YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Wolff

lines on the record: 184
first: 2022-06-17
most recent: 2022-06-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Life is struggle. And for me, I have found That to be true, that the struggle Whether it is to build a relationship with your child, I have two children, whether it's to build one with your spouse, whether it's to understand a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this relationship to a student or to an audience. It's a struggle to do all those things. But that network of struggles That makes life Interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Survive, survive. And you're so busy. That you tell yourself you can't do that. Of course, you can. And there are other reasons why you're not going to look at those problems, but the survival is so urgent that you can fool yourself this way and my parents did that”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I married it Didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I think as I look back on it, that was more than a little what was going on. And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family never talked about, never dealt with, never at least explicitly engaged in any of that.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had to perform. I went to high school Here in the United States, I had to get all A's. I had to be on the football team. I had to play the violin, the orchestra. I had to do all these because everything had to be achieved. So I'm an achievement crazy person that way. But that's functional in this dysfunctional society.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I came from a family, you know, if your family is political refugees, which mine were, who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another continent, learn another language, find another life, income and job. The disruption goes real deep for any refugee. So my mother and father were both refugees. They met as refugees. So I had to, in a way. Make it up to them. I had to be. I was the first child of their younger sister, but the first child. Know there's a lot of psychological pressure on you if you're in that situation. Nobody means you harm, but you've got to do what they couldn't, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do. It's the closest they're going to get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university students. My father was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Afraid of it no, think about it, yes. I'm not afraid I've always thought, you know, death is hard for the people that are left when you're dead. Worry more about my wife. I'm very attached to my wife. I might mention to you, I got married when I was 23 years old. That's my wife to this day. So I'm lucky because if you get married to anybody at age 23, either luck or it isn't.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because most of the people who say something like that to me. Are people who, if they had the vocabulary, and some of them do, would say, you know, I thought I was seeing through that outfit that Emily was wearing. I thought it, and they did. And all they needed was a little extra this information or that factoid or this logic ah yeah and they have that and I remember And now I get that gratitude a good bit, and yes, it is enormously gratifying. I'm not sure I could get it any other way. I had learned, and I'm walking proof that being a critic of society and doing it systematically and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life, a very good life.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. First of all, my advice is go for it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely better than they were when I had to do it. And I could do it, and I can I'm happy I did it. Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made that I've never regretted. And I've never regretted being a critic of this society. Never. I find it edifying. I find it... I mean, the gratitude people express to me for helping them see kind of what's going on. Is unbelievably encouraging. What can I tell you?”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, and I want to be honest with you, as I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause from the podium, you know, that I lean into the microphone as I say, with as much smile as I can get, I'm having a time of my life. And that's the truth the truth. I never expected. Look, I'm used to teaching a classroom, a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or ten students, or a regular undergraduate class with thirty or an occasional introductory course with a few hundred. I've done all of those things many times. But an audience, you know, that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that, no, that's new.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would put it, I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would put it a little differently. Capitalism struck me early on in my life. as not that great a system, and nothing has happened to change my mind. In other words, the development of Just kept giving me more and more evidence that this, and I must say over the last 10 years. What's really changed the last 10 years? I mean, I can't describe to you how big that change is. And that may be more important than anything else we've discussed. Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television or a radio thing or give a talk at some conference or Once every two or three months I'd be invited and I would do it. Academics often do. I now do two to three to four interviews every day. So”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've had the benefit that because I went to all these fancy schools, I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture, and when I have been put in difficult positions often wave my pedigree and it works like garlic with the devil back away. They back away Americans are very differential to. That kind of academic prestige.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know, again, I'm Hegel. On the one hand, I was denied good instruction. On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own. And the motivation when you do that is very different. I'm not the student who sits there with my notebook taking notes of what the great professor says and reading the text and getting ready for the exam. I don't have an exam doing something slightly risque, you know, kind of. Romantically And oppositional I was able to find always one or two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation, other students who felt enough similar to me that we could get together and read these books and talk about them. I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me of their time and their effort to teach me along the way.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was the honest truth. I don't know how anomalous I am. I really don't. But the truth is, no, I have, if my wife was sitting here, she tell you what she tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true. But then again, luck never is the only explanation for things. It's part of it. What can I say? I didn't choose the time of my birth. I didn't choose the communities in which I grew up or the schools I attended or anything else.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I know people who had exactly what you said. I mean, your question's perfectly reasonable. If I were you, I'd be asking me that question, too.