welcome to again to world politics returning us dr richard curtis thank you very much thank you very much bill dr curtis what is a marxist philosopher a philosopher who uses some aspect of marx's system of philosophy in their work which really breaks down to x two major areas on the one hand marx was a philosopher who followed a really deep thinking german philosopher by the name of hagel who preceded him by one generation and marx reinterpreted a lot of hay goals work i am a marxist philosopher in that sense that i work in the deep areas of the philosophy the other senses the critical sen marxism and socialism equate is that one and the same thing socialism is the outcome so marxism is the philosophy that predicts socialism as a future for human development but there are many kinds of socialist not all of them are marxist well how would you how it was let's get some definitions of terms here what how would you define a capitalist says ok so capitalism is a system that's organized around the free movement of capital and historically we often over think about this but capitalism really starts in the fifteen hundred with a transition out of fuel ism and into as this capitalist form but that's one of the things that marx really emphasized in his work is that history moves in these kinds of transitions now and they they take revolutionary form in politics on a national level but what's happening if you sort of look at the whole globe over a long period of time there is this development that happens and it happens all over and evenly across the globe to be sure but so it's a true historical process if i understand correctly so short of a violent revolution there's always a little revolutions in our interactions is basically what you're saying right because capitalism takes over in different countries has in history a different times and in some of those cases it isn't a violent form our revolution was violent to the french revolution was violent but that's the first of those revolutions where the capitalist class is challenging the feudal class for power but after those revolutions of the can but that f class begins to recognize that they need to concede power so you get the formation of constitutional law when you said that our revolution was violent are you talking about the american or you talk about the western european revolution you know the american revolution was in the seventeen hundred seventeen hundreds in the french shortly after ours but there wasn't a revolution in sweden yet sweet the american revolution wasn't wasn't a marxist economic no no no that the revolution from feudalism from feudalism to capitalism each of these transitions historically involves conflict so the true that transition from feudalism to capitalism is what those revenue revolutions represent is actually the consolidation of the power the power of that of those that group of people called the capitalist clear you're saying transitions as if there's some sort of darwinian evolution that's taking place like we we're vald and you know we can't live as slaves we can't run the primitive society or feudalism that's almost like slavery in bondage and that we just sort of  our conditions is that what's happening it is what it is what's happening i think it's what happens historically my own view is that human beings have to have an intrinsic sense or at least develop it as a result of our interactions a deep seated sense of our equality of the equality that we have with each other and so when that equality is challenge when when when we are degraded in some way we react to that naturally and over the top over the course of history we see that in the progress from this is actually of a line from a from an english philosopher alfred north whitehead but it didn't transition from slavery being universally accepted in plato's time to slavery being universally rejected in his time which was he was democracy in the greek city states were democratic in a way but you had to be a citizen to be a member of that democracy a voting member of that democracy you know was that was the only way to be wealthy though back then was it to have slaves well i think slaves were a measure of wealth  and certainly wealth if marx's view of wealth is that wealth wealth is is the surplus extraction of value from labor so if it anytime someone is working for you and you're able to pay them less than the less than the actual value of what they produced because you can sell it for something for more whatever that's a way of making money so slavery certainly is profitable that way profit roughen it was more did was he a visionary course he a visionary but was it utopian kind of point in what i know and that's that's actually one of the things that marx and his kids collaborator for it again those were particularly strong about is that what they were doing was a scientific analysis and when i say swinton scientific it in them they're using the german word vison shah which we translated science in english but it really means organized study so what they were doing was an organized study of history as opposed to religion or su well as opposed to where there are religious socialists who who engels wrote a book called socialism utopian or scientific in which he criticizes what he calls utopian socialists who are or motivated by moral sentiment and whil and engels shared the moral outrage of those those kind of religious socialists their point was that what this that this development this history economic history is history it's not something that you just will into being and that's that's actually one of the disagreements that marx has with women or lenin has with marx when i want to look at that argument but lenin comes along and wants to push marx his ideas in a way and say well armed with the power of these ideas we can move this history faster and mark marks were works a lot a lot of a lot of people think would have been a little bit suspicious of that move and and and argued that no the these things have to develop on their own the slaves point of view especially compared to ours that they did not treat their slaves anything like the way we treated slaves in the united states though they were own and it was sort of a way of being it was part of one's family history but they were generally not abus and all want to defend defend lenin but people can argue with that the but but what's not really in dispute is that lenin is different from marx in an important way in that lenin argued that it was possible to come to kind of speed up that ripening process for history and that's that core that's the real core disagreement so would you say a ripening process you're talking about people on the shackling from capitalism well it's actually that the that the formation of socialism begins within capitalism and has to develop a nothing that it can step into the void which is what happened with feudalism that capitalism as a form like our saying it's introduced in the fifteenth hundreds a of people think of capitalism till they start to think about the the seventeenth hundreds or