Why? Radio Episode, "Why not Socialism?" with guest Robert Paul Wolff
10:33PM Nov 10, +0000
Speakers:
Announcer
Jack Russell Weinstein
Robert Paul Wolff
Keywords:
people
socialism
marx
capitalist
workers
live
political philosophers
talk
decisions
capitalism
world
question
socialist
comrades
philosophy
money
society
years
means
grandfather
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Hi, I'm jack Russel Weinstein host of why philosophical discussions about everyday life. On today's show, we're asking the question, why not socialism with our guest, Robert Paul wolf. I'd like to add that this episode is being made possible by a generous donation from Paul Gaffney. Thank you, Paul, for your support. political activism in America has been usurped by Facebook. The website has made outrage into entertainment and political argument into branding. In a certain sense, this is not new French existentialists, once Rome Parisian cafes performing their political views, and American hippies use their picket signs to troll for sex. But Facebook has made these behaviors measurably worse. It's a platform fueled by emotional gameplay, not political argument, and its endgame is well known when you link to that blog photo or pictogram that angers your friends. Not your parents By the way, not the establishment, not even the man whoever that was, but your friends. When you find that link that inspires your friends to be publicly petty and respond with virulent diatribe, then well, you when nothing happens next, people will claim they post on Facebook to educate their audience. But awareness as it has come to be called, is not an end in itself. Knowledge without action is of little use to anyone and conviction without participation only strengthens the status quo. The more people who actually feel as if they're doing something by posting on Facebook, the happier those powers are. Because Facebook politics is not a threat to anyone. All it is, is revenue generating clicks for a major corporation. every instance of social network vitriol makes someone money, someone other than you. The commodification of dissent is a fairly new phenomenon. It's a product of the second half of the 20th century. It reduces moral claims to T shirts and political ideas to Instagrams replacing action with advertising. But there's one person social media aren't prepared to deal with Karl Marx, I don't mean of course marks his face or a select few quotes. I mean, his body of work his lengthy complex, sometimes even obtuse analysis in the modern world. How do we know this? Because the language of marks is now regarded as insults to throw with those who believe in his ideas. In America, at least to be a socialist is to be naive. To be loyal to a union is to be corrupt. to challenge capitalism is to be traitorous. I'm surprised by how little I see Marx's words on the internet, even from my most left wing friends. And when they do show up, I'm always disappointed to see how many people breeze by them, making them powerless through disregard. You'd think we'd all have realized by now that the most potent in justices and the most dangerous ideas are the ones we don't talk about, not the ones we plaster on our walls for all to see. My claim is that Marx was always correct. It's not, although when he wasn't when he wasn't, will be one of the major topics of today's episode. But rather than Marx's depth, and insight is beyond what our culture is prepared for, there's no way to reduce his critique to a Facebook post because he offers volumes of evidence. And there are a few ways to use his claims to refute a blog entry. Because taking any of Marx out of context without detailed explanation, disarms power, Facebook and other social networks lack nuance. They don't have the tools to argue against Marx, nor do they have the complexity to present him he just gets left behind. In fact, the only place where Marx is taught with any regularity is in literary criticism, class based analyses of novels is still standard fare and English courses. And it's been influential enough to be get feminist critique ethnic studies and all manner of cultural analysis. But Marx is only allowed when we talk about fiction, and only when he is reduced to simple formulas for producing a literary critique. But genuinely encountering Marx changes people, the experience stays with them, even when it means devoting much of their energy to proving him wrong. As with the Republican Party, the American right is always against him and always accusing others of being his agents, so they're never without him. President Obama's is far from a socialist as a modern politician can be. Most democrats abandoned allegiance to Marxist ideals long ago, but you'd never know that from listening to the conservative majority in Congress. According to them, everyone else is a Bolshevik in disguise. So why not socialism? Why not give it another look another thought of a test run without assuming its danger or falsity to do so as the purpose of today's episode, just the fact that we're taking Mark seriously may infuriate many in the audience, but others anger is no reason not to engage with ideas that have already changed the world. Our job as thoughtful people is to understand first and challenge Second, if some of what we encounter sticks. We have to have faith that we'll be better off for it.
And now we turn to our guest. Robert Paul Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, is the author of 21 books on the history of modern philosophy, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, economics and African American Studies. He's one of philosophies most powerful voices articulating alternatives to capitalism, including reconsiderations of socialism and anarchism. Bob, thanks for joining us on why
I'm delighted to be here. I'm sitting here listening to your intro. And I just was hoping you'd keep going, because I found it quite interesting.
Well, thank you so much, folks, the show is being recorded. So we won't be taking questions live. But if you'd like to join the conversation, please visit our chat room at y radio show. org post on facebook@facebook.com slash y radio show or tweet us at at y radio show. So I've been trying to think about Bob, I've been trying to think about what Marx did what Adam Smith did what even folks like Amartya Sen. And Paul Krugman do, and I was wondering, what is it that a political philosopher does? Do they concern themselves with theoretical structures and utopia? And and and analyses in the abstract? Or do they intend to be policymakers to, to influence the decisions that government makes?
Well, first of all, I'll tell you what we don't do. We don't build anything, we don't grow anything, we don't make anything, we don't even offer health care. So we're not actually contributing to the day to day life of the people around us. What we do, if we are serious about our calling, is to look at the world and try to understand why it has gone wrong in the ways that it has, and what we could do to make it better, not by adopting particular policies, but by trying to think through right down to the ground. What it is, that is the structure of the world that we live in the social world. That's really what a social philosopher does, what a political philosopher does.
What what what what does this phrase mean, the structure of the world? What? What is the structure of the world?
Well, let me respond not by answering that question. But by asking a question. Everybody knows that we need capital, capital is the stuff that we use to get along in the world. It's the machinery, it's the tools, it's the, it's the seed that we plant to grow food, it's the knowledge that we use to learn how to start a fire what to make a bullet, or to construct a building. So we need capital. But it's an interesting question to ask, why do we need capitalists, capitalists have the private individuals who own that stuff, and they won't let anybody else use it unless they can make a profit from it. So that when those who actually do the work in this world set about working eight hours a day or more, and producing the goods and the services that all of us need and use in order to live? The capitalist say, you can't do that unless I make a buck out of it. Why do we need capitalists? That's a kind of question, a foundational question, a structural question that nobody ever asks, these days, you read Paul Krugman, and you read all the other commentators on economics in the world. And they are very good at predicting whether interest rates are going to go up or down or what the unemployment rate is going to be. But they never stand back and say, why this system? Why not some other system? That's the question that Marx asked. And it's what makes his his writing so dangerous. God knows they aren't exciting to read, sometimes they can be very difficult and very obscure, but they ask questions that nobody asks these days. And that's why they're scary.
