Marxism’s Ongoing Relevance

Today I responds to a request many of you have made and something that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while. To talk about the ongoing relevance and importance of Marxism. It’s an important tradition not only of thinking about the world but also of efforts to change society and, as a theoretical tradition, and as an  accumulation of efforts and reflections on changing society, it’s as relevant as it ever was, maybe more so. So, I want to talk about that and hopefully help us make use of what that tradition has achieved but first, of course, we have to clear away the debris of the cold war which made all of that virtually impossible. For the last 75 years, as most of you know, we have basically been a society that demonizes Marxism in a variety of ways. So we have to kind of clear the air so we can talk about this in a reasonable, rational way.

The first reason that Marxism was demonized was the hostility of the business community and of the wealthy in America, who saw the New Deal that’s right back in the 1930s, who saw the New Deal as some sort of secret effort to get rid of their power, their prestige and their wealth and to replace them with some kind of socialism. And they were horrified, and they went after what they thought was the theory of all of that: namely Marxism. And so, it became the big evil then. There was the second reason that many of you are perhaps more familiar with, which is that Marxism was identified with the great enemy of the United States after 1945, the Soviet Union, the USSR. It was seen to be some kind of tool that the USSR used to threaten the United States and so it was demonized on that ground and then there was the caricature that what Marxism is or was, or to this day seems to be is some sort of nationalization for the government to come and take over everything in the economy, to suppress individual liberty.

I was struck by the remarks of a mayor in a small city in Texas over the last couple of weeks, who when asked to provide city supports to the people suffering from the cold, from the loss of power, from the fact that they couldn’t drink or use their water, he responded “I can’t do that. I’m not going to give the cities resources to help the people. That would be Marxism.” Whoa! Really, helping people is Marxism? I can’t figure out whether that’s a silly caricature or a secret way to make Marxism seem a lot more reasonable than those folks perhaps were used to. And then there’s the reality I know really well personally, which is the failure, the refusal to teach what Marxism has been in any kind of rational way. Marxism whether you like it or not is not the issue here. Marxism is the most developed critique of the capitalist economic system that we live in, that exists, it’s built up over the last 150 years in virtually every country on Earth, a set of thinkers and writers talking about the problems of capitalism what they come from what’s to solve them and so on.

This is an enormous tradition of criticism that is useful to study not because you want to accept it in every detail, of course not, just like you don’t study anything else that way, but to see what insights there are. And here I am, and I’m going to give you my personal story of this. Having gone to all the right universities here in the United States, all the elite schools, here’s what the reality was. I went as an undergraduate to Harvard then I went to Stanford for a master’s degree and I finished my education at Yale University with a PhD in Economics. I spent a total of 10 years of my life in those three institutions, two semesters a year. That’s 20 semesters studying history and economics, mostly economics. And here’s the reality for 19 of those 20 semesters where we studied the capitalist economic system, we were not assigned one word of Marx and not of any of the followers he’s had. In the last 150 years who’ve developed his way of thinking in one of the 20 semesters, I had a professor who did that, but he was unusual. His name was Paul Baran at Stanford and everybody who studied with him knew that he was unusual in the sense you couldn’t get it anywhere else. So complete was the demonization of Marxism that even the intellectuals, the professors, the academics were afraid to go anywhere near it, to look at it, to read it, to think about it, even to work with students to understand what was and wasn’t valuable within it.

It was a level of cold war craziness, because that’s really what we’re talking about, that means that Marxism was too frightening for people to even learn about. Okay, now let me explain why it is so important and why it’s such a tragedy that it was censored out of the conversation of our society. Here is the basic insight Karl Marx developed. He said, that in  capitalism, what we’ve heard about how it works, to make technology progress (which it does) and what we’ve heard about how it produces wondrous amounts of goods and services (which it does) has to be put alongside of the fact that in the core of capitalism is a fundamental conflict. That the people brought together, the employer on the one hand and the employees on the other, are locked into a relationship that is fundamentally conflictual. That in the core of this system is a relentless, endless class struggle, and it pits the employer against the employee. This is not an argument that conflict is the only part of this relationship, but it is an argument that it is a core part of the relationship, and if you want to understand capitalism, if you want to make society better, you must pay attention to that core conflict, because of its importance and of all of its consequences. You want to make the system work better, you’ve got to deal with that.

You cannot pretend it isn’t there, otherwise you’re like the person who pretends that there’s no difference between how we treat male and female genders in this society or no difference in how we treat well-off people and poor people or white people and not white people, etc. we’ve learned in our society. I hope that these are important differences and conflicts that have to come to terms. So is the one between the employer and the employee and no one has studied those conflicts more than Marx and the tradition he initiates, and you can see it once

you’re aware. You can see it because there are visible signs of class struggle all the time. As I’m

speaking to you, 5 000 workers in Alabama are figuring out whether they are going to have a

union at the Amazon warehouse because the employer has treated them awfully and they’re not happy about it and they want to fight against it and they may or they may not, but that’s class struggle friends! Then there’s the supreme court ruling in Britain, a week ago, which decided that the so-called “gig” workers, you know, the Uber the Lyft drivers, they are entitled to the same protections that workers who get a regular wage.

