04/05/2010
Vincent Barletta on Alexander the Great
Vincent Barletta specializes in Iberian literatures and cultures of the medieval and early modern periods. He is the author of Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (U of Minnesota P, 2005), for which he was awarded the 2007 La corónica International Book Award. He is also the editor and translator of Francisco Núñez […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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The great thing about being dead is that whatever a new survives takes on a new life.
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We have a show for you today I've been meaning to do for some time now on Carl Marx or more precisely on what is living and what is dead in Carl Marx.
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Now that communism is presumably dead, it was a slow death to be sure which some people attribute to intrinsic flaws in Marx's theories and other people attribute to communism's misunderstanding or misapplication of those theories.
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Was it Stalin who spoke about the iron laws of history?
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Iron is good for many things but it's too heavy a medal for the flow of history and too rigid to contain the exuberant turbulence of capitalism, which has proven far more resourceful when it comes to perpetuating its system than the iron men of history ever suspected.
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Here's the question. Now that communism is dead, his Marxist critique of capitalism more relevant than ever before.
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Stay tuned friends, it's going to get hot in here today.
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Looks so good, it looks so cool, your plan to live in to the poor, but don't give him in.
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What exactly triumphed and what lost out when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 was it a victory of freedom over tyranny of democracy over totalitarianism of the dignity of the individual over course?
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Under the war over course, collectivism? Shortly after the fall of the Wall, Francis Fukuyama declared that we had arrived at the so-called end of history by which he meant that all the great conflicts that had sponsored history had been resolved and that liberal democracy, call it democratic capitalism, had now revealed itself to be the end point or denouement of the whole story.
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Fukuyama got a lot of grief for that rash declaration, but who knows it may still turn out that he was right after all, although personally I would never wager a bit on the end point of history.
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Liberal democracy is a slippery concept, many ideal logs, especially in America, speak of democracy and capitalism in the same breath.
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All too frequently democracy is nothing but a euphemism for capitalism, but are the two so naturally correlated through the interests of capital naturally promote the cause of democracy or the other way around does democracy or a certain kind of democracy actually promote the interest of capital.
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Let's call it consumerism because by now it seems that capitalism and consumerism are becoming synonymous.
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I suspect that Marx's analysis of the internal contradictions of the capitalist system is more pertinent today than ever, for Marx believed that the greatest danger to capitalism is not an external enemy, but its own excesses.
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There's nothing dead as far as I can tell in his insight that only capitalism has the power to destroy capitalism.
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Through its fundamental lack of restraint, its need for more and more growth, more and more profits, more and more markets.
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Marx was certainly right about this much, capitalism is the most powerful force of social, political, economic and cultural destabilization the world has ever known, especially in its recent drive to globalize and in the process deregulate the international economy.
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In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels, Presently spoke of how capitalism by virtue of self-propelled dynamism was bound to promote, I quote, "constant revolutionizing of production uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions ever lasting uncertainty and agitation."
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There is hardly a society anywhere in the world that has not been convulsed by the constant revolutionizing of production uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions ever lasting uncertainty and agitation described by Marx and Engels.
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It's a process that got underway in earnest after they wrote the Manifesto, which makes Marx a prophet of sorts, at least when it comes to globalization.
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I have with me in the studio a guest who is exactly the right person to engage these issues, my colleague Mark Mankal, Professor of History here at Stanford.
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His specialty as a historian is China, but Professor Mankal's interests range broadly.
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Carl Marx and Marxism are of special interest to him, and he has taught courses in this area at Stanford.
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Mark Mankal is also the founder and director emeritus of Stanford liberal education, SLE for short, which is an elite humanities track for freshmen, one of the most successful programs of its kind in the country.
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An intense interest in Buddhism and political theory led to a research sabbatical in Bhutan, where Mark got to know prominent political leaders, thinkers, and members of that society.
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Three princesses attended Stanford as a result of that, and where he has lived in Bhutan that is extensively for the past decade and a half.