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shaped by it, and it was that impetus to open Marxism to be more inclusive in what it deemed to be important to understand that this and they call themselves cultural Marxists, but they had a completely different meaning from this. This is just Know just bad mouthing, that's all this is.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And Marxists are particularly those who like to look at that interaction. In other words, they're interested in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism. There's another name I forgot. Stuart Hall is British. Gramsci is Italian. Lukac is Hungarian. The German is Walter Benjamin. B-E-N-J-M-I-N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school of Marxism that developed in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people, many of whom were interested in cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against the narrow Marxism that was so focused on economics and politics. There were people who said, you're leaving out very important parts of modern society that are shaping the economy as much as they are.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who devoted themselves to analyzing how it is that a particular culture is on the one hand shaped by capitalism and on the other hand becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow. In other words, how do we analyze the interaction between the class struggle on the job and attitude towards sexuality or movements in music or whatever else culture. And there are Georg Lukacs, this Hungarian, great name in there, the greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci, and a modern name just died a couple years ago, a British intellectual named Stuart Hall, H-A-L. If I were teaching, which I have done, a course in cultural Marxism Those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you articles and books to read of their stuff because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many others.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a mentality. But I don't blame them. I mean, it's childish. It's mean spirited, but it comes out of the fact no one ever sat them down and said, Do you hear is this tradition? It's got these kinds of things that people kind of share, and these big differences look, an intelligent society which this country is, could have and should have done that. It was fear and a kind of terror that made them behave in the way they did and we're now seeing it. Having said that, there is such a thing as cultural Marxism. What that is, is simply those Marxists”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't know much about Marxism. I've always been interested in culture. I mean, Lukac, the man I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that's what they're famous for, the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture. Gramsci writes a great length about the Catholic Church, about theater and painting in Italy and on and on. I mean, this is just ignorance talking. They don't know anything about that. They wouldn't know what the names are. It's a label that summarizes kind of a shorthand. I'm against all of this. I don't want to be told that there's ugly racism in this country and it always has been, or sexism, or phobia against gay people or whatever it is that's agitating them. And Marxism or socialism, it's just like socialism is the post office. It is.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So instead of calling them this or that, you call them a Marxist in many circles this is even worse than whatever other adjective you might have used. But it doesn't have a particular meaning that I can assess. The closest you get is your little list. It is somebody who is concerned about race and sex and sexual orientation, gender and all of those things and wants there to be transgendered bathrooms and I don't like any of these people so I slap the word Marxism or the phrase cultural Marxism because it isn't Marxism about getting more money or controlling the industry or all those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned about. So this is odds.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not much. Mostly Marx, one of the consequences of the taboo after World War two is that Marxism, like socialism and communism, become swear words. It's like calling somebody, well, I won't use bad language, but using a four-letter word to describe somebody.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. Some of them lasted weeks or months or years, but it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general switch. And once that was done, it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system we have today. That's the only model we have. So for me, that's what I see when I look at socialism. I see the Paris Commune was an event, an attempt. Lasted a few weeks. I see Russia. That was an attempt lasted seventy years. Then I say, and you fill in the blank, I see these are all early experiments. These are all you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good, the bad what do you build on? How do you learn? And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition, when it's serious, that's what it does”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm in the business of buying and then reselling stuff and living off the difference. But you know, I could make more money if I produced some of this stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody else. So I'm going to make you a deal. I'm going to give you money once a week. I'll give you a money, what we would later call a wage. And you come here and under my supervision you make this crap that I'm going to then sell and this all works. In other words there were efforts to Unconscious, not self aware, to go out of feudalism to a new system.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only use it because Marxists I use as a noun. A person is a Marxist. Marxian I use as an adjective to qualify. But I don't mean some great different. The last point I would like to make about AOC and Bernie that's also general I'm a historian too, and I know that the transition out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism was a transition that took centuries and that occurred in fits and starts, so for example a feudal manner would start to disintegrate, serfs would run away, then run into a town how would they live in the town they had no land anymore because they had run away from the feudal manner? A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal understanding what they were doing. Merchant would say to one of these serfs,”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a million years, right? So Altiser is a philosopher, tried to bring a version of postmodernism into Marxism with enormous impact all over the world, where he traveled not just in Europe, all over, right? So if you want to look him up, I'll spell it out for you. A L T U S E Ruis, the Luis L Ois, Luis Altuser. Look him up, you'll see tons of stuff. By the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember, of his works in English. The way the textbook I wrote in economics, in case you're ever interested, was also published by the MIT press.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isolation from the whole, you know, when I explain to people the contribution made, for example, to modern Marxism, I'll give you an example by the French philosopher Luis Altouser. I don't know if the name means anything to you. Okay. He was the rector of the ⁇ cole normale superior in Paris. That's the equivalent. Imagine in this country if there were a university that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. It would be the university. Well, the Ecole Normale in France, in Paris, is the. He was a tenured professor who became the rector, the rector is like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist Party most of his adult life. That was possible in France during the Cold War. That was unthinkable in this country. You could not.