that's what brings us together this evening and or perhaps we should be thinking of one thousand nine hundred and forty six decolonization the chinese revolution or one thousand nine hundred and twenty nine the great market crash the great depression and here in the united states particularly here in new york city the radical s it's also the the end of the millennium and beyond unfettered freedom an incalculable political enforcement for accumulation and domination test driven in the third world and brought home to roost as many th century marxist themselves had thought the clockwork mechanisms of history had proven them right it wasn't simply another political program claiming to be better rather this was the judgment of history there was no the unlikely pages of the financial times and the economist or the wall street journal and bloomberg news in the belly of the last cold warrior standing a majority of adults under the age of thirty identify as explicitly anti capitalist had no interest in alienation he had no interest in achieving an ethical democratic society it was all about science and structuralism this became super cool and the one thing you didn't do scientist who was an economist as dry as they come no offense to the economists my ex husband is one as dry as they come who had some scientific laws to say about how capitalism of collapse that's not marx marx is about alienation marx is about exploitation marx is about how more and more people will become completely deprived of anything like the capacities as their own and anyone who's an academic and if you are adjuncts or my students desperately striving for a job you know that the c corporation distinction has completely collapsed we will see the end of tenure in the next ten years and you will be people who no longer have what tenure was which is a kind ownership accumulation of capital becomes in fewer and fewer hands the result is militarism it the result is inevitable imperial domination and we are seen that at every step of our day to day life marx has never been more relevant they will never be a society where human beings live together in peace and dignity until capitalism  kicked out of stanford fired from columbia as a union organizer arrested when i got my job back as a national for the national labor relations board a board we don't really have any more and i have no regrets i did armed self defense for the black panther party i had no regrets and i became a law professor and perhaps that is a sign of the cunning of reason why marxist relevant to understands that that trying to involved in to help transform the world the first one is one i think most folks in this audience might know which is the simple labor in the white skin can never forget self as long as labor and the black skin so part of what we've been trying to work on is the other part of this book right now i'm a science fiction nerd and i like my essence and that all of the religious world is about an inverted projection of the qualities of that essence the destruction by capitalism of the basis of those beliefs is their real undoing conditions of life is a pregnant phrase here the conditions of life are social labor resting freedom from necessity socializing nature just as it naturalizes the social abolishing artificial forms and producing social wealth or so it could be the real critique of the present is not in any argument so much as to the fact that social production does not actually produce social wealth for all and his relations with his kind the melting into air of the old beliefs under the blowtorch of development of the force of production reveals the means by which the production of social wealth by social labor is turned instead into misery and brick a reason scientific method cosmopolitan values modern communication how can the potential of these things be realized as general and social attributes of a way of life for all what agent could be the bearer of those values not capitalists who proclaim a universality that quickly reveals itself to be partial and one sided once the question of property is raised as marx and engel sales we're in the manifesto the real forces for change are those who ask the property question nor do they see themselves or their kind as agents of change per se ideas don't make and remake the social world the social world makes and remakes ideas an abstract idea requires an abstract agent life of a peasantry it's thrown them off their land into the mohawk more of industrial labor now with nothing to lose but its chains labor becomes a potential bearer of an ever more abstract form i have a sm this brings us to the interesting question as to what and where the working class is now however marx recognized thanks to angles succor geographic work in manchester that the industrial working class was displacing the artisan and  but it's not the case that this became a universal form of labor nor has the global distribution of labor stood still they're probably more industrial workers in china now than there are people in the whole of the british isles industrial work is not quite the same given how into the production process information is these days marx wrote the manifesto with the aid of concepts appropriated from german philosophy he wrote capital intellectual resources that included the latest thermodynamic and metabolic concepts from physics chemistry the life sciences not to mention careful ethnographies of industrial technology from charles babbage but no science of information existed in his time what labor is after the instrumentalizing not just a physics and chemistry but biology and information science seems to me an open question so what would it critique not just of the science of political economy but a critique of those other sciences beam labor now has to be thought as including not just social production but also social reproduction front in class struggles of a distinctly twenty first century type but let's not forget that while the planet may now be made up of a majority of urban dwellers many still work the land the enclosure of the land proceeds of carbon enough to tank the whole climate system marx had no inkling of this in the s but by the time he was working on capital however he's starting to think about what he called metabolic rift he read the earth science of his day he understood how com modified agriculture was a maker of deserts and that this had a geochemical basis so that's where we are and that's why marx now the peculiar form of dynamism of the commodity economy treats both labor and nature as disposable things to be consumed in the production of exchange value and for the extraction of a surplus by a ruling class we see clearly how this innovates and disorders the working class how many hideous forms of physical injury but also with mental confusion bonds and bond markets we have a world to save thank you then let's see the little bit that i'm gonna extract from marks is a corpus comes from the third volume of capital it's it's on on differential rent which just means why one piece of land commands more rent than someplace else and mark says from the standpoint of hire of a higher economic form of society private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another i think you know chattel slavery will continue to seem to us even more obscene and absurd than private ownership of land nevertheless i want to talk about private ownership of land or as of the globe as mark significantly says as being obscene and absurd in its own way i think it's significant that he says the globe not land because of course it would be it wouldn't be surprising to us if someone said well i'm a landowner but if they said i'm a globe owner you'd think what the fuck where'd you buy that and and yet of course we are in a situation like that where there are essentially private owners of of the globe and that's to say they they own these parts of the globe from which they can extract mining rents having to do particularly with fossil fuels that end up affecting what the rest of the real estate on the planet looks like very much so marks in this little chapter says you know basically differential rent exists in two forms there's the form that comes from ground rent