Capitalism vs. Socialism: A Soho Forum Debate (Full Transcript)

Socialism is a product of capitalism, it always was. There was no socialism before capitalism came into being. Why? Because capitalism, in the French and American revolutions, made a big fat promise when it asked people to leave the feudalism that existed before, and shift over to capitalism. It made the promise, as in the French Revolution, that capitalism would bring with it liberty, equality, fraternity, and, let’s add, democracy and prosperity.

Socialism is the movement that recognizes that what capitalism promised: liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy, wasn’t delivered, and never was. And socialism is a movement which, if it has anything in common among its different tendencies, is a notion that we can do better than capitalism. It’s a yearning to do better. It’s the kind of yearning slaves had to go beyond slavery, or serfs to go beyond feudalism. Employees and the people who empathize with them figure we can go better and do better than capitalism. That’s what socialism is.

Beyond that, socialists agree about three flaws, failures, of capitalism. And again, briefly, to go through them. But there are three: Capitalism is unstable. Capitalism is unequal. And capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic. Let me briefly explain.

Unstable. Every 47 years, in every capitalist country, on average, there’s an economic downturn. Not due to nature, and not due to war. Just built into the system. It’s called the business cycle, because it always comes back. Millions of people lose work, businesses go out of business, a crazy crash. You know what it’s like if you pick up the financial press. You know we’re waiting for the next one to hit this year or next.

Mr. Trump’s biggest worry about being re-elected is that it’ll happen too soon. He worries, as we all do. It’s an unstable system. That’s crazy to live in an unstable system. If you lived with a roommate as unstable as capitalism, you would have moved out long ago. What an amazing thing, to accept a system that every 47 years threatens millions of people with unemployment, lost income, interrupted vacation, interrupted education, lost mortgage, you name it.

Then let’s do the next one, Inequality. Oxfam in England keeps track of these things. And the latest number from them summarizes it all. The 80 or 90 richest people together in the world, have more wealth than the bottom half of the population, three and a half billion people. That’s the achievement of capitalism, that kind of distribution.

If you took away half the wealth of those 80 to 100 people, guess what? They’d still be the richest people in the world, only you’d now have a vast amount of money to deal with the sickness, the lack of education, the absence of water, the insufficiency of food of the vast majority of people. What an achievement, such inequality.

And now finally, the lack of democracy. The part of it you probably know and thought about is the buying of our political process. On display every day, everywhere, you all see it, you all know it.

But here’s a part of the lack of democracy you might not have thought about. Long ago, we got rid of kings, queens. We decided we didn’t need somebody sitting at the top of society telling us all what to do so that we would all be, oh, let’s call it subjects, that’s what they called us. So we got rid of the kings and queens and we said, no, you know, we can run this in a different way, this political system. We can all get together, we can periodically vote and take steps and collectively make the decisions that used to be in the hands of the kings and the queens. How interesting.

We democratized, at least a little, the politics. What we didn’t do was to democratize the economics. So what do we have inside each enterprise? A little king, an owner, a manager, a board of directors, a king and his court who run everything, who make all the key decisions, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits everybody in the enterprise helps to produce. If it’s too difficult for you to hear me out, then it’s a sign that I’m getting to you.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thanks. We’re good. Please, keep going. Please, please hear out Professor Wolf. Please respect Professor Wolf.

RICHARD WOLFF: We don’t have democracy in our workplaces. We never did. The commitment to democracy is verbal in this society, limited to the voting activity where we live, but not where we work. And as adults, that’s where we spend most of our time, going to work, being at work, and recuperating from work.

In the workplace, no democracy at all. We do what we’re told. What we produce belongs to somebody else. And we have no say over what they do with it, how this is organized, what the technology is. And socialists, therefore, have said, my God, we can do better than capitalism. And that’s what they want. And that’s what they agree on.

But here’s where the disagreements. How do you go about it? What do you do? And we have a benefit, socialists do today. We have some experiments that were made in the 20th century, Russia, China, Cuba, and so on. And we learned from those experiments what works and what doesn’t, what should be pursued and what should be set aside.

And so the new socialism, and if you’re not aware of it, that has to go back to what I said at the beginning, you haven’t been keeping up, which is hard to do in a society which makes socialism a taboo.

What has happened to socialism is a refocusing of itself. It’s not interested so much in the state doing things that achieved rapid rates of economic growth, true enough, but it also left too much power in the hands of too few people, and that has to be addressed and dealt with, which socialists have been doing.

And the new focus, the new focus of socialism is to do something at the workplace that was never done, to go beyond capitalism in the organization of the workplace, to democratize the workplace, to make where we spend most of our adult lives at work a place where democracy reigns, where all the people who work in an enterprise participate in making the decisions of what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

Because if they all together made those decisions, we wouldn’t give some people $150 billion and other people have to borrow money to get their kid through college. We wouldn’t have the inequality. We certainly wouldn’t allow the irrationality of every four to seven year instability. Everybody together would choose a technology that isn’t dangerous to the health of all of us at the workplace.

We could go beyond capitalism, but we have to have the courage to do what was not yet done, not in Roosevelt’s New Deal, and not in Russia or China either, the transformation at the base of society into a democratized workplace. That’s the new direction of socialism. That’s where socialism will be in the 21st century that we are now entering. It’s a new and a different socialism. It has learned from its own earlier experiences and experiments.

Two little footnotes: Capitalism did not emerge out of feudalism all finished in one swell foop, did it? If you know the history, you’ll know that capitalism started in this town, in that town, in that village, in that area. Often it didn’t last more than a few weeks or a few months, sometimes a few years, and then it was crushed by feudalism, and they had to figure out how to survive, and they had to get together. It took centuries.

Socialism isn’t born all at once either. It makes its early experiments. It had one in the Paris Commune in 1870, and then it had some other experiments in the 20th century that I’ve mentioned. And just like with capitalism, you learn from your experiments how to make it better next time, how to correct the mistakes you made in the project that has animated socialists from the beginning.

We can do better than capitalism, and there is no reason that the human progress that took us beyond ancient villages and tribes and slavery and feudalism should imagine itself to have stopped at this point. Every other system was born, evolved, and died. Capitalism we know was born and evolved. I’ll leave it to your inference as to what it is doing now.

Thank you.

NICK GILLESPIE: All right. Thank you, Richard Wolff. Follow him on Twitter @RichardDWolff, with two Fs. And now, taking the opposite side, is Gene Epstein. Follow him @GeneSohoForum.

GENE EPSTEIN: By the way, there are seats up front for people who are in the back, and I want to apologize to Professor Wolff for that outburst. That was very rude. We don’t run the Soho Forum that way, and thank you, Professor Wolff, for being gracious about that.

Well, let me start. It is a pleasure to share a stage with Richard Wolff, who I consider my alter ego in a parallel universe. We both came of age as socialists, in my case from age one, since my mother was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, and I have her FBI file to prove it. You could always tell who the FBI agents were in the party because they were the only ones who paid their dues on time.

Richard paid his dues by getting an economics Ph.D. at Yale, followed by a career advocating socialism. I paid my dues by evolving into a different kind of radical, a bleeding-heart, freedom-loving advocate of capitalism. I believe that even the deeply flawed capitalism we have now, heavily distorted by government interference on behalf of the powerful, is preferable by far to Richard’s socialism in promoting freedom, prosperity, and equality.