So what's the difference between a worker, let's say, a plumber, who is planning to make money to pay his or her bills to get an education to feed his or her family, and a capitalist? Who's making a buck? for whatever reasons he or she has, why is one making a buck in? I'll use this term, although it might not be the right one a better way and one is making a buck in a worse way.
Well, the simple answer is, you need the plumber. You need the plumber, when you're when your toilet gets stopped up and without the plumber, you're not going to be able to use the toilet. You don't need the capitalist. The plumber can do quite nicely Thank you without a capitalist making a profit often. But the capitalist doesn't as a capitalist, do anything except say you may use what I privately owned, so long as I can get rich off, you're doing it. Now of course, you have to be clear. There are a lot of people who are capitalists who are also managers, and they run companies. Now managing a company is a real job and you're somebody who's got to manage if you just get a bunch of money Together, throw them into a factory and say, Okay guys have at it, you're not likely to produce anything unless somebody is organizing it. But that job is a job that people get paid for. It's part of the salary structure of the company. It's the manager salaries, the capitalist is the person who owns or controls the capital. And what he does is nothing except say, I permit you to use my private owned by privately owned capital. And if you do, I will only let you do so. So long as I can make a profit from it. We don't need that. We don't need people getting making a profit off the labor of others. We do need people working and working hard and making this a better world. And that's what they do day after day. So
so. So who is a capitalist? How do I identify a capitalist on the street? How do I tell the difference between a capitalist and a manager, and anyone else? Who is engaging in either administrative or financial or other activities? What makes a capitalist a capitalist? And how is this a separate category?
Well, first of all, it's a little hard to tell them on the street. In the good old days, when I was young, you could tell what people did by the clothes they wore. And if anybody listening to this show has ever played the old Monopoly game, you can remember the little card with the man with a top hat and $1 sign on his belly, he was the capitalist. Nowadays, you take a look at somebody owns an airline, and he might very well be the guy who's serving your your coffee, at a Starbucks, it's very hard to tell the difference. But when you take a closer look, the capitalist is the person who owns the company or owns a share of the company. Now, in the old days, it was easy to see who owned the company, the guy who owned the company was the guy who lived in the big house across the street from the factory. And every day stood there and watched while the workers streamed in. Nowadays, it's really the managers who run the company. And in addition to their salary, they pay themselves these multimillion dollar bonuses, which are actually just profits, which they put into their own pockets, it's a little bit more complicated now. But all you have to do is stand back and notice that in the last 20 years or so, almost all of the economic growth in the United States is going into the pockets of the richest 1% or one 10th of 1%. While ordinary working people haven't seen a rise in their real wages at all. And that'll tell you who the capitalists are, they're the people who are getting all of that extra stuff that workers have been producing all these years.
Alright, so so I guess I have a two part question. And they're related. The second part has to do with something that you write in your outstanding piece, the future of socialism, where you talk about how the notion of the middle class really hides the fact that that, that the people we're talking about are in fact, the rich. But before we get there, let me ask this, I and I suspect like you because we're both college professors have retirement funds in this organization called t double A craf. And we are invested in the stock market. And when the stock market goes up, my retirement portfolio goes up. When the stock market goes down, my retirement portfolio goes down and whatever it is we're invested in, and I have no idea what it is, when it when when they're plumbers make money, I make money. So does that make me and you capitalists as well.
What it does is to take us part of the way toward the point when the people as a whole will own all of the capital in the country. And then we will have socialism. This is a waystation along the way. It you it's perfectly true that there are some unions with very large retirement funds invested in the market. And although they have no control over the companies that they own stocks in because shareholders no longer have any control over the companies that they have shares in, they do have a piece of that capital, that's perfectly true. And that's a step along the way if we could take that all the way and just impose a 100% inheritance tax on the wealth of the wealthy so that when they kick off the their wealth doesn't go to their kids, but goes to the people who created it, we'd be on our way to creating a society in which the work would be the same. The people what you do when you went to a job would be the same the wages would go up because instead of the profits going into the pockets of a few, they will be spread around in wage increases for those who actually do the work.
So this is this is fairly This is fairly complicated in order to understand I think part of what we're talking About I think it's important to ask the question, What did the world look like then versus what it looked like? Now? How do we categorize things? And in order to do that, I actually want to ask a slightly different question, although I think it connects directly in your piece on socialism, you start off by talking about your grandfather's dream. And certainly many, many folks in that time, so socialism as the answer to a bunch of things. And it is clear talking to you and reading your material, that this is not just an academic enterprise, although it is, it is also very personal and very intimate to you. And so the question I have is, what was it about that generation? What did socialism offer to that generation that was so attractive to so many people that led to the red diaper babies and other folks, and what is it that people now inherit? That there's that that this small group of very, very devoted believers hold on to what was happening when Marx was writing what was happening when, when this modern socialism came to the fore? And why was it of so much interest to the workers, to the immigrants to the intelligentsia, even to all the folks in the early 20th century, that that help us understand this experience in early 20th century America?
