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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“Well, it shouldn't be because I get an example. You go to many parts of the United States today and you ask people what socialism they'll tell you, they look you right in the face and they'll say the post office. And when I first heard this as a young man, what the post office. It took me a while to understand the post office, Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government runs something. This is socialism. Capitalism is if the government doesn't run it, if a private individual who's not a government official runs it, well, then it's capitalism. If the government takes it, then it's socialism.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Stalin, you know, Lenin dies and there's a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky loses the fight. He's exiled. He goes to Mexico. Stalin is now alone in power, does all the things he's famous or infamous for. And by the end of the 20s, Stalin makes a decision, I mean, not that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that they do the following. They declare that they are socialism. In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the state, not when the state capture has enabled you to do X, Y, Z other things. No, no. The state itself, once you have it, is socialism.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1923. Yeah, he's only there for four or five years. He's very clear. He even says, and I've done work on it, I've published, so I know this stuff. He says in a famous speech, let's not fool ourselves. We have captured the state, but we don't have socialism. We have to create that. We have to move towards that.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this. Everybody was right, the state is crucial. We were right. We were the revolutionaries. We seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state and socialism is when the working class captures the state either by reform or revolution and then uses its power over the state to make the transition from capitalism to the better thing we're going toward. And again, make a long story short in the interest of time. What happens, which is not unusual in human history, is that the means of Becomes the end. In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear before he, you know, he doesn't live very long, he dies in twenty three, so he's only in power from seventeen to twenty two, but that time he has his brain trouble.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not much in the 40s anymore. In the 30s. And here's the best part. It was paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. So when people today say, well, you can tax the corporations. The joke is I have to teach American history to Americans because it has been erased from consciousness.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never existed before, such a half tell today. Minimum wage for the first time still have that today, and a federal program of employment that hired fifteen million people. I mean, these were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working class.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“were the Union people by at large, and the communists were the revolutionaries, by and large because they were affiliated with the Communist International, with Russia and all of that. And in between, you might say that the two socialist parties. One that was Trotskyist in inspiration and the other one more moderate Western European kind of socialism. And they had this intense debate. And they ended up the reformists won that debate. There was no revolution in the 1930s here. But there was a reform that achieved unspeakably great successes, which is why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does, because it achieved in a few years in the 1930s, starting around 1932-3, Social Security in this country. We had never had that before. It's the same one we have now. Unemployment insurance.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you an example from the United States. In the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties, you had an extraordinary shift to the left in the United States, the greatest shift to the left in the country's history, before or since. Nothing like it. Suddenly, you created a vast left wing composed of the labor movement, which went crazy in the 1930s. We organized more people into unions in the 1930s than at any time before or any time since. It is the explosion. And at the same time, the explosion of two socialist parties and the Communist Party that became very powerful, and they all worked together, creating a very powerful leftist presence in this country. They debated in a strategically real way reform or revolution.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd rather tell you the historical story. Over and over and over again in most cases, the reformists have always won. Because revolution is frightening, is scary, is dangerous. And so most of the time, when you get to the point where it's even a relevant discussion, not an abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have won.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes way beyond what the debaters at the time. And if you're interested in the great names, there was a great theorist of the role of the state in a reformist strategy to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important. His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the two other huge figures in Marxism at the time, and they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate. And by the way, that debate still goes on.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rigged. You can't get there. They've long ago learned how to manipulate parliaments. They buy the politicians and all that. And therefore, revolution is going to be the way to do it. Revolution gets a very big boost because the Russians. They did it that way. They didn't do. I mean, they fought in the Duma, in the parliament, but they didn't. This focus on the state, I would argue,”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet vulnerable because of suffrage. If suffrage is universal or nearly so, if everybody gets a vote which in a way capitalism brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism in the French American Revolution is to create a place where elected representatives. So the government being subject to suffrage creates the notion aha. Here's how we're going to we have to seize the state. And then that gets agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how to do it. One side says you go with the election. You mobilize the voter. That gets to be called reformism within Marxism. And the other side is revolution. Don't do that. This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is real.