which is pure location and i think we certainly should recall the perversity of ground rent ground rent that's to say like it doesn't have to do with there being anything special about this bit of land which is to say that there's a waterfall in it or a you know an oil basin in it and it's interesting so marx has various critiques of this one of one of the problems we had the private ownership of of land in this sense is simply that it doesn't encourage the productive forces to develop very quickly because you can be absolutely passive and just just sit around and collect your rent and i find it interesting in this particularly decadent moment of capitalism that we have in the white house the the tsiyon of a owner of real estate who himself is a corrupt real estate tycoon and whose daughter is married to another person of the same species kushner that is to say and so you know i don't want to say anything good about industrial capitalism but you know at least it does develop the the forces of production where as a you know simply being a rentier does not did this thing just turn on suddenly i hope you could i hope people heard what i had to say earlier it was very good it was plagiarized  and then you know the second aspect and marx talks about you know the particular perversity that is involved with these differential rents having to they're often just like an exploitation of pure poverty and as you know probably from reading things like a planet of slums you know the highest rents in the world are not paid by people who live in palaces but pay their their rack rented out of people who live and are sleeping you know eight ten twelve to a room in in slums  and so marx says what does he say he says that it turns out that you know this can turn basically slums into more valuable parts of land and potosi in bolivia the great silver mind that you know produced so accumulation of european capital but marx does not neglect either mining rents that's to say the rents that come from some specific feature of the land it's greater agricultural productivity deposits of  petroleum or copper ore or silver and i think you know we should think particularly about the problem with mining rents right now which is to say that obviously there you know often now these things are formally nationalized or socialized but of course the rents themselves go through concessions to various private corporations or state owned companies like saudi aramco or whatever so  then you know between the two of these things they both tend towards enormous enormous lis differential outcomes differential rents produce very differential outcomes in the sense that you've got some kind of some areas of the earth that because they're owned by certain people and not by others are absolutely laid waste to wrecked poisoned you know people end up with very high rates of cancer something if they've got pesticides sprayed all over them and then other people don't have to suffer the consequences of these or because of private ownership of land for residential purposes cuz merely essentially flee to higher ground that's to say go go and buy real estate in new zealand or whatever you've got an enormous sort of industry in terms of the buying of passports that's taking place right now so these things are possible because of something that we take for granted which is that somebody can just say that's my part of the globe i own it and i don't care what it does to the rest of the globe and and in fact the reason i don't care is because i own this other part of the globe in new zealand where i'm safe from all the consequences that will befall the rest of you  what marx goes on to say in this in this passage i wonder if i guess because maybe the mic wasn't on me i should quote the original line let's see where is this business so marx marx says  it's gonna it's gonna be quite good so what you may not have heard me saying cuz the mic wasn't working was that the original was this from the standpoint of a higher economic form of society private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another he goes on to say even a whole society a nation or even all simultaneously existing societies societies taken together are not owners of the globe they are only its possessor is to say people have the use of it for the fruits of the place but they don't own it like bony patras familias pardon my latin that is to say good heads of households and which reminds us that the the in economy and in ecology has to do with a household ultimately the household is the earth like good heads of health households they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition i think it's become very clear that it's going to be impossible to do anything like that as long as we continue to persist with this absurd convention which we take for granted that somebody can actually own six hundred and sixty six th avenue or whatever it is that their kushner's are trying to bail themselves out of or that they can own you know this deposit of this the sedimentary basin where a lot of oil was deposit or deposit or that they can own this agricultural land rather than than some other we should all of us as you know henry george propos long ago be getting any rent that is paid to the land that all of us are born on to just as citizens of this planet and that's one thing to begin to demand which means ex pro creating not just the owners of the means of production that have been produced by other people but the means of production that were pre existent the means in production that don't result from human handiwork but that are just lying around us in the form of the planet so i think we think a lot about those of us who've read marx we think a lot about the two elements of kind of the great try out of classical political economy which is to say labor and capital but there's also land nothing can take place unless it takes place somewhere and of course what we're seeing right now really is the devastation of this planet for succeeding generations because of private ownership of land right now so in addition to polishing private ownership of the means of production in terms of actual physical creation myth of the americas which involves at moments a very sarcastic version of genesis in his poem united fruit company it goes something like this when the trumpet sounded everything was prepared on earth and jehovah gave the world to coca cola incorporated to anaconda copper the biggest mining concern in in chile ford motor company and other corporations the united fruit company reserved for itself the most juicy piece the central coast of my earth the delicate waist of america so you know that can be our genesis or we can have another genesis in which we have a different type of jehovah that does something very very different van i would like to begin by performing what is us were called your knowledge meant of the country this is the fact that we're gathered here a bunch of people coming from different background probably different skin colors in a city which is part of a settler colonial state so we are standing in a land that belonged to the lenape people who have been dispossessed marginalized brutalized exterminated we gather here i'm italian speaking about a german philosopher in english the language of empire so that's the background of what i'm gonna say so why to prevent this from happening so what i will try to do is to say why even when we try to go beyond marx we're still doing that together with marx and i will do this in particularly by focusing on two areas of research which i think have gone well beyond marx but still win marks gender and race so here's my line i picked up a line from the communist manifesto i don't know what that's a new school to production and consumption in every country few lines down in the place of the old local and national secure and self sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction universal interdependence of so according to quijano who is the peruvian marxist thinker unfortunately is written mainly essays so it's not i think as widely known as as it should be we cannot understand the range and classify people and there's something to remember to think about bodies scatter around