Well, what happened, what was happening when Marx was writing, which was a couple of generations before that, was that as capitalism developed, especially in England, you had men and women who used to live on farms and be and be peasants who would flooded into the cities. And we're now working 1214 hours a day and making scarcely enough to put food on the table, and who have been thrown out of work whenever the capitalist decided that he didn't need them anymore. They were living, and lots of them couldn't even get jobs, many, in many cases, the only people that the capitalists would hire with their children so that they would their children would get jobs paying pennies, and they wouldn't be able to get decent jobs. And they were desperate. Now, for a time, when my grandfather came to the United States, he came with a little baby. But when he was a young man, then the same thing was true of workers in the United States, they were just getting by, they were not doing well, they were struggling. And they brought with them, many of them from Europe, these ideas that there was a different way of organizing things. And so not all of them, but a lot of them supported the Socialist Party, my grandfather even got himself elected to the New York Board of Aldermen in 1917, kind of the high point of my family story. But then World War Two came. And after World War Two, for a while, things looked up, unions were strong wages were going up. And there was a period of time there 20 or 30 years, when it looked as though the workers were getting a better shake in the system. And so the demand for turning the system around, began to die out. And instead, people pin their hopes on making it into the middle class. And you remember, being in the middle class meant, first of all, owning your own home. Second of all, having a car third, getting a paid vacation, fourth, only working five days a week. And fifth, having a shot at your kids going on to higher education. That was what made you middle class. And for a long time, 2030 years, a lot of workers, not black workers, but white workers felt that they really had a chance at that. Now, of course, what we see is another period of time when the workers are struggling, and the people who made it into the middle class are being driven back down into the working class. They're losing their pensions, they're losing their homes, their wages are stagnating. And they no longer have the hopes that an earlier generation had. So maybe just maybe this is a time when people might start again, to be asking, why do we need capitalists? You know, I
think as many of our listeners still, these questions are absolutely in the air. And the dissatisfaction economically, even as the economy starts to do better is profound. And I want to ask you about the nature of the solution in just a second. But you said something in passing that really intrigued me. You were telling your grandfather story and you said that that he was elected to I think set the Board of Aldermen in New York and then you said this is the high point of your family story. Now I guess and I'm asking this because I think it's metaphorical. I think it's instructive. You are a tremendously well regarded very successful philosophy professor, you spend in your career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which is an outstanding program, you're at Chapel Hill now, which is an outstanding program. I know that you you split your time between here and Paris, which I should be so lucky. Why isn't your story, the height of the family story? What is it about what your grandfather's doing that you think of as worth glorifying? Other than personal humility, of course, as opposed to your tremendous success? Why is his story Why is his moment, the height of the family story,
because in my view, what he was doing, I mean, his job was he was a cigar salesman. That's what he did to earn a living. But he spent his life working for the people around him. And when he served in the Board of Aldermen, just for a brief two years, he had a chance, not much of a chance, but a chance, actually, to talk to the larger society, and maybe do something for the people around him. My success is a personal success. It's all very nice. I mean, I've lived a very comfortable life. But what do I do? I mean, let's be honest about it, what I do is I shoot my mouth off, and I get paid for it. And every time I shoot my mouth off, they pay me more money, I publish a book saying the system is rotten. And they say, Oh, that's fine, we'll give you a raise. Well, that's very nice. But it's not exactly something that I can be feel all that proud of as compared with my grandfather. I'm not ashamed of what I do. But let me come back to the question that arose at the very beginning, which is what the political philosophers do,
I was gonna do exactly the same thing, what
because you said something very important. You said, these ideas are in the air. When once these ideas get in the air, once people come out and, and in occupy, in the occupy movement, and they sit in Wall Street, in this in the street, in Wall Street, and so forth, and they begin to act. That's the time when political philosophers have a job that they can do, which is to say things that will help people who are already angry and upset and convinced that something's got to be changed, say things that will help them think about how those changes should take place. Let me say something about social change?
Well, let me let me turn for just a second because we're closing in on the break. And then and I want to point out saying, you know, I asked you in the beginning of the discussion, what a political philosophers do. And your answer was listing what they don't do and talked about looking at the structures, there are political philosophers, who would describe themselves as teaching people what justice is discovering, and articulating and putting out in the world, what's right, and what's wrong, how the government should work, etc, etc, etc. I think those people might see that project more akin to what your grandfather is doing, or had done. But But since you have a very particular and I think, really important notion of what it means to work for the common good, there is this difference. And I think part of that is what leads if I'm not mistaken, and correct me if I'm wrong, leads to or comes out of this, this, this interest or this attachment to socialism, that what it means to work for the common good, is more than just instructing or directing or revealing. It's making practical day to day life better for people. Is that a fair description?
Yeah, let me tell you a story of this time about a student I had way back in Colombia when I was teaching Columbia University in the 60s, when at that time, I was very deeply involved in the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant. I don't even want to get into that. But I was very agitated about the question whether there was an objective, universal, rational principle of morality that could be demonstrated with absolute certainty, which conflict there was, and I had come to the conclusion that Kant arguments didn't work. And I was very upset about that. And after class one day, a student who'd been very active in the student rebellions came up to me, and he said, Why are you so worried about that? And I said, Well, I mean, if I don't know what the fundamental principle of morality is, I won't know what I ought to do. And he looked at me sort of the way an adult looks at a child and doesn't understand something, but maybe if he says it very simply, the child will catch on. And he said to me, first you have to decide which side you're on, then you'll be able to figure out what to do. And at the time, I thought, Oh, boy, what a cop out. But then the more time that passed, the more I realized that that young man was right. The fundamental question that everybody faces in this life is who we are comrades. Who do you make common cause with Who do you stand with? Who are you going to fight for the for what you all care about with? And once you figure out who your comrades are, do you stand with the workers? Or do you stand with the capitalists? Do you stand with the rich? Or do you stand with the poor? Do you stand with those who have been oppressed? Or do you to stand with those who are doing the oppressing? Once you make that decision? Then you can start thinking through what you want to do. And I think that's that truth that that, that I don't know, that kid is now probably about what he's probably now about 65 years old, so it's not a kid anymore. But that young man gave me an insight by his comment that I've carried with me ever since.
And we're going to revisit this inside. It's really important. And in fact, I'm going to tell a story about my own students in just a moment. You're listening to Robert Paul Wolf and jack Russell Weinstein on why philosophical discussions about everyday life. We'll be back right after this.
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You're back with jack Russel Weinstein and Robert Paul wolf on wide philosophical discussion about everyday life, we're asking the question, why not socialism. And I guess I'm gonna start this next section by talking about a student of mine from quite a few years ago, her name is Mary, Mary came into my content, the 19th century class, which is a class that starts with contents with Carrie garden does marks along the way, as a cheerleader, and wanting to be a lawyer. And in fact, a lawyer in a fairly prestigious law firm, as we talked about in my office, and she read marks, and it was hard. And it was problematic. And it began, as I said, in the monologue, and I had her in mind when I said it, it began to change her. And she talked to me about it, she taught a class about it, she changed her attitude about philosophy, she changed her attitude about the world. From Marx, I don't take any credit for this from Marx. And she became one of four of the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement, who came from North Dakota of the original 200. There were four, one and 50, who were part of the organizing committee. All four were my students, and I'm incredibly proud of them all. I don't always agree with them. I don't think everything they say is right. But that's not the issue. The issue is I got to see, Mary Lorenzo ism and Jeremy grow into deciding what side they were on, and acting on it, as Bob talked about before the break. And when I think about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and those mostly young people who spent all that time in lower Manhattan, trying to make a point, trying to change the world. And I know that Marian ism, at least are still working with unions working to organize politically, I take great satisfaction in seeing people discover their responsibility for the world. And so, Bob, I want to come back to you for a second and ask how do we decide what side we're on? In a minute, I'm going to ask you what we mean by socialism, because we haven't talked about that. But how do you decide if you decide what side you're on first? And then the moral conclusions come later? How do you make that decision? How do you come to where you should be either for yourself or for the universe, depending on your metaphysics?