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when this begins, but it really gets going after he dies, is this debate among Marxists about the role of the state. They all agreed nearly all of them agree that you have to get the state. The working class has to get the state because they see the state as the ultimate guarantor of capitalism. When things get really out of hand, the capitalist calls the police or he calls the army or both of them. And so the government is in a sense this key institution captured in Marxist language by the bourgeoisie, by the other side, the capitalists.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When he's in struggle, that's what he's interested in the work. Think of it almost mechanically like the workplace. In the workplace, there, some people who do this and other people who do that, and they accept this division of authority, and they accept this division of what's going on here, particularly because he believed that the core economic objective of capitalism was to maximize something called profit, which his analysis located right there in the workings of the enterprise. Not in the government was not the key factor here.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The state mentions it, but he's interested in the details of how capitalism works factory by factory, store by store, offer what's the structure, the government secondary for him.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they got, they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say, well, what will that new system look like? They didn't go that way. What they did was ask the question, how could we get beyond capitalism? It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured people's minds, people's daily lives, and so on. The focus of the conversation became, this was already by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism whereby we would get beyond. And again, make a long story short. The conversation focused on seizing the government. See, before that it wasn't that the government was not a major interest. If you read Marx's capital, the great work of his maturity three volumes, there's almost nothing in it.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He and the other producers of an anti-capitalist movement, people like the Chartists in England, that's a whole nother movement, the anarchists of various kinds like Proudhon in France or Kropotkin or Bakunin in Russia, and so on. You put all these together and there was a shift in what the audience Let's call it a mixture of. Militant working class people on the one hand and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other, they now wanted a different question. They were persuaded by the analysis. They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would like to do better than. And the question became how do we do this? Not anymore should we, why should we could we maybe fix capitalism? No, they had gotten to the point the system has to be fundamentally changed.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gathering together the precursors to his own work, Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that partly because he didn't work a regular job and partly because he was an exile in London most of his adult life, he worked in the library. I mean, he had a lot of time. He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were manufacturers. And you might say the first half to two-thirds of his life are about the critique of capitalism. And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work, Western Europe, more or less, was interested in. That's what they wanted. And he gave that to them. He wasn't the only one, but he was very, very effective at it. By the last third of his life,”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The real world. Probably the best way to get in there. Is to describe something that happened in Marxism that then shapes the answer to your question. In the early days of Marx's writings, and you know his life spans the 19th centuries. Born in 1818, dies in 1883, so literally he lives the 19th century. And you might, I mean, to make things simple, you might look at the first half of the first two-thirds of his life as overwhelmingly”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, for example, let me just take your point one step further, you really cannot understand the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese, and the others, because each of them is a kind of response, let's call it, to the way the Soviets did it. Are you going to do it that way? Well, yes, and no is the answer. This we will do that way, but that we're not going to do, and the differences are huge. But you could find a thread I can do that for you if you want, in which all of them are in a way reacting.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. It's not that they're stupid and it's not that they're ignorant, it's that, well, ignorance may be, but I mean, it's not a mental problem, it's the taboo shut it down. And so all of the reopening that in a way recaptures what went before and develops it in new direction, they just don't know.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Marxism or Soviet Marxism or Russian there were these words that where the adjective was meant to somehow say kind of this is the canon. You can depart from it, but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing. And by the 1960s, it was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of, and the irony is, particularly here in the United States, with a taboo against Marxism kicks in right after World War II is so total in this country that I, for example, through most of my adult life have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time simply explaining to American audiences that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism which wasn't the canon before nineteen seventeen and hasn't been since at least the nineteen sixties, but they don't”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians after the revolution because they occupied a position for a while, not very long. But they occupied a position for a while in which, I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these people criticizing capitalism for a long time. Even the Marxists ever since mid-century. And these were the first guys who pulled it off. They made it, and so that there was a kind of presumption around the world. Their interpretation must be kind of the right one, because look, they did it. And so for a while, they could enunciate their interpretation. And it came to be widely grasped as something which, by the way, gets called in the literature official Marxism. The very idea that you would put that adjective in”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a German word, I don't know if you speak the other languages, there's a wonderful German word called Fetzichte. And it's stronger than the word refuse. If you want to refuse something but with real strong emphasis is a German way of saying I don't want anything to do with that. And he would talk then in philosophical terms, because remember, he was a student of philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest. He would wax philosophical and say, you know, that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having a child. You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person, and will find his or her own way, and these ideas once they're out there. Go their own way”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had a great sense of humor. I don't know if he had a chance to take a look at his writing, but he had an extraordinary sense of humor. So my guess is he would deploy his humor in answering this question too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of the interpretations of his work, and he's very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could erase the connection between those things, and the lineage they claim from him which he would.