the globe in terms of races in terms of different colors that have the function of  differences in contexts and epochs and timings the modern capitalist division of labor on a world scale has been and still remain intrinsically linked to the constant of race and its relative apparatus as one of the most important tool for labor control and the reason the reason for this is easy to understand as a system predicated on an endless expansion of profit that's one system and there could be powerful tool for labor control something similar can be said for the concept of race despite the fact that left feminism has gone well beyond marx and was also criticized marx for not being seems to me then one cannot but build from an analysis of the international division of labor and of the way in which to divide in line between productive and their productive labor is constantly being recently fired in different contexts but also constantly being reproduced as marxist feminists have been pointing out for quite some time together we raise capitalism also needs a gender division of labor because to put it bluntly people attributed gender on the basis of dreams so if you are dreaming about hunting for all the purposes of social life you no matter what your genitalia where you would still be a man and vice versa if you were dreaming about of these because i would like to point the fact as i said transversally that even when we are trying to go beyond marx and i think it's important that we keep doing that we're still building from some of his thank you let me begin by apologizing for my lateness i was stuck in traffic three blocks away for twenty minutes and the only reason i didn't run is because i broke my leg and that leg break put this is my quote remarks put a check on my pretensions now that quote is actually from volume one chapter twenty five in the discussion of the reserve army of labor and what he talks about which is the key thing the theme of my little discourse here is that when capitalism has a situation where unemployment falls the labor market is tight workers feel strong wages rise then profitability falls this slows down growth slows down the demand for labor and the reserve army swells again the gates floodgates that whole back immigration all that are open we know this historically so you get back a pull of labor and this is where marx says this process puts a check on the pretensions of workers of labor now the key thing here is that this highlights the fact that capitalism a system in which actions produce reactions and a channel and limit what can be done within the system profitability rules the system that's absolutely clear we don't have a vaccine for malaria it's not profitable we have millions if not billions of dollars spent on on plastic surgery because it is profitable so we understand totally that that's how the system operates sorry so i want to tie that to my particular interest i'm an economist and i'm proudly so  so let me say that right away getting to socialism is vastly harder than getting to mars and that's something you have to remember and the one thing you do not want if you want to go to mars is have people who are fervent know a little bit about physics and a little bit about geology pack the rocket with stuff light the fuse and let's go because you won't come back in fact you probably want to get off the ground but you certainly will not come back and that is because understanding how to do a difficult task requires you trying to understand how the basic principles translate into concrete actions you forget to put that screw in or you don't know that that ring doesn't handle cold very well which happened in the challenger thing when they blew up the whole space ship itself killing people somebody will pay the price for that ignorance and so that brings me to the second point which is that this explains why mark spent so much of his life and energy writing his damn work on economics which he called also his damn work on economics and he thought that he had the original plan was six books and of that the first book was going to be called on capital and he'd even finished the first book then you have three volumes of capital he didn't even finish that he only finished one volume and at the end he well he didn't finish that and there's a hole in the key analysis of how capitalism works and therefore what happens if you intervene in capitalism it isn't enough to be militant it isn't enough to be fervent in and out to be  on the side of the working class if you do things that harm them they have a right to turn away from you and this is a concrete issue brazil argentina what happens if corbin wins in england is he just going to pump up the economy how does that work what's the theoretical basis for that what's a concrete empirical waste i would argue that marx actually tried to lay that out in capital but it's there in bits in cases and quoting capital is not gonna help you that you have to try to trace the logic of that you have to trace the concrete expression of that which changes over time because capitalism is a evolving system but you have to understand how that relates to its original arguments i have an enormous regard for marx i think is the  greatest thinker in that century possibly in in modern times but he did not finish his damn work and our understanding of that has to take this into account how do you take it into account well you have to see how the logic holds together suppose let me make it more concrete here suppose that you were asked by jeremy corbyn look we're about to get win labour what do we do now one answer people get well support the worker what does that mean high raise wages well what are gonna do about profits what are you gonna do about international trade what determines exchange rates what is the feedback effect on that unemployment what if you raise wages and workers lose jobs what if you lower wages and workers gain jobs as reagan did then he got the support of the working class and it wasn't just smoke and mirrors look at the data you actually got a rise in employment and people were very grateful for that because high wages for some does not mean high wages for people who are unemployed now if we don't understand how this spaceship of the capitalist economy works if we just substitute our fervor for that understanding then the cost of our mistakes are borne by workers they don't hang leftists these days for making that kind of mistake with in the old days if you're an astrologer and you said you know something's gonna happen you get it wrong they pretty much punished you and sometimes they hung you just to sort of pass the message along economists don't get hung for being wrong social scientists don't get hung for being wrong maybe political militants do but that's because they were right the difference is we really have to pay attention to the the burden of marxist work and i don't mean that in a bad sense it's a burden because as we taken seriously as we take in holistically i don't like quotes for marx mainly because allows you to dismember what is in fact the whole and i understand that quotes reflect an aspect that's perfectly fine but what is a representative quote for newton or darwin or freud for that matter if you don't read their work you will not understand the place so i urge people to read the damn thing itself read marx and it's a mess there's no question about it his retire is views change over time you have to understand that and people explain how that is he started off a believer that wages will go down to subsistence because he started from ricardo and then he turned against it he started off opposed to the labor theory value then he turned towards it if you don't know that you get these quotes will be incoherent because any great thinker learns over time learns from their study and no one studied capitalism better than this man this man and engels too by the way i want to end by saying that i went to manchester and i went to the chatham library and i saw this room with a little table and three windows with leaded glass and you could look out and on the room on the tables with the books that marx and engels were studying when they wrote the communist manifesto that is as close as i i really want to know what the book thank you all um so my task is difficult because you guys have played so much out on the table here and i'm not gonna be able to like sew it all together and i think that's like one of our themes as well is it's very difficult to do that not hesitate you need to be like a jo i want to i want to ask this question but there were a couple things that i did hear like you know little threads running through some of these some of these presentations  one and and what what sort of is interesting to me about almost all of them is i don't think they would have been running thirty or forty or fifty years ago many of you talked about financialization many of you talked about climate change  i was thinking in particular right you know of the chiara and anwar you both talked about the sort of unfinished project can i think you gestured up this as well there's also this in this question of the cosmopolitan jump in think about you know how we are addressing this question different today than we would have you know as i said in one thousand nine hundred and ninety one or in one thousand nine hundred and eighty i mean in particular the role of finance land climate and this question of the sort of yeah i'll put it in scare quotes the cosmopolitan character and i may have scared you all off please the obvious question is why do these rotten things happen and the answer is because it's profitable and we have to stop thinking of these as something that is bad for society and therefore bad it's very good for capital it's perfectly good to destroy the environment if you can make some profit now that's just no way that we can get around that and persuading them that it's bad doesn't work the koch brothers are not fooled because they understand that their wealth and power comes from these facts now the second point i want to make is that financialization is often viewed as something to do with monopol mean people often say these guys sitting there and now of course we hopefully there'll be women also sitting there destroying the planet and they do it because they have power and monopoly power i want to argue that the essence of m s treatment of capitalism was that monopoly is not the central mechanism it's competition and it limits what capitalists themselves do it's not true that a few capitalist decided to have a crisis just for the fun of it or this they have to despoil the environment if it's profitable so you have to prevent it from being profitable you can both limits but how are you going to do that the politicians are subject also to the influence of them of these monies npr has a program run by the koch brothers which is the market watch right they always talk and now the numbers is never an unemployment number in that numbers because they're being paid by one side only last point which is it again i apologize for being an economist but people don't often understand that financial profits in marx and indeed many forms of profit merchant profit do not come from surplus value they come in fact from the old idea of buying cheap and selling dear you buy an asset it goes up in value you have made a profit until somebody pays for it that person is paying for your profit and the asset maybe goes down then they lose that source which marx calls profit and alienation is almost entirely lost to the marxist discourse which likes the idea of surplus value but marx is the one who introduces this idea look at theories of surplus value chapter one first two pages he says there are two different types of profit and he's quoting someone else and all that so when i say that his work is unfinished he should have put that in volume three right it was pretty obvious but he didn't write volume three angles put it together and you can't blame angles for doing what he did but you have to take seriously the logic of it financial profits do not come from surplus value by and large except for those rents interests and dividend payments that come directly derivatives don't and if we understand that we can link it back because capitalism works now and doing this very fine work of completing the work that marx initiated the finishing the project on the other hand i'm also wondering what is the space life i'm coming to think more and more than that the capitalist logic is never as pervasive as we will want to think it is so not just in terms of  the very fact that as much as marks on writings and thinking about capitalism the very proper project of capitalism the very project of reducing every living relations to the  isn't finished in itself and a wonder where those sites of resistance should not be mobilized for thinking about something we haven't yet said revolution  i want to maybe make three points and the first is interesting because i don't think we remember sometimes the brutal history of united states and destroying the great social socialist experiments that democratic socialism based on an ethical view of a new humanity was possible and in that brief year that he ruled he engaged in so many experiments including different ways of and we don't remember them we don't think about them this is i think both of your points because they didn't die with him his last words as he had to have a jump in conversation with  el castro who gave him an ak forty seven i will never use this gun he said looks like i'm going to use it so you have to teach me how where the following i died today because i will not surrender the dreams that we have realized materially in a democratically socialist chile i die today but the dream of a democratic people from saudi arabia and drove their airplanes into the world trade center that's not my september th my september th is finale and they stood by that dream now he did and we haven't built on them then we have nicaraguan we have this on these days of course you know henry kissinger said when aliante was elected we are looking at the face of a dead man so the united states intentions towards  were clear from the beginning and that's all that's all history now you know as a citizen of the united states something i'm constantly trying to escape i i feel the weight i feel  did it in iran and we would have done it in south africa now why didn't we do it in south africa bears we found the english and the united states nelson mandela and he after twenty seven years in jail  early and a social democratic program at least social democratic program thinking he was actually working with a program that might be initiated it never was and what a mandela do he systematically demobilized the mass movements that had overthrown apartheid and that's why and i want us to all take a moment and remember her winnie mandela divorced know not because she was having an affair with the lawyer no because she could not love a man who was selling out everything she had stood for through torture imprisonment everything your service and you need a common to do it to fit through what these great experiments are because they're there and they have been there for a long time simply not the case in the ghost it is a great privilege to be able to have access to that kind of technology and so the when we speak of technology we have to yeah now i have a several different minds now i'm glad you touched on that technology piece because i think people often don't recognize how inaccessible that is to people right here to certain communities right here within the united states definitely within the community i work went in in jackson a significant portion that other community does not have iphones and not have any any of this it's very little access to it and that there's a another form of what also we've touched upon but there's another form of exclusion and it's not just social exclusion it's actually exclusion from being able to participate and engage in the market and increasingly being able to participate and engage in in official society and that's a critical part of what is taking place right here within our own confines right  so that's the critical piece for so for me i think the the what we're trying to articulate in in regards we're talking about alternatives is in some respects you know we're trying to do some innovative work some dreaming work some alternative building working what we call community production but we see it as a major gamble in a major risk and it makes us oddballs in immediate respects within this  kind of emerging cooperative world because there's not a model that we can necessarily point to with great ease us engaging in this experiment is going to be profitable in any form of fashion but the question wines are being outside of profitability at least in our direct community can we afford to be excluded from the development of this technological pace in orientation which is a different orientation th saying we have to make sure that this business enterprise is profitable can you afford to be excluded if you have some elements and the ability to exercise a democratic choice to engage in doing or engaging and developing these kind of productive forces so even my point to try to make the connection is that even when we dream and i'm one that thinks that it's trying to encourage folks to always look towards revolution to never take that off the agenda to dream and to dream the the big anybody who knows me and and i try to drink far beyond what i know i can do but i think it's a goal post and a goal mark there's something that keeps folks energized on on making and owning their own agency as opposed to being confined to the limits that they are normally constricted within but then we have to recognize there is a serious gap around actually knowing what the hell that we're doing and that is a critical piece that i know at least within cooperation jackson you know we are we're confronting and one of the things that you know there's three of us now who it sounds crazy but i think the only thing that we can we can name it is we're trying to figure out how do you make an anti capitalist business model right how do you do that and how do you do that with the premise that you're going to do business not only in a way that not just restricts the surplus or distributes the profit but you're going to do it in a way which is economically sound as possible ecologically sound as possible which automatically threatens in our system automatically threatens your bottom line so there's still some technical pieces to how this thing actually functions and works that i don't think we fully have a graphs of within the left and i think a lot of our practical projects suffer for a lack of it i know i'm seeing  facing that in a major way in terms of what we're trying to develop because there's a there's kind of a growing divide between in our work and cooperation jackson between being practical which means just stick to your normal kind of business model cooperative model as opposed to putting what we would call signal when i was training post putting in the old school way putting politics in command those directly confront what your bottom line and having the knowledge and skill of expertise of folks who mostly support most of our members have not gone to college have some major literacy challenges and i'm asking them to develop an anti capitalist business model now i don't take that as a as something that's an impossible task in the least but it's hard to articulate trying to go someplace when at least i must speak for myself i don't feel comfortable about knowing all the different mechanics of the economy itself and i've read pretty much all the things and i think i have a fairly decent graphs of marks and a fairly decent grasp of the economy but there's some major pieces around you know particularly how finding its work in here and now that i don't think we really have a clear grasp of on the left right now and without having a clear grasp of it these i think it just leads us i think oftentimes to calling tactics strategy when we fundamentally don't have a strategy and i think we need to come to grips with that and and do the work that thing to really take that on and let me speak to one point then i'll stop trying to link this together so seven or eight was that there was going to be a major investment in automation and instead they kind of sit on most of that money and the things that have been to me at least in my analysis of it the thing that they've done the most is not so much invested in in automation they've done more of an investment in ai and that is a piece i think that we need to examine which is about this is is there a shift in the transition in the overall process of primitive accumulation which is more about social control than it is necessarily about profit at this particular point in time asked about spying right it's facebook spine he said no no no no no no because people willingly give us that information so it's profoundly different at least in his mind and i think he represents the sector capital view is profoundly different in the level of social control that we're actually exerting because people willingly participate in the surrendering of this information and being shaped by how this how this piece is being rolled out which i think speaks to a bigger piece around you in your point around where do we see social activity and social transformation happening and how do we see it happening i think is a big question because there is a critical piece of being more connected to social media but less connected to other humans that i think we definitely have to figure out if we're gonna make a real goal at transformation one of the things mark's changed his mind about actually his technology but that he was trying to have a critical theory of technology was actually kind of ahead of his time in fact ahead of the time of the editors of his collected works who excluded the notebooks and manuscripts on technology from them so they're not even part of a corpus so you know beyond the the six books that marx was trying to write there's other ones that he didn't think to write that we still have to write after him right and one of those it seems to me is about the forces of production which aren't the forces of production of marx's time this is not a steam based error the information science begins here in new york in one thousand nine hundred and forty eight to give it different kind i think angles was aware that one needed to have a handle on these things we spent so much time trying to figure out the sciences at exactly the same time that the chemical industry in germany is getting going there's a kind of industrial appropriation  it's the infrastructure that their cell phones connected is the thing to pay attention to and that is global and affects the life chances of everybody and it affects your life chances even more if you don't have any access to it or all connection to it right someone else is going to decide that the value of your labor is is worth nothing or that this production will go someplace else like you don't even have a knowledge of what is going to be done to you so that it has a hinterland doesn't negate the fact that barely glimpsed that the window to figure any of this out is kind of closing because you know we're kind of treating it as if one can produce an economy in an open system when it's ication doesn't do it what we're doing is venus forming earth right turning it into our runaway greenhouse effect that's what we're doing and we know that because there's a science of it what would be a critical relation to that science what we're critical relation information science and you could go through so i think that you know the project is even faster than the unwritten six books but it means that all kinds of intellectual labor have to work together in a comradely fashion i just don't think there's a master discourse there's no one discipline all have to figure out what an equality of forms of knowledge would  be i want to come back to a theme because it may have been misunderstood my opening remarks were my belief that socialism is much harder to get to than mars or venus or whatever but then why would we want to know what the earth is like if we're planning to go to mars and the answer is that we don't know what's on mars and if we don't understand what on earth will be utterly unprepared even more unprepared than our ignorance would allow we need to know as much as we can in order to go to someplace unknown the second point is that my understanding of