler as an aust-, a little funny man with a mustache, who, who was Austrian, wasn't even German, you know, the, for them, that mattered. So, he, he comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism, which he immediately does.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Only people who don't know or care about the history pick up on the word. You know, it's like, there are people here in the United States who like to say, we are not a democracy, we are a republic. Which is like saying, I'm not a banana, I'm a fruit. You have to explain to these people, a banana is a kind of fruit. So, you have to explain to people, yes, we're a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy as a way to govern the republic. Because to say you're a republic doesn't imply what kind of government you're in. You have to go through that with people, so they're gonna get it.

• 2:13:40Lex Fridman?

  And, and certain words have power beyond their actual meaning. They're used in, in communication, whether it's negative, like racist, or positive, like freedom of speech.

• 2:13:52Speaker 01

  Or Democrat, with a D.

• 2:13:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and then you use that to mean something.

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 2:13:57Lex Fridman?

  Or negative, uh, what, stop, Donny, stop being a socialist.

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02Lex Fridman?

  Or some, whatever, whatever that means, that's not even used as any kind of philosophical or economic sense. So let's fast forward to today.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:10Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Bernie Sanders.

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:13Lex Fridman?

  Uh, there's another populist. Figure that represents some of ideas of maybe let's call it democratic socialism. And maybe let's try to start sneak up on a definition of what that could possibly mean. But AOC Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, she's from these parts.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  Yes, please.

• 2:14:33Lex Fridman?

  So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC.

• 2:14:38Lex Fridman?

  Are they open to some ideas in Marxism? Are they representing those ideas well in both economic and the political sense?

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:50Lex Fridman?

  Where do I begin?

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the socialist movement predates Marx was always larger than Marx. And has gone on to develop separately after Marx's death. So.

• 2:15:05Lex Fridman?

  Can we pause on that? Actually, can you? Is there a nice way to delineate, draw a line between Marxism and socialism? Or if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism.

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  That's better.

• 2:15:18Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to like, maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism is?

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Right. Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics. And as I said earlier, devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  And that's its strength, how it does that, how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works. That is really the forte of the Marxist tradition. Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  Figures it's there so that people who aren't Marxist are nonetheless aware of Marxism. Like it more or less, study it more or less. Uh, but it's a broader notion that I like to use this sentence to describe. It's a broad idea that we can do better than so than capitalism that really. There are all kinds of things about capitalism. That are not what we as modern citizens of the world. Uh, think are adequate and we are in a tradition. That goes back to all the people who thought they could do better than slavery. And all the people who thought they could do better than feudalism.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  Uh, we've made progress feudalism was a progress over slavery. Capitalism was a progress over both of them. And progress hasn't stopped and we are the people who in a variety of ways. Want the progress to go for the further and are not held back. By believing that capitalism is somehow the best beyond which we cannot go or even think. We find that to be in the worst sense of the word. A reactionary way of thinking and we're that large. Community, many of us are not interested in economics all that much. We don't think that's the focal area.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  We are socialists for example, because we want to do something to deal with. Climate change to to we think the world is about to kill itself. Um, uh, physically and we want to take steps with other people. To stop that to to to fix that etcetera, etcetera. So that that's for me, uh, a kind of difference. It's a little difficult to say because there's no other figure like Marx that has an equal um impact, an equal place within the broad socialist tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  But that's very specialized and that's a whole nother kind of conversation. And whatever you say, the influence of the great anarchist thinkers, Kropotkin, Bakunin, um, Sorrel and others, still doesn't amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far. That could change, but I mean, up to this point, um, that's the, um, I think that's a way of understanding the relationship.

• 2:18:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's interesting that the, some of the ideas within anarchism, and of course, it's a, one of the more varied um disciplines.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:58Lex Fridman?

  Because there's such, maybe by definition, such variety in their thinkers. But they kind of stand for a um dismantling of a power center. And that, if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:19:17Lex Fridman?

