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

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“The gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day of the lives of these workers. The majority of workers would have been really helped by this technology. But instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle of more money. You want to support a system like this? To”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what he does the technology leads. He's happy. He's become more profitable. He's got an extra 50, which is why he buys the machine. The workers are screwed. Half of them just lost their job, have to go home to their husband and wife, tell them I don't have a job anymore. I didn't do anything wrong. The guy was nice enough to say there was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn't need any. So I'm completely screwed here. I don't know what I'm going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage, my children's education, or whatever else he's got going for himself. Now, now the point. There was, of course, an alternative path. The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same that you did before for half a day's work. You would have got the same output, same revenue, same profit as before.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do it with half the workers. And so the capitalist goes to the workers, by the way, this happens every day. And he says to half of them, you're fired. Don't come back Monday morning. I don't need you. It's nothing personal. I got a machine. Why does he do that? Because the 50 he now no longer has to spend on labor because it doesn't need half of them. He keeps. Everything else is the same. The machine, everything else is just to make their math easy. So he keeps as his own profit the fifty that before he paid for those workers. Because when he sells it for 220, that 50 he doesn't have to give to the next job because he has a new machine.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Takes his product and sells it and gets the revenue, let's say the revenue is, it doesn't really matter. It's $120, for lack of a better word, $220, sorry. And he takes 100 of it and replaces the tools, equipment, and raw materials he used up, another hundred to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other 20 is his profit, and he puts that aside. Now along comes a technological breakthrough. Machine, a new machine. And the new machine is so effective that You can get the same out, the same number of units of output with half the workers. You don't need to spend a hundred on workers. You only need to spend fifty.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the notion that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is somehow built into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous, and I can give you because you do math, you'll understand it. Think of it this way. Imagine a production process in which you have. Hundred dollars that the capitalist has to lay out for tools, equipment and raw materials. $100 that he has to lay out for workers, hire the workers. And he puts them all together and he has an output. And let's say the output is a hundred units of something and whatever the price is, and that's his revenue”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I take my hat off if I had one because that is one of the only ways to justify this system. Long ago, let me get the heart of it, long ago capitalism could have Overcome hunger. Could have overcome disease, could have, I mean, way beyond what we have now. But it didn't And that's the worst moral condemnation imaginable. How do you justify that when you could you didn't? Look, let me get at it another way because this may interest you anyway. The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically dynamic, it is. And along the way, it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better. No question.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States, federal minimum wage was in two thousand nine when it was set at the lofty sum of seven dollars twenty five cents an hour which you cannot live on. Over the last twelve years or so, whatever it is, not eleven, twelve, thirteen years since then, we have had an increase in the price level in this country every year, and in the last year eight and a half percent. During that time that the prices went up, the minimum wage was never raised. This is a time of stock market boom, of growing equality. This is a society, you know. The nerve of the defender of capitalists who wants now to get credit for the improvement in the standard of life of the workers that was fought by every generation, you know it takes your breath away. It's an argument”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What that means is replace a worker with a machine, move the production from expensive US to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants from other parts of the world because they will work for less money than the folks that you have here at home. Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for for decades over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning to right now. The reason we have a minimum wage, which was past middle of the 1930s, when it was proposed, it was blocked by capitalists. They got together. And today, just a factoid for you.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has been mostly represented by capitalists, which makes a certain sense And those capitalists, with very few exceptions, some but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the lives of the mass of people.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. And Mark's very attentive to that explicitly agrees with this on many occasions and applies it, of course, to the central object of his research capitalism. So this is not a simple minded fellow who's telling you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this system achieved or accomplished. And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological dynamism of the system, which Marx takes to be profound because, you know, he lived at the time when major breakthroughs in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved. But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement in the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people, Mark's now comes back and says, oh, wait, wait a minute here. Number one. Capitalism as a system.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have several responses to that, but I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's going on there. But let me give you the argument so that you can hear them and then you can evaluate them. As can anybody who's listening or watching. Marx was a student of Hegel and one of Hegel's central arguments was that everything that exists exists in contradiction. In simple English, there's a good and bad side if you like to everything. And you won't understand it unless you accept that proposition and start looking for the good things that are the other side of the bad ones and the bad things that are the other side of the good ones, etc.