even the eighteenth i mean i always think of mercantile wisdom is that transition transit and then it is it sort of this transition phase but but technically that's so that's the beginning so you get these the introduction of the this capitalist form which is really just a matter of of what what what we're artisans becoming producers of goods on a larger scale and so they begin to hire workers instead of doing things over it just by early and originally is not even seen as a threat to the feudal system but as it grows and that that way of relating to the world economically that way of producing goods that way of making things happen in social in  production of social goods is this really what economics is really all about is how are we going to go about producing goods and services in society and it's receipt of a lot of social organization that becomes irresistible feudalism couldn't resist that organization well it's just  at it was it was efficient at doing what it did so it did it and then it gets bigger and bigger and suddenly it becomes a kind of monster that the feudal class now has to now has to fight and eventually gets consumed by because it overwhelmed  and that's the what marx is really arguing about socialism is that the transition to socialism will be will follow the same sort of path that where there is this fight that takes place from the old system giving way to the nuisance but it will be the new the old system will be introduced into the new system little by little at first and then there will be the core this crisis now in with with feudalism it's a different sort of mechanism capitalism is its own animal and so it has its own behavior in a way patterns in the way that it  operates and it's really the patterns that capitalism moves in that marx was describing in the most important of those patterns is what he calls crises of overproduction and that's what we're witnessing right now and what's happening today is exactly what marx said was going to happen that capitalism would reach this point where it had the capacity to reduce lots and lots of stuff but would do things to make it so people couldn't buy the stuff so you have all th stuff and not enough people can took to buy over production and that becomes a crisis because factories have all this capacity we have all this is that people can't people can't buy it and i don't workers right now is what happened is it is described in the hundred seventy s by a guy named ernst mondal who talked about imperialism and now let lennon wrote a book about imperialism so he's the one who introduced that is a as a concept in the in the in terms of the capitalist wasn't linen again was somewhat true times and there's one some things that he is the some things that he wrote in speeches that he gave particularly on the equality of the genders that is is you know very relevant and important historically that he would speak out on things like that but definitely in the overall his d just lost his mind of sort of paranoid delusions what you're saying that the ill will of capitalism is the loss of job loss of security loss of say confidence and capital relates to the idle factories over production right to do so in the one nine hundred seventy s what happened was the capitalist firms discovered that they could make more money if they moved their factories to the third world so more and more production that had been going on in the united states starts to happen in the third world and gets imported back all of a sudden big corporations had a lot of extra money lying around they didn't know what to do with because they weren't paying their workers as much well they still needed to sell stuff that's been a trend since the seventy's since the seventy's so what they did was they started offering cheaper and cheaper credit to consumers and so people ordinary workers seventy's head jobs are moving overseas people expect that their standard of living is going to at least go up a little bit so but instead of wages they have credit so people are making less money but they have all this credit available to them so they can we can buy all would find a way to make a lot of to make a lot of stuff and make workers poorer at the same time and that that would reach a crisis point and in fact it does every every fifteen years or something like  little that's what that's actually what that is it's a mini version of the same crisis of overproduction what we're experiencing is the big one that he said was going to bring the system down so well marx did say that these business cycle crises natural capital in your words it wasn't  well it wasn't and one of the marks is even the first one to say they would get worse he's the one who predicted the easy one who outlined how the end would follow from those crises i think the credit crises were fairly well known even before marx and certainly ricardo was very important to marx's understanding of capitalism market work hard it was an early capitalist theory in the generation i think after adams just after adams or maybe two generations after adams but fundamentally this overproduction is  adam smith was a very devout calvinist and when he writes about the invisible hand he's talking about calvin's god so unless you're prepared to be a calvinist you're not a capitalist in an adam smith sense because you don't believe in an  invisible hand because that's calvin is calvin's god anyway but he was you're really saying that he thought divine intervention would come would do it that's yeah because the says it's too chaotic otherwise i mean so so when he thinks of something's going to smooth the system out well that something would be you know he calls the visit he talks about the market i mean that's that is the language he uses but if you know anything about his biography you know that when he writes that phrase the invisible hand of the market he's talking about god intervening to keep things even and smooth because god in calvin's view controlled everything right cal calvin is the one who talked about double predestination he did just god isn't just deciding who's damned according to calvin god was deciding who's who's going to heaven too so it's all it's all because god's ultimately in control well look most people who like to fancy themselves capitalists especially in the most libertarian verse versions of it don't have much to do with calvin's god but for some reason they think that the of getting old doesn't it so is that it's not it doesn't seem like it's going to happen with a revolution in an ordinary sense of guns that the system is just collapsing we're just watching it fall apart the american people now are one element is you have to have real democracy not the phony democracy that we have the i know that's the most important element is that by virtue of the the american people becoming the owners of these very large enterprises we get to have some say in what happens which means we the american people can decide we're going to make this a democratic endeavor we're going to the management democratic rank we can make everything about a democratic now before i lose the thread i want to go back and repeat viewers what it is that is causing the food or we know that there's over production in the capital and by this we mean the people that control the means of production the people in the forbes and fortune five hundred one thousand you know the guys that are making millions of dollars a year these are the real capitals you a lot of other classes that mark said for other people what actually comes down to that to do if you hire other people to work for you or do you get hired by other people that sort of come down to th doing to ruin capitalism i know it's in pursuit of greed but explain that mechanism again they're over producing which cuts down on demand right now a lot of people may be familiar with a little story about henry ford and one of them there is this the story i've heard that some people challenge it so i don't know if that's actually true or not but it is said that one of the things that for did when he introduced the assembly line production met method for his for his  cars was that they he said that he was going to make sure to pay all of his workers enough so that they could afford to buy his product because he knew they had to have customers to well that's often offered as an example of an enlightened form of capitalism because it's for henry ford recognizing the problem that marx was talking about well and even work going back to ricardo even farther marx is just emphasizing it more but it's that problem if if if capitalists make stuff but they don't pay people enough to buy the stuff then the whole system just falls apart and the reason they're not paying people enough is that is the profit that's the profit so profits really really and then you take from the worker exactly and that's the irony of it is that if they were less greedy the system wouldn't have these crises and they would they would do better in the long term because they would have to worry about the system collapsing but because they're so greedy in the short term they want to maximize that short term profit that forces the system into the collapse and of years credit which was maxed out which is really just mortgaging the future the worker can't mortgage that future anymore because there's a limit to how much you can get to anyone so how much anybody can borrow even the american government at some point has a limit because the chinese can only buy so many treasury bonds and what what's laid bare now is that people are buying capacity they have no good income exactly on their credit so that means that the demand for the big capital has goods which are overproduced is now in collapse and demand for everything and then that becomes a cycle of the becomes self reinforcing on it on its own so we see that with cars that we see right and it's going to spiral down because more as  people buy less that means factories make less so they hire fewer people but those fewer people have less to spend so less is made so there are less and there are fewer workers and it's just it's a spirals down and that's what marx was saying what ultimately happened is that the system would would reach this breaking point where it was the house of cards then credit is really just a house of cards in the end this house of cards would just come down now did more to predict what the ruling class would do course they've been able to do just about whatever they want to with they go to government and they get a corporate welfare check well right now that's just an example of of the phenomenon that as he describes it now in course you know marx is known for this for talking about class and class struggle and so one of the things that he notes as a social critic is the way in which the capitalist class dupes everyone else into thinking that they somehow have some interest in this thing called capitalism and how they will how they use the government as a way of shoring up their position in college because the government just the executive committee of the ruling class that looks out looks over the property of the the rules are but you know so you feel good the one thing that lots of books and has amazing things to say but there's this great line ruling classes throughout history have wanted only one thing more everything if you know that and know nothing else you know more than if you know everything else but don't know that by which he's just trying to emphasize the point that the most important thing in the world that you could you should know the most important point the world that everyone should know is that greed will conquer everything once it's only in some sense marx was talking about development of the individual the masses of society their gardener in the afternoon a philosopher in the morning you know poet in the  evening you know you wouldn't just have a job or you change the tire all day long loop right now and that alienates individuals and they become machines which were not meant to be but that's what work has become structured because it makes more profits for capital right and that's one of the things that's that's been problematic for centuries really and in you know we have a whole struggle a there was historically a whole struggle about the eight hour day indeed today may day is something that originates to commemorate a large protest that was in order to get legislation to that gives us the eight hour workday but that was that's this that's what the reason that was an issue so much of an issue especially one hundred years ago was one hundred twenty hundred thirty years ago because people were working fourteen sixteen eighteen twenty hour days i mean that was what capitol demand of demanded of labor and you know while we have that profit always wants more and more and more of of people's lives and in some sense it did their very souls but yes so marx one of the few things that he that he talks about when he when he describes the future and he's very short on descriptions of the future most of what he does is a critique of capitalism is that is that what you were saying is that he talks about you know the people would be free to pursue multiple interests that we in our life would not be governed by one thing that we did all day that was that was that was all we had time to do is that we should have some time that we devote to social goods where we're producing things doing things that are good for the community and other time where we're doing things that are good for us pursuing interests that are healthy for our own development of you know motional spiritual and time for our families and then that that we should have that with as human beings that's what the economy should be about that's what it should be providing get us out of this jam what do we you know you mentioned that we have to know what printing told us struggle warfare the marxist all right they try and take and they try and take everything and that's why it's a that's why it's a struggle is because they're trying to take everything now it fails in the end and that's the that's what we're watching falling apart