  So where you have the, you know.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  There's a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas uh that uses the phrase, quote, "the withering away of the state." That's a quotation from Lenin. Uh, people should understand, that's a quotation from Lenin. And it was made by Lenin positive. In other words, Lenin was saying, that's a good thing. That's something we stand for. We want to create the conditions under which there is a wither. Because you remember, the, the communists or whatever, they weren't called that at first in Russia before the revolution. They were just socialists. They were hunted down and persecuted by the government, left and right. They had no love for the government.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  The government was their literal, everyday enemy. And uh. Being critical of government didn't just mean this particular government, but of the whole, being a Marxist, you always ask the questions of the social constitution of whatever it is you're struggling against. So there was this interest, why is the state so important? Especially because if you understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism, it didn't have powerful states. One of Lenin's greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia, and it goes back centuries. It's a huge book, three or four inches thick,

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  and I'm one of the few people who've read it. And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe. The development of a powerful central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate to hold on, which ought to be suggestive that maybe the turn to powerful governments here in the United States or in Europe is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can't go on and has to marshal every last

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  bit of power it can not to be lost in history.

• 2:21:31Lex Fridman?

  It would be interesting to see what the Soviet Union would look like if Lenin never died.

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  Right. A lot of people have asked that question over the years, a lot of people.

• 2:21:40Lex Fridman?

  There's Stalin sliding in in the middle of the night, erasing the withering away of the state part.

• 2:21:46Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:21:47Lex Fridman?

  So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie Sanders, what are your thoughts about these modern political figures that represent some of these ideas? And they sometimes refer to those ideas as democratic socialism.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  Right. The crucial thing about Bernie and about AOC, and it's particularly true about Bernie, because AOC is much younger and Bernie is an older man. Bernie, being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student, as an activist, then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont, as a mayor and all the rest. He lived through, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America. And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945, '06 to the present, I mean,

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  it really never stopped, was a Manichean worldview. The United States is good, it defines democracy, and the Soviet Union is awful, it defines whatever the opposite of democracy should be called. Good here, evil there. It was taken so far that even in among the ranks of academic individuals, it was impossible to have a conversation. I mean, I can't tell, just make it very personal, the number of times I would raise my hand

• 2:23:18Speaker 01

  in my classes at Harvard, or Stanford, or Yale, and I would ask a question that had something to do with Marxism, because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses to teach this to me, except by people who trashed it, you know, that, other than that, and I didn't want that. So I would ask a question, and I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I didn't much care for and those who were good teachers that I liked, fear, it was just fear. They didn't want to go there, they didn't want to answer my question. And I, after a while, I got to know some of them, and I found out why.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to understand this. Either they would have to say, "I don't know," which would be the honest truth for many of them, but a professor does not want to say, "In a classroom, I don't know," that's just not cool. Or they'd have to, if they knew, they'd have to say something that indicated they didn't know really much, and they weren't even going to do that. Or, they would know something, and maybe that would be because they were interested.

• 2:24:29Speaker 01

  They did not want the rest of the students to begin to say, huh, you know, Professor Smith, um, you know, he's interested in. Mm, mm, mm, this is not good for your career. You don't know how this is gonna play out. Who's gonna say what to whom. And I could see in their faces, what I later learned, because they told me, don't come to my office hours. You're, we're in the office, we can talk about it. But I'm, that's how bad it was. Is it, is it not still? Pretty much. In my field, the great so-called debate, I mean, I find it boring, but the great debate for my colleagues is between what's called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics.

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  Neoclassical, the government should stay out of the economy. Let's say fair or liberalism. And the Keynesian saying, no, you, you crazy neoclassical. If you do that, you'll have great depressions and the system will collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems, to fix the weaknesses. And they hate each other and they throw each other out of their jobs. One of the very few things they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like me out.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  That they can find common ground to do. So I had to learn it all on my, why am I telling you this? Because this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism of the post-World War II period, the vast bulk of all of that is unknown, not just to the average American person, but to the average American academic, to the average American who thinks of himself or herself as an intellectual. I mean, I, I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  They have no idea. Or saying, there's this man Lukacs, a Hungarian Marxist. He really had interested. Or to explain that Gramsci was not a great literary critic. He was head of the Communist Party of Italy for most of his adult life. What does that mean? Why, you like Gramsci as a literary critic, but um, uh. They were, and they didn't even know. They don't even know. It's been erased. It's a little bit like stories I've heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet Union because he, he obviously fell out of favor. And so somehow all of his writings, many of which are very interesting and complicated.

