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Richard Wolff

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2022-06-17

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2022-06-17

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1. “That's right. The killed coming, they fought communist in the street. They had pitched battles. They literally threatened each other's existence and their life. And the first people that he arrested and put in jail were not Jews and gypsies and all the other people he eventually killed. It was communists. They were the number one and socialists right behind him. Why? Because up until he takes power, january of nineteen thirty three, that's when Hitler takes power. The last elections, two of them in nineteen thirty two. The Socialist and Communists devote together fifty percent of the vote in Germany. So he appealed to the German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said, the communists and socialists are going to win. And you're just the capitalist. You have too few people.”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Other parties did this too, just like Hitler. They put the word socialist in their party, but they wanted to make it clear that they weren't anything to do with the Soviet Union or anything to do with Marxism, so they put the word Nazional. Nazi is the first four letters of national Nazional in German and AZI is how you spell national in the German.”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Other parties call themselves Catholic. Germany is divided. The upper two, the northern two-thirds is Protestant. The southern third is Catholic. Munich and Bavaria is Catholic and every other part of Germany basically is Protestant. You could be in the Catholic Party, that was the South, or you could be in various conservative, Prussian and other. If you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing, I mean, Germany, a very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time. You know, Germany was the major competitor to Britain for the empire. The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and US taking over from Britain's empire. So anybody who wanted to approach the working class in whatever way had to Come to terms and be friendly to socialism.”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Every German city and every German town powerful and enjoying its rise up, that's my family is involved in this. I really do know the story. It meant that starting around 1967 eight. If you wanted to have any kind of presence in the German working class, you had to use the word socialist. You had to. Otherwise, they wouldn't pay any attention.”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “The only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler was provide him with his stepping stone to power, but had nothing no other. He didn't know anything about it, didn't care anything about it, nor did the people around him. Here's the story of what happened there, which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history, the work that I did. The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German party. It started around 1870. Marx was still alive. Some of his own family were leaders, Fernand LaSalle and other his daughters. By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany. Nobody understood it. It was overwhelming. It was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution in 1917. Here was a political party that was now in every”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “the national socialist Deutsche Arbeiter German Worker Party. National Socialist German Worker Party Here's the history. Did he care about the workers?”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power. They're hoping what? Do they like the government? No. They're desperate. This is not a pro government, and it wasn't in Russia either. They were in a desperate fix. And so and he took advantage.”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “He can throw a tariff on anything. He gets up in front of the American people and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff. That's not what a tariff is. It's not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman course in economics, which everybody knows. Everybody who teaches these courses, no, it doesn't matter. He's still calling the shots. What is going on here is that a society has come to a point where it can't solve its problems. And it begins what? To tap into older forms and all of the laissez and all of the individualism. And suddenly the Republican Party is gung. And now they're going to make abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do with your uterus.”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what they find familiar to what seems to make sense and he's the guy look let me give you an example from American history the Republican Party has traditionally in this country been the party of private enterprise and minimum government In comes Trump runs for office in twenty sixteen is elected. What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most massive government intervention in the worlds of economics that we've had for decades. Nobody says anything. The Republicans cave and the Democrats largely too.”