Well, first of all, this is a life decision. It's not a rational calculation, there is no correct answer to that question that can be deduced from fundamental principles, there is no standpoint that you can adopt from which neutrally you can decide what the correct side is to be on. You have to look into yourself and look at those around you. You have to ask whom you care about whom you make alliances with whom you identify with. And then you choose. And there are some people who look at the world and they choose to identify with the powerful and with the rich and with the and with the important, and we all know them. They're the people who tend to get elected to public office. They are the people who run companies they are the people who we see on television all the time, they're very pleased with themselves, they're very successful, sometimes they're very smooth at making themselves seem to care about you. But the bottom line is, we know, we know which side they're on. And that's a choice you have to make for yourself. It's not something that anybody can make for you. It's not a choice your parents make for you. It's not a choice that's built into your genetic structure. It's a choice. It's a real life choice. And you make it in many different ways. But there's no, there's no, there's no formula for telling you how to make that choice. You have to decide who you are, and who you care about.
I have to be honest, that that speaks very intuitively to my experience, and yet at the same time, when I hear you talking, and you use the word comrade Neuwirth use the word capitalist, at best, I think, to many people, it sounds old fashioned. At worst, it turns people off. I remember years and years and years ago, I was an undergraduate. And I was attending a lecture given by someone from South Africa, trying to encourage people to engage in political action against apartheid. And he walked and he said, Good afternoon comrades, and an older gentleman in the audience heard those first three hours and went, made this horrible guttural noise, mutter under his breath and left, the word comrade was repulsive to him. Why? Why are these words? So? Why do we have this gut reaction to these words? And how does that gut reaction relate to the choice that we have to make that isn't a rational calculation, but it's a life decision as you describe it?
Well, let me respond. It's interesting that you mentioned South Africa because I've spent 30 years of my life deeply involved in South Africa. And I've been there 35 or 40 times. And I fell in love with that country when I first went there in 1986, precisely because it was the first place I'd ever been, where when you met somebody you knew right away, whether that person was your comrade, or your enemy. And the reason was that the country was split into two parts fighting about the life of the country, and there was no middle ground. In America, you can just get along and chat with people, you meet them, you talk about the latest football game or whatever. And you can go for a long time not having any idea what their politics are. I, I'll tell you honestly, I think that when that man made that guttural sound, and marched out, he was paying the speaker the greatest possible compliment he could, because what that meant was that the speaker had made clear which side he was on, this guy was on the other side, and he didn't want to hear it. And so he left. You know, I gave a talk at Williams College a year or so ago. And I said, you have to decide which side you're on. Sometimes you have friends. And sometimes you have enemies, you have comrades and enemies, they were very upset about that they wanted to be nice. They were nice middle class kids who had been brought up to be nice to everybody. And they didn't, they didn't want to draw distinctions, even on the most important questions. And I think it's important to do that. It's important to recognize that there are some things by God, that it's worth having a fight over, there are some things that it's worth breaking ties with somebody over if somebody really wants to defend the exploitation of workers and the discrimination against people of dark skin. I don't want to be that person's friend, even if I'm trying to be a nice guy, because those things are more important than being a nice guy.
You know, it's it's, again, we're talking about things that really speak to me. I tell people, I'm you know, those folks who know me and I've mentioned this on the show that North Dakota has not always been the easiest place for me to live. I'm an expatriate New Yorker, and I read as an expatriate New Yorker and one of the things that I always say when I have trouble living in the North Dakota culture where there is this we call it min Dakota, nice this Minnesota North Dakota notion of nice say, I don't know the rules here in New York, I know where I stand, I understand how things are going on, there is an attraction in knowing the rules and knowing the categories that everyone's in at the same time. If you're in these different camps, if everyone is easily identifiable. Where's the subtlety? And where is the ability to change people's minds? How do you get people to switch teams? If everyone is so isolated and only talking to the people who wear the same clothes or are on the same social strata or, or have the same politics?
Well, there's a difference between knowing who you are and where you stand. And, and figuring out how to try to win allies. And sometimes it takes a little softness, sometimes you can reach out and say to somebody, look, you and I don't agree on fundamentals, but in this case, our interests happen to be aligned, or there are things that we can agree on. That's the kind of negotiation which is a perfectly adequate and acceptable and desirable part of politics in the modern world. It's what when Congress is working, which it hasn't, I mean, you probably have listeners who haven't been alive since Congress stopped working. But I can actually remember the old days when, on occasion, people across the aisle would negotiate with one another, and come to agreements. And when Congress is working, when the people in Congress who represent huge numbers of Americans Act as their representative, so that the people of North Dakota, talk to the people of New York through their senators or their representatives, and come to some kind of agreement, that sort of thing is always, that's always on the table, and is always possible. But let me say a word about occupy because it was interesting that you brought that up. And there's something I want to tell people who are listening, that they may not understand. I'm an old guy, I'm 81 years old. So I've been around, I'm four times the age of some of my students now at UNC, if which is a little daunting. But I've been around long enough to recognize that there are many different ways in which you can try to change the world. And no one person is going to change the world, all by himself or herself. So that, and I think of social change as being a little bit like a landslide. It's a whole lot of trees and rocks and big clumps of dirt and little pebbles, rolling down the same side of a hill. And as you watch that landslide, there goes a gigantic tree. And that's Martin Luther King, and there goes a great big boulder. And that's Fannie Lou Hamer, and there goes a tiny pebble, and that's me, you're not, you're probably not going to be a boulder, and you're probably not going to be an enormous tree that's been uprooted and is rolling down the hill. But so long as you're a pebble rolling down the right side of the hill, you're on the right side, and you're part of changing the world. But the key is, find something you like to do, because as I say to my students, right now, you may feel that something's happening, you got to get involved. But remember, 40 years from now, you'll be a lot older, and the world still will need change. So find something you like to do so that you'll stick to it through the hard times as well as the easy times through the boring times as well as the interesting times. So that when you get to be my age, you can look back and say, Well, at least I never gave up, at least I kept going. And some. Now, for example, you need to have people who stand on street corners and hand out leaflets, I hate to do that. I hate to do it, because I get very embarrassed trying to shove leaflets on people, I don't know. But I like raising money I've made out of my computer. And I like writing books, I don't write books, because it's the most important thing to do. I do it because it's just one of the many things that need doing and I happen to enjoy doing it. So I know I'll keep on doing it. If when you're young, you choose a way of being active in the world and making it a better place that you like that you enjoy that you find is something that's as they used to say, ego syntonic for you, then you'll keep on doing it for 2030 4050 years, and you're going to have to, because I guarantee no matter what happens, the world is going to need you trying to make it a better place 50 years from now.