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  Uh, anyway, so what you're gonna have in this country is a slow awakening of socialism from a long hibernation called the Cold War. I never expected, to be very honest with you, that I would live to see. I knew it would come because these things always do, but I didn't expect to see it. So I have been surprised, as have a lot of us, that when it starts to happen, it happens fast.

• 2:27:41Lex Fridman?

  So the, uh, you see Bernie as an early sign of the awakening.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:27:46Lex Fridman?

  Uh, from the Cold War to, to.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:27:49Lex Fridman?

  Accept the idea.

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  Bernie was always a socialist. We all knew, and everybody who paid attention, he didn't hide it. But 2016, he go, he makes a decision, momentous, to run for president. He's just a senator from Vermont. Vermont is one of the smallest states in the Union. The people who live in Vermont love to tell you that there are more cows than people in Vermont, et cetera, et cetera.

• 2:28:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  Uh, so here from this little state, this elderly gentleman with a New York City accent.

• 2:28:19Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  Runs for, or, and says, I'm a socialist. And when they attack him, he doesn't run away. I'm a socialist. I'm a socialist. Now, he had been, it wasn't that, it wasn't a secret that suddenly got out. But the great question, and I, I don't mind telling you because I went to the right schools. I know a lot of people, you know, Janet Yellen was my classmate at Yale and stuff like that. So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party, and I said, well, what do you think about Bernie, uh, entering the race? Makes no difference, they get 1% of the vote. Right, he was wrong. Yeah, they had no idea what was coming. But the truth is, I didn't either. It wasn't just that he didn't get it. I thought his 1% was probably right.

• 2:29:06Speaker 01

  So we were both wrong. Yeah, change can happen fast. Do you think AOC might be president one day? Yeah, possible, possible. And but two things. Number one, it's fast. Number two,

• 2:29:23Speaker 01

  it's going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate, calm, non-confrontational socialism you can imagine. So not AOC or Bernie? No, no, they are not confrontational, in my judgment. In terms of the ideas of socialism. I mean, they're both very feisty. They're feisty personally. But not. But not ideologically. Got it. You know, she is, Bernie is also. You know, in honest moments, and they're both really are pretty honest folks, at least in my experience.

• 2:30:04Speaker 01

  In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that his, what he advocates as democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s. It was a kind of popular government, tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide a lot more support for the working class than you do now. That's not a fundamental change. That's what he means by socialism. When he talks about it and he's asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot. Okay, that, that, that's consistent. That's the softest kind of socialism. And that's where we're going to start in a country coming out of hibernation.

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  Pretty soon, it's already happening, there'll be people who need and want to go further in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are comfortable with. You can already see the shoots of it now. You know, AOC voted together with most of the others to support the money for Ukraine. Okay, that a lot of people in the socialist movement do not support that. Uh, and that's gonna, I don't know exactly how that's gonna work out, but. That should give people an idea. There are disagreements and they're gonna fester and they're gonna grow.

• 2:31:21Lex Fridman?

  They don't, the people in this, so people in the socialist sphere don't support money from the United States in the large amounts that it is being sent to Ukraine. Is it because of, it's fundamentally, the military industrial complex is a capitalist institution kind of thing?

• 2:31:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:31:37Lex Fridman?

  I wonder what the.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  I mean, there are some people for whom that's the issue. Then there are people for whom this is, you know, it's guns and butter and why are we, why are we over there when we have such needs at home that are being neglected?

• 2:31:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  And then there are people who, well, go back to what we talked about at the beginning, who are more like Lenin and Debs. This is, this is a fight between Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and, and wannabe oligarchs in Ukraine and what are we doing here? We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a settlement. Don't kill large numbers of Ukraine. I mean, everybody's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian is a little strange here. What are you doing? You're supposed to be in favor of peace, you know? And for the United States, which just finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq,

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  to be against another country invading, I mean, who in the world is gonna take this seriously? This is crazy. You know, I invade, it's good and you invade is terrible. What? You know, what are you doing? What, why are you doing that? What, what, what's, what's going on here? All of these questions are being acted, by the way, not just by socialists, by lots of other people too, inside the Democratic Party and also inside the Republican Party. You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that, they are against the stuff in, in Ukraine. They don't want the money spent there. They don't want the weapons sent there. They don't like the whole policy. It's, and, and Trump wobble.