They can’t be denied those protections by renaming them as a “gig” worker as opposed to a regular employee, so they’re going to have to get minimum wage and they’re going to have to get paid holidays something we don’t have in the United States. But that class struggle in England won. Than look the class struggle is present in the bitterness of millions of Texans watching their senator galvanizing off into the sunset of Mexico and then telling lots of lies about it. Everywhere, workers know employees, know the many ways in which the employer is trying to make more money more profits at their expense and how they have to fight it and struggle against it. Then there are the invisible ways the class struggle works its way out. Think of yourself, and the people you know who worry about losing their job worried about losing their income. Struggling, even if they can’t put it into words. With the fact that they’re caught up in a relationship where whatever the work is that they do, there’s somebody, an employer in a position to take the job away, to take the income away, to make it impossible to make your home payment, and keep your home, to keep your kids in the school. That power get vested in somebody, who you barely know and who may do that because he sells the business to somebody else, because he moves, because he doesn’t like you. Who knows?

These are issues of class struggle that float up into your consciousness and shape your life. Then it’s on the other side too, you know, lots of employers they kind of have to live with the class struggle too. They don’t trust their workers do they that’s why there’s a camera in the bathroom, they want to monitor how long you’re in, there they want to check what you’re doing, they’re worried that you’re taking the stapler home at the end of the day. They’re worried you get the picture. The class struggle is everywhere! Marx is the theoretician who explains it, but to pretend that it isn’t there, to pretend that we don’t have to study it, and to pretend we have no use for the single most developed analysis of it, that’s childish. It also influences everything in our society.

That class struggle that Marx analyzed for one thing: Marx  hammers at the fact that the workplace in capitalism is a deeply anti-democratic totalitarian place. A tiny minority of people, the owner, the board of directors in the corporation have extraordinary power. That is, unaccountable! We don’t elect those people to run the enterprise. The workers there, the employees, they don’t have much power over that employer. The employer hires and fires the employee not the other way around. Where we live we can vote at least the people who rule over us but not in the workplace. No rights of voting! There is no democratic election. You know who elects the board of directors. The shareholders. The big shareholders who own the bulk of the shares. They elect the board of directors. You, the workers under the board of directors have no votes at all. What an interesting arrangement! What does it teach people? It teaches people to accept that kind of rule not just where they work but of course when they go home too. It gets them used to it. It makes seem necessary or natural or routine. It teaches non-democracy you know. What else it does? It makes people lose initiative.

Why should you put yourself out when the company will make profits out of whatever it is you develop? You won’t get them. You’re just a worker. Have you wondered about the killing off of initiative that comes from this fact that you as a worker have no skin in the game no real involvement in the fruits?

I was talking about the influences of the class struggle, that central contribution of Marx’s work. The influences it has on the whole society, kind of a demonstration of why it’s important to understand it. I want to get to an idea that is covered by the word alienation, in the sense of being separate from something, alienated from it. Marx has a wonderful discussion in his Das Capital about all this and I can summarize it. It’s a dense summary, I apologize for that, but I can summarize it as follows. Something happens to a human being when you pour your brains your muscles into producing something you’re a worker you make a beautiful object you make a service that really helps people whatever it is and then something happens at the end of the day. It’s five o’clock, you’re done for the day and then something happens which you may not think is important, but Marx says it’s crucial, because of the relationship between the employer and the employee, that boss-worker relationship that is full of struggle.

The capitalist takes from you what you produced and tells you to go home, you’re done here. Go home, eat something, sleep and come back tomorrow, do it all again. But what you’ve produced is taken from you, it’s alienated from you and someone else who didn’t work with you to produce it will decide what happens to it, where it goes, to whom it goes, for what purpose it is used. That’s none of your affairs. There the employer is going to take it, sell it, make money off of it, and you’re not involved. This is for the adult something like the little lesson learned by the three-year-old in the sandbox when another child comes over and snatches your doll or your truck and takes it away and you discover loss. And you’re going to have to come to terms with it maybe bursting out crying, maybe needing to be comforted by the adults in your life and so on but when you’re an adult no one comforts you. It’s the way the system works and you become disconnected from your own product from something you’ve poured yourself into and that is painful.

And that is psychologically stressful, and it’s one of the ways that the capitalist system, Marx argues, affects your psychology through this struggle. Why aren’t the workers, Marx asks, in charge of the disposition of what they have made? That’s part of what work ought to be. That’s part of what a human being needs to complete the work. He or she has done to be part of the decision of how to use it, how to make the community stronger by virtue of what you have added to it through your labor and breaking that down making a small unaccountable minority, the dictators inside the enterprise, the employer have them take your output. Take your work and do whatever they want with it. It is a loss to you and that loss ramifies inside your personality and Marx says, all that in poetic language and then there are the things that the class struggle does.