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He was deeply involved in Bhutan's recent transition to democracy and is currently the director of the Royal Education Council for the Royal Government of Bhutan, which oversees and implements educational reforms at all levels.
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We will talk to him about his Bhutan work later in the show since it has given Mark's very special relevance these days in Professor Mankal's mind. Mark, welcome to the program.
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Thank you.
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I gather from our pre-recording conversations, Mark, that you agree with me that Mark's may be more relevant to the geopolitics of the world today than he was ever before.
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Why would that be in your view?
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Well, I agree with the observation. I am not sure I agree with some of the premises in your introductory remarks.
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And let me get that out of the way first, the statement that implies, as everybody does, and I think quite incorrectly, that somehow marks in communism are related to each other.
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Or for that matter, Marxism in communism, related to each other in some fashion, is really a tremendous error that was generated both by the communists and by those who are anti-communists.
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Both sides needed somehow, for reasons we'll come to, perhaps, needed to establish connection between Marxism and communism.
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In fact, Marx in his own life kept saying, "I'm not a Marxist," which meant that he did not believe that Marxism should be an ideology, it should not be an ironclad statement about anything.
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I think Marx's far more relevant today curiously than he was even in his own lifetime.
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The Communist Manifesto, for example, is a extraordinary work, a remarkable piece of literature, which has read all too infrequently by our students, for example.
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And in it, Marx describes with an incredible clarity the condition of the world today at the end of the 20th beginning of the 21st century.
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Far greater precision than would have been characteristic of the world in which he lived in the middle of the 19th century, for example.
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He foresaw, not because he was a prophet, but some kind of vision, but simply through the application of logical understanding of the nature of society, of the economy, of the political economy, as he used to be called.
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He foresaw the logical developments of the situation in which he lived, the consequences, and the future were different from the present, but the logic led in that direction.
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And today, in many, many parts of the world, most particularly outside the United States, for historical reasons, and Marx has come into his own again.
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To his own again, you find the right, the left, the middle up and down everywhere. People are now beginning to recognize in Marx's writings a description of the reality that we ourselves are now living in.
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Well, to go back to this separation, you would like to reintroduce between Marx and communism.
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He was prone to use that word sometimes, which were communism.
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He certainly was.
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He was a communist manifesto, for example.
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Well, it was actually the manifesto of the Communist Party.
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But the Communist Party of that time was by no means in any way related to what comes to be called the Communist Party of the 20th century.
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That Communist Party was a group of working class intellectuals, if you will, on members of the working class, mostly English, some Belgians, and the like, who were, in fact, asked him to write the manifesto.
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But the word communist in that context referred to communal, not to the Communist Party as such, but rather to the party that stood for communities stood for the solidarity of those who were opposing capitalism.
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And it had no reference to the kind of state ideology with which we now associate with communism.
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In fact, Marx quite clearly argued that with the end of capitalism and the transition through socialism, the state itself would disappear.
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The communist, of course, did just the opposite, and argued by the opposite.
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I think it was the Communist Party's in Russia, China, primarily in their satellite parties, that in fact make of Marx in ideologue.
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Let me explore that one or two steps for that.
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Marx was a philosopher of capitalism.
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He was an analyst of capitalism.
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And he knew that's what he was doing.
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He was really looking in a very, very objective fashion at the capitalism of his day, and then drawing certain historical conclusions from it.
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He also had a very strong moral message that he wanted to deliver.
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And that was the exploitation of human beings by other human beings.
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He was unacceptable.
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But he understood that Marxism itself would disappear.
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That is to say when you got through socialism and into some new form of society, which he was not able to or wanted to define.
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But when that happened, Marxism would no longer have any role to play, it would simply disappear as another outdated system of analysis, in applicable to the future.
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That's where the irony comes in. That his analysis is more applicable to the future than he could ever have imagined.
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But it's our future, not the Communist future.
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To which it's applicable.