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  So Mr. Biden's policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right. And every day that this thing lasts, these criticisms get bigger. Anyway, the point is that AOC and Bernie.

• 2:33:29Speaker 01

  Should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War isolation from the whole, you know, when I explain to people the, the, the contribution made, for example, to modern Marxism, I'll give you an example, by the, the French philosopher Louis Althusser, I don't know if the name means anything to you, okay, he was the rector of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, that's the equivalent, imagine in this country if there were a university that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT, I mean,

• 2:34:10Speaker 01

  it would be the university, well, the Ecole Normale in France, in Paris, is the, he was a tenured professor who became the rector, the rector is like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist Party, most of his adult life, that was possible in France during the Cold War, that was unthinkable in this country, you could not, in a million years, right, so, I, Althusser, as a philosopher, tried to bring a version of post-modernism into Marxism, with enormous impact all over the world, where he traveled, not just in

• 2:34:51Speaker 01

  Europe, all over, right, so, if you want to look him up, I'll spell it out for you. Sure. A-L-T-H-U-S-S-E-R, Louis, the Louis is spelled L-O-U-I-S, Louis Althusser, look him up, you'll see tons of stuff, by the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember, of his works in English, um, by the way, the textbook I wrote in economics, in case you're ever interested, was also published by the MIT Press. And the title? Contending Economic Theories, Neoclassical Keynesian and Marxian. That's right. That's an MIT. Marxian. Yeah, that's right. And by the way, when we think, I don't know if there's an interesting distinction

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  between Marxian economics and Marxist.

• 2:35:40Lex Fridman?

  I suppose Marxism is the umbrella of everything that's.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  I only use it because Marxist I use as a noun. A person is a Marxist. Marxian I use as an adjective to qualify, but I don't mean some great difference. There's a last point I would like to make about AOC and Bernie. That's also general.

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  I'm a historian too. And I know that the transition out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism was a transition that took centuries and that occurred in fits and starts. So for example, a feudal manor would start to disintegrate. Serfs would run away, then run into a town. How would they live in the town? They had no land anymore because they had run away from the feudal manor. A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal, understanding what they were doing. A merchant would say to one of these serfs, I'm in the business of buying and then reselling stuff and living off the difference.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  But you know, I could make more money if I produce some of this stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody else. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna make you a deal. I'm gonna give you money. Once a week, I'll give you a money, what we would later call a wage. And you come here and under my supervision, you make this crap that I'm gonna then sell. And this all works out. In other words, there were, there were efforts unconscious, not self-aware, to go out of feudalism to a new system.

• 2:37:19Speaker 01

  Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. Some of them lasted weeks or months or years. But it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general switch. And once that was done, it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system we have today. That's the only model we have. So for me, that's what I see when I look at socialism. I see the Paris Commune was an event, an attempt.

• 2:37:54Speaker 01

  Lasted a few weeks. I see Russia. That was an attempt lasted 70 years. Then I see, and you will fill in the blank. I see, these are all early experiments. These are all, you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good, the bad. What do you build on? How do you learn? And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition, when it's serious, that's what it does.

• 2:38:21Lex Fridman?

  So in your ideas, sort of capitalism was a significant improvement over the feudalism.

• 2:38:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:38:27Lex Fridman?

  And we are coming to an age and over slavery. And we're coming to an age where capitalism will die out and make, it's not that capitalism is somehow fundamentally broken. It's better than the things that came before, but there is going to be things yet better. And they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and socialism. Is there, just to linger briefly on the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter.

• 2:38:59Lex Fridman?

  There's something called, I'm sorry if I'm using the terms incorrectly, but cultural Marxism. Right. Criticisms of universities being infiltrated by cultural Marxists. I'm not exactly sure, I don't pay close enough attention.

• 2:39:17Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 2:39:18Lex Fridman?

  But it's woke, it's, there's a, there's a kind of woke ideology that I'm not exactly sure.

• 2:39:25Speaker 01

  That's not you.

• 2:39:26Lex Fridman?

  What is the fundamental text? Who's the Karl Marx of wokeness?

• 2:39:33Lex Fridman?

  All I do know is that there's certain characteristics of woke ideology, which is hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys.

• 2:39:47Lex Fridman?

  And basically, everyone is a bad guy, except, except the people that are very loudly, nonstop, saying that they're the good guy. And that applies for racism, for sexism, for gender, gender politics, identity politics, all that kind of stuff. Is there, is there any parallels between Marxian economics and Marxist ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter?

• 2:40:20Speaker 01

  No, not much. Mostly Marx, you have to, one of the consequences of the taboo after World War II is that Marxism, like socialism and communism, become swear words. It's like calling somebody, well, I won't use bad language, but using a four-letter word to describe somebody. So instead of calling them, you know, this or that, you call them a Marxist. In many circles, this is even worse than whatever other adjective you might have used. But it doesn't have a particular meaning that I can assess. The closest you get is your little list.

• 2:40:59Speaker 01

  It is somebody who is concerned about race and sex and sexual orientation, gender, and all of those things, and wants there to be transgendered bathrooms, and I don't like any of these people, so I slap the word Marxism, or the phrase cultural Marxism, because it isn't Marxism about getting more money, or controlling the industry, or all those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned about. So this is odd, since they don't know much about Marxism. I've always been interested in culture.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  I mean, Lukacs, the man I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that's what they're famous for, the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture. Gramsci writes at great length about the Catholic Church, about theater and painting in Italy, and on and on. I mean- This is just ignorance talking. They don't know anything about that. They wouldn't know what the names are. It's a, it's a label that summarizes, kind of a shorthand. I'm against all of this. I don't want to be told that there's ugly racism in this country, and it always has been. Or sexism, or um, uh, phobia against gay people, whatever it is that's agitating them.

• 2:42:24Speaker 01

  Marxism or socialism. I mean, it's just, it's like socialism is the post office. It, it is. It is a mental, well, but I don't blame them. I mean, it's childish. It's mean spirited, but it comes out of the fact no one ever sat them down and said, you know, here is this tradition. It's got these kinds of things that people kind of share and these big differences. Look, an intelligent society, which this country is, could have and should have done that. It was fear and a kind of terror that made them behave in the way they did, and we're now seeing it. Having said that, there is such a thing as cultural Marxism.

• 2:43:09Speaker 01

  What that is, is simply those Marxists who devoted themselves to analyzing how it is that a particular culture is on the one hand shaped by capitalism, and on the other hand, it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow. In other words, how do we analyze the interaction between uh, the class struggle on the job and attitude towards sexuality, or movements in music, or whatever else culture?

• 2:43:47Speaker 01

  And there are Georg Lukács, this Hungarian, great name indeed, the greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci. And a modern name, just died a couple of years ago, a British intellectual named Stuart Hall, H A L L. You want to, if you want, if, if I were teaching, which I have done, a course in cultural Marxism, those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you articles and books to read of their stuff because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many others.

• 2:44:23Lex Fridman?

  So there is something to be said and understood about. The kind of culture that capitalism creates and the kind of culture that enables capitalism.

• 2:44:31Speaker 01

  Yes, and Marxists are particularly those who like to look at that interaction. In other words, they're interested in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism. There's another name, I forgot. Stuart Hall is British, Gramsci is Italian, Lukacs is Hungarian.

• 2:44:52Speaker 01

  The German is Walter Benjamin, B E N J A M I N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school of Marxism that developed in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people, many of whom were interested in cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against the narrow Marxism that was so focused on economics and politics. There were people who said, you're leaving out very important parts of modern society that are shaping the economy as much as they are shaped by it. And it was that impetus to open Marxism, to be more inclusive

• 2:45:32Speaker 01

  in what it deemed to be important to understand, that this cult, and they call themselves cultural Marxists, but they had a completely different meaning from this. This is just, you know, bad mouthing, that's all.

• 2:45:48Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a more personal question. So for most of the 20th century, no, not most, but a large, many decades in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War and before, being a Marxist is one of the worst things you could be.

• 2:46:04Lex Fridman?

  Have you had dark periods in your own life where you've gone to some dark places in your mind? Where it was difficult, like self doubt, difficult to know, like, what the hell am I doing? When you're surrounded by colleagues and people, you said prestigious universities, both personal interest of career, but also as a human being, when everybody... You know, kind of looks at you funny because you're studying this thing. Did that ever get you real low?

• 2:46:37Speaker 01

  No, I know people that who had exactly what you said. I mean, your question's perfectly reasonable. If I were you, I'd be asking me that question too.

• 2:46:47Lex Fridman?

  And what's wrong with you?

• 2:46:48Speaker 01

  Nothing wrong with the question.

• 2:46:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  And here's the honest truth. I don't know how anomalous I am. I really don't. But the truth is, no, I have. If my wife were sitting here, she'd tell you what she tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true. But then again, luck never is the only explanation for things. It's part of it.

• 2:47:19Speaker 01

  What can I say? I didn't choose the time of my birth. I didn't choose the communities in which I grew up or the schools I attended or anything else.

• 2:47:27Lex Fridman?

  No, but the fact that there was no courses or extensive courses on Marxian economics.

• 2:47:31Speaker 01

  But you know, again, it's I'm Hegel. On the one hand, I was denied good instruction. On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own. And the motivation, when you do that, is very different. I'm not the student who sits there with my notebook, taking notes of what the great professor says and reading the text and getting ready for the exam. I don't have an exam. I had, and I'm doing something slightly risque, you know, kind of romantically different and oppositional.

• 2:48:08Speaker 01

  I was able to find always one or two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation, other students who felt enough similar to me that we could get together and read these books and talk about them. I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me of their time and their effort to teach me along the way. And I've had the benefit that because I went to all these fancy schools, I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture. And when I have been put in difficult positions, I often waive my pedigree and it works like garlic with the devil. They back away.

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  They back away. Because Americans are very deferential to

• 2:48:58Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:48:58Speaker 01

  that kind of academic prestige.

• 2:49:00Lex Fridman?

  But there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken by this. You have, uh, uh, just naturally, somebody, um, who just has perseverance.

• 2:49:15Speaker 01

  Well, I would put it, I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would put it a little differently. I think capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system. And nothing has happened to change my mind. In other words, the development, uh, just,

• 2:49:38Speaker 01

  just kept giving me more and more evidence that this, and I must say, over the last 10 years, what's really changed? The last 10 years, I mean, I can't describe to you how big that changes. And that, and that may be more important than anything else we've discussed. Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television or a radio thing, or give a talk at some conference or something. Once every two or three months, I'd be invited and I would do it, like academics often do.

• 2:50:17Speaker 01

  I now do two to three to four interviews every day. So, uh,

• 2:50:24Lex Fridman?

  There's a hunger.

• 2:50:25Speaker 01

  There, wow, is there hunger.

• 2:50:27Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating.

• 2:50:28Speaker 01

  And I want to be honest with you. As I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause from the podium, you know, that I lean into the microphone and I say, with as much smile as I can get, I'm having the time of my life.

• 2:50:47Speaker 01

  And that's the truth.

• 2:50:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  That's the truth. I never expected, look, I'm used to teaching a classroom, a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or 10 students, or a, uh, or a regular undergraduate class with 30, or an occasional introductory course with a few hundred. I've done all of those things many times. But an audience, you know, that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that, no, that that's new.

• 2:51:19Lex Fridman?

  Is there advice you can give, given your bold and non-standard career in life? Advice you can give to high school students, college students about how to have a career like that, or maybe how to have a career or a life they can be proud of?

• 2:51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:42Speaker 01

  First of all, my advice is go for it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely better than they were when I had to do it. And I could do it, and I can, I'm happy I did it. Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made that I've never regretted.

• 2:52:05Speaker 01

  And I've never regretted being a critic of this society, never. I find it edifying, I find it, I mean, the gratitude people express to me for helping them see kind of what's going on is unbelievably encouraging. I mean, what can I tell you?

• 2:52:24Lex Fridman?

  So that fills you, that fills you with joy. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes fills you, that's, that's a life, not just important, is joyful.

• 2:52:33Speaker 01

  It's because most of the people who say something like that to me are people who, if they had the vocabulary, and some of them do, would say, you know, I thought I was seeing through that outfit that emperor was wearing.

• 2:52:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:49Speaker 01

  I thought it, and they did.

• 2:52:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:51Speaker 01

  And all they needed was a little extra, this information, or that factoid, or this logic, ah, yeah. And they have that, and I remember having that, too. When I had a teacher who made something clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude. And now I get that gratitude a good bit, and yes, it is enormously gratifying. And I'm not sure I could, could get it any other way. And it, I had learned, and I'm walking proof, that being a critic of society and doing it systematically and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life, a very good life.

• 2:53:37Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes to an end.

• 2:53:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:53:45Lex Fridman?

  Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?

• 2:53:48Speaker 01

  Afraid of it? No. Think about it? Yes. Yes. I'm not afraid.

• 2:53:55Speaker 01

  I've always thought, you know, death is hard for the people that are left. When you're dead, you know, it's not gonna bother you very much. So it's... I worry more about my wife. I'm very attached to my wife. I might mention to you, I got married when I was 23 years old. That's my wife to this day.

• 2:54:15Speaker 01

  So I'm lucky, because that's... If you get married to anybody in their age 23, it's either luck or it isn't.

• 2:54:24Lex Fridman?

  What has, uh, what role has this love played in your life?

• 2:54:28Speaker 01

  Enormous.

• 2:54:31Speaker 01

  Because I came from a family, you know, if your family is political refugees, which mine were, who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another continent, learn another language, find another life income and job. The disruption goes real deep for any refugee. So... So my mother and father were both refugees. They met as refugees.

• 2:55:03Speaker 01

  So I had to, in a way, make it up to them. I had to be, I was the first child of their... I have a younger sister, but I was the first child. And, you know, there's a lot of psychological pressure on you if you're in that situation. Nobody means you harm, but you've got to do what they couldn't, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do. It's the closest they're gonna get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university students. My father was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life.

• 2:55:46Speaker 01

  So I had to perform, you know, I went to high school here in the United States. I, I had to get all A's. I had to be on the football team. I had to play the violin in the orchestra. Do all these because everything had to be achieved. So I'm an achievement crazy person that way. And, but that's functional in this dysfunctional society.

• 2:56:09Lex Fridman?

  But on top of that, that's an achievement within the game of this particular society.

• 2:56:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:56:15Lex Fridman?

  But then love seems to be a thing that's greater than that game. Is that something that made you a better person?

• 2:56:22Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 2:56:22Lex Fridman?

  How is it, how, how was it made you a better Marxian and a better?

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  Everything. Because my wife, my wife by profession is a psychotherapist.

• 2:56:32Lex Fridman?

  Excellent. I love it.

• 2:56:34Speaker 01

  And I needed it.

• 2:56:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:36Speaker 01

  And so I married it. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I think as I look back on it, that was more, more than a little what was going on. And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family never talked about, never dealt with, never, at least explicitly engaged in any of that.

• 2:57:03Lex Fridman?

  Because it was all about survival. The immigrant challenge is survival.

• 2:57:07Speaker 01

  Survive, survive. And you're so busy that you tell yourself you can't do that. You, of course, you can. And there are other reasons why you're not going to look at those problems. But the survival is so urgent that you can fool yourself this way. And my parents did that.

• 2:57:26Lex Fridman?

  One last question. What's the meaning of life, Richard Wolff? Why, why are we here?

• 2:57:32Speaker 01

  I will quote you, Mr. Marx.

• 2:57:35Lex Fridman?

  Let's go.

• 2:57:37Speaker 01

  Life is struggle. And for me, I have found.

• 2:57:44Speaker 01

  That to be true, that the struggle, whether it is to build a relationship with your child, I have two children, whether it's to build one with your spouse, whether it's to understand a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this relationship to a student or to an audience. These are, it's a struggle to do all those things. But that, that network of struggles, that makes life interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.

• 2:58:24Lex Fridman?

  And meaningful.

• 2:58:25Speaker 01

  And very meaningful.

• 2:58:26Lex Fridman?

  And that latter thing, I gotta say, you do masterfully. You're one of the great communicators and educators out there today, and it's a huge honor that you will sit with me for so many hours.

• 2:58:36Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:58:36Lex Fridman?

  This is awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolff. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.