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On here. All of these questions are being active. By the way, not just by socialists, by lots of other people too, inside the Democratic Party and also inside the Republican Party. You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that. They are against the stuff in Ukraine. They don't want the money spent there. They don't want the weapons sent there. They don't like the whole policy and Trump wobble. So Mr. Biden's policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right. And every day that this thing lasts, these criticisms get bigger. Anyway, the point is that AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go back to what we talked about at the beginning, who are more like Lennon and Debs. This is a fight between Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs in Ukraine. And what are we doing here? We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a settlement. Don't kill large numbers of Ukraine. I mean, everybody's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. It's a little strange here. What are you doing? You're supposed to be in favor of peace, you know, and for the United States, which just finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq to be against another country invading. I mean, who in the world is going to take this seriously? This is crazy. I invade it's good. And you invade, it's terrible. What? You know, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? What's going on?”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No There are some people for whom that's the issue. Then there are people for whom this is, you know, it's guns and butter and why are we over there when we have such needs at home that are being neglected? And then there are people who”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, AOC voted together with most of the others to support the money for Ukraine. Okay, a lot of people in the socialist movement do not support that. And I don't know exactly how that's going to work out, but that should give people an idea. There are disagreements and they're going to fester and they're going to...”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not ideologically Know she is Bernie is also. Know in honest moments, and they're both really honest folks, at least in my experience. In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that what he advocates as democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the nineteen thirties. It was a kind of popular government tax the rich a lot more than you do now to provide a lot more support for the working class than you do now. That's not a fundamental change. That's what he means by socialism. When he talks about it and he's asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot. Okay, that's consistent. That's the softest kind of socialism. And that's where we're going to start in a country coming out of hibernation. Pretty soon it's already happening. There'll be people who need and want to go further in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are comfortable with. You can already see the shoots of it now.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possible, but two things. Number one. It's fast. Number two. It's going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate, calm, non confrontational socialism you can imagine.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Runs for all and says I'm a socialist. And when they attack him, he doesn't run away. I'm a socialist. I'm a socialist. Now, he had been. It wasn't a secret that suddenly got out. But the great question, and I don't mind telling you because I went to the right schools. I know a lot of people, you know, Janny Ellen was my classmate at Yale and stuff like that. So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party and I said, well, what do you think about Bernie entering the race? Makes no difference. They get 1% of the vote. Right? He was wrong. They had no idea what was coming. But the truth is, I didn't either. It wasn't just that he didn't get it. I thought his one percent was probably right. So we were both wrong.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bernie was always a socialist. We all knew, and everybody who paid attention, he didn't hide it, but 2016, he makes a decision momentous to run for president. He's just a senator from Vermont. Vermont is one of the smallest states in the Union. People who live in Vermont love to tell you that there are more cows than people in Vermont, etc., etc. So here from this little state, this elderly gentleman with a New York City accent.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expected to be very honest with you that I would live to see. I knew it would come because these things always do, but I didn't expect to see it. So I have been surprised As have a lot of us that when it starts to happen, it happens fast.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or saying, there's this man Lukac, a Hungarian Marxist. He really had interest or to explain that Gramsci was not a great literary critic, he was head of the Communist Party of Italy for most of his adult life What does that mean? You like Gramsci as a literary critic, but um and they didn't even know they don't even know it's been erased It's a little bit like stories I've heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet Union because he obviously fell out of favor and so somehow all of his writings many of which are very interesting and complicated anyway so what you're going to have in this country is a slow awakening of socialism from a long hibernation called the Cold War I never”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they can find common ground to do. So I had to learn it all on myself. Why am I telling you this? Because this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism of the post-World War II period, the vast bulk of all of that is unknown, not just to the average American person, but to the average American academic, to the average American who thinks of himself or herself as an intellectual. I mean, I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history. They have no idea.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much in my field, the great so-called debate. I mean, I find it boring, but the great debate for my colleagues is between what's called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics. Neoclassical, the government should stay out of the economy, laissez-faire or old liberalism. And the Keynesians saying, no, you, you crazy neoclassical. If you do that, you'll have great depressions, and the system will collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems, to fix the weaknesses. And they hate each other, and they throw each other out of their jobs. One of the very few things they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like me out.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be the honest truth from any of them, but a professor does not want to say in a classroom I don't know that this is not cool. Or they'd have to, if they knew, they'd have to say something that indicated they didn't know really much and they weren't even going to do that or they would know something. And maybe that would be because they were interested. They did not want the rest of the students to begin to say, huh, you know, Professor Smith, he's interested in it. This is not good for your career. You don't know how this is going to play out. Who's going to say what to whom? And I could see in their faces what I later learned because they told me, come to my office hours. We're in the office. We can talk about it. But that's how bad it was.