There's, there's so there's so much in that and there's so much richness in everything that you've said so far, that I've really neglected what probably should have been the second or third question. And so I'm going to walk past the wonderful things that you said, which I think we'll revisit and ask the very basic question. When we talk about socialism, what are we talking about? What is socialism? And what does it look like?
socialism in a sentence is collective ownership of the means of production. It means that the capital I talked about at the very beginning of the show, is owned by everybody, not by a small number of private individuals. And because it's owned by everybody, all of us collectively can make decisions about how it ought to be used. Should it be saved, so that we can expand the economy or should it be consumed Now, let me give you a couple of examples. America is an interesting place. When you think about it. It turns out out that you can make a lot of money, producing cheap, nicely designed low cost clothing, and therefore, even very poor people look to be well dressed. But it turns out that you can't make much money producing inexpensive housing. So the same people who have nice clothes on, can't find decent housing, because the money is all to be made in expensive high end housing. Now, there are complicated economic reasons for that. But what that means is, if it's private capitalists who are making the decision, what to do with the capital, they're going to produce a lot of high end expensive housing, and a lot of nice, nicely designed cheap clothing. But they won't produce decent housing, because they can't make a fast buck out of it. That's an irrational way. That's a senseless way for the capital of the world of the society to be used. socialism is simply the collection of socialism doesn't mean that there are no mom and pop stores. It doesn't mean that there are no privately owned gas stations, it doesn't mean that people can start their own little businesses, that's got nothing to do with socialism. socialism means that the big accumulations of capital in the society are collectively owned. And they ought to be collectively owned, because they were collectively produced. When a capitalist, you know, the old joke that the cartoon about the man standing in the window, looking out at a great big factory and saying, I built that, right. And of course, he didn't build that a whole bunch of workers built that he just paid their wages, if they if he could make a profit out of it. He didn't build any he's probably never lifted a hammer a day in his life. Four of the richest people in the United States are Walmart errs, and none of them has done a day's work. But they are all four of them taken together, they have vastly more wealth than the bottom half of all the people in the United States have. Now that's just insane. socialism means taking this social capital that we have all produced by our efforts, and making it the property of the people as a whole. Is
it socialism an economic system? Or is it a political system? Or is it a mishmash of both?
It's going to have to be both. It's not a mishmash? Well, if you like mishmash, it's a mishmash. But as you can tell that jack and I both come from New York mishmash is probably not a common North Dakota term, maybe not. But let me say socialism is necessarily democratic. Why is it necessarily democratic? Because if you get all of the capital in society, put it in the name of the people and then have a few private individuals at the top of the society running things. Let's face it, it will be in short order. What you'll have is a dictatorship. You'll have Stalinist Russia. Nobody needs another Stalinist Russia once was enough. Thank you very much. Right.
So so the Nazis, the National Socialists were not really socialist, the USSR, the Soviet Socialist Republic was not we're not socialists, China is not socialist. And in fact, they're not communists, either. Because and this is your answer, I presume, because the power does not actually reside in the people. And that's a necessary condition for socialism as
Exactly, exactly.
So why, you know, there are going to be people who are listening to this and say, oh, they're talking about Marx are going to talk about Marx, but more but they haven't other than just in the previous sentence I used, uttered the word communism, why are we talking about socialism instead of communism? Isn't marks associated with communism?
Well, I could give you a technical answer. Marx had a theory about the stages of economic development. The first was something he called primitive communism, you can forget about that people running around in loincloths, and nobody hadn't had much of anything, then you get a slave society, then you get a feudal society, then you get a capitalist society, then you get a socialist society. And finally you get a communist society. And in a kind of a back to the beginning, you come back to communism, but now it's a different kind of communism. The term communism got seized on and it became a term that meant Soviet style, state capitalism, or state ownership and running of everything. I'm happy to stick with the term socialism because socialism is clearly identified in the literature, if not in people's minds with democracy. And democracy is an essential part of this collective running of society.
Now there are people who will respond economically. We got a question in advance from Larry in Massachusetts, and also from Bruce in North Carolina, asking a version of this question, which is following high EQ and find me sis and others, that what capitalism does is make economic sense Decisions baked based on local factors and local information. And so capitalism works the market better than anything else. And socialism will always fail, because it can't take the local information or the universal information into account fast enough and can't respond to the markets needs and people's needs. So socialism is inherently flawed economics. Do you find that a compelling objection?
Not in the slightest? Let me say, first of all, there is a precise technical response that can be given to that. And I can't give it on the air because it is not allowed to keep it on the air. But a polite version of that would be raucous laughter. Anybody who's lived through the last eight years or so is ought to burst out laughing at the suggestion that the market works. So well. The market just about tanked the world economy. But let me say a word about these two characters, neither of whom anybody listening to this show has ever read.
Well, we had a preview last month show was actually on high IQ. So our located listeners will have some experience with him.
Well, there you go. Here's the thing. See, when hire can find me Is this where right we're writing, which is now what is this 2015. That's got to be, what, 70 years ago or more. They were right. Because at that point, capitalism had not developed far enough to develop into socialism. Think about the way a modern Corporation actually works. It's in the modern gigantic corporations, these multinational international corporations, they are like little worlds, they are huge. And they they make decisions, not on the basis of what the market says each day, but on the maker them on the basis of policies that are made by the managers, which have more of a political than an economic structure to them. There's a technical answer, which I've given in that paper that you refer to but this is the wrong place to start boring everybody to death. With that, suffice it to say that capitalism has developed to the point with computers with just in time supply of raw materials, with the sort of thing that you see every day, when you go to the supermarket. When you go to the supermarket, and you check out your barcode on your on your selections is scanned. When that barcode is scanned, it doesn't just put up the price on the on the cash register. It also keeps track of what's being purchased so that the people who run the supermarket know every day, how much of each item has been purchased, and they know what they have to replace. That's a kind of perfection of control. That was unthinkable 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, and is now so commonplace, that you see it every day in the supermarkets. That sort of rational control of economic activity, for the first time is making something like socialism realistically possible, it is genuinely possible now to make economy wide decisions. And indeed, economy wide decisions are made all the time. It's just they're not made in the interest of the people they're made in the interest of capitalists, in a time has come when we can transition from capitalism to socialism.
And that's the example you just use supermarket is incredibly interesting, because I don't know how many people are aware, but there are many fast food restaurants now that when you talk into the microphone in the drive thru and make an order, you're actually making an order to someone in India, and the person in India takes the order and then transmits it to the to the restaurant 10 feet from you by computer. And so the the technology has completely changed that process. But but in the midst of your discussion, you talk about it over about five, six pages in the paper, but you you mentioned it now this really profound and important observation. And I'd like you to expand a little bit just a bit, that in essence, major corporations for AIS, and Exxon, whoever else Excel, they're making centralized planning decisions in exactly the way that the so called free market capitalists say is impossible. Could you could you talk a little bit about how in fact a large corporation is centralized and is more like socialism on some level that the process then free market proponents like to admit,
sure, think about a corporation that's got a couple of different divisions like you know, an automobile company that makes several different lines, several different models and each one is headed up by a vice president. or a corporation, which is, is doing three or four different things. And each division has its own manager, each of those managers is trying to get ahead. And each of them is trying to get promoted to the next level where they get the big bucks, you know, the $20 billion bonuses and so forth. Their competition is not, it turns out, this is a tricky technical matter. But it turns out that no accountant no matter how skilled in accounting can tell that company, what is the economically rational thing to do, because there are alternative ways of calculating, each one of which helps one of those vice presidents and hurts another vice president. So the choice of which accounting technique you use, turns out to be itself a political decision. These big corporations have internally started to make decisions politically, not because they were reading Marx when they were in college and now want to be socialists. But because it's the only way that they can make decisions as capitalist. That's something that fun Mieses and hyack didn't anticipate I don't blame them, they would. It happened 50 years after they wrote, they didn't foresee it coming. But now that it has happened, it turns out that the market can't decide for the managers of this Corporation, which corporate policy to adopt. That's why very often, we refer to these top Corporation managers as corporate statesmen. Because we recognize that they make quazy political decisions, the only difference is, instead of making those political decisions, in the interest of the people, they make the political decisions in the interest of themselves and the shareholders. But they are still in their structure, political decisions. Marx said something when he was a young man that was very profound. And it's been very often quoted, he said, The New Order grows in the womb of the old Well, he was talking about capitalism, which grew in the womb, of feudalism, but the same thing is happening now. socialism, the the rational organization of the economy, which is the precondition of socialism, is growing in the womb of capitalism. And that's why those your students who took part in and helped to run the occupy movement, were really on the cutting edge of something new that may be coming down the road.
So the real difference between a centralized socialist economy and the upper echelons of Verizon is not the method of decision making. It's simply that a socialized a socialist economy, cares about the people in general. And Verizon cares about the stockholders.
It's the same old question, which side are you on? But which side he won? But now not a question asked to a particular individual, but asked to an entire system? Is the whole American economic system on the side of the people or is on the side of the rich owners? And that's the question that the people themselves have to decide.
So let's talk about the sides for a second. In particular, I want to talk about workers, for a couple reasons. First of which you have a tremendously interesting discussion in that paper, about workers and where Marx got a couple things wrong. And we'll get to that in a minute. But I got two questions. The second part of Larry's question in Massachusetts, but also IRL in Illinois, both asked questions, Larry asks about how do you control in a socialist society? workers posts and production? You start to answer that already. And and how do you make decisions? Don't they involve individualized contracts and other sort of aspects of the free market? And then and then Earl asks, Is it possible for the working class to take control of the productive centers and run them democratically without a revolution without something that destroys the state power of the capitalist? So? So I guess that this is there's a double ended question about the nature of workers right now. And the economy. The first one is, can you make individual decisions about workers and control workers under a socialist structure, including contract decisions and stuff like that? And the second is, do we need as Marx seemed to suggest a revolution? And can we shift into socialism without destroying the power of the state power of the capitalists and large scale unrest?
Let me answer the first question. The second question first, because I think it's the more interesting and important one. Marx himself by the way, thought that in England It might be possible to have a peaceful revolution through the ballot box. And I think the same is true. I mean, remember this, people tend to forget this. But it's very important to keep reminding yourself on any election day, if the American people want to, they can vote an entirely new world into existence. I think it's clear from what we have seen in this country that if the American people go to the ballot box, and they vote for people who want socialism, they will be screaming and there will be yelling, but I don't think that the army will be called out, and we'll start shooting voters. And I don't think that if it were the army would obey the commands. If it is, if the American people chose to change this country, they could do so peacefully. Now, in doing so they would destroy the power of the capitalists how they would impose taxes on them. What the only as I say, in the old days, you could tell a capitalist by the clothes he wore. Now, he may wear torn jeans and be worth $20 billion dollars. take away his 10 $20 billion. He's just another guy with torn jeans. If you tax that capital, those accumulations of capital and place them in the ownership of the people as a whole, which you could do just by electing a congress and a president who wanted to do that. If you did that, America would go through a socialist revolution without a shot being fired. Without any guillotines. Without people being tortured without people being bayoneted, we would just change the world. Now, everybody says, Oh, well, but the rich have so much money. Yes, they have a lot of money. And they can blanket the airwaves with advertisements. But I think everybody knows that people don't have to watch ads if they don't feel like it. And very, most of people don't watch ads. Unless you really I mean, I happen to really like the Geico Gecko. So I watched the gecko, the Geico ads. But if you don't, you don't have to believe what you're told, in advertisements on television, you can just walk into the ballot into the voting booth, and vote for a person who wants to change the fundamental economic structure of America and you could do it at the next election day.
Okay, so So let me ask the transition question. Why don't why don't Americans do that You seem to have such a certain amount of faith in the general public that many pundits don't have. They seem to say, well, money is destroying the election process, the rich have have excess power, because all of this external money is going into a state election, that candidate one, you seem to think that that that giving money that power is a matter of personal choice. Do you have faith in the populace? Do you have faith in the individual person that he or she will? Will when given the chance make the right decision?
Well, let me say there are fundamentally two kinds of people in this world and they can both be found in Winnie the Pooh. There are takers and there are ears. Tigger is this bouncy Tiger who bounces around and is always cheerful. And er is this very sad, very down at the mouth. Dunkey, who's always saying all nothing's going to go right. Now I am by nature. I am a peculiar animal. I'm a natural Tigger, whose theory is er ish. So I can write books in which I explain why the American people are not going to do anything. But I bounce around like Tigger saying they will, they will, they will, because I mean, I'm 81 years old, I don't want to spend the rest of my life depressed. I would rather think that my grandchildren are going to see a better world. But so if you asked me, as an as a political side, you asked me what a political philosophers do with the beginning of this show. If as an official political philosopher, retired professor of political philosophy, you asked my professional opinion, I will tell you that it doesn't look good. But if you ask me as a human being, I'll say we can do it. We can do it, we can do it. And who knows? Maybe we will.
So why hasn't there been a worker revolution? Why what did Marx get wrong? that he had such faith in a worker in in France and a worker in England and a worker in Germany and a worker in Detroit and a worker in LA and a worker in wherever that they would see themselves as workers first, and not other? Why hasn't there been this unified workers response that might anticipated three reasons, three things that Marx got wrong.