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What? You know what that means? It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat, while the poor foot person has no milk for their five children. There it is. Do you want a market? Why?”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word shortage means, has no other meaning. If the demand is greater than the supply, okay, now you've got a problem. You can't satisfy all the demanders because you don't have enough supply. You have a shortage. Okay, now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people who have a lot of money to bid up the price of whatever's short. That solves your problem because as the price goes up, the poor people can't, they drop out. They can't buy the thing at the exalted price. So you've got a way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people with the most money. At this point, most human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn against it because it contradicts their Christian Judaic Islamic all of them would say”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whoa, what do you do? What ethics would justify you? Do it. It's like a market in general. Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage. That's one basic way to understand it.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suppose you were interested in Suppose you took us your problem. We have a set of funds that can be loaned out. People don't want to consume it. They're ready to lend it. Okay. To whom should they lend it? Well, we could say in our society, we're going to run this the way professors in institutions like MIT work this They write up a project. They send the project in to some government office. Where it is looked at against other projects. And this office in the government decides what going to fund this one, and that one because they're more needed in our society. Then that problem, and so we're going to lend money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here because we're going to, but instead what we do is who can pay the highest interest rate?”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facilitates it and it is an institution that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible danger to community. Which, by the way A way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world. Look, the medieval Catholic Church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury. And this was that God said. If there's a person who needs to borrow from you, then that's a person in need, and the good Christian thing to do is to help him. To demand an interest payment rather than to help your fellow man is God hates you for that. That's a sin. Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cohesion, they destroy community, they make some people rich and other people poor, and they set us against each other and it's terrible. And here's what, that's they agreed on that. Here's what they disagreed on. One of them said, okay, there can be no markets. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no, no. Too late for that. The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in amongst us would be too devastating. So we can't do that. But what we can do is control it, regulate it. Get from the market what it does reasonably well and prevent it from doing the destructive things it does so badly.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something as central to daily life as economics broadly defined. It made no sense. That's creation much, much later. That's capitalism that did that, created the feel of it. So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them particular passages. By the way, footnote, because your audience will like it, Plato and Aristotle talked about markets because they lived at a time in ancient Greece when market relations were beginning to intrude upon these societies. So they were both interested in this phenomena that we're not just producing goods and then distributing among us. We're doing it in a quid pro quo. I'll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange. And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason they destroy social.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See how well it works off. No, but the serious part of this is that economics. Know it's really about capitalism. Economics as a discipline is born with capital. There was no such thing. When I teach courses at the university, for example, called history of economic thought. And I begin the students with Aristotle and Plato. Say, you know, they talked about really interesting things, but they never called it economics. There was no, it made no sense to people to abstract.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to work up. You can take look, mathematics is full of abstractions. You can say, as we do in economics, Keteris paribus, you know, everything else held constant, but you have to know what you just did. You held everything. You know why you do that? Because you can't do that in the real world. That's not possible. You better account for that. Otherwise, you're mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted from to get the abstraction.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right because too many other things are going on, too many things are changing, and you cannot assume much as you want to, that the outcome on the output side is uniquely determined by the change you made on the input side. Can't do that.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is value? I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that. But I just want to get to this. Hegel, who was Marxist teacher, has a famous line. You can't step in the same river twice. And the argument is you and the river have changed between the first and the second time. So it's a different you and it's a different river. You can choose not to pay attention to that. You can't claim you're not doing that. You can't claim that you can actually do that because you can't. There is no way to do that.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually, in real terms, so physical, not the value. You could do a value, but it's really more the physical you're after.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The notion is if you take away one worker right now from the pile, what will be the diminution of the output? That's the marginal product of that worker.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a factor of production like a worker. In the textbook when it's taught, I've taught this stuff. I hold my nose, but I teach it. Then I explain to students, what I've just taught you is horse shit, but first I teach it.