Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295

Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the lord gets. Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, n- not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle.

The following is a conversation with Richard Wolff, one of the top Marxist economists and philosophers in the world. This is a heavy topic, in general, and for me personally, given my family history in the Soviet Union, in Russia, and in Ukraine. Today the words Marxism, socialism, and communism are used to attack and to divide much more than to understand and to learn. With this podcast I seek the latter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx, as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries. And in general, we need to both steel man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize, and to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant and at times dangerous. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Richard Wolff. Let's start with a basic question but maybe not so basic after all. What is Marxism? What are the defining characteristics of, uh, Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology?

Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition that takes its founding inspiration from the works of, uh, Karl Marx. Um, but because these ideas that he put forward spread as fast as they did and as globally as they did, literally it's, uh, 140 y- years since Marx died, and in that time his ideas have become major types of thinking in every country on the Earth. Um, if you know much about the great ideas of human history, um, that's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time. And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity, is that the Marxian ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories, and economic conditions. So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently in different places at different times. And therefore Marxism, as a kind of first flush definition, is the totality of all of these very different ways of coming to terms, uh, with it. For the first roughly 40, 50 years, um, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism. Marx himself, that's all he really did. He never wrote a book about communism. He never wrote a book really about socialism either. His comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed. What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism, and that's what Marxism was more or less in its first 40 or 50 years. Um, the only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks. Uh, in 1871 there was a collapse of the French government, uh, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany, and then the result was something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian society. And Marx's people, people influenced by Marx, were very active, uh, in that commune, in the leadership of the commune, and Marx wasn't that far away. He was in, uh, London, uh, and these things were happening in Paris. You know, that's an easy transport even then. And for a short time, very short, Marxism had a different quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize societally differently. Before, that had only been implicit. Now it became explicit. What is the leadership of the Paris Commune going to do, and why, and in what order? And in other words, governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted a few weeks, the French Army regrouped, uh, and under the leadership of people who were very opposed to M- Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed a large number of the, of the Communards as they were called, and deported them to islands in the Pacific that the, that were part of the French Empire at the time. The really big change happens in Russia in 1917. Uh, now you have a group of Marxists, Lenin, Trotsky, all the rest, who...... are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again, a war, like in France, uh, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation because it is the government that loses World War I, has to withdraw, as you know, uh, Brest-Litovsk and all of that, and the government collapses and the army revolts. And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, um, splits under the pressures of all of this, uh, into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions. Lenin, Trotsky, and the others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story short, he's in exile. Uh, his position, uh, Lenin's position makes him, gets him deported because he says Russian workers should not be killing German workers. I mean, this is a war of capitalists who are dividing the world up into colonies and Russian working people have no... should not kill and should not die for such a thing. As you can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out. Interestingly, in the United States, the, the comparable leader at that time of the Socialist Party here, as you know, there was no Communist Party at this point, that comes later, um, the head of the Socialist Party, a very important American figure named Eugene Victor Debs, makes exactly the same argument to the... that Americans should not fight in the war. Uh, he's in the pa- he has nothing to do with Lenin. I don't even know if they knew each other. But, uh, he does it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States. By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well. Really, very well. It's remarkable. Um, and he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you-