First, Marx really didn't understand the extent to which racial or ethnic differences would dominate people's thinking beyond their economic interest. Second, he didn't appreciate the extent to which national identification French, French versus German, would dominate their economic thinking, when my grandfather was a socialist. I've gone back and read the newspapers of that day in which he appears. And all the New York socialists who many of whom were emigrated from Europe, were quite sure at the beginning of the First World War that the French and the Germans, workers would never fight one another because they were all workers. And they were devastated when it turned out that they were freshmen and German first, and workers second. The third thing that Marx got wrong, which is really important, is that Marx thought that capitalism was reducing all the workers to the same kind of homogeneous level of semi skilled machine operatives. What he didn't anticipate was this very pyramidal structure of the work world, in which a guy who works in a factory and a woman who works in a fast food store, and a middle manager who works in a corporation, may all be technically workers, but their social classes so different, that they find it impossible to form any kind of comradeship. Let me throw out a fact which people tend not to know. But which is really important and understanding America. Everybody talks about the importance of getting a college education. Well, right now in America, two thirds of the adults don't have a college degree, two thirds, only 35% have college degrees, 65% don't have college degrees. Now, if you don't have a college degree, you can't be a doctor, you can't be a lawyer, you can't be a nuclear physicist, you also can't be an elementary school teacher, or a secondary school teacher. You can't be the manager of a Walmart store. You can't be an FBI agent, all sorts of jobs that people don't think of as fancy upper class jobs are close to you, if you don't have a college degree. Now, if you watch television, you get the impression that the only people who don't have college degrees are people who live in ghettos. But that's not true. Two thirds of Americans don't have college degrees. There's a class structure that divides people that makes them look at one another as different from from themselves in a way that makes it very hard for them to join forces and recognize that they're all on the same side, and that they should work together rather than against each other. In the old days, we used to talk about the difference between suits and shirts, suits meant people who went to work and wore suits, and they got paid by the month. And they had paid vacations and shirts meant guys who went to work and got paid by the day with a week and they got dirty, and they worked hard physically. And they didn't wear suits and ties. Well, that same class division exists very complicated Lee in the United States. And it's not getting any better Quite to the contrary, it's getting worse. That's Marx didn't foresee that. And unfortunately, without that kind of identification across the board, it is difficult to put together a real mass movement.
And you point out in service of this complexity, that we don't understand that a firefighter who's married to a schoolteacher is actually rich. Zach, how is that so?
Well, if you actually take a look at the figures, I mean, I know that Republicans don't like facts, but democrats do. So if you take a look at the figures that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out, you will see that a well paid firefighter, and a well paid high school teacher have a family income that puts them well above the middle of the economic ladder in the United States. And a college professor to college professors who are married to each other are in the top five or 4%. Now you don't tend to think of college professors at state universities as being the rich, and they certainly don't think about themselves as being the rich. But the fact is, this country is in a way, a lot poorer than we imagined. One of the reasons being that the people We see on television are all living a lot better than most of those who are watching them. Even the people on television who are represented as workers live in houses that real workers can't afford, and they lead lives that real workers don't live. There are an awful lot of people who are working at luck, you know, you take a look at the median wage, that median means that half a making less than half of making more? Well, the median wage in the United States is around 35 $36,000 a year. That means that half of all the people who are lucky enough to have full time jobs and making less than that. And anybody who tries to live on 20, or 25, or 18, or $23,000, a year knows that you're not living very well at all.
So
what
are the, again, a two part question? The first is what what is the most important thing that you think that Marx got right? And second, what is socialism look like? If America was to become socialist tomorrow, in 10 years, in 20 years, what would our society look like? Marx is famously quiet about what the end result what the end community looks like, what a communist society what a socialist society is really going to look like. And so folks who are interested in him don't have a lot of answers to say, Well, why don't What do we want? What is what is? What are we expecting? So what do you think the key people walking away from the show? What's the key insight that Marx gives us that you think is the most important? And what is the socialist system going to look like? Why should we strive to realize this thing?
The one thing that Marx got, right? He got it right. And he's still right today is that in a capitalist society, capitalists make their money by exploiting workers. They make their money by giving, taking from the workers a part of what the workers have themselves produced. That's the fundamental fact of capitalism. Without that there's no capitalism. You can forget about everything else marginal product, and in entrepreneurship, and all the rest of it. The fundamental fact is, people go to work every day, and they produce the goods and the services, and they reproduce the goods and services that the society needs and that it consumes. And the capitalists take part of what has been produced by the workers, and they appropriate it to themselves. That's the fundamental fact of capitalism. Marx got it right. If you want it in a sentence, it is capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class. that's fundamentally true. Now, if America, Mirabelli dicto went socialist, how would the country change, the first thing that would happen is that the gap between rich and poor would dramatically diminish. The second thing that would happen is that decisions would be made about how to spend America's capital based on America's needs, not based on how the capitalists can get rich off it. So we would rebuild the fun, the crumbling infrastructure, and we would improve the education of little children. And we would make sure that everybody in the country had a decent meal three times a day, and we would make sure that everybody in the country had decent medical care. And we would, we would, little by little we would reduce the gap between rich and poor until there were no poor and there were no really rich because America is a productive, rich society, perfectly capable of giving everybody who lives in this country, a decent life. Now, would it be heaven? No. Would we all eat peaches and cream the old joke you know after the right now the capitalist see peaches and cream after the revolution will only peaches and cream? Well, no, we won't all be eating peaches and cream will still have to go to work, we'll still have to work hard will still have to produce what we consume. But it will be a just society. And as that happens, people's relationship to each other will change. There won't be bosses and workers were the people who work will be proud of working they will unite in unions and they will bargain collectively. The people who now own will have to get a job and contribute to the society and they won't be able to pass on to their children vast accumulations of wealth that they got out of the backs of the workers.
Will there still be some inheritance? Will there be Netflix and Outback Steakhouse will there be iPhones? What if all these things that that folks claim are the innovations and the luxuries of market capitalism? Would they disappear
well Let me say if I speak myself personally, Netflix, yes, Outback Steakhouse is No. But that's just my personal taste. Yes, there is a role for entrepreneurship and for invention and for innovation. And I'm perfectly happy if the people who actually do the innovating, get up, get a little rich off it. So if you want to ask whether Steve Jobs should have gotten a bunch of money, or Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos, sure, why not? Should their kids get it? No. Should they keep getting it? 20 years after they invented that stuff? No. But if I mean, it's like the old question as well, will Chamberlain or you know, LeBron James is such a great basketball player, shouldn't he get a big salary? Sure. Pay him a million bucks a year pay him 10 million bucks a year? I don't care. That's not that has nothing to do with capitalism. nothing whatsoever. That's that's a phony argument.
And so and that's, that's for our listeners. That's a very famous argument in in, among other places. Robert nozick. anarchy, state utopia? Yes. Where he argues about justifies that will Chamberlain at the time, LeBron James now is justified in getting the salary. So this goes back to Larry's question from Massachusetts, which is what how do you regulate individual contracts? And how do you have power? and and and and instruct the workers in such a large scale socialist state? How do you do that?