Richard bears a very heavy burden of proof because his socialism has never existed. He repudiates my mother’s Soviet Union, my mother’s favorite Cuba. He has indeed called these systems state capitalist. I’m glad he’s learned from their mistakes since their mistakes has in fact, of course, cost the blood of tens of millions of innocent people.

He wants the economy, as he explains in his book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, he wants the economy reorganized around workers’ self-directed enterprises in which employees own and democratically run companies and keep the broadly defined profits or surplus that normally go to the employers. I fully support what Richard calls employees becoming their own employers, so long as people freely choose that arrangement.

Richard thinks such firms are a substitute for capitalism, but they’re actually just another option that capitalism offers. Nothing about the system of protecting property rights of firms in the free market dictates how these firms must be structured. Richard himself has written about the “varying kinds and degrees of democracy in the workplace, which already exist.” Based on these cases, he observes, “workplace democracy responds to deep needs and desires”.

But these deep needs and desires seem to run only skin deep. Richard has written that in today’s worker-owned enterprises, “it might be legally possible for worker-owners to transform the enterprise so that they become not only owners, but also collectively directors.” However, he concedes, that has very rarely happened.

Well, no doubt it very rarely happens, because workers very rarely want it to happen. But the move to workers’ self-directed enterprises can happen in the capitalist system if workers do want it to happen. Start with the fact that the bottom half of the population accounts for one-third of all consumer spending, the bottom four-fifths for nearly two-thirds, adding up to trillions of dollars per year.

On the investment side, there’s over a trillion dollars in labor union pension funds domestically and an estimated $40 trillion worldwide held by labor union pension funds. All this financial firepower could be marshaled to make workers’ self-directed enterprises the dominant mode of production.

And it would be true to the 1960s view that radical change must be implemented by the same people who seek to be the embodiment of that radical change. But the unwillingness of workers to follow the Marxist playbook is as old as Marxism itself.

Around 1980, democratic socialists like Michael Harrington and Tom Hayden advocated a bottom-up socialism similar to Richard’s, but they acknowledged that without the coercive power of government, worker-owned enterprises, “are almost impossible to get off the ground”, as two of them wrote.

Richard might argue that it’s okay to use government power to try to jumpstart workers’ self-directed firms, since government often rigs the game anyway. But a Marxist like Richard should be deeply troubled by the old contradiction of radical change from below being implemented by the force of government from above.

And beyond that, he would use government to socialize finance and the allocation of labor. That’s why he and I are taking opposite sides in this debate. He advocates a full-blown form of socialism that will put freedom, prosperity, and equality under siege, just like the old socialisms did.

But let’s go all the way with Richard and assume that a socialist political party wins at the ballot box with two-thirds of the electorate voting for its candidates. Since two-thirds is normally interpreted in politics as a mandate, the government makes Richard’s socialism a reality. But voting for a radical idea in a voting booth is very different from a full and active commitment to that idea. So let’s not assume that the two-thirds have anticipated the real consequences of what they voted for.

Richard writes that apart from doing our assigned jobs, workers would each be, “democratically and collectively given fully equal participation in decision-making over their own enterprise and over the broad economy.” He adds, somewhat ominously, “no one could work without engaging in both roles.”

There will be a need for financing under Richard’s socialism, both to create new worker-owned companies and to provide funds for enterprises that want to expand. The “obvious alternative”, writes Richard, to the existing sources of finance is, “socialized banking, consisting of, self-workers’ self-directed enterprises where workers and communities affected by bank policies together direct and operate banks.”

So Richard would shut down the nearly $50 billion raised annually through crowdfunding and the several hundred billion raised through various forms of venture capital. And finance is not the only function he would relegate to the power of politics.

He also proposes a specialized agency that would, “always know from constant monitoring which existing enterprises need more laborers, which have registered the wish to commence new production, all the relevant skill and experience requirements, and where effective laborers and enterprises are located.” He adds that the agency’s reports would be submitted to all workers to aid them in making their decisions.

Notice that he’s talking about knowledge of the relevant skill and experience of 160 million workers in the U.S. across hundreds of thousands of firms. That’s information the specialized agency will, always know from constant monitoring. From my work experience, I can tell Richard that those constant monitors who keep coming around will be the butt of jokes and the information they come away with will be superficial when it isn’t totally misleading.

So in Richard’s world, we’ll be required to do our assigned jobs, attend meetings about company matters, and vote on the outcomes. We’ll also have to pour over the reports of the labor allocation financial agencies and then discuss their recommendations with many others and vote on those outcomes.

I submit that only in a dystopian nightmare can most of us imagine ourselves spending our waking hours in this way, especially since the vote of any one of us can hardly determine the outcome anyway.

Richard approvingly uses the 1960s term participatory democracy, in which we each get to participate actively in democratic decision making. In a 1970 book called After the Revolution, sociologist Robert Dow explained the arithmetical unworkability of this idea. If each attendee at a meeting were given just 10 minutes to address the issue being voted on, it would take 10 hours to move on to the next issue, provided there were only 60 people at the meeting.

But let’s take this leap and assume the participatory democracy would be functional. Many firms seeking to expand their operations will have to borrow funds from the democratically run financial agencies while also applying to the democratically run labor allocation agency for more workers. And these democratically run agencies will be ruled by the vote of the majority.

But to pick up on an objection raised by Atlantic Magazine journalist Conor Friedersdorf, we might ask, how easy will it be to get the democratically run finance and labor allocation agencies to support the expansion plans of firms that produce Muslim prayer rugs and Qurans and the building of new mosques?

Friedersdorf goes on to ask, “Would you prefer a socialist society in which birth control is available if and only if a majority of workers exercising their democratic control assents, or would you prefer a society in which private businesses can produce birth control in part because individuals possess economic rights as producers and consumers, the preferences of a majority of people around them be damned?”

Friedersdorf’s question applies to the related issue of freedom of speech and press. Would you prefer a socialist society in which dissenting journalism is available if and only if a majority of workers exercising their democratic control agrees, or would you prefer a society in which private enterprises can produce dissenting journalism, the preferences of a majority of people around them be damned?

So at best, our freedoms would be circumscribed by the tyranny of the majority. But we don’t have to press this decisive objection, since the overwhelming likelihood is that elected representatives and their appointees will have most of the real power. There won’t be enough hours in the day for us to even be aware of the thousands of decisions being made each day on our behalf.

Special interest will form around these centers of power, and as Friedrich Hayek accurately predicted about conventional socialism, the worst will get on top, because power-hungry people are mainly the ones who end up on top.

Our most beloved living ex-president, Barack Obama, was called by New York Times journalist James Risen, “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”

As left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, Obama used the archaic 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more journalists, including James Risen, than all previous presidents combined. So freedom of speech and press is a fragile thing, constantly being assaulted on all sides, and especially by government.

If you magnify the reach and power of government under Richard’s plan, politicians in power can stifle dissent by stealthily denying funds and labor to enterprises that put out information that government doesn’t want published.

Now take the issue of prosperity. Take the force that brings prosperity, innovation, or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. Richard thinks that as long as people can be offered another job, they’ll agree to giving up their current job to allow creative destruction to happen.

But since people naturally resist change, efforts at major or even minor change would likely be thwarted by special interests reluctant to give up their established positions.

Imagine the response if Steve Jobs sought funding for a smartphone that would also replace a flashlight, a watch, a camera, a compass, a calculator, a recorder, CD player, and GPS navigator, threatening the industries that turn out those products. The pattern of obstruction will be emboldened by the knowledge that most new ideas fail and few succeed in a big way anyway.

Policies toward imports could make Donald Trump look like a free trader. When consumers voted with their dollars to buy Japanese cars because the cars were better made and lasted longer, there was a market in place that made it hard to stop the imports. But in a politicized environment, the threatened industries would find it easy to prevent the foreigners from selling us the cars.

The planners will have a perfect excuse for rejecting any projects or proposals they don’t like, the economic reality of scarcity. By scarcity, I mean the fact that what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is, so they can reject proposals they don’t like on the reasonable grounds that the resources are simply not available.

So freedom and prosperity would both be under siege in Richard’s system of socialism. On inequality, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, you can find income equality in a prison where power is quite unequal, and political power will be more unequal than even under a flawed system of capitalism. The flawed system we have is preferable by far to what Richard proposes in terms of freedom, prosperity, and equality.

Because we have so many avenues of private funding, dissident publications like The Intercept, Jacobin Magazine, Reason Magazine, books like by Richard Wolff, and a debate series like the Soho Forum can persist. Because we have private funding and reasonably functioning consumer and capital markets, innovation that brings prosperity can persist and even flourish.

And on income inequality, the turn toward capitalism in countries like China and India has lifted hundreds of millions out of grinding poverty and has therefore meant a narrowing of income inequality globally.

But I began by saying this is a flawed system, riddled with crony capitalism. Richard mentioned the instability of the U.S. economy. Indeed, it is unstable. I read Richard’s analysis, and as far as I can understand, he believes that The Great Recession was triggered by the fact that the consumer was tapped out. The consumers could no longer afford what they were buying.

Well, if he looks at the data, he’ll find that just before the Great Recession happened, consumer spending continued to rise. That was in the fourth quarter of 2007. What he ignores, what he ignores was the crony capitalist policy of government through the Federal Reserve that brought that awful event.

So I’m Gene Epstein, and I’m here to recruit you. Yes, we have – yes, we have a flawed capitalism, but in order to make it a better capitalism, we have to do a lot of radical things, including reigning in the power of the Federal Reserve that does indeed cause a banking cartel and brings instability in this economy. Maybe we can talk more about those things later on.

Thank you very much.

NICK GILLESPIE: All right. Well, thank you, Gene Epstein. The debate is joined.

Now we’re going to have five minutes of rebuttal each. Gentlemen, I’ll suggest that you stay seated and use hand microphones. I’d like to go to the podium. You want to go to the podium. Okay. We cannot keep these guys down. So we won’t try.

Richard, you have your option. I just want to remind people of a couple of things. One is, remember that the proposition, the resolution under debate is socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity. Follow Richard Wolf @RichardDWolf with two Fs. Follow Gene Epstein, @GeneSohoForum. Follow me @NickGillespie. Follow the Soho Forum @TheSohoForum, follow Reason Magazine @Reason.

Richard Wolff, please, you have five minutes to rebut.

RICHARD WOLFF: Listening to Gene makes me realize that a book that you write is a little bit like a child that you have. You think it’s yours and then you watch as it becomes its own thing and is understood by other people in ways you never imagined. I cannot recognize three quarters of what he said, it sounded to me like quotes of somebody I didn’t even want to meet.

I’m not proposing a kind of socialism, I don’t believe in looking into the future and telling you what the society ought to be. People who tell you the future are usually found in carnivals, you pay them a little bit of money, they tell you who you’ll be sleeping with in two weeks and you giggle. If you actually take seriously what they’ve proposed, you need help.

I’m not proposing what a socialism would look like, number one. I’m talking about how you get beyond what we have because like in all societies, you’re either satisfied with the way things are or you’re looking for how to make them better. If there’s a genius in the United States, it’s been that we’ve been willing, in many areas, to do better.

But there’s a taboo when it comes to economics, represented by what Gene said, that you really shouldn’t look at that because it’s only going to get worse. Those nasty politicians will do all the terrible things that should make you stay with what you have. Oh yes, tinker with the Federal Reserve or here, but don’t change the fundamentals.

Where did that come from? Where did the economic system get a pass? We debate about family life, we debate education, we debate our transportation system, but debate the fundamental structure of capitalism, which is not about markets and not about the government, but how you organize the production and distribution of the goods and services without which you cannot live.

Slavery did it with masters and slaves, feudalism did it with lords and serfs, capitalism does it with employers and employees. And the whole purpose of my book and the work that we do and the new directions of socialism is to question and transform that. No more group of employers telling us all what to do and employees living in that undemocratic workplace.

And the whole notion of controlling the government so it doesn’t oppress you in all the ways that Gene likes to enumerate is to create a social force at the base of society that could possibly prevent that. And making the mass of people in the workplace have the final say and power over what that workplace does, means you don’t have a small group of people in a government cutting a deal with a small group of people called employers at the expense of a large group of people called employees. That’s the transformation at the base of society that will mark the 21st century’s socialism.

So that all the old arguments against the socialisms of the past, arguments predicated on what’s wrong with the government and the overwhelming power of the government, they’re not relevant anymore because the thrust of socialism is at the base of society, not at the level of government.

There’s a reason Karl Marx wrote no books about the state and endlessly studied the production and distribution of goods and services, because that’s the core of the economy he wanted to take us beyond. And that’s the problem we have. We have let that go as if there’s something necessary or holy or sacrosanct about that way of organizing production. So we all take it for granted. We shouldn’t. We never should have.

The impulse to democracy ought to have been applied in the workplace. And as for the arguments, gee, you wouldn’t want to go to all those meetings. Those were the arguments of the kings. We don’t need democracy. The mass of people haven’t the time or the interest or the intellect or the education or the training or the, come on. We ought to recognize those kinds of arguments against change for what they are. They’re fearful.

So we’re going to stay with what we have, the capitalism that we have, producing the very humorous takes on Mr. Trump or Mr. Johnson in England as the expressions of a system spinning out of control, in part because we don’t face that the basic organization of production has been given a free pass and is what’s holding us back.

Thank you.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you, Richard. Gene, please, you’ve got five minutes.

GENE EPSTEIN: Well Richard wrote a book called Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. It was published seven years ago. I read it quite recently. Richard probably hasn’t read it very recently. That’s where at least commendably, commendably, he’s written a whole book, a book by the way that Karl Marx never did write, about the socialism that he wants. And I quoted copiously from that book in my initial talk.

If Richard is now going to say, oh well, you know, that book, it’s a, you know, forget that book, just, you know, try to recognize that socialism is preferable to some of the crap that goes on now, then we’d have to say, Richard, we’ve been hearing that for over a century, you know, from socialists. Then we had the Soviet Union, Stalin, then we had Mao, then we had – we’ve had a lot of mess from your socialism. You’ve got to be a little bit more specific before we get the least bit interested in something that has been so disastrous for humankind.

So I want to get Richard back on the straight and narrow and take him seriously that he’s proposing something with a nuts and bolts definition, workers’ self-directed enterprises. And the embarrassing thing for Richard, as it was for Marxists right back to the time of Marx, is that they’re selling something that workers don’t seem to want.

We had socialism in Israel. We had 5% of the country really was socialist. I trust that Richard would agree that the kibbutzim of Israel, where 5% of them really were socialists in a true sense, the bottom-up sense. And that’s what I’m proposing. Now, of course, what also happened to Israel, as Richard probably knows, as you probably know, is that those kibbutzim just fell apart. They don’t exist anymore. People lose interest in it.

But again, what we are saying, we libertarians are saying, go for it, workers’ self-directed enterprises. You do have co-ops. Richard, in another mood, said, hey, look, you’ve got co-ops. It speaks to needs and desires. And indeed, maybe it does. Then go for it. But then let’s build it from the ground up, just like I’m proposing.

And then we have a system of capitalism. Do I want to keep the flawed system of capitalism, the system that fights, the political system that protects the powerful? No. Capitalism is a system of profit and loss. Profits encourage risk-taking. Losses encourage prudence. That’s the system.

Now, we abrogate that to the crony capitalist system. That’s what brought about the housing bubble that caused the Great Recession. I’m quoting Noam Chomsky, a guy I also like, by the way, even though he’s a socialist. To a too great extent, we privatize profits and we socialize losses. That’s what the Federal Reserve does. That’s what it’s all about. Do I want to sit back and like this system? By God, no.

We have a crony capitalist system, by the way, that shafts people of limited means most of all, that defends the rich and powerful, and there have been victories against it. We used to have an airline cartel protected by the Civil Aeronautics Board. Then somebody noticed that where the CAB didn’t dominate, a flight between L.A. and San Francisco within the same state cost half what it costs to fly from Washington, D.C., rather, to Boston. Same distance, twice as expensive, because of government.

So then they abolished the CAB, and there was competition in the airlines. And that was a huge victory for middle-income people. So victories can be won.

Richard, I want to recruit you to change this system of capitalism, if you’ll excuse the expression that my socialist Uncle Abe used to use, but I use it as a contraction for crony capitalism. We need more capitalism, not less. We need to change things. Richard could join us, or he could focus on building his workers’ self-directed enterprises from the ground up, building on top of the co-op movement, the employee ownership movement, which, by the way, already gets tax breaks that I don’t necessarily object to, that already gets those breaks. Go for it. Turn everybody on to workers’ self-directed enterprises, and they’re perfectly compatible. It’s just like being in business for yourself. That’s all it is.

It’s a great idea. It hasn’t really caught on, but maybe it has potential. I welcome it. Thanks very much.

NICK GILLESPIE: All right. Thank you, Gene Epstein and Richard Wolff.

We’re now ready to do the audience Q&A. We have a couple of microphones set up. Please walk up to them. I am going to be – I realize that each of you probably on some level view the other as a Nazi. I am going to be – which is wrong on both counts. But I’m going to be a Nazi. I’m going to ask you to state a question. We don’t want to hear a lot of speeches. We want to hear questions. Direct them to either or both people, debaters.

So let’s go, and we’re going to start right now. Go. First question.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hello, my name is Nicholas Jacobi. I’m from Germany, native German, and it took me 35 years and winning the Green Category for learning what libertarianism is. I studied social science in Germany.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you. What’s the question?

MALE AUDIENCE: I would like to know from Mr. Wolff why he thinks that it was not possible for me to learn about libertarianism and too many of the majority. Even though I studied social science and taught it for seven years in high school, yeah, I’m now 38 years old and it took me a year, but you learned it obviously before you – you learned about Marxism before you even left high school, because if you know about the term when you start studying, I would say it was much easier for you to find out about the other side than me that studied social science and taught it.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you. Okay, thank you. Richard, please use a microphone, hold one up, and I guess it should be on, could you –

RICHARD WOLFF: Can you hear me?

NICK GILLESPIE: Yes. Okay. Okay, so the question was basically – He was calling BS on the idea that you couldn’t learn about Marxism.

RICHARD WOLFF: And the question was that I really could, or that you want to know why I couldn’t?

MALE AUDIENCE: It took me 35 years to do that.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay, so – He took a long time and you took a very short time. Why is that?

RICHARD WOLFF: He’s saying libertarianism is harder to learn about than Marxism. I never indicated the number of years it took me to learn Marxism.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay, Richard, can I –

RICHARD WOLFF: I’m sorry it took you a long time, if that helps.

NICK GILLESPIE: Do you feel like there is not a free flow of information in contemporary America?

RICHARD WOLFF: It blows my mind that you could even say that.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. All right, thanks.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me explain. Economics departments, which is what I know around the United States, is where you might learn Marxian economics. You have to go – first of all, the vast majority of economics departments in the United States have no person in them who knows of or teaches a course in Marxian economics.

Number one. They don’t have them at all. Number two, the vast majority subscribe to a basic kind of mainstream economics that’s called neoclassical economics, which is the dominant tradition. There is a small dissenting group that are called Keynesian economics because of something that happened in the Great Depression and the new development of a critical perspective that has nothing to do with socialism.

There’s tremendous fights between the neoclassicals, who are the majority, and the Keynesians, who are minority. One of the very few things the two groups can get together on is excluding Marxists. That’s the way the American economic system works. And since it’s the economics departments of our universities that train the politicians who deal with economics, the journalists who do economics, and the people in the top reaches of business, you have a solid kind of mask, if you like, of uniformity in which the kinds of things that a Marxist economist talks about are bizarre for them, not because of their complexity or their newness, but because they have no experience whatsoever in dealing with these things. And that has been true for the entirety of my experience in the American academic environment where I’ve been a professor all my life.

It is a systematic exclusion of the kinds of ideas that I represent that make students to this day not encounter it, or, if they have a lot of fortitude, to have little study groups on the side at their own expense to learn this kind of material, because this country remains afraid of dealing with that kind of thinking and that kind of tradition, even though the literature for it is massive.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. Thank you, Richard. And wait, Gene. I’m sorry. Hold on. Richard, can I ask, does it complicate that scenario at all, that we have at least one major candidate for president, Bernie Sanders, who identifies as socialist and has a large turnout? I mean, the idea that socialism is somehow suppressed seems like a reach, to be quite honest.

RICHARD WOLFF: Bernie Sanders is the first candidate in 75 years not to disown that title as part of the requirement not to commit political suicide. And you want me, the first time in 2016 that he dared do it, breaking that taboo, I’m supposed to pretend that the one person so far done it in 75 years undoes what I just said? You got to be kidding.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. And, Richard, I’ll look forward to the first time a major party candidate actually explicitly is libertarian. Gene, do you have a comment?

GENE EPSTEIN: I completely agree with Richard that there’s a lot of mind rot in the academic departments on economics. Most of these economists basically want to run the world. They want to pretend that economics is a branch of mathematics. It’s a waste of time for the most part. In the age of the internet, don’t let school get in the way of your education. There’s no excuse not to inform yourself about a whole range of things, including Austrian economics, with which I identify, or Marxist economics, with which Richard identifies. The internet offers just an incredible amount. Lectures from Richard Wolff himself on the internet, I appear regularly on part of the problem Dave Smith’s show. So you want to catch that, to learn economics, be intelligent in a way that whatever you really learn, you’ll teach yourself anyway. Don’t let school get in the way of your education.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you. And there’s… It might be interesting. We’re going to go to the next question. By my count, I think there’s two Marxist economics departments in the country. There’s one at Notre Dame and one at UMass Amherst. There’s about two Austrian programs, maybe three. So as Dave Smith pointed out, we’re all losers in this room. We have that in common. We’re in the same club.

RICHARD WOLFF: Okay. Let me just briefly correct. There was, at Notre Dame, a department. That program was destroyed about eight or nine years ago and doesn’t exist. And the program at University of Massachusetts, where I taught, has ejected most of the Marxists that were there. There were half a dozen. And so it is now really better described as a Keynesian or left-wing Keynesian program. There’s no Marxist department in the United States. There are only scattered Marxists here and there.

NICK GILLESPIE: We’ve got to build one to get those workers building up from the ground. Let’s go. Okay. Question. Sir, no preamble. No… We don’t care where you’re from. We’re all strangers here. It’s the French Foreign Legion. Just ask the question.

MALE AUDIENCE: This question is for Richard. In a 100% capitalist society, laissez-faire capitalist society, where there’s no Federal Reserve, you would be well within your rights to be a socialist. All you would need to do is band together with other socialists and form your own community. Whereas, if I want to be a capitalist in a socialist society, I would be forbidden from doing so. Why do you want to force everyone to be a socialist? Why not let the capitalists be capitalists, let the socialists be socialists, everyone’s happy?

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you. Richard.

RICHARD WOLFF: First of all, in whatever socialist societies you’re referring to, and the major one in the world today is the People’s Republic of China that uses that name, they are busily encouraging people to form and develop capitalist enterprises. So the premise of your question is wrong, number one.

Number two, I never said and would not argue that in a society that is in transition, as I believe capitalism is, there aren’t all kinds of spaces for there to be enterprises organized in the old traditional capitalist way, and enterprises organized as worker cooperatives in the new direction. I would expect that kind of coexistence to continue, to be filled with tensions and difficulties, much as capitalist enterprises began in feudalism and existed in a tense relationship until the transition happened further.

So my presumption is there will be coexisting different structures in whatever name you give to these societies in transition.

GENE EPSTEIN: Okay. Look, in line with the gentleman’s question, again, under capitalism, property rights of firms are protected. So if there’s a worker co-op owned democratically by the workers and they’re all directoring it, their property rights will be protected. If it catches on and the entire economy is worker co-ops, I say, that’s great. That sounds terrific. Run your own enterprise.

Some of the other things Richard proposes, which would be the iron fist of the state having to do with finance, that I object to. However, there was an article in the National Review under William F. Buckley, the right winger, welcoming worker ownership. I know that article well because I wrote it. And so, again, we’re not arguing about that. What Richard doesn’t really want to do, I know, for example, he likes Jeremy Corbyn’s idea, another kind of top-down plan where you can sneak this kind of thing through the back door. Go for it. There are co-ops. They already exist.

So in line with what the gentleman said, we already have what you’re talking about. We have worker co-ops. We have a huge blend. And if it tilts toward more worker ownership, wonderful.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. Next question, please, sir.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi. My question is for Richard as well. One of the core tenets of libertarianism and capitalism, or true capitalism, is the non-aggression principle. So my question for you is, do you think that socialism intrinsically violates the non-aggression principle? And if so, can you explain how committing aggression leads to greater freedom and equality?

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. Richard? Do you want to do a quick description of the definition of the non-aggression principle?

AUDIENCE: Or you want me to? Yeah. Sure. So the non-aggression principle is the principle that you’re essentially allowed to do whatever you want as long as you do not commit violence, you do not initiate violence against another person.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. Thank you. Richard?

GENE EPSTEIN: Can I answer for Richard?

NICK GILLESPIE: Well, you know, that… No, no, no. Let’s let Richard…

GENE EPSTEIN: Richard wants me to…

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. Richard, you’re good with that?

GENE EPSTEIN: Richard wants me to answer for him.

NICK GILLESPIE: Gene, please.

GENE EPSTEIN: Thank you, Nick.

NICK GILLESPIE: Gene Epstein of One Man show.

GENE EPSTEIN: Okay. Look, what’s Richard’s answer? Richard’s answer is, well, you know, you’re free to starve, you know, under capitalism. You know, if you don’t work, you don’t get a job, you’re going to starve, you know. I mean, that’s…

So that’s aggression, you know. So again, you know, forgive me, but, you know, you’re coming at Richard from left field because he’s going to say that clearly the capitalist system commits aggression because you’re going to starve unless you get a job. And then, of course, we have a lot of answers to that. Somehow or other, all the starvation tends to happen in socialist countries, not in this country.

But I think I got Richard fired up. He’s going to answer you now. You’re free to starve. I just jump-started.

NICK GILLESPIE: Mission accomplished.

RICHARD WOLFF: This remarkable tendency in a frightened society to assign starvation or deaths, it’s the only place in American culture where counting dead people seems to be a way to make an argument. Gene mentioned it before. Now it’s starving people. Before he mentioned the disasters of socialism where millions died. What an interesting argument. We’re going to count millions dead.

Well, what is it that capitalism’s history shows us? The worst two wars in human history, World War I and II, these were products of competition among capitalist economies, weren’t they? Four hundred years of colonialism destroying two-thirds of the world were products of capitalist accumulation and competition. What kind of mentality picks a few examples of admittedly horrible things that deserve to be criticized but a comparison of death counts?

The first book I ever wrote and published, Yale University Press, was called The Economics of Colonialism. It studied what Britain did in Kenya. Britain arrived in Kenya in 1895 and set up the East Africa Protectorate. And 30 years later, 1931, the Depression hit, I studied what happened in Kenya at that time.

When the British arrived, they did a census, four million people. In 1930, they did another census, two and a half million people. British colonialism killed millions of people in one small country. Multiply that. If you want to do the death count analysis, which I find bizarre, you’re in very shaky ground attacking socialism on the basis of capitalism. And the same kind of cherry-picking of your examples came with Jean and Kibbutzim in Israel. Do worker co-ops sometimes fail? Of course they do. Do capitalist enterprises sometimes fail? You bet they do, all the time.

What is this strange kind of choosing your example? Let me give you a counter-example. In 1956, a group of workers with a Catholic priest in the north of Spain, in a little town called Mondragon, made a worker co-op. The priest led them. Six workers, 1956. Today, something called the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation has over 100,000 workers. It’s the biggest worker co-op on the planet. It is a great success. It’s the seventh largest corporation in Spain. It is a successful worker co-op.

Two American corporations pay the Mondragon Corporation to have their scientists working alongside the scientists in this worker co-op. The name of the two American corporations is General Motors and Microsoft. They understand what those worker co-ops can do, even if people here have to pick an example where it didn’t work out. It’s as if I said, well, capitalism? Just look at the Ford Edsel.

GENE EPSTEIN: Again, I like what Richard just said. Again, go for it. I only mentioned the kibbutzim because, obviously, the kibbutzim were a well-known socialist phenomenon. It didn’t work out. Mondragon did. I was a part. I was very interested in the worker ownership movement in the 1980s, ironically, by the way. When I was senior economist in the New York Stock Exchange, I was going to all the meetings. We were hearing about Mondragon all the time in the 1980s.

Thirty years have passed, and we don’t have a Mondragon in the U.S. So I encourage Richard to go for it. Build it. Capitalism will love it. Why not? So, again, I’m not trying to discourage Richard about going for it. I’m just saying that he has the means to do it. He can start that revolution right away within the context of capitalism.

With respect to the body count point, the only point that’s being made in this case, and again, I honestly apologize to Richard for backing him in the sense that he seems to be now defending the state capitalism that he objects to. He wrote a whole book, collaborated on a whole book, in which he condemned the Soviet Union as state capitalist. So he doesn’t really want to defend those old line socialisms.

But the difference in terms of body count is that this was what governments did to their own citizens. These famines, because they couldn’t run the agriculture right. The worst getting on top, lunatic sociopaths like Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong and Pol Pot taking over, and murdering their own people either through the sin of commission or omission. That’s the difference.

Oh, God, of course, the body count with respect to war, two million people killed in Iraq and Vietnam. Of course, our body count with respect to wars abroad, horrible. Richard and I completely agree about that. We’re talking about the body count of governments against their own people under socialism. That’s the bad record we’re talking about.

NICK GILLESPIE: A question, sir. And by the way, if there are in fact any women in the room, it would be nice to hear from you. All right. Scoot up to the front of the line. Sir, you’ve got a man bun, that’s close enough. We’re transitioning here.

MALE AUDIENCE: I do identify as male, and I suspect I will continue to do so. I hope that doesn’t disappoint anybody here.

NICK GILLESPIE: Very good. Okay, ask your question.

MALE AUDIENCE: Thank you very much to both of you. This has been very thought-provoking. I have two short questions, primarily for Gene, but I think-

NICK GILLESPIE: Just ask one. This is Sophie’s choice time. Pick one of those questions, because the other one’s not going to make it.

MALE AUDIENCE: Is economic growth ever undesirable, i.e., does it ever lead to increased suffering either domestically or abroad? And what are we going to do with AI when it happens in about 20 or 30 years and nobody has jobs?

NICK GILLESPIE: Very good. Very good, sir. Okay, either of you. Richard?

RICHARD WOLFF: Absolutely. We do not prioritize, or we ought not, if that’s your question, to prioritize economic growth as if it’s a unidimensional plus. It can be, as we learned from ecological sensitivities built up over the last 30 years, that it can be a very dangerous and negative phenomenon.

But in a society that allows a decision of what to produce and what to invest in to be done on the basis of a private profit calculation, you are hardly in a position to bring in all of those other issues that have to be dealt with. I remember in my education, I was taught a bizarre language which gives it away, that there are, we should remember, our teachers told us, externalities. What a wonderful term. Something that isn’t central to what we’re dealing with, it’s an externality, only slowly to discover that the externality can be more negative than what’s internal is positive.

Capitalism sanctifies the profit motive. The socialism alternative has always said profit is one among a whole range of objectives and no decisions should be made based on any one when all the others are equally important to the quality of life.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thanks. Gene?

GENE EPSTEIN: Well, I guess then I won’t answer the question about artificial intelligence since that was the second question. Again, obviously, excuse me?

MALE AUDIENCE: It’s an important one.

GENE EPSTEIN: Well, can I answer both questions?

NICK GILLESPIE: Answer one.

GENE EPSTEIN: Okay. Well, I got the moderator.

NICK GILLESPIE: We got to leave some people behind.

GENE EPSTEIN: We’ll talk later, sir. Okay. It’d be fun to talk about AI. But look, with respect to economic growth, again, first of all, no, obviously, I am an individual. I’m a libertarian. I don’t believe there’s anything a little bit sacred about economic growth. If people, basically, by the way, if we all decided that we would prefer to work 20 hours a week, then that labor-leisure choice would begin to prevail.

Capitalists would only get us to work for them. We’d be willing to only work part-time. And we’d say we’ll work for a little bit less so that it’s advantageous to employ two of us for 20 hours a week rather than one person for 40. So then we would have a diminution of resources. We would have a shrinkage of the economy. Wonderful. Why not? If people only want to work 20 hours a week, then we can compete. We can compete. I perhaps want to explain to Richard, because the simple math is that if full-time workers get $20 an hour, then we’ll just work for $18 part-time, they’ll get two of us for less.

So therefore, we can opt for living less. We make those choices all the time. What’s a Jewish lawyer, a kid who couldn’t get into medical school? Well, I’m Jewish. I didn’t become a lawyer or a doctor. I chose to be a sloppy-ass journalist. So therefore, we make those choices all the time. It’s an individual choice. There is nothing sacred about economic growth.

With respect to this economy, externalities, we are individuals. We have individual freedom. You can’t throw garbage on your neighbor’s lawn, however. My right to move my fist stops at your chin. And if a capitalist is polluting your backyard and causing that harm, you should sue him. So therefore, we do need a tort system in order to protect against any individual choice, anything that a firm does, or indeed that an individual does, in order to make sure that they don’t harm us in the process of pursuing their own goals. That’s the best defense.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. Thank you, Richard. Quick rebuttal. Rebuttal.

RICHARD WOLFF: I really find it extraordinary, this sort of comment, that if we would like to work only shorter hours. The history of capitalism is the history of the struggle of the mass of working people to reduce the length of the working day from the 16 hours it was in early capitalism in England to 14, to 12, to 10, to 8. It’s been a struggle at every point, capitalists driving people, children as well as adults, to work incredible hours, workers having to mobilize and fight. It’s not a matter of the libertarian notion, let’s just choose. That’s not the way the world worked, it hasn’t worked that way in the past, and it doesn’t work now.

That’s a system that imposed those struggles and all the suffering that went into it until people said, no more, we won’t work that many hours, we won’t let you have our children when they’re sick. That’s the history of capitalism, and we’re not even counting all the injuries and all the deaths in that game of counting human suffering from a system.

GENE EPSTEIN: I suggest that Richard read a book called, by Stanley Lebergott, which is a whole history of the labor markets, of the capitalist markets, and it’s got a lot of good facts in it.

Now, I believe that one of the things that Richard should try to answer is, how was there a whole lot of progress? Why was there so much immense progress by laborers from 1870 to 1925? Or indeed, he says that wages were rising for decades, and the unions statistically were negligible. Government was on…

NICK GILLESPIE: All right.

GENE EPSTEIN: May I finish? No, I want to end with one fact, there was a 49-hour work week, capitalists had a 49-hour work week as of the 1920s, as Lebergott shows. The work week fell, the work week fell because in order to get workers to work for you, to bid for workers, their labor and leisure choice was such that they wanted… There is a Marxist myth that there is inequality, no equality between bargaining between laborers and workers. Well, that’s relied by about 100 years of history, before unions became the least bit of a presence in this economy.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you. Okay. Madam, please, question.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: We’re currently in an opioid crisis, and the World Health Organization ranks our healthcare system 37th in the world. Do you think it’s still possible for our current system to fix this, and how would you, using socialism, fix this?

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. Richard, I guess will take the first whack at that.

RICHARD WOLFF: One of the charming features of the capitalist system has been the endless effort on the part of virtually all capitalists to try to get more than the normal surplus out of their workers, the difference between the value added by a worker and what the employer pays the worker, that normal surplus, if you like. They’ve always tried to do better by controlling the market, or what we used to call monopolization, becoming strong enough to jack the price even higher to make more profits.

And one of the ways you do that is to control a market. In this country, one of the most successful examples is the medical-industrial complex, four industries that work together: the insurers, the drug companies, the doctors, and the hospitals, and the producers of medical devices are with the drugs. They’ve gotten together, and they’ve produced this situation, A), where we pay more for medical care than any other advanced industrial country, and the quality of our health care is at best mediocre, as the young woman pointed out in our ranking number 37. The solution to the problem in our medical care is not another law, another special federal program, another stop. It is a problem in which you have taken something as important as human health, A) subjected to the capitalist profit motive, and B) allow that monopoly to function, to coordinate its behavior, and to rip this society off from A to Z, and laugh all the way to the bank.

GENE EPSTEIN: First of all, the Soho Forum in a few months is going to have a debate, a Soho Forum debate, on the opioid crisis. I invite Richard to come, a free ticket for you, Richard, and a free ticket for the young lady who asked the question, to that debate.

Basically, Richard and I agree about 90% of the way about the medical care system. It’s a crony capitalist system. It has to be unraveled. It has to be adjusted.

NICK GILLESPIE: Gene, I would say your solution, though, is not to make it fully socialized, but rather to put more market forces in.

GENE EPSTEIN: Yeah, workers self-directed enterprises, if indeed that’s the way they want to construct it, because I’m all for those WSDEs, which is, by the way, what Richard calls it.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay, very quickly, Richard, 10 seconds.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, one theoretical confusion. When I talk about capitalism, I’m talking about arranging production with employers and employees as different people in an endless struggle. I’m not talking about markets. The confusion between a capitalist organization and a market is something we ought to get beyond. Slavery had markets. Remember? We had bought and sold slaves. Feudalism had markets. The market isn’t what’s unique about us. Capitalism is what’s unique, and that has to do with the organization of production, which is why that’s what we go after, and that’s the focus of socialism, not some dead old stale debate about whether the government should have more or less influence on the market. That’s a different subject.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay. We have a couple of minutes left. I want to enforce, brutally, quick question, quick answers. Let’s get through two or three more of these things. Sir, go ahead.

MALE AUDIENCE: Richard, can you be more specific about what you’re advocating, and can you unequivocally say that your vision of socialism will or will not be mandated by the state?

RICHARD WOLFF: Absolutely. Socialism always understood, whatever its moments, whatever its aberrations. If you really want to understand where the notion of the state being powerful came in, a brief summary of the history.

In the 19th century, socialism basically was born. It was the shadow of capitalism. It’s capitalism’s self-criticism. Whenever there’s capitalism, it produces socialism. The notion that you’re going to get out of capitalism by somehow eliminating socialism reminds me of what Mark Twain said when he read his obituary in the newspaper. The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated, he wrote. The reports of the death of socialism are absurd because capitalism reproduces it.

So here’s my idea. We don’t need the state because the whole role is to transform the base of society. But just like every other emerging system, like capitalism and feudalism, the state, it was thought, can help the process. So the focus of socialists became, capture the state, either with parliamentary or revolution, and then use it to make the transformation.

What happened in the Soviet Union, understandably, and in China too, was you focused on grabbing the state, you managed it, you took the state. But then that next step, that got delayed and postponed, and therein lies the problem whose solution is to transform the base of society, which is why there’s a focus on the workers becoming their own bosses in the workplace.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay, thank you. Quick, let’s do one, maybe two more questions. Sir.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi, this is a question for Mr. Epstein. I was just wondering, are federal domestic taxes the only major way to fund federal spending?

GENE EPSTEIN: Repeat the question, I’m sorry?

MALE AUDIENCE: Are federal domestic taxes the only major way to fund federal spending?

GENE EPSTEIN: Are federal domestic taxes the only way, major way to fund, well, empirically, no. I mean, a lot of federal spending comes from printing money from the Federal Reserve, and obviously a lot of federal spending comes from borrowing money.

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay, we have time for one final question. We’ve got a couple of kibitzers over here. Okay, ask a quick question. No, you’re not paying for this microphone. Okay, no, I don’t want to, you know, Reagan, Reagan, take a hike here.

MALE AUDIENCE: Do I get a chance to ask a question now?

NICK GILLESPIE: Yeah, please, ask.

MALE AUDIENCE: Thank you. My question is, if we’re talking about economics, how can we have a debate about which system is better? And I’ve been listening, and I knew from either of you gentlemen, once the word computers and how that impacts on everything. I felt like I was listening to a debate about the mechanical age, and I was, that the debate really was which platitudes are better, socialist platitudes or capitalist platitudes. Could you discuss and incorporate a little bit about how the computers and the electronic age work on the feelings that you have about socialism and the feelings that you have about capitalism?

NICK GILLESPIE: Okay, let’s end that. Thank you very much, sir. And we’re going to boot into the computer age right before we go to the rebuttal. We are done with questions. So thank you all for standing up, you may now sit down, Richard, why don’t you begin with that?

RICHARD WOLFF: Right. This is not the answer you probably want, but you’re going to get it anyway.

NICK GILLESPIE: You know, that sounds like both capitalism and socialism.

RICHARD WOLFF: One of the remarkable things in this debate between capitalism and socialism is the easy way folks who are rendered uncomfortable by it find another way, a tangential argument to focus on, as if they can somehow thereby escape these basic system questions. You can’t.

Every major technological change has led to people doing something which, if I were mean-spirited, I would call a platitude. Everything is going to be changed by the jet engine. Everything’s going to be changed by electricity. Everything’s going to be changed by chemistry. Everything’s going to be changed. You finish the technological determinism, it used to be called. Each new invention is going to radically change, no it doesn’t, it changes things for sure. But it doesn’t alter the basic systemic questions that we’re talking about.`They’re not platitudes, they’re not evasions.

The focus on the new technology as if it is magically going to lift us out of these problems, it’s a mirage. It has been that through the last 200 years of technical breakthroughs, and AI and computers don’t change that story.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you.

GENE EPSTEIN: I want to comment that I don’t know if there’s a syllable of what Richard said that I do not fully agree with just now. Indeed, look, we’ve had the computer age for three decades. We have ATMs, we have automatic tellers. Wants are infinite. And as Richard indeed is absolutely correct in saying, the way we run our economy is the way we run our economy. Richard and I, we agree. We have nothing debating.

NICK GILLESPIE: You know what, we’re going to stop this phase, this was the audience Q&A. We now have the people, the two debaters, Richard Wolff and Gene Epstein, going into their final statements. They each have seven and a half minutes. And again, remember that the proposition, the resolution before us is socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity. Richard Wolff, you have seven and a half minutes to seal the deal.

RICHARD WOLFF: The first sign that socialism is on its way is that we’re having this debate. That we have Bernie Sanders running and he has the name socialist and he doesn’t give it up. He doesn’t turn away. Elizabeth Warren, who has very similar programs, she still feels the need to reassure everybody she likes capitalism. Bernie doesn’t.

The reality is up until six years ago, my presence on the American media scene was so tiny, none of you would ever have heard of me. I’ve done more public speaking at the invitation of American audiences in the last four years than I did in the previous 50.

Yeah, the public awareness is to the right because of the last years of neoliberalism and the orange clown. I understand that. But beneath that is a shift to the left in the United States. Nothing illustrates it in my mind any better than the remarkable number of times Gene Epstein told you how he agreed with me.

I don’t run away from the label socialist and I don’t run away from the label Marxist either. I’m proud of what I’ve learned from those traditions. But I’m also very clear, and I really hope I’ve gotten that across, that the way the question for this evening was posed is a problem. There is no singular socialism. There never was.

Socialism is a large, complex tradition of multiple different notions that are often at great odds with one another and have had long and bitter disputes. What in the world do you mean by socialism? Is it the social democracy of Scandinavia and German and Western European countries? Is it the socialism that China or Russia or Cuba talk about? Is it the focus on transforming workplaces into worker co-ops instead of undemocratic hierarchical workplace kingdoms?

What do you mean when you talk about socialism? The very idea of using the singular reflects what I tried to say at the beginning. We have to understand we are emerging from a 75-year period in which we didn’t learn about it, think about it, or discuss it. Or if we did, it was in dismissive, cursory manner that didn’t teach Miko anything.

It’s always been an awkward moment when American tourists go to Europe and discover that in every single European country, socialist parties are big, important political institutions. I won’t embarrass you by asking you how many of you know that the government in Portugal today is a coalition of the Portuguese Socialist Party, the Portuguese Communist Party, and the Portuguese Green Party, and that they’ve been the government for quite a few years now. I won’t embarrass you.

The last thing I would say is because of this peculiar fetish Americans have about the government as either being something that’s going to save us all, which is crazy, or which is going to crush us all, which is equally crazy. Governments do what they do in large part because of the pressure from those who have the position to shape them.

One of the problems with the liberal, in the old British sense, or the libertarian if you like, is that the argument always starts with the government as if it were a deus ex machina that just has some qualities of things it does without asking the obvious question, why does the government do this or that or the next thing? We’re supposed to believe it’s built into the genes of the government that it does certain things.

The government does what the pressure of the society and the way it’s organized make it do every bit as much as what the government does influences the rest of the society.

Let me conclude by correcting Gene about Jeremy Corbyn because he’s the future in terms of what we’re talking about. The British Labour Party, the second party in England, by the way, a party most of whose members identify as socialists. In the British Labour Party, there’s a commitment they’ve made. And the commitment goes like this. When we’re elected, one of the first laws we’ll pass is the following: Any company organized in Great Britain can continue the way it is as a capitalist enterprise. But if it comes to the following decision, either shut down or to move out of Great Britain or to sell itself to another company or to go public with an IPO issuing shares, before it can do that, it must give its own workers the right of first refusal. That’s the law. That the workers can buy the company and convert it into a democratically run worker cooperative.

And when everyone says, well, where in the world will the workers get the money to do that, Mr. McDonald, the closest advisor Mr. Corbyn has, smiles and says, the government will lend it to them. Why? Because for the British people to have freedom of choice between a capitalist undemocratic enterprise on the one hand and a worker co-op democratic enterprise on the other, they have to have some experience of what they’re like, both to buy from and to work in. And the only way they can have that experience so they can choose freely between them or what mix they want of them is if there’s a sector that they can buy from and work at.

So we, as the leaders of Britain, have to create the sector so that the free choice of our people between systems can finally happen. That’s the role of the government, expanding free choice, rather than being represented as imposing something in that fearful imagery that we all have, as if the government is like those nasty people at the post office who make us wait before they sell us the stamps. Thank you.

GENE EPSTEIN: Well, I agree with Richard that he and I agree about a great deal. And I think that’s wonderful. Why do we agree about a great deal? Because we’re both radicals. And radical people do see a lot of evil in our current society, even though I think Richard basically wants to march in the wrong direction.

And tonight, I’ve been a little bit troubled that he oftentimes abandons his own book written seven years ago and occasionally lapses into defending the old-style socialisms and falling back into the mode of saying, you know, well, socialism is a lot of things, let’s just do it. And again, ignoring the fact that we need to focus, I guess, again, on the old socialisms.

Well, take a controlled experiment. Society, the world in history, gives us very few. East Germany versus West Germany. West Germany, mainly capitalist, East Germany socialist, impoverished in East Germany, under the foot of the Stasi’s. In West Germany, capitalist, much more affluent, much more comfortable with democratic society.

North Korea versus South Korea. I needn’t elaborate on the differences there. Taiwan and Hong Kong versus most of China until China began to go capitalist. So we have the record staring us in the face of the awful failures of these societies. So we want to say goodbye to all that. They were disasters.

Then we have the social democracies of Europe. Maybe that’s a waste of time to talk about because they are, for the most part, capitalist anyway. But then we cite the Scandinavian countries, even though Norway is a country of five million people sitting on a huge oil well, basically selling oil to the rest of the world and, by the way, apparently worsening global warming in the process. So we want to defend Norway and Denmark.

Well, let’s not cherry pick. Let’s look at the whole range of economies and the experience in Europe, and let’s include Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, where it’s gone very badly. The average is very, very unimpressive. They used to talk about Eurosclerosis. Very troubled economies, by and large. So we want to say goodbye to all that.

So now, again, I want to take Richard literally and talk about his work as self-directed enterprises. I imagine when you hear him saying employees becoming their own bosses, well, you know, there are millions of people who are their own bosses. I didn’t make that up. Richard didn’t make that up. Form a co-op, a family-run business. All of those things are possible under socialism. And the problem that Richard faces is that, by and large, it hasn’t caught on. Maybe it has hope.

So now Richard is resorting to cheering on out of desperation and out of, unfortunately, not taking seriously the fact that you want to work. There are people, by the way, who still are fostering worker democracy. I met a lot of those people. They want to start these firms. They want to run it that way. They think it’s better. People are happier doing it. Wonderful. Let’s do it.

So now Richard is championing the plan of Jeremy Corbyn, where the government is going to start lending money on advantageous terms to companies that want to go workers, self-directed enterprise. How advantageous is that going to be? Jeremy Corbyn, a very ambitious politician, who, by the way, is on record as admiring a lot of hard-fisted strongmen like Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, he might just start giving it away. Capitalists might start selling these firms to people.

Again, Richard is looking for the top-down solution to a bottom-up revolution, and I implore him to abandon all that and go the capitalist route with his plans.

Now then, finally, I try to take seriously what he wrote in his book. He wants to socialize finance. He wants to put it under a political thumb. He wants to specialize labor allocation. He wants to tighten the government’s control over those two sources of enterprise expansion so that dissident publications would suffer, innovation would suffer. All of those things would set us back in terms of prosperity and freedom.

And again, I guess, you know, I mentioned equality. I might ask you the old, you know, 10-20 question. Would you prefer a society in which the top 1% gets 20% richer and the other 99%, the rest of us, get 10% richer, or would you prefer, that’s more inequality, or would you prefer a society in which the top 20% get poorer and the bottom, no, excuse me, the top 20% get poorer and the 99% get 10% poorer? We all get poorer, but then since the top 1% is getting 20% poorer, that narrows equality.

Well, we want actually, because extremes touch, and Richard and I believe in individual rights, I want people to make their own choices about how they live their lives, the professions they lead, where they want to work, and what they do. And capitalism offers that potential, but it can indeed evolve. We do need to free up the housing markets, which are under the thumb of the crony capitalists.

We do indeed, and that is hurting poor people, preventing them from moving to high-wage cities like New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco. We need to free up the guild systems that make it hard for poor people to get other kinds of jobs, the licensing system that protects people, that prevents poor people from moving into better jobs.

There are a whole lot of radical things we need to do to change our economy, but we need to keep the fundamental freedoms under capitalism. Capitalism, private property, is necessary, although not sufficient, to a free and open society. It’s not sufficient because government can always come in and jail you the day after you publish something you don’t like, just like Obama tried.

But it’s necessary, it’s necessary, because if you give somebody like Obama, some political leader, control over your property, over the means of production, then you make it hard even to function in the first place. You make it hard for Richard to sell his books, you make it hard for the Soho Forum to operate, you make it hard for Jacobin Magazine to operate. And that’s why you have to vote against Richard’s resolution.

But Richard does have an out. Workers self-directed enterprises, capitalism offers it to you, Richard, I say go for it. Thanks very much.

For Further Reading:

Israel, Russia, China, Iran: The World in Conflict: Walter Russell Mead (Transcript)

The Natural Order of Money: Roy Sebag (Transcript)

(Through The Bible) – Book of Proverbs: Zac Poonen (Transcript)

AI, Man & God: Prof. John Lennox (Full Transcript)

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