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I would say that it's more applicable to certain aspects or certain realities of the future, which we are living, which was his future, which is our present.
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But at the same time, there are aspects of his theory, which are at least rhetorically prophetic, and so far as you just mentioned.
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And he is claiming that in a future moment in history, there is going to be the disappearance of the class structures and disappearance of capitalism.
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And there is going to be a kind of state where there is an equality of rights and so forth.
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All this kind of hypothetical projection about a future state is something that where you can say that his predictions have not yet come about as a historical reality.
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Whereas what has come about as historical reality is the way that technology has outrun in its sort of energies, the class system, which lags behind.
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And so there has been huge revolutions in the realm of technology that have yet to be followed by the kinds of transformations in the class structure that he was collecting.
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I am inclined to argue the opposite. To begin with, Marx was a great advocate of capitalism.
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And this is again something that Congress always repressed.
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Marx saw capitalism as you say, as the "zubrant" creative, vital element in modern history.
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Far more vital than a zuber named Creative than any other previous society in his opinion.
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He also foresaw that it would spread around the world that in fact, capitalism could not survive without what we now call globalization.
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This was absolutely essential.
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The implications of this with some geographical changes are very apparent for us today.
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For example, you say, well, the technology hasn't resulted in the kinds of social change.
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I disagree completely on that. I think that our modern technology has in fact gone precisely the way Marx predicted.
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Marx understood that capital, the bourgeoisie, if you will, had the constantly invent new forms of production, new forms of technology in order to keep going, in order to increase profits, etc., etc., the argument is fairly well known.
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Which in fact is exactly what has happened. Marx also foresaw, and here is a very interesting little side view where Marx was correct, but geographically dislocated.
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Marx foresaw, for example, that the numbers of the proletariat would increase tremendously.
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That the middle class would begin to disappear, which of course, even if you look at the United States today in the last decade has begun to happen.
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But globally, given the fact that Marx predicted globalization, globally, indeed that is what has happened.
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The proletariat, which really means the Chinese working class today, the American proletariat is the Chinese working class, has exploded enormously.
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What Marx was also probably intuitively correct about is that, as he said, that with globalization would come the weakening of the state, which was really in the middle of the 9th and century beginning to emerge.
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Instead, we get a different kind of governance, a class governance, which indeed many of us feel is exactly what the WTO, for example.
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So what we now begin proceeding is the emergence of this worldwide capitalist government, which is not a state, it's a different kind of political organism.
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And we see the emergence of a worldwide proletariat, geographically located more in China than any else, but being the proletariat for vast areas of the industrial west.
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Whether the prediction of our class conflict, instead of will come true on a global scale remains to be seen.
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Marx himself was never certain.
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There's a very interesting phrase in the manifesto that most people have paid no attention to, rather than very beginning.
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He says, "Well, history is the history of class struggle, in which one class will dominate over the other and eventually take over its power.
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Unless the struggle between them leads to their common ruination."
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So he first saw very clearly the possibility that the struggle could lead to the ruination of society itself.
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That was also an alternative in his mind.
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That is not read very often by people, even though it's right there at the beginning in the midst of the great literature that he wrote at the beginning of the manifesto.
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Can I ask you, Mark? I hear what you're saying there about the rigor of the analysis and how much of it corresponds to things that evolved after he was writing.
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But the notion of class struggle is one that I have a lot of problems with.
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And so far as I think it was even best told Brett to under-set something at the post-war world war tactics.
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And he was saying in Germany, for example, that capitalism found this incredible
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ruse in order to perpetuate itself. It turned the pro-Litarians into bourgeoiss by giving each one of them a Volkswagen on a little house in the suburbs and having all of a sudden being invested in owning a little bit of private property.
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And therefore, they become the defenders of the middle class and the capitalist class.
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And they don't any longer, they're much less likely to enlist in the class struggle.
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The one can imagine that the same thing might happen in a country like China where the pro-Litarians enrich themselves sufficiently that they have enough that they feel that they have to defend it against a communist revolution again or something like that.