marx was that it's not about economics it's about political economy and political economy encompasses socialism also and by the way marx has lots of critiques of socialist schemes in his various writings because he argues that they're not economically feasible on the other hand they are economically feasible societies within our purview who we don't hold as models or perhaps not all of us hold as models because they don't fit our idea of socialism but they're economically very viable the amish the amish are male dominated  christian politically and religiously structured society but they help each other they're very cooperative if someone gets hurt or their barn burns down they everybody stops and they build it back up but they do something even astonishing to me which is that they require every young person to leave at the age of eighteen they kick them out they say go live among the english which is us everybody else do what you need to do and then you tell us within a year whether you want to come back to our restricted structured society or you want to be free almost all of them come back now have we been able to form a socialism that says to people okay until the age of eighteen you're with us then go out and then come back we haven't we mostly had people who want to leave and we've had to lock them in and we don't understand that we don't understand why we failed tied in as disenfranchised partners yeah exactly and i think it's really important for us to recognize that because if you have a little cellphone with a sim card and no contract and no access to internet or anything else and the internet there's no internet in your township and as you know most townships were not even lit up during apartheid and now they're only partially lit up now so if we're talking about lights we're not talking about internet access so i think that what happens often is the incredible differential between the global south and and stop africa it's one of the most advanced african countries quote unquote we need to remember what that is and then the second point and i think we're all in agreement with this is it the great socialist experiments like that ollie and they began or a south african economist who presented an entire program of transformation when reconstruction and development seemed real but these programs need to be studied and looked  because there are other ways of organizing the economy that are available to us and yet they're not only not taught they are pretty much suppressed  socialism how did people experiment with it and the answer is no so i think that part of our task is of course to remember that we are in an obvious global economy but we've been in a global  encouraging words it is that matters it changes things and i think that the most important thing we can do is both to engage with all the difficult economic questions of transformation  but also then to begin to mobilize behind them so that we begin to see that there are absolute alternatives to anything called neoliberal capitalism thank you before yeah thank you so much for the panel discussion so i'm very much interested in the question of marks now but also marks when and so right i think that it's a tremendous amount of work is required to accomplish marxism i'm worried that sometimes theorizing about marxism can be almost passive aggressive and procrastinator ii and so i'm interested in how well who holds the responsibility for accomplishing marxism but then link to that question is who even what's involved in the means to protest effectively how do we create spaces of accountability where we can actually begin to to change the order things in this ideal marxist society what is the place of women are they i mean because today they're second class citizens and and i even see them as enslaved really  if it's the same what difference does it make another one do you any of you have thoughts about that today this i want to begin with the women question because i think it's hugely important i i decided to speak about that among all the possible thing i couldn't mention the question of the coloniality of gender and tied it with that of race because there's a tendency to think that we're gonna think about capitalism and then at some point add gender and women and mix it and then things are going to be fine i mean you can't do that i mean we be inside of the thinking and the action from the very beginning so even the question what is the role of women it's very bad if you're raising the question it should have been in the thinking from the very beginning it's a women question the gendered division of labor is across all bodies we are all gendered whether it's clearly some people benefit more from the gendered division of labor than others but we are all complicit so there's no way to say let's think about why marx now and then maybe ever a final chapter of the day on the question of women  so um that's why i wanted to speak first okay so the question of the the role of power what conception of power the soviet union versus  which experiment so i personally think agree with kasturi oddest diagnosis of the soviet union as an example of state capitalism so i that's not exactly the example of socialism that i think drusilla was thinking about when she was saying that you know we don't even have knowledge i don't know enough about the keyboards i know i totally agree with what drusilla said there are so many don't have the knowledge i mean we are here talking in english that's the language of empire what we learn what is translated in those languages are less we are lucky enough and we have done all the dirty job or learning other languages so that's huge this is a by itself it's a daunting task but it's something day you know we at least we should keep in mind when when we do t s i think i mean at least this is the way of hurt drucilla's point so in terms of the question of power and which strategy and and marx when i tend to to stay on the libertarian side and think that the oppression is multiples so we have to act on multiple grounds so every every when and everywhere is good no there's no i would actually be very worried if there were marx contribute towards and made some contribution towards helping us to liberate our thoughts and our thinking but i'm not trying to limit it to borrow from i'm not trying to limit from just that train of thought when there's so much more that he didn't know couldn't have known that we have to figure out collectively so did he point us in some right directions i think yes that doesn't mean that he was so profoundly prescriptive or that there was no room for improvement and i think the the we have the benefit as i see it we have the benefit of the experiments of the th century however you know bad they may have been or short lived or door you know just cut off at the neck you know from imperialism we do have the benefit of those experience the question is are we going to seriously study them interrogate them and then allow them with our own experimentation be a guide towards our practice and our action to me i think that speaks to this question around you talked about the state right  or was that one of the question one of the questions  re in a little experiment with that right now in in my hometown and we're having a rough go at it which is not a negative thing in my view you know not a negative thing i think the question is what can folks learn from what we're struggling what do what can we learn from what we're doing and then figuring out what is translatable to in your context and what is not  i will say this i think at least the formulation that i have found most dear in that respect i wouldn't say comes from the the venezuelans but i think there's a sector of their movement which is articulated i think in a way i find most useful and practical which is that we're struggling for a participatory and protagonistic democracy right and a participatory and protagonistic government a government that take sides and does not try to be uphold bourgeois liberalism and this whole neutrality like no that's not what we're doing that's not what we should be doing and in my view but we have to recognize that there are real consequences for taking that and are we prepared to deal with that and i think you know this may be a controversial piece i haven't seen but a few examples in society whether the the the  forces from the left come in to hold on hold state government and actually do a serious enough job of preparing people for the consequences that come from challenging the system and i think that i something that we need to figure out how to do and do better critically better and then the other piece that i'm always reminded of is which is where in my mind i've always tried to see our movement going and there's another phrase you know again not from venezuela but where i first heard it in the s comes from some of the movement there which is that you know we don't want to be the government we want to govern right and that's a critical distinction and i think sometimes we lose sight of in the quest for state power as being the thing that's going to solve all of our problems relative to the struggle or in the task  music ceremony ously is very very exciting now to have this is it working this that yes well you know i'm somewhat lowed to wade into the question of revolutionary strategy which one of those questions involved but i do have a very sort of minor sort of plea as as concerns the culture of the left i think one of the things that i really enjoy in marks but fine like least helpful is his tremendous powers of rhetorical indignation of not suffering fools gladly or just an idiot if you don't agree with him on every every point even as he changes his mind over the decades and i find this in my own experience of the the culture of the left that's a say you know people are like trot that's absurd you reformist and you think of course it's actually relatively easy to see what's wrong with all of these different points of view and but clearly nobody nobody seems to be in possession of the the key to the skeleton key to sort of revolutionary strategy otherwise we would have put it in the lock and turned it and we would know what we're doing and i have found it off putting to have people who like to arrive but rather abstruse theoretical positions through you know studies of various you know second international thinkers and they think if you don't accept this application of completely bygone analyses of historical circumstances to our particular moment you know obviously kind of some sort of a you know renegade idiot and i you know it's not as if what we should just do is sit around and have a friendly discussion with one another that means not ever to have any revolutionary fruits but at the same time it's clear that like you know it's not one thousand nine hundred and eighty nine more and more people are going to come to talks like this because people see that capitalism is fundamentally not working that we have to replace it somehow and it seems to me that what what we don't want to do is to  know deflect to that energy by you know the kind of familiar devil's of sectarianism not that we shouldn't be heated because this is a matter of you know it's a subject of passionate importance but so who basically i don't know what to do about to second that ecumenical calls i none of those strategies of the labor movement proved to be completely successful so like why pick i mean there's probably things in all of them and things we haven't thought of i want to pick up that question of the state with the if you'll pardon the sort of ironic thought that like the state that seems best able to be the ruling class in committee these days is the people's republic of china and that is a great historical irony that that needs at least to be noted and and just a speculat thought that maybe the american state is actually not the ruling class in committee and that's part of its dysfunction it's something even worse than that it turns out that is imaginable and is where we are i will confess my slogan for the  obama campaign i thought it should have been put the ruling class back in charge is like a it's like a minimal demand you know because ended up being a hell of my worse you know it's where we've ended up so it could be things worse than that state yelling to bear in mind about the state is that the labor movement back out of the state so it might need more language to describe that near liberal doesn't describe all of that i noticed labor's never mentioned and the rhetoric of neoliberalism so so to bear in mind states always a complicated question and and here i'm just glancing on it with a couple of provocations i would just stand with obama put the ruling class back in power who has the fantasy but they're ruling on behalf of all the people because donald trump has no fantasy that he's ruling on behalf of anybody but his immediate real estate interests and so we actually do have something different because whatever you think of obama he actually believed that he you know old fashioned b former wife said no no no no oh no but and chris hanney who was assassinated said no the thing i want to add though is there are going on all over the place right now and there's no reason not to join them because there's no such thing as a perfect movement i was a you know in marxist leninist groups as a kid i was a union organizer taxi union in the last month seventeen taxi drivers have committed suicide because being a taxi driver is in new york no longer a feasible occupation now everybody can do something very simple destruction of the union movement in the united states systematically done starting with ronald reagan has d mobilized one of the most important movements but it's always fought including despite all of its racism for civil rights so by martin luther king got shot he started to talk about class race gender and unity a people against we need to see that these movements those adjuncts at every major ivy league school are unionizing right now and go join the picket lines they need help so i that one of the things that happens is that the investment but there are no mass movements is itself a self fulfilling prophecy there are mass movements and every block in new york city start fighting back i want to remind people that lenin was a real revolutionary actually did a huge thing but he spent a lot of time studying theory anybody knows anything about lenin's history and his practice that he was also a great theoretician and he did connect his understanding of theory to his politics so the idea that these are separable makes no sense to me this is what i meant by going to mars you not everybody's gonna be a physicist or an engineer but if you don't work collectively for sure you will not get off the ground so it's important to know the past in order to prepare for the future now one of the things that capitalism does perhaps all societies do is teach us to forget to make us forget you know and the men in black have this thing they have a little device and when they don't want to remember the expressive button it's a neuralyzer being a light comes on and you forget everything well capitalism does that exactly it does it through the bling and the flash that did directs our attention towards those things but also removes from  history the knowledge that would otherwise disrupt the system and part of our function is to keep that knowledge up in front keep reminding people even though they may walk out of here or help flashin and they don't remember anything maybe i'm just complaining about my students but anyway the other thing is that marx is not a prophet it's not a religious figure he did the best he could with the knowledge he had he was a genius but that doesn't mean that you have to take his words as a religious gospel you have to understand the logic of it and perhaps you don't agree with the logic but you have to at least encounter that logic just as you would with newton or einstein maybe you think you're beyond newton and i said and perhaps you are but first you need to know them in order to know what you are and that doesn't mean that everybody has to know everything if we're going to do this we have to be collective which means that people have different areas of knowledge and the only way we get a head is that we share and discuss that knowledge and disagree i mean a normal part of any process like that i i wanted to mention a little bit about talk a little bit about the kibbutz soviet the inequality out by repressing it and then everybody was unhappy because the enterprises were not doing well we're not doing any better and the enterprises are doing well we're angry and so the the problem with market socialism was the market part it creates self interest conflict antagonism and so the idea for me that you can base a socialism on markets misses the point of markets which is to try to get better than someone else and inequality is a characteristic feature this by the way one of the comments marx makes about abuses of market socialism kyboots is the same thing capitalism and markets are very corrosive if you insert a kibbutz remember communes i'm old enough to remember communes they didn't last either for the same reason it was very hard to maintain them in the corrosive influence of capitalism and the influence of what is striking to me about the amish is that they do do that and we well because i have a strong binding force and that's when we very important to understand strong binding elders in the system they don't let the kids get education well yes but it's a binding force it's a fact you know we have lots of people in capitalism and don't let their kids get education but they say capitalists they don't go so maybe but i think you shouldn't overemphasize how good education is because education is part of the neuralyzer part don't forget that that's part what education does but my point is that we need to understand forms that we don't like you know to understand what we can take from that and there are experiments being done all those chairs set all across the world and through time many failed but we can learn something from their successes and their elements and perhaps we can figure out how to have a binding force for society that is strong enough to allow people to leave it and want to come back now there's a question whether that will happen in a poor economy or rich but we already know that that's not the central question what binds people together is not the wealth that they have but the connections and the social matrix a place they feel they have so that raises question in the ideal society what is the place of women i don't think we can answer that question either men or women until we talk about what this ideal society looks like it's another question  placing men and women there we have to talk about where that place is and to do that we have a lot more issues than male female we also have a third world and i mean imagine that we would say capitalism is a great country i mean us is great country it will make it even greater by just dropping the borders letting everybody move here but let's say we only did it for women do you think that the system can absorb that i don't think so i think that's exactly why this system is limited and so if you're going to talk about some other system you have to have some story some idea of how would work in order to talk about these issues more concretely  mike i'm actually gonna say something super super super quickly and thinking especially about this the kibbutzim question and the sort of state and women and marxism there's a sort of question of like original sin and like principles right one they were independent labor meaning non only jewish no arab right i think there was maybe one or two integrated kyboot seem to actually three things to corrosive larger system of capitalism which it was not part of trying to overturn three part of an overall project to create a nation like any other right that was the goal it was not the overturning of global capital was to be like all the other capitalist states which brings me to the last thing which i'm so glad that can raise the sort of the issue of the peak of the the communist party of china whenever you hear someone on the sort of radio or the tv say oh capitalism it's so great right we it's in the past fifty years x number of people have been lifted out of poverty by unfettered free trade and the  expansion of capitalist marcos is that and the other what their act translated that into english you know is the communist party of china has lifted x number of people out of poverty now i'm not like a super thrilled with the way they've done it but we don't understand and that's sort of the last thing is the state right the state changes i think i think yeah and can i'm really glad you serve raise us right like the specter of the right destroying the state has always been a little bit bullshit right they destroy the part of the state that expresses democratic sovereignty they expand the part of the state that is surveillance policing and militarization the enforcement of private property this is a dynamic that leftists have to take more seriously i just wanted to respond to two things one on the question of the state the state changes but let's say first of all historically speaking we it has not always been there is also a relatively recent over a certain population and the control of the land has always been there since the beginning of the state that's why you know it's not that the world was better before i'm not saying this but there's a way in which the state and colonialism went together from the very beginning people tend to think well the state began in europe then it was exported to the rest of the world no the state europe because at the same time when the control of the land was being exercised in europe three dimensions of the form of the state raw resources were dragged from the colonies so stating colonialism of always going together i still haven't figure out whether the state is the tool of colonialism or whether it's colonialism is a tool of the state but you can't abolish one without abolishing the other so that's my two cents on the state i think the two go together s more rights than another one so there's no i don't think there's a maybe it's it's it's it's a big statement i know but i do think that's the question of at least for me that's what i'm going in thinking about the question of the state secondly on var i loved your talk but i still have to disagree on the question of women we have to think about where we're going and then we add women again it's not gonna work it's gonna if well okay so maybe i interpreted badly but so let me just restate what i thought i mean the thinking about the gendered division of labor has to be there from a polemic called the russian revolution where she said that almost everything that bolsheviks had implemented through the empowerment of a state constituent assembly she took on their land policy she took on their phony national self determination policy she took on their absolute failure to address the gender and family question might live together differently and nothing we'll remain the same everything melts into air at your point so there's no socialism in eastern europe there was no socialism in soviet you know socialism in china there's never been any socialism so i mean they tried each one of them to institutionalize a completely different relationship to the state and i are trying to disband the state basically and no it didn't work but then do we need to the great theorists and the global south as they've been thinking about these issues for over a hundred years and it's time that if you'll forgive me white people stop just focusing on yin and what the white people did it was all fucked up i mean really stop and and and then i think we will see that there are very different theories of the state out there that's right some of which you can embrace some of which you want to criticize but really we need to expand that's your point maybe it marx taught us a lot about what's the problem with capitalism once we get beyond that and we start thinking about what it would be to be socialist we have no i do is have the widest form of participatory democracy and experiments and creativity that we can begin to imagine thank you i think i think we're coming close to being  bank again i know there's more to say here and you all are invited to stick around for our reception on behalf of the goethe institute and brooklyn is too but this is not to be end of a conversation this is the beginning of a conversation