   2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “It's not the product of history. No, no, no. It was the systems, feudalism, the church. It was the structures and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its own rhythm and doesn't follow the calendar of a political revolution.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “An authority lying that comes from the individual. If you have a sequence of kings, if in your feudal manner the Lord sits called the landlord and he has unspeakable power over everything that goes on. And you do this for thousands of years? Yeah, you can make a Russian revolution in 1917, but if you imagine, you've gotten away from all that people assume without ever thinking about it, you're going to have trouble. Stalin is figured here as the originator of his situation. He wasn't. He didn't never have that power. He may have thought that, but I don't. He's the product. Look, the Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn't that kind of guy. You know, he was a baseball playing lawyer. That's what he was. But they made him into Tala.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “If you allocate power And you do it for a very long period of time. And you do it on many levels of ideology. It is not surprising that it sticks and it stays. And you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution and you will discover it has a life of its own and it's going to take a long time before people don't. If you have a religious tradition, Christianity that prides itself on its monotheism and that it doesn't want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was Zeus and Diana and all the others, and they were very human-like, but instead we have one who is the absolute beginning. What are you doing? You're teaching people.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “You've put things together there that I would. That's why I think if you give... German. If you, I remember, I told you, my mother was born in Germany.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Sir, the French would say Tutsir, right? All alone. That's one. The second thing is economic isolation. Russia's a poor country and it needed what it got before the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans particularly, but others too. Now this was all cut off. And you can see the replay with the sanctions program. We're going to do it again. We're going to do it again. We have to do the world is different and the sanctions don't work, but they're going to try them. They're going to try because it's the history. But that culture was today is completely different. Russia's a different place today, but Russia has China and that changes everything. And they don't get that here yet, but they will.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Very, yeah, I mean, not in order of importance, but it's a very important part of the psychology of being, you know. What you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence that indeed there was a lot to be afraid of at that time. Nobody had ever done it. Look, you could see the effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea which had no support at first, that you could have socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous. That socialism was internationalism. Marx was it. Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, workers of the world unite, not workers of Russia unite, workers of he had to go through a procedure of kind of coming to terms with the fact that the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried in Berlin, was tried in Munich, was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here, they all failed. And he's left.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy since nineteen seventeen has been obsessed with Russia. Even now, this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia as if Russia still was the Soviet Union, as if people haven't figured out. That was a big change back in nineteen eighty nine and 90. You know, Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before, or at least they're not Lenin. They may not be so different from some of the other. But in any case, so you had one factor was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation, the global, I mean, Rosa Luxemburg is, I mean, I assume you know the Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin. She's a critic of Lenin's, by the way, but she's a leftist. Hunted down and hacked into bits, killed,”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “If you know American history, this country, the leadership of this country went completely berserk. I mean, we had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before. The 20s were a time of palmyrades in Boston, the Sacco Vanzetti trials. I mean, really grim hostility. And you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution. The US, Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops. What you had right away was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. There was a great professor at Princeton, Meyer. I forget his first name.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “They tried, they couldn't. Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year. The rest of the world, though, was horrified. The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken this immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism, yes, but still not challenging the power now it had the power and in a big country. And they freaked out.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “That the old Russian regime collapsed. World War I just fell apart, the Tsar and all of that. It couldn't survive. It had already been in trouble. There was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war to Japan. I mean, if you know Russian history, which I assume you do, you'll know that there was a lot leading up to the collapse in 1917. And in some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small, that could seize the opportunity of that collapse, happened to be Marxists. Earlier on with Kerensky, the first government that tried, it wasn't people all that impressed by Marxism. It was people more skeptical and would not have been called Marxists probably by history.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I don't think so. I think there are many things that led to the bloodshed and all that Stalin's regimes did. And I spent 10 years of my life. With another economist writing a book. About that, to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. You might want to take a look at it sometime. But there, I'm going to say a few things now, but all of those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, etc. in that work. Let me start with playing a little bit with Hegel. The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the Soviet Union did, but what the rest of the world did. I mean, you had a really interesting move. And I'll give you a parallel from today. The move was”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Democratically decided they would never give two or three individuals $100 million while everybody else can't send their kid to college. They're not going to do that.