That are kind of obvious Marx points out, number one, if a tiny group of people, the employers, always a small minority of any capitalist society, if they’re in a position to decide what happens with the work the workers, the employees produce they’re going to go out there sell it and keep the bulk of the money for themselves. In other words capitalism produces, reproduces and worsens inequality, wealth concentrated among the employers and the few at the top. That they employ you know the CEOs and folks like that, they get it all, don’t they? We’re living through a pandemic. Even a pandemic that threatens us all doesn’t stop capitalism’s relentless inequality production. That’s why Jeffrey Bezos sees his fortune during the pandemic go from 130 to almost 200 billion dollars, while 25 million people are unemployed. It blows your mind at the minute you think it. Marx was eloquent. If you don’t want a system that is built on inequality and worsens it even in the pandemic, you’ve got to deal with it. Class struggle is built in to the way every store every office and every factory are organized in capitalism. He also points out that it’s a system that breeds really destructive feelings and emotions. Workers are terribly worried that they’re going to lose their job. It’s easy to become competitive with other workers to see them not as your comrades your friends, your fellow workers, helping to make your work add up to something, but rather to see them as people who may get the job that is taken from you who may be the ones left on the job when there are layoffs.

All of that means workers don’t trust the employer because they see them trying to make more money by moving abroad, to where wages are cheaper, bringing in machines that can substitute for workers, hiring children, women, immigrants to whom they can pay less. They see all that. And there’s a bitterness and the bitterness may turn against the employer or it may turn against the scapegoat who gets blamed even though the class structure and the class struggle are the problems these people face. It means the employer, as I mentioned, becomes also very bitter towards the employees. If there’s trouble in the enterprise the employer blames the employees. They’re not really in it, as if that should be surprising to anyone, of course, they’re not in it. You’ve kept them out of it by taking their product, by not making yourself accountable to them. Of course, there’s tension and bitterness that’s the point of Marx’s directing us to think about it.

The class struggle is part of our lives. Shapes our society, conditions our own personal existence. We should understand it, we should examine it, we should be aware of it. The last thing Marx stresses about this class struggle and the capitalist system in which it takes the form of  the tensions between employers and employees is to note that it changes. Class structures of any kind have always changed. You know, the class structure of slavery the master and the slave have very similar problems. Those are two classes. The master wasn’t accountable to the slaves and the slave was the property of the master. That was a class structure and a class struggle and it’s gone because people blew it away. Refused to continue after long experience. And the same is true of feudalism. And the same will be true of capitalism. At least that’s the reasonable expectation.

Marx wants to set before us another implication: one that he didn’t have the time to work out because he died at a relatively young age, was the fact that if the state takes over which in some societies it has partly or completely, that may not change all that much. If the state continues to organize enterprises and workplaces in the form of a tiny group of people making all the decisions sitting at the top, the employer and the mass of people who are in the employee position it will not matter all that much that it’s a state enterprise as opposed to a private one because it hasn’t gotten away from the contradiction, the conflict, the struggle, the class struggle. Because it hasn’t done away with the class difference with the class structure of production moving from a private to a state enterprise. Without changing that, isn’t what Marx had in mind and here Marx becomes a philosopher again, which is how he started as a young man, everything he says suggests its opposite.

The history of the human race when it went through its slavery phase, its feudalism phase and now its capitalism phase always with a class structure and class struggle, a small group of masters or feudal lords or employers in capitalism and a large group of slaves, serfs, employees, each of those gives people the idea that things could be other than they are. And you know what the other is? A society whose workplaces are not divided between a small group who run the show and a mass of people who are alienated from running the show. It doesn’t have to be that you are stuck in that position. What gives you the imaginary alternative, suppose Marx says, that we could have in our minds the alternative that the workplace, the enterprise is a democratic community not divided between a minority on top and a majority underneath. We have a name for that, don’t we? And you know it from this program.

It’s a worker cooperative. It’s a situation where one person, one vote, we all decide together democratically what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output. We are no longer alienated because it’s ours and we run it and we have the vested interest and we will have initiative an inventiveness because we will be the beneficiaries all of us, of whatever each of us contributes. So, the irony is: class divided societies develop the vision of their own negation – Hegel would say – that is they understand that one could go beyond the trap. Therein, it’s like understanding that you could have a different relationship than the one you’re in. The very difficulties of the one you’re in give you insights into what you would rather be in what alternative relationships might look like, and you know, when you understand this you realize that what Marx is about has very little to do with the government.

It’s not about the government coming in and doing this or doing that. It’s not about the government taking over it’s not about taking away your liberty had nothing to do with those things. Those are smears, caricatures designed to turn people away to demonize Marxism. So it’s not available to learn from Marx’s insight about the class differences in society, the class  struggles that shape our society. They’re powerful, they’re useful. Are they all 100 percent right? Of course not! Do we have to develop and change and adjust them to our circumstances? Yes, of course! This isn’t a religion, this isn’t a dogma. Some people have made it.  That like some people have done that with every other set of ideas ever brought forward. But we don’t have to but to refuse to engage it the way in my education. It was required that’s self-destructive childish blindness doesn’t befit real education or a society at comfort with itself. Marxism is worth understanding because it’ll teach you, as it has taught me, a great deal about the world I live in.

And if this program is of use to you, good part of the credit goes to what I’ve learned from the Marxist tradition.