thank you so much to cathy and to cricket for that very generous introduction and to everybody who had a hand in inviting me here and in organizing this visit so far it's been fabulous and there is a such a lively community of engaged people to talk to and i'm getting all kinds of good ideas and i hope to get some more good ideas for me tonight as i try out something that is brand new probably not one hundred percent ready for prime time but i thought i'd go with it and so i am going back to my original title you can see the uncertainty i've been going through which is what should socialism mean in the st century well the word socialism is back for decades this word was considered an embarrassment despised failure and a relic of the bygone era no more today politicians like bernie sanders and alexandra alexandria ocasio cortez where the label proudly and win support while organizations like dia say democratic socialists of america attract new members in droves but what exactly do these people mean by socialism however welcome enthusiasm for the word does not automatically translate into serious reflection on its meaning what exactly does or should socialism signify in the present era in this lecture i'm going to provide some very preliminary thoughts about how we might develop an answer that's a hedge i'm not actually going to give you an answer i'm going to tell you how to develop an answer  drawing on an expanded conception of capitalism i'm going to suggest that we need an expanded conception of socialism which overcomes the narrow econom received understanding disclosing the capitalist economies contradictory and destructive relations to what i call its non economic background conditions i'm going to argue that socialism must do more much more in fact than transform the realm of production over and above that does it or rotten which of course i wholeheartedly endorse it must also transform productions relation to its background conditions of possibility especially to social reproduction to state power to non human nature and to various forms of social wealth that have lain outside capitals official circuits but within its reach i'll explain what i mean by that very soon in other words as i'm going to explain a socialism for our time must overcome not only capitals exploitation of wage labor but also it's free riding on an wage carol work on public goods expropriated from racialized populations and non human nature the result as i said it will be at least the outlines of some ideas about to think about an expanded conception of socialism and i should add something that i meant to write down but forgot but it's very important whatever this is it's not going to be social democracy and it's not going to be soviet communism ok let's just be clear about that ok so an expanded conception of socialism now expansion though is not mere addition the point is not to add more features to received understanding while leaving the latter unchanged it is rather to revise our conception of received understandings of socialism by incorporating structural accounts of gender sexuality race ethnicity ecology and democracy the result will be to cast a new light on a whole range of very classical topo oyo of socialist thinking for example on the question of property markets and planning in socialist societies on the relation between socially unnecessary labor free time and social surplus on emancipation domination and crisis i won't give anything close to a full accounting of any of these matters let alone all of them but i am at least to indicate how they are going to look different how they assume a different guise once we view capitalism as something more than an economy and once therefore we view socialism as something more than an alternative economic system now i'm going to begin with capitalism and this i think is the absolutely necessary starting point for any discussion of socialism socialism i mean to say is no mere aught or utopian dream if it's worth discussing at all now it must be rather because it's the crystallization of real historically emergent possibilities of potentials for human freedom and good living potentials which capitalist society itself has brought into view but cannot itself realize put differently socialism is a response to capitalism is in passes to the problems it generates non accidentally and which it cannot solve likewise socialism aims to overcome capitalisms built in injustices as well as its structurally grounded social divisions and social conflicts more generally socialism aims to remedy capitalisms ill and so it is there with capitalism that we must begin only by identifying capitalism  and institutional structure can we grasp exactly what it is that must be transformed and only by proceeding on that basis can we envision the positive outlines of a socialist alternative so what exactly is capitalism and what is wrong with it often capitalism is understood now really as any as an economic system a system whose defining components are markets private property especially in the means of production waged labor commodity production exchange transactions credit and finance all of these things of course are denominated in money terms which and all of them are combined in such a way in a capitalist society as to instruct as to institutionalize the pursuit of profit as a system imperative something that must be done now on this view capitalism coincides with the range of activities relations and objects that are monetized let's call this the narrow or restricted view of capitalism it's held by most people in the business world by mainstream economists and it's the on reflective commonsense of our society at large surprisingly perhaps even many of capitalism scripts subscribe to this narrow view traditional variants of marxism for example understand capitalism as a system of class exploitation centered on the relation between capitalists and workers that is between those who own the means of production as their private property and those who own nothing but their own capacity to work and who must sell that peculiar commodity which marx called labor power to a capitalist in order to live this relation on the view i am describing is centered on a market exchange that is the exchange of labor power for cash wages but it is not an exchange of equivalen rather the capitalist pays only for the workers socially necessary labor time that is the hours needed to cover the costs of the workers subsistence the capitalist appropriate rest of the time the worker works as a surplus value the relation is therefore one of exploitation that's the technical meaning of that term in marxism class exploitation then is the crux of capitalism on this traditional marxist view it is the source of profit and rising productivity but also of poverty inequality unemployment of irrationality and of periodic outbreak of economic crisis now that this traditional marxist view is a huge improvement head and shoulders above the standard apologetic views and yet it is still too narrow it's not that the view is wrong so much as that it's incomplete it captures what i like to call the front story of capitalist society while glossing over the back story the back story and here actually i should speak in the plural the back stories are about the non economic conditions that make possible the economic front story let me mention very briefly for such conditions st the unwaged labor of social reproduction that is the work primarily but not only of women in households in neighborhoods in civil societies in some cases in public service institutions the work that includes housework child birthing and child raising care of adult family members household maintenance and all the work of preparing either future labor power or replenishing existing labor power ok so that's an absolutely necessary non economic non monetized precondition of economic production in a capitalist  economy nd such condition expropriated wealth and clued ing that is wealth that is not paid for in the same way that the workers subsistence cost is paid for  exploitation but that rather is simply seized and stolen or perhaps paid for very much on the cheap so where including here not only sorry we're including here the labor of racialized populations whether in slaved colonized dispossessed or super exploited would be one word that people use and these subjects are those who are not accorded the status of free workers who own their own labor power and must therefore be recompensed at least for the socially necessary cost of their own reproduction instead they are constructed as depended or unfree others whose property whose assets whose persons can simply be seized  necessary precondition for a capitalist economy are the so called free gifts or if they're not entirely free at least the cheap inputs from non human nature which include such things as supplies of energy arabella land roma tiriel the carbon carrying capacities of the atmosphere the carbon capturing capacities of carbon sinks forest oceans water etc etc these two are inputs to capitalist production and absolutely necessary preconditions for it but their reproduction is not paid for or at least not wholly paid for either finally there are the public goods supplied by states and other public powers such as law and order property rights the money supply infrastructure and crisis management at least in the later stages of capitalists history of capitalism history these two are necessary preconditions for a capitalist economy which are not themselves valued economically or fully  reproduced all four of these things i've just mentioned social reproduction expropriated wealth free gifts of nature public goods are absolutely indispensable conditions as i've said for a capitalist economy without them there could be no workers no labor power no social trust no social bonds no material inputs for that human transforms in the course of work no infrastructure no money etc so these are enter grohl preconditions for a capitalistic commie and therefore in my view part and parcel of what we ought to mean when we talk about a capitalist society capitalism or from now on going to try to remember to use this phrase capitalist society which better compas is what i mean capital society in non economic background conditions as well as the economy that they make possible so on the view i've been explaining here capitalism is not an economy it is an institutionalize social order that situates a monetized economic zone of interaction into tense contradictory relations to a set of non economic zones it sexual situations the economy in relation to the polity production in relation to reproduction exploitation in relation to expropriate sion human labor in relation to the material substratum on which the labor works which comes from nature this is what i mean by an enlarged or expanded view of capitalist society now this few has some important consequences for the present inquiry it enlarges our sense of what is wrong with capitalism and of what it is that socialism must transform on the traditional narrow view there are two main things that are wrong with capitalism st it's unjust and nd it's unsustainable or crisis prone both of these are very important ideas but they are again sometimes are usually interpreted to narrowly on the narrow view of capitalism the in the in its injustice consists in exploitation the fact that the worker works many hours for free for the capitalist producing enormous wealth in which she or he does not share the benefits of which flow to capital capital which appropriates the surplus and reinvest it for its own purposes and its own further benefit in an ever expanding spiral of accumulation so the injustice on this view is essentially a matter of class exploitation in sphere of production it is above all an economic injustice the crisis tendencies diagnosed in this view are also essentially economic an economic system that is oriented to limitless accumulation of surplus value appropriated privately in the form of profit is internally self contradictory and self destabilizing the drive to increase profit by increasing productivity through technological innovations periodic lee results in falling profit rates in the overproduction of goods the accumulation of capital with with no outlet of investment solutions or high should put that in quotes suppose it solutions like financialization only postpone the day of reckoning while ensuring that it will be all the more severe when it finally comes in general as we all know the course of capital is development is punctuated by periodic economic crises it takes the form of boom bust cycles  includes the stock market crashes financial panics bankruptcy chains and mass liquidations and mass unemployment in some what's wrong with capitalism on the narrow view is economic class exploitation and a proclivity to economic crisis once again this picture is not so much wrong as incomplete once we adopt the expanded view of capitalist society we see additional injustices and additional crisis tendencies the expanded view discloses an expanded catalogue of systemic injustices  the social structure o institutionalization of a fundamental division between two types of necessary social labor economic production remunerated by wages and social remunerated supposedly by love this of course is a gendered division and in a society in which money is the end all and be all it's obvious that it's institutionalization entrenches a strong gender asymmetry and form of gender subordination it is in my view the most important structural basis of women subordination  capitalist society a condition that is not accidental but structurally hardwired second capitalist societies also instituted a fundamental division between free exploited workers and dependent expropriated others the former as i mentioned are positioned as right sparing citizens who can be exploited but not otherwise violated with impunity they have the ability to call on states to affirm their rights vindicate their rights the in the in contrast the dependent subjects are vulnerable to violation are the source of a stream of cheap inputs that swell the tide of profit and they have trouble claiming any rights or protections from a violation they are this just division has historically and still today coincided with the global color line and i think that race has a great deal to do with this idea of being vulnerable to a violation an expropriation so here we see then the institutionalization in this stupid distinction between exploitation which ember kate in a capitalist economy there is no profitable exploitation without a background of expropriation and this division then maps as i said onto the global color line and therefore genocide rd capitalist societies also instituted a fundamental division between human labor and its material subject straight up which no longer seem to belong to the same ontological universe nature is reduced to a tap and a sink it is and is open to extract a visit and instrumental ization if this is not an injustice against nature or against non human creatures in nature and i'm going to be agnostic about that it is at the very least an injustice against future generations of human beings who are left with a hell of a mess capitalist societies also th point so we see there's a set of injustices above and beyond classics boy taishan hard wired structurally entrenched injustices finally capitalist societies institute a fundamental division between private economic power which is the power of capital to organize production for its own profit and public political power which is the power of states and other public institutions to rule through law and a supposedly monopoly on so called legitimate violence now one thing that is built in here is a truncation a shrinking of the scope of the political of the scope of issues that can be subject to democratic collective decision making and control to expel from the political agenda a whole set of questions about the organization of production about our relation to nature about the relation of production to social reproduction all of these things mean eight weakening in a shrinking of democracy this is this is a major political injustice that is hard wired into capitalist society rendering citizens as subject to private powers over which they have no say all of the most important  exactly we produce and how much what an urgent basis on the basis of what kinds of social relations and for whose benefit what we do with the social surplus if any we produce all of these questions are off the table so we see some fundamental political injustice if you believe that democracy means the right to a say in the conditions to which you are subject so on an expanded view of capital society all of these injustices are structural they are every bit as deep seeded and as non accidental as class exploitation a socialist alternative to capitalist society must therefore remedied them to it must change not only the organization of the economy or of production as economically defined but it must also change the relation of production to reproduction and it must end capitals reliance on the expropriation of nature's so called free gifts and on the wealth of racialized populations socialism must also expand the scope of democracy beyond the miserable limits and confines that capitalism places on it if socialism is a remedy for capitalisms injustices it needs to change not just the capitalist economy but the entire institutionalize social order that is a capitalist society but that is not all the expanded view of capitalism also enlarges our view of what counts as a capitalist crisis this if you discloses some built in self destabilizing propensities above and beyond those internal to the capitalist economy these propensities include a structural inclination to social reproductive crisis as capital tries to avoid paying for unwaged care work the very activity on which it depends hence we see in its history periodic stresses on family life periodic downturns in the birth rate and especially acute today a kind of pincer attack from two sides simultaneously in which finance capital demands state disinvestment in social welfare which had been built up in the previous era in part as a kind of support for social reproduction that's one side of the pincer movement the other side is the recruitment massively of women into waged work long hours of grueling low paid service work especially you put these two things together defunding of public support for social reproduction demanding that the historic providers of it namely women spend their time devoted to to accumulation in the wage sphere and you have a real crunch as we see today so tendency built in tendency to social reproductive crisis which periodically becomes acute rd a tendency no sorry nd a tendency to ecological crisis as capital tries to avoid paying the full replacement costs of the inputs it takes from nature resulting in things like soil depletion resorts depletion depletion of the atmosphere can't carbon carrying capacity the overwhelming of carbon sinks capital helps itself to all of these things without accounting their ecological reproduction costs it assumes as it were that nature is just infinite and can replenish itself ad infinitum without limits a proposition we now know to be clearly false as a result capitalism periodic lee destabilizes the metabolic interaction between human beings and the rest of nature leaving a trail of wreckage in its waste in its wake and today of course we know and especially acute outbreak of ecological crisis above all in the fact of global warming rd capitalism's tendency to ecological and social reproductive crises are inseparable from its reliance on explore created wealth from racialized people and its reliance on stolen lands constrained and coerced or bodies confiscated labor confiscated animals tools reproductive capacities it's reliance on racialized regions and zones also as a dumping ground for its toxic waste and environmental racism and global kerrick chains where it imports cheap reproductive labor to replace the work previously done without pay for working mothers so here we see and intertwining of the ecological the economic the social reproduction of and the racial ethnic antagonisms in a new form of crisis finally it we can avoid mentioning capitals proclivity to generate political crises both crises of governance and crises of had gemini capitalism tries to have it both ways it lives off public goods while trying to avoid paying taxes and to weaken state regulatory capacity to hollow out public power today mega corporations with a global reach by far out gun the territorial states who might have once claimed to be able to rein in them in this is an especially acute issue now with financialization as financial markets and investors take it upon themselves to discipline states no longer to be disciplined by them but to tell states what they can and cannot spend money on and how much and so on and so forth thereby hobbling state capacities to solve our problems and especially to rein in capital the result of this crisis of governance which we see in full force for example in the e u the result is today a major crisis of his gemini in contemporary capitalism the the right and of the left which want something other than neo liberalism ok in general capitalist society harbors multiple crisis tendencies above and beyond the merely economic these are not so much interest economic these other tendencies as intra realm contradictions between the economy and its background conditions of possibility capital as i said has a built in tendency to erode destroy deplete destabilize its own conditions of possibility to eat its own tail this too is part of what is wrong with capitalist society and what socialism must try to overcome in some not just class exploitation but also gender subordination racial ethnic imperial domination ecological predation and political injustice likewise not just economic crisis but also social reproduction crisis ecological crisis political crisis and so on now this means that the project of rethinking socialism for the st century is pretty big it's a tall order far too big obviously for a single person in the space of a single elected lecture or frankly at how even having all the time in the world and even far too big for any group of thinkers if this project is developed at all as i hope it will be it will be through a combination are able to fertilise and to synergize with conceptual programatic thinking and political organization nevertheless a few things can be said even now to clarify at least some aspects of this project i want to briefly discuss what i think of our four important principles that must guide our thinking as we see about trying to build or envision a socialist project and these are just to name them quickly the principles of non domination of the democratization of what i'll call boundary problems of sustainability which is a principle of anti freeriding pay as you go and democratic control over social surplus let me explain these quickly now  beginning with the anti domination principle and what this requires is that whatever it is socialism has to overcome those so called hidden forms of structurally entrenched domination that has to be a priority it's a deal breaker i just mentioned a whole set of forms of domination entrenched in capitalist societies that need to be abolished just as exploitation and domination based upon it must be this means that the larger social matrix in which all in the case of reproductive labor what we need i would say in a nutshell is to overcome the whole gendered division of reproductive labor as well as the split between so called productive labor and reproductive labor all of this is socially desiree work and needs to be considered together and treated as on a par that doesn't necessarily mean as i'll suggest in a moment something like wages for housework it's not about universalizing wage work but about thinking about some other way of dealing with this in addition not just exploitation but also  abolished we are also talking about the need to overcome democratic deficits by changing the relation of economy to polity and especially with respect to social surplus as explain in just a few minutes we're also talking about overcoming intergenerational injustices that reside in ecological and all of those related things ok what what all of this is to say in short is that we're talking about transforming the economies relation to its four fundamental background conditions in some cases this could mean actually abolishing a particular institutional division or separation in others it might mean redrawing the boundary in a different place or it might mean softening the boundary without abolishing it fully there are lots of ways to think about this and i can't go into detail here but the crucial point is that we are talking about making reflective collective decisions about how we want to handle the basic shape of the institutionalize social order where we're not going to accept having these things decided behind our back as a result of the private ownership of the means of production in a system oriented to private profit ok let me i have a whole bunch of stuff here about why we don't want to command economy but i think it's probably obvious  some of the promises promising aspects but also deficiencies of attempts to think about council communism most of which are focused on factory councils and twenty which proposes housework councils in addition to factory councils that's quite interesting ok look  it we're talking about a whole set of  meow of of boundary issues and how to think about them as i say i'm going to leave the the details aside right now ok let me go now to my  rd principle which is sustainability anti free riding pay as you go a socialist society must undertake to replace enry preplan ish all the wealth it uses up in its own social production and social reproduction it must replenish care work that is the work of people making if you like work and so on just as it replenishes work that produces use values it must also replace all the wealth it takes from the quote unquote outside from nature and from peripheral societies and populations who remain either distant from or outside its central official orbit it must repaired and replaced all the political capacities and public goods it draws on in the course of meeting its other needs it can't hollow out public power and it must the idea then is that it must end freeriding this proviso is the scene a known for overcoming obviously the intergenerational injustices in demick to capitalist societies we're talking then about free riding on nature here it is also necessary though to overcome the multiple crisis tendencies that are built into capitalism the ones that i just explained ok a th and last principle i want to suggest is democratic control over social surplus what i mean by surplus here is whatever wealth whatever use values the society can generate in excess of what it requires to reproduce itself at the given level at which it finds itself in history in capitalist society as we saw surplus is treated as the private property of the capitalist class and is invested by its owners as they see fit which generally means with an aim to producing get more surplus on and on and on without limit in a spiral of accumulation and this as i said is both unjust and self destabilize so a socialist society must democratize control over social surplused it must allocate surplus democratically deciding collectively expect exactly what to do with the excess as well as how much of it to produce indeed whether to produce any at all it might decide simply to work a lot less and be content with the same level of social reproduction in other words socialism much must treat those questions i listed before as political questions what and how much to produce how many hours to devote to surplus production over and above the work needed to reproduce society at its current level how much free time we should allow ourselves and how much work time what projects improvements aspirations to do something better to progress should we invest our surplus labor capacities in scientific research in labor saving technology in more labor intensive care work there are lots of possibilities here as i said surplus time means time that's left after basic needs social reproduction are met it is time that could be free time free for what for art for creative activity for relaxing for socializing for taking it easy who's to say now in the early stages of socialism i actually doubt that surplus time would loom very large at all the reason has to do with the enormous unpaid bill that socialist society would inherit from capitalism although capitalism prides itself on its productivity and although marx himself thought it was a veritable engine for producing social surplus i have my doubts the reason is that marx reckoned a surplus pretty much exclusively in terms of the labor time that capital takes from wage workers after they produce value sufficient to cover their own immediate costs of living and you'll recall that that is marxist definition of surplus value by contrast he paid much less attention to the various free gifts and cheap so that capital or or up propre it and still less to its failure to cover their reproduction costs what if we included the those social costs in our reckoning what if capital had to pay for the free reproductive work for the ecological repair and replenishment of the damage it creates for the express wealth of weight racialized subject peoples for the public  on which it freely draw us how much surplus would capitalism really have produced if it actually had had to pay for all those things that's a rhetorical question of course because i myself wouldn't know how even to begin to arrive in an answer but i do believe there are some feminists and environmental economists who are actually thinking about what these things really cost in any case a socialist society would inherit a hefty bill for centuries of unpaid ecological reproduction costs expropriation costs and so on and so forth for as well as a hefty bill for massive unmet basic human needs across the globe needs for healthcare for shelter or housing for transportation for education for f security and nutrition etc etc these two can't really be counted as surplus investment but rather as absolute necessities and the same holds for the pressing and enormous job of in the world economy shifting the entire it's entire basis to renewable energy that's hardly at this point a surplus luxury that we could decide to forgo so the question of what is surplus and what is necessary leads me to one for their observation which concerns a question i posed earlier about the role and character of property and  markets in a socialist society i think both those things private property and markets have little or no place at either the very top of the society or at the very bottom but they might play a role in the in between what i mean by the top is that question i raised about the allocation of social surplus assuming there is a surplus to be allocated it must be considered the collective wealth of the society as a whole no private person or entity can own it it's impossible to say who contributed exactly how much to it we're talking about the production of what some in marxist thinkers called the general intellect for example it cannot be attributed individually no private person therefore can have the right to dispose of it surplus is truly collective property to be allocated through a collective process of self determination which must somehow i can't say how be organized democratically the us market mechanisms should have no role whatsoever at this level neither markets nor private property at the top the same holds i want to claim for the bottom by which i mean the level of basic  human needs again shelter clothing food education transport health care leisure etc i have no illusions that we can specify now or once and for all what exactly counts as a basic need and what exactly is required to satisfy it on a global scale that too must be a subject for democratic deliberation and decision making but whatever is decided must be provided as a matter of right and not on the basis of ability to pay here is where the principle from each according to his abilities or her abilities to each according to her needs rings true this means that the use values we produce to meet these needs cannot be commodities they must rather be public goods so no markets at the bottom just as at the top no private property either this is why incidentally i am not a big fan of universal basic income which is something that a lot of people find progressive it involves paying people cash so that they can buy the stuff they need to meet their basic needs so it treats basic needs have spec sions as commodities produced privately for private profit socialists should reject this view and should treat these goods as public goods as i have said so no private ownership or market exchange at the bottom and at the top what about the in between i don't have a worked out principled view about this matter but i imagine the in between as a space for experimentation with a mix of different possibilities so this would be the place where something like market socialism could be considered perhaps a socialist society could encompass small or medium sized enterprises preferably work or own which could organize supply chains with one another on a market basis they might also sell some stuff they produce i'm not talking about things that are needed to satisfy basic needs to consumers the owners could be paid for the work of organizing this production in the form of a stipulated percentage which might be considered the equivalent of a profit but they would not have the uner collateral right to invest their profits in any way that  they their fancy dictated they couldn't for example buy a coal to burn as energy to power machinery just to take an example they could not necessarily dispose of their property in the free market nor would they control that portion if any of the total social surplus that they might try to claim should be credited to them for reasons i already explained my idea is that once the top and the bottom are socialized and commodified then the whole question of the role of markets and the role of property in the middle is going to take on a completely different valence and character than it does from our perspective in a capitalist society and that's why i have a looser feeling about what might be possible there i think the whole question gets transformed and i'm pretty sure that gets transfer even if i can't say exactly how ok in fact i have to say that i realize how thin and rudimentary is the view of socialism i've been sketching here it's not even really a view a set of principles a set of a way of thinking about things it's only the barest beginning and of a few ideas but i hope that even this poor beginning can have some value i hope specifically that it convinces you that the socialist project is worth pursuing that socialism is not simply a day per se relic nor a fashionable buzzword but the name for a genuine alternative to this system that is destroying the planet and is mocking our capacities for living will and freely in a democratic way i also hope that i have convinced you that socialism cannot be broached in the old school way based on correcting a restricted set of problems that are deduced from a restricted view of what capitalism is only by starting with an expanded view of capitalism and by proceeding from there to develop an expanded view of socialism can we envision a conception that can speak to our full set of concerns and needs at the present time if i have st persuaded you of that and if i have inspired you to want to pursue this project further i will have considered this lecture despite its evident defects of success