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “All my experiences with that group of people, corporate exact, full of those stories. They made a mistake after mistake, which they would tell you about. Didn't undermine. They were always able to blame somebody else, something else that scraped them through. And had they not been able to, they would have been replaced by another person who did the same thing. For as long as they could. And they knew it. They would talk about it at family events. That's how I know.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “I won't mention the name, but personally had a lot to do with a very large company here in the United States here in the New York area. Involved two brothers and a family who built it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was Kind of the and he was more responsible than anybody else building it up. He took care of his brothers. He had a nice feeling about his brothers. So the one brother who could not Without help ties shoes, became a vice president, got an enormous salary, got a beautiful office in a skyscraper, not that many blocks from where I'm sitting right now. And that was the way that family handled that company. And all of his relatives were somewhere in this company doing a variety of whatever. And my experience with this, and because I went to the schools I told you.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Universities, big ones, famous ones, not just as a student, but as a professor. I've been half a dozen schools. I teach now at a new school here. Another one, right? They all model themselves after businesses, they model their, you can attack the bureaucracy of universities, good reason, it's a mess, but they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing their bureaucracy in a business like manner. So you're looking at a difference which isn't there. The government and the private sector are partners, and both of them wouldn't have it any other way. The corporations want that from the government, and the government now knows that to please the corporations is the number one objective they have, because that's how they keep their jobs and keep their system going. And so for all practical purposes, this is the same people.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Again, we're not living on the same planet. The greatest practitioners of central planning are corporations. Elon has an operation like General Motors Ford, IBM, or any of the other megacorp. They have to plan. They buy up companies because they don't want to deal in the market. They don't want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their markets or sell their outputs to somebody they don't control. They want the professor to teach the genius of a market. They hate the mark. And when they grow to be big, they keep buying whoever they were dealing with before so they could better control them, which requires them then to plan the production and distribution of goods inside rather than buying them in the market. The model of the government, is it a private corporation? I have spent my life, give you an example. In American Union,”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “These are twins. Look What you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats just now, with which I agree. I would say the same thing about corporations and the government. This is the same people, literally.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “If I were a capitalist, I'd love this. I kicked the workers by throwing them out of their home, and they don't get angry at me. They get angry at the government. I fire large numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them as a result of having no job and no income. And they get angry at the senator. I'm laughing all the way to the bank. This is a genius stroke.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Know what's bad and what's dangerous and threatens you? It's the government. The government's going to come in and tell you what to do. The government's going to run your life. The government's the problem. There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics. Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn, like the so-called Great Recession of 2008. Who do they blame? The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed, and what is the media all about? The government.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Sure. For me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people who have had that freedom eroded under the capitalist. That's a motive for my Marxism. It was for Marx too. He loved the French Revolution. He loved the Libert egalit fraternite, the great three, and then democracy, the American contribution, if you like. He believed in all of that. His critique of capitalism was it promised it and then never delivered it. And the reason you have to go beyond it is because it didn't deliver what it had promised. So for me. It is the fulfillment of a general. But again, I'm a Hegelian Marxist, so if you want. Individualism for me is not the way it's set up in this society, some sort of antithesis to the government. I think an immense con has been pulled on the American people. And the con works like this.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “I'm trying to be rationally here. If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do, if it's got a lot to do with fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use of the fossil fuel, particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass transit. We're doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Bigger and bigger, bigger, but that's that. By the way, there's one more thing on the rationality, and this goes to Elon Musk. You're interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year. The number was just released yesterday. 49,000. Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country. They use up an enormous amount of energy. They use up enormous amount of resources. There is a way to make transportation much more rational. And we've known it for decades. It's called mass transportation. It's a really beautifully maintained, crystal clear, clean, frequent system of buses, trains, street trolleys, vans. It could easily be done in this society. In fact, I once did a project that I estimated cost $30 billion. That's less than we're sending to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Some little 18 year old kid who has to go three hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket. What? And it happens every day in this country, every day.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “After two years of this one two punch, they got an inflation a third punch, and we are now predicting rising interest rates and a recession at the end of the year or early next year. You can't do this to a working class. When this was done to the German working class in the nineteen twenties, Hitler was the result. You keep doing that in this country? We're already watching it. You're going to get that too. You're already getting bits and pieces. You can't keep doing this.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Wage package. They were already out of whack. I mean, the average CEO pay is now $300,000, 300 times what the average worker pay is. But they're jacking it up even more. Why? Because that's what's happening in their universe. That's what they're all doing it. And they have to do each one of them justifies that I have to do that, otherwise I'd lose my guy to the next one, which of course is true, but is no comfort for the mass of people who aren't CEOs for whom this argument isn't very exciting. They're doing that at a time when the American people can't cope. They've just gone through the COVID disaster. They've gone through the worst, second worst economic crash of capitalism in our history.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “No, no, I don't want to The problem with capitalism is And maybe you'll like this. The problem with capitalism is Not that it is the one thing that's consistent with human nature. That's what its defenders would like to have us believe. But if anything, I would argue the opposite, that it is such a contradiction to parts of our nature, not other parts, that it can never quite make it. There's always going to be the people who don't go along with it, people you're talking about, who do quit along the way, or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top by God knows what hook or what crook that they did it, but most of them go, and you know why? Because their humanity is contradicted by what it is they're being asked to do. I mean, the corporate sector this year, just to give you an idea. CEOs jacking up their”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “People who vote for you are going to kick you out. You can tell them all day long what a lovely person you are. Then they're going to look at you and wonder what happened to you. How did you even get this far with the lovely person horseshoes?”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “So much come on, they have their uniqueness, as you're quite right, but so does every other industry. The one thing that's common is that many become few. What you can also have is when you have a few, they jack up the price, they make an enormous profit, and in the irony of capitalism Marx would love this, they begin to incentivize people to break into this industry'cause the few remaining are making a wild amount of profit because they are a few and can jigger the market to make it work like that for them. The reason every small capitalist is trying to build market share. That's a polite way of saying they want to become a monopolist or to be more exact, an oligopolist, one of a handful of firms that dominates. That's what they're there for.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Absolutely. I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms. And let me respond to that, and then I'll counter argument. First, competition. Here again, we have to be Hegelians just a little. Competition destroys itself. It doesn't need any. The whole point of competition is to beat the other guy. If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better quality or a lower price or maybe both, then I win because the customers will come to me because my price is lower or my quality is better, and they'll leave the other guy he'll go out of business. Now let's follow When he goes out of business,'cause I won the competition. He fires his workers. I hire them because I'm now going to be able to serve a market he can't serve anymore, so I'm going to buy the used equipment and thereby many.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “In the workplace, a tiny group of people, unaccountable to the rest of them, the employer, whether that's an individual, a family, a partnership, or a corporate board of directors, tiny group of people controls economically a vast mass of employees. Those employees don't elect those people, have no, there is no accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable. And this society insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor matter of producing everything in a way that is the direct it's autocratic.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “He started reading extensively in anthropology, and one of the reasons he did that toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering that in this society and that, including here in the United States, that there were examples of people who organized their production in precisely this way as a collective, democratic community in which everybody had an equal voice. So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output. We all help to produce. So let's do it in this country where democracy is a Valued nearly everybody subscribes to think about it this way. The stunning contradiction that there is a place in our society where democracy has never been allowed to enter. The workplace.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Okay, it goes right back to what I said earlier. The workers themselves, the collection of employees together appropriate their own surplus and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of whether or not to buy a machine. And whether or not To use the machine and the savings it might allow. Be handled by more leisure for themselves or as a fund for new developments. Technology or new product or whatever they want. And you know, this is an old idea in human. Marx loved that. Toward the end of his life, he...”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “For us to be good Hegelian Marxists and say Let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision that we can. We'll make mistakes, but we'll all make them together. It won't be one of us making a dictatorial decision. You know, Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat not as a notion of how government is not, I'm sorry, not Marx Lennon did that. Not as a notion of how a government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is. The dictatorship of these key decisions is not made by some sitting council, it's made by each little capitalist in his or relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is why Marx focused his analysis. On that point. And by the way, I can sketch for you right now so it doesn't lurk in the background what the alternative is.”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “I agree with that. And I'd love there to be a democratic mechanism, so let's discuss it. Let's debate it. And then let's decide what mixture, because it's not either or. The math problem I gave you is either or. We could mix it. You could have a third less of a working day instead of a half less, and then the other part would be extra profit for our employer, et cetera, et cetera. So let's have a democratic discussion of what is the mix between the positive and we have no such thing. All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only, we know what they do, they always choose the one that maximizes their profit because that's what they were told to do in business school where I've taught. So not only is it an undemocratic decision, but it's lopsided to boot. So we don't have the opportunity. But I would love...”

    2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source