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So how do you see class struggle as a political reality? Not a social economic reality, but a political reality.
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And from the Marxist point of view, and I think that again history is not too far from this.
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From the Marxist point of view, there's a process that goes on.
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The process begins with the growing self-consciousness of workers as being part of a similar situation relevant to other people in society.
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Now what that means is that in the capitalist system, the working class, as Marx famously said, really owns no property, it only owns the labor of its hands.
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One of the functions of thought, one of the functions of education in this regard, is to make the members of that class conscious of the fact that they share a certain solidarity with other people in the same category.
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For Marx, a class was defined as a group that shared a certain relationship to the means of production.
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In other words, the means of production are large industries or technology, what have you at any given period of time?
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And I don't own any of it. Therefore, I am outside the that class that owns the means of production. I am without property. I am a propertyless class.
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Interesting that the idea of proletariat made so much of in the West and Chinese was translated to be the propertyless class.
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And that really is the crucial point of mind.
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That class will eventually, from Marx's point of view, recognize everything else being equal, that it's basic enemy is the class that possesses the means of production.
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But what happens when you give that propertyless class of Volkswagen and a house?
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What happens is that the class relationship to the means of production does not change. The worker who buys a Volkswagen or a Chevrolet or what have you.
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And buys a little house still doesn't own the means of production. He may own a little bit more things. He may become more of a consumer.
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But he doesn't own any of the means of production. The Americans tried, and this is a really interesting thing in which American needed the Soviet Union and needed the idea of communism in order to survive and develop policies of survival for capitalism.
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One of the things that happened in the particularly in the 50s, for example, or in the Great Society of Johnson.
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The idea was that if everybody could be a capitalist by owning just one share, the symbolic ownership of one share, that would make everybody into a capitalist and we could be a no class society.
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And for many decades, Americans, the ideology taught that we may have interest groups. We have strata, but we have no classes.
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What they did not understand, and what Marx also did not understand, by the way, did not really perceive, was that in America the question of ownership would become less important and the question of management would become the crucial issue.
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What is the management of industry, the management of industry, of production.
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So what happens is that you get a replacement of the family-owned firm by a managerial class that theoretically, and we have all received, because we all own a share of something, I bought a share once just to see what would happen.
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And you get invited to the shareholders meeting to elect the new managers. That is all sham, of course, because I hardly anybody goes and we all sign our proxies existing managers.
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But a man named Burnham discovered this. So understood this was happening. A man who had been on the left of good socialists in the early 40s, and he was actually in the 1940s, wrote a book called the "Manigereal Revolution."
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And which he said, "Here is a change that what happened in capitalism is that the managers became the ruling class, and that the capitalist classically understood by Marx became secondary to the control process."
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And then he looked around the world and said the fascists had become the true carriers of Marx's ideas, because they understand what a ruling class really is, and that it's managerial, not actual ownership of property, right?
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So he became very right-wing and very in fact, very promosalini at the time.
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So there was a change in capitalism from the point of view of capitalists, but not a change in class structure.
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So look here, am I, an employee at one time of Stanford University? I don't own Stanford University. Stanford University is the instrument for the production of knowledge. It's a means of production. I don't own Stanford University. I'm an employee.
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I considered myself at one time a wage slave at Stanford University, right?
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But no one owns Stanford University. Oh, they do indeed. The Board of Directors, the Board of Overseers, what have we called them?
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Own Stanford University.
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Well, we wouldn't call them a managerial class of the university. No? They are the people who choose our managers, right? They are the ones who decide who will be the president and the provost and so forth and so on.
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If knowledge is your product, and the university is a means of production of that product, the university comes fairly close to being a modern capitalist institution.
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Well, let's not talk about the university because I have problems just on a philosophical level of equating knowledge with a product. I think that there's more to knowledge than something that is either produced or and marketed.
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I guess I'm a platonic enough to believe that knowledge is more of a process of recollection of something that we've already been endowