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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:52 - Marxism
10:21 - Communism
45:27 - Human nature
57:43 - Economics
1:04:34 - Capitalism
1:36:58 - Governments and corporations
1:47:53 - Stalinism
2:01:52 - Nazis
2:08:48 - Socialism vs Marxism
2:16:28 - Bernie Sanders and AOC
2:33:29 - Cultural Marxism
2:40:28 - Darkest moments
2:45:58 - Advice for young people
2:48:17 - Mortality
2:52:08 - Meaning of life

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Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets.

Serfs produce a surplus which the Lord gets.

Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets.

These are exploitative class structures because 1 class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle.

The following is a conversation with Richard Wolf, 1 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.

I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx, as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

And in general, we need to both steel man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize, and to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant and at times dangerous.

To support it, Please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Richard Wolff.

Let's start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all.

What are the defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology?

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.

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 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.

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.

The only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks.

In 1871 there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany, and in 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 commune.

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?

In other words, governing, organizing a society.

But since it only lasted 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 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 1917.

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, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation, because it is the government that loses World War I, has to Withdraw, as you know, 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, 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 short, he's in exile.

His position, Lenin's position, makes him, gets him deported because he says Russian workers should not be killing German workers.

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.

The head of the Socialist Party, a very important American figure named Eugene Victor Debs makes exactly the same argument to the Americans should not fight in the war.

He's in the past, he has nothing to do with Lenin, I don't even know if they knew of each other, but 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.

And he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you see the link.

Although he had much more courage politically than Bernie has.

That's really interesting, I'd love to return to that link maybe later.

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 going to do in the Soviet Union?

And a lot of this was then trial and error.

Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if he had, because it was 50 years earlier in another country, etc.

So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens then 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 1 to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative post-capitalist society ought to look like, how it ought to work.

And there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion, and I would say that that's still where it is.

You have a tradition now that has these 2 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 1, is that human society can do better than capitalism, and it ought to try.

So we'll look at the critique of capitalism on 1 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, where his ideas that were implicit were made explicit?

Would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations?

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.

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.

There's a German word, I don't know if you speak the other languages, there's a wonderful German word called verzichte.

It's if you wanna refuse something but with real strong emphasis.

So this verzichte is a German way of saying I don't want anything to do with that.

And he would talk then 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 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.

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

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

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.

And so that there was a kind of presumption around the world, Their interpretation must be kind of the right 1 because look, they did it.

And so for a while, they could enunciate their interpretation 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 Marxism, there were these words 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, it was gone.

But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of, 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, it's that, well the ignorance may be, 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.

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.

Right, because for example, let me just take your 0.1 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.

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.

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

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, 1 interesting, so Stalin's implementation of all of this, 1 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.

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?

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

In the early days of Marx's writings, and you know, 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.

He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were manufacturers.

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.

He wasn't the only 1, but he was very, very effective at it.

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 other movement.

The anarchists of various kinds, like Proudhon 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 1 hand and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other—they now wanted a different question.

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 yet, well you might imagine, they didn't go and say well what will that new system look like?

What they did was ask the question, how could we get beyond capitalism?

It seems to have captured people's minds, people's daily lives, and so on.

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, 3 volumes, there's almost nothing in it.

The state, I mean he mentions it, but he's interested in the details of how capitalism works.

Factory by factory, store by store, office.

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

Think of it almost mechanically like the workplace.

In the workplace there, 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.

The government was not the key factor here.

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?

But the government is not part of that picture.

So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when this begins, but 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 captured in Marxist language by the bourgeoisie, by the by the other side, the capitalists, 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 gonna, 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.

1 side says you go with the election you you you mobilize the voter that gets to be called reformism within Marxism And the other side is revolution.

This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged.

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 Parliament, but they didn't.

And that this focus on the state, I would argue, 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 role of the state in a reformist strategy to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein.

His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, 2 other huge figures in Marxism at the time.

And they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate.

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

Can you comment on where you lean in terms of the mechanism of progress, reformation versus revolution?

I'd rather tell you the historical story.

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 an 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.

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.

And at the same time, the explosion of 2 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.

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 that the 2 socialist parties, 1 that was Trotskyist and inspiration and the other 1 more moderate Western European kind of socialism.

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 because it achieved in a few years in the 1930s starting around 1932-33 Social security in this country.

Unemployment insurance, never existed before, but 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.

30s, not much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s.

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.

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

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 becomes the end.

In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear, before he, you know, he doesn't live very long, he dies at 23, so he's only in power from 17, he's at 22, by that time he has his brain trouble.

1923, yeah, he's only there for 4 or 5 years.

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.

With Stalin, 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, and by the end of the 20s Stalin makes a decision.

I mean not that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that they do the following.

In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the state.

Not when the state capture has enabled you to do XYZ, other things.

No, no, the state itself, once you have it, is socialism.

So when a socialist captures the state, that's socialism.

Well it shouldn't be because I give you an example.

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 know, when I first heard this as a young man, you know, what?

It took me a while to understand the post office, Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government runs something.

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.

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

So what role does central planning have in Marxism?

So Marxism is concerned with this class struggle with respecting the working class.

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Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295