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have kind of a bifurcation. Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism. But another part of it becomes a set, and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative post-capitalist society ought to look like, how it ought to work. And there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion. And I would say that that's still where it is, that you have a tradition now that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism, notion of the alternative, and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework in which I would answer. That's what Marxism is about. Its basic idea, if you had to have one, is that human society can do better than can. Capitalism and it ought to try.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The importance in terms of Marxism is that now this seizure of power by a group of Marxists, that is a group of people inspired by Marx, developing what you might call a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians too, but a Russian interpretation, this now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism into a plan at least. What are you going to do in this Soviet Union? And a lot of this was then trial and error. Marx never laid any of this out. Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if he had because it was 50 years earlier in another country, etc. So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens then more later in China and Cuba and Vietnam and Korea and so on, is that”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jean Victor Debs makes exactly the same argument to the Americans should not fight in the war. He's in the pet. He has nothing to do with Lenin. I don't even know if they knew of each other, but he does it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States. By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well. Really, very well. Remarkable. And he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders. If you see the link. Although he had much more courage politically than Bernie has. That's really interesting. I'd love to return to that link maybe later. History rhymes. Yes, the complicated story. Anyway, what.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Splits under the pressures of all of this into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions, Lenin Trotsky and the others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story short, he's an exile. His position, Lenin's position makes him gets him deported because he says Russian workers should not be killing German workers. This is a war of capitalists who are dividing the world up into colonies and Russian working people have no, should not kill and should not die for such a thing as you can expect. They arrest him and they throw him out. Interestingly in the United States the comparable leader at that time of the Socialist Party here as you know there was no communist party at this point that comes later the head of the Socialist Party, a very important American figure named U.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The really big change happens in Russia in 1917. Now you have a group of Marxists, Leiden Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again, a war, like in France, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation because it is the government that loses World War I, has to withdraw, as you know, Breslatovsky and all of that, and the government collapses, and the army revolts. And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers Party.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before that had only been implicit, now it became explicit what is the leadership of the Paris Commune going to do? And why and in what order and in other words governing, organizing a society? But since it only lasted a few weeks, the French army regrouped and under the leadership of people who were very opposed to Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed a large number of the communards, as they were called, and deported them to islands in the Pacific that were part of the French Empire at the time.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks. In 1871, there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany, and in the result was something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian society, and Marx's people, people influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune, in the leadership of the commune. And Marx wasn't that far away. He was in London. These things were happening in Paris. That's an easy transport even then. And for a short time, very short. Marxism had a different quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize societally differently.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently in different places at different times. And therefore Marxism as a kind of first flush definition is the totality of all of these very different ways of coming to terms with it. For the first roughly forty fifty years, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism. Marx himself, that's all he really did. He never wrote a book about communism. He never wrote a book really about socialism either. His comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed. What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism. That's what Marxism was, more or less in its first forty or fifty years.”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition that takes its inspiration from the works of Karl Marx. But because these ideas that he put forward, as fast as they did and as globally as they did. Literally it's one hundred and forty years since Mark's died, and in that time his ideas have become major types of thinking in every country on the earth. If you know much about the great ideas of human history, That's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time, and what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity, is that the Marxian ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories and economic conditions”
2022-06-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #295 – Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source