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gender explained all kinds of issues, the car park people are males and the childcare people are females. And that in our culture is a very big marker of what, but the one who said only the economics professor nobody else says this stuff because in economy, I don't know if you were familiar with our profession, but we have something which we call marginal product. This is a fantasy. I was a mathematician before I became an economist. I loved mathematics. I specialized in mathematics. So I know mathematics pretty well. What economists do is silly, is childish, but they think it's mathematics, very sophisticated. It isn't. But think for a minute what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal product.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe he parks it and he moves it around to get it in and out. By any measure that I know of that makes any rational sense, being in charge of toddlers two, three, four year olds who are at the key moment of mental formation the first five years to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who watches your car. Come on, I know how to explain it.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incorporating You don't believe that. This country is now being literally transformed from below by an army of workers who work at Amazon, fast food joints. You know what their complaint is? It's killing us. We get paid shit and it's killing us. There is no relationship except in the minds of the defenders of capitalism between the ugliness, the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one hand, and the wage. Let me give you just a couple of examples. This is my job. This is my life, what I do. The median income of a child care worker in the United States right now as we speak is $11.22 an hour median. So 50% make less, 50% make more. The median income for car park attendant is several dollars per hour higher than that. What does the car park attendant do? He stares at your car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The worker would never come and say, because she's been taught I want this payment, a wage, for the work I do. And I want this payment for the risk I take.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that job every day to forestall all the other things he could have done, he was taken a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next month, next year. He bought a house which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's now stuck. He has to make a monthly payment. If you make a mistake, you capitalist. He's the one who's going to you're a capital, you got a lot of money, otherwise you wouldn't be in that position. You've got a cushion. He doesn't. If you investigate, you'll see that in every business I've ever been in, and I've been involved in a lot of them.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So everybody's taking a risk. I always found it wonderful. You talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk. Let's go with the worker with the capitalist. That worker? He moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to take that job. He made a decision to have children. They are teenagers, they're now in school at a time when their friendships are crucial to their development. You can yank them out of the school because his job is gone. He took an enormous risk.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, there's risk. Almost in everything you undertake, any project that begins now and ends in the future takes a risk that between now and that future something's going to happen that makes it not work out. I mean, I got into a cab before I came here today in order to do this with you. I took a risk the cab could have been in an accident, and lightning could have hit us, a bear could have eaten my left foot. Who the hell knows?”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As included people who defend it on the grounds that it is the only system consistent with human nature, and that every effort to go beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you endless documents of every tribal society I've ever studied, every anthropological community that has ever been studied, slavery wherever it's existed, I can show you endless documents in which the defenders of the system, not all of them, of course, but many defenders used that argument to naturalize a system is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going, to counter the argument that every system is born, every system evolves, and then every system dies. And therefore capitalism It was born, and since it's been developing, we all know what the next stage of capitalism is.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The argument isn't really then is there a need or an instinct? Is there some human nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is, this has to be repressed or else we don't have a society. And Freud helps us to understand that that repression is going on all the time and it has consequences. It's not a finished project. You repress it. It's gone. It doesn't work like that. So for example, When you get a bunch of people together at some point, they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to want the other person or persons to disappear, to be dead, to be gone. But we don't permit you to do that. We just don't. Every economic system that has ever existed.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many ways of responding in no particular order. Here are some of them. The history of the human race, as best I can tell, is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society arise And as they do, Rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they are socially disruptive and unacceptable.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you're not getting the point of the Marxism. The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation per se. You got to change the organization of the workplace so there isn't a group that makes all the decisions and gets the surplus vis- ⁇-vis another one that produces it. If you do that, you will destroy the whole project. Not only will you not achieve what you set out to get, but you'll so misunderstand it that the Germans again have a phrase. It goes crooked. It doesn't go right. The project gets off the rails because it can't. Can't understand either what its objective should have been, and therefore it doesn't understand how and why it's missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped for.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at our country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my life and I've lived here all my life and I've worked here all my life. It's tearing itself apart and it's tearing itself apart basically over the redivision, the redistribution of wealth having so badly distributed. But that's all in Marx. And notice, as I explained to you what is going on in this tension filled production scene in the office, the factory, the store. I don't have to say a word about the government. I'm not interested in the government. The government's really a very secondary matter to this core question, and here comes the big point. If you make a revolution and all you do is remove the private exploiter and substitute a government official without changing the relationship.