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a conversation. I mean, I can't tell, just make it very personal. The number of times I would raise my hand in my classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale, and I would ask a question that had something to do with Marxism because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses to teach this to me except by people who trashed it, you know, that other than that. And I didn't want that. So I would ask a question. And I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I didn't much care for and those who were good teachers that I liked fear, which is just fear. They didn't want to go there. They didn't want to answer my question. And after a while, I got to know some of them and I found out why. Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to understand this. Either they would have to say, I don't know.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. The crucial thing about Bernie and about AOC, and this is particularly true about Bernie, because AOC is much younger and Bernie's an older man, Bernie, being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student, as an activist, then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont as a mayor, and all the rest. He lived through what, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America. And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945, six to the present, I mean, really never stopped. Was a Manichean worldview. The United States is good, it defines democracy, and the Soviet Union is awful, it defines whatever the opposite of democracy should be called. Good here, evil there. It was taken so long. That even in among the ranks of academic individuals It was impossible.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It didn't have powerful states. One of Lenin's greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia, and he goes back centuries to huge book three or four inches thick, and I'm one of the few people who have read it. And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of Feudal, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe. The development of a powerful central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate to hold on, which ought to be suggestive that maybe the turn to powerful governments here in the United States or in Europe is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can't go on and has to marshal every last bit of power it can be. Lost in history.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Lenin. And it was made by Lenin positive, in other words, Lenin was saying, that's a good thing. That's something we stand for. We want to create the conditions under which there is a will. Because you remember the communists or whatever, they weren't called that at first in Russia before the revolution. They were just socialists. They were hunted down and persecuted by the government left and right. They had no love for the government. The government was their literal everyday enemy. And being critical of government didn't just mean this particular government, but of the whole being a Marxist, you always ask the questions of the social constitution of whatever it is you're struggling against. So there was this interest. Why is the state so important? Especially because if you understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism,”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas that uses the phrase the withering away of the state. That's a quotation from Lenin. People should understand that's a quotation.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To fix that, etc. So that's for me a kind of difference. It's a little difficult to say because there's no other figure like Marx that has an equal impact, an equal place within the broad socialist tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition, but that's very specialized and that's a whole nother kind of conversation. And whatever you say, the influence of the great anarchist thinkers, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Sorell, and others still doesn't amount to the impact that Marxism have had so far. That could change, but I mean, up to this point, that's the I think that's a way of understanding the relationship.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over both of them, and progress hasn't stopped. And we are the people who, in a variety of ways, want the progress to go further and are not held back by believing that capitalism is somehow the best beyond which we cannot go or even think we find that to be in the worst sense of the word a reactionary way of thinking. And we're that large community. Many of us are not interested in economics all that much. We don't think that's the focal area. We are socialists. For example, because we want to do something to deal with climate change. We think the world is about to kill itself physically, and we want to take steps with other people to stop that.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socialism is a bigger broader tent within which Marxism figures it's there, so that people who aren't Marxists are nonetheless aware of Marxism like it more or less, study it more or less, but it's a broader notion that I like to use this sentence to describe. It's a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism, that really there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the world think are adequate, that we are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who thought they could do better than slavery and all the people who thought they could do better than feudalism. We've made progress. Feudalism was a progress over slavery. Capitalism was a progress.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marxism is a systematic analysis, heavily focused on economics. And as I said earlier, devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism, And that's its strength, how it does that, how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works. That is really the forte of the Marxist tradition.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are not a democracy, we are a republic, which is like saying I'm not a banana, I'm a fruit. You have to explain to these people a banana is a kind of, so you have to explain to people. Yes, we're a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy as the way to govern the republic, because to say you're a republic doesn't imply what kind of government. You have to go through that with people so they kind of get it.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, but it was explicitly done as a deal. The ruling group said to Hindenburg, the old Prussian man who was in charge of the German government at the time, you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise, he would never have done it. He had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler as anny man with a mustache who was Austrian, wasn't even German, you know. For them, that mattered. So he comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism, which he immediately does. Only people who don't know or care about the history pick up on the words. Know it's like there are people here in the United States who like to say”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source