First of all, I'm not sure what you mean by instruct the workers. They're not children, they'll make their own decisions. But you regulate contracts? How do you do it now? You let people negotiate contracts, and you tax what they make. If they make too much. If they're making more than then the society as a whole thinks they ought to we do that right now. We used to do more of it. Unfortunately, thanks to the Republicans and the Democrats, alas, we don't do that as much as we used to do and as much as we should. But that has come all of the daily making of particular economic decisions is not what socialism about is about socialism is about deciding what the great capital accumulations in a society should be, what they should be, what should be done with them. That's what socialism concerns itself with, if somebody wants to start a restaurant, God bless him, as as Elizabeth Warren says, God bless. If he was, you know, if you want to start a restaurant and work 80 hours a week and try to make a success of it, fine, you serve good food and you you have customers, you'll do nicely. That's fine. We got restaurants and socialism just as we had them. In capitalism. That's not that's not the question of capitalism versus socialism.
So that leads to what I suspect will be the last question, which is, many folks argue that socialism is anti individualistic, that it takes away individual freedom that only the free market is the place where where people can be autonomous that people can make their own choices that people can pursue their own dreams is socialism. Anti I'll use the term liberal but it's it's it's problematic, anti individualistic, is it collective in the way that its critics suggest that it is does it take away individual freedom?
I'm going to answer you by not directly but by drawing a contrast between two myths, which live in American life and mind and culture. One is the myth of the mountain man, the lone rider, the cliff, the Clint Eastwood, who rides into town, then rides out again, who lives on his own, who doesn't depend on anybody. Of course, he needs somebody to make the bullets for the guns and a gun that he has and so forth. But he's a loner, he, he's honest, so on his own, and that's one ideal in America. And Mike, I wouldn't be surprised if out where you are. That ideal is a very high, highly respected one. There's another ideal in American society, the ideal of the Amish, barn raising. When a community all gets together in big to help one man, raise the sides of his barn and finish the barn and it's a job that takes everybody working together. And so all the women make food and pies bake pies, and the children run around and play games and the men get up on the ladders and they bang the nails and finally, at the end of the day, the barn is raised and they all have a great dinner. And they go home knowing that the next time there is a man who needs a barn raising, everybody will turn out to help him. Those are individuals They're not mindless slaves, but they understand that they are a community. And they work as a community when they need to, to help the whole community to survive those two images of the lone rider and of the collective barn raising our it seems to me the two images that are competing in our in our spiritual life. And when somebody says, will socialism, kill individualism? No, not not a bit of it, not any more than having a barn raising kills the individualism of all the people who are living in that community, but what it will, but what socialism will do is allow people to work together to help everyone in a collective way. Because all of us have created collectively, the wealth that we are now enjoying, we didn't make it individually. And we we need to work together to create it and recreate it collectively.
So gender issues aside in the Amish example, the the idea that that these people are drones and forced into the circumstance is a misrepresentation, at least, in part, because people can choose to participate and walk away, and they've chosen community. And so ultimately, this is an example of what you've said all along, which is you have to make a choice, in this case choice between a collective a collective help that is expressed by the The Legend of the Amish, barn raising, or the loner who lives purely autonomously, but who has no help when he or she dies in under attacked by wolves or what what have you
exactly?
Well, this has been a tremendously wide ranging discussion and full of really important insight that I think lots of people will end up thinking about in the future. And I think a very, very sympathetic and important look at something that doesn't get the attention that deserves Bob, thank you so much for joining us on why
well, thank you and I will now go back here in the Southland to my 22 degree weather and you can enjoy your weather out where you are.
I would I'd give a lot of money capitalist or not for for 22 degrees. You've been listening to jack Russel Weinstein and Robert Paul wolf on why philosophical discussion about everyday life and I will be back with some further thoughts right after this.
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We're back with why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host, jack Russell Weinstein. We've been talking with Robert Paul Wolf, about socialism about Marx and really about what the world looks like today and what it could look like. At the heart of his discussion was this injunction we have to choose, we have to decide which side we're on. In a certain sense, this is an old fashioned way of thinking about American politics. But in another sense, it's the most profound way of looking at the country at politics and about what it means to be human being Are you a good person or a bad person? Are you doing the right thing or the wrong thing? And what group do you think is doing the right and wrong thing? what the purpose of today's discussion was, was to suggest that maybe there's a side that we have dismissed that shouldn't be dismissed. Maybe there's a theory an idea, an aim, a goal that gets a bad rap that shouldn't have a bad rap. And in this case, it's socialism. The words that we use the word socialism makes many people cringe the word comrades the word capitalist, it seems so violent, so outdated, so dangerous. We don't like it. We don't like to use it. We feel silly. But maybe we feel silly, not because they're meaningless. But because they're so meaningful. That using them brings to the front a set of ideas that we don't want to confront, because they're too hard, or we don't want to confront because they reveal too much about ourselves, our shortcomings, where we've acted badly how we've wronged other people. Maybe the reason why we have this emotional reaction to these words, is precisely because those are the words we really need to attend to. And in that regard, maybe Some of the things that we have to do are already here, Bob pointed out that major corporations work on a centralized economy, that major corporations make political rather than economic decisions in just the way that Marx anticipated essential economy would do. If that's the case, then socialism isn't very far. And that it isn't very hard to get to what is important, what is far away is this notion that we act for the interest of the common good, not for the interest of a few stockholders, or solely ourselves. JOHN F. Kennedy famously said, Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country. Was Kennedy a socialist, or was Kennedy pointing out that we have a responsibility to the people around us to care for them, to make sure that they have what they need, and that when everyone has what they need, when everyone has the minimum, at minimum, pardon the phrase, then we are all more free to pursue what we want to pursue, it doesn't mean that we can't get rich, it does mean that we can't have everything that so much wealth, so much power is consolidated in so few people, that the rest of us have nothing. And so the question that I have to answer to ask at the end of this discussion is not just what if it's already here? But what if it's easy? What if socialism could happen simply, easily with just the decision of a voter? What if it's almost here, and the only thing stopping it is us? Would we want it? As you think about that show? Think about that? Think about why not socialism? You've been listening to Jack Russel Weinstein on live philosophical discussion about everyday life. As always, it's an honor to be with you.
Why is funded by the Institute for philosophy and public life Prairie Public Broadcasting in the University of North Dakota's College of Arts and Sciences and division of Research and Economic Development. skipwith is our studio engineer. The music is written and performed by Mark Weinstein and can be found on his album Louis soul. For more of his music, visit jazz flute weinstein.com or myspace.com slash Mark Weinstein. Philosophy is everywhere you make it and we hope we've inspired you with our discussion today. Remember, as we say at the Institute, there is no ivory tower.