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should never have done that in the first place. My response, so you understand. All of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic, political, culture, these are all giving the ice cream cone back to the kid. You should never do this in the first place.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metaphor, simple, metaphorical story. You have two children, let's assume, and you take them to Central Park a few blocks from here. It's a nice day, and the children are playing, and in comes one of those men with an ice cream truck comes by. Ding a lingle ling a ling, your children see the ice cream, daddy, get me an ice cream. So you walk over, you take some money, and you get two ice cream cones, and you give em to one of the children The other one begins to scream and yell and howl. Obviously, what's the issue? And you realize you've just made a terrible mistake, so you order the one you gave the two ice cream cones to, give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it is. And that's how you solve the problem. Until a psychologist comes along and says, You know, you didn't fix it by what you just did.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easy becomes very easy. Exploitation exists if and when the surplus that's produced is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced it. Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the Lord gets. Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who gets it and who gets to decide what to do with it? Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it. So that's the logic of the word sequence. It's produced. Marx uses the word appropriated. In other words, whose property, who gets to decide, if you like, what happens? All that property ever meant is who gets to decide and who's excluded.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The workers themselves could get it. That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism. Communism would be if the workers who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. X minus Y. X is the total output. Y is the consumption by the producer, therefore x minus y equals s the surplus, exactly. Exactly. Now Marks argues that The minute you understand this, you will ask the following question Who gets the surplus? Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it? And Marx's answer is therein lies one of the great shapers of any society. How is that organized? For example, who gets it? What are they asked, if anything, to do with it in exchange for getting it? What's their social role? For example, here we go now. If you get this and you get the core of it anyway, and I don't charge much. Workers themselves could get it”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because surplus has a notion of its discretionary, its sort of extra. He's not taking a judgment that it's exercising.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In every human community, Marx argues, there are the people who do that work, but they always produce more chairs, more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume, whatever their standard of living. Doesn't have to be low, can be medium, can be high, but they always produce more than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx, when he writes this, uses the German word mehr, which is the English equivalent of more. It's the more. That more got badly translated into the word surplus. Shouldn't have been, but it was. By the way, by German and English people doing the translations.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what he analyzes is that there is something going on there that has not been adequately understood and that has not been adequately addressed as an object needing transformation. What does he mean? The answer is exploitation, which he defines mathematically in the following way. Whenever in a society, any society you organize people adults, not the children, not the sick, but healthy adults. The following way. A big block of them, a clear majority work, that is, they use their brains and their muscles to transform nature, a tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, whatever.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of starts heading back down, that's Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete because he's not a complete faker. But beyond that, no, there was nothing in the book gives you two paragraphs of an approach. But that's Cold War. I mean, that's really neither here nor that. That's the craziness. Yeah, that's the Cold War in this country. My professors were afraid. Anyway, let me get to the... till the core of it what I think will help. Marx was interested in the relationship of people in the process of production, that he's interested in the factory, the office, the store, what goes on, and by that he means what are the relationships among the people that come together in a workplace.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal. I'll give you an example. The major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many years the canonical book, it isn't quite anymore, was a book authored by a professor of economics at MIT named Paul Samuelson. And people kind of, you know, a whole generation or two were trained on his textbook. If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree. And the tree is Adam Smith and David Ricardo at the root and then the different branches of he's trying to give you an idea as a student of how the thing developed. And it's a tree and everybody on it is a bourgeois. And then there's this one little branch that goes off like this.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another conversation you and I can have. So I went to Harvard, then I went to Stanford, and I finished at Yale. I'm like a poster boy for elite education. They tried very hard. By the way, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League, 20 semesters, one after the other, no break. In those twenty semesters nineteen of them never mentioned a word about Marxism. That is, no critique of capitalism was offered to me, ever, with one except one professor in Stanford in the one semester I studied with him, he gave me plenty to read, but nobody else”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me push you a little further. They didn't succeed in my judgment as a Marxist. And I'm now going to tell you why they didn't succeed because they didn't understand as well as they could have or should have what Marx was trying to do. I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circumstances. This is not a critique of them, but it's a different way of understanding what's going on. Give you an example. Most of my adult life, I have taught Marxian economics. I'm a professor of economics. I've been that all my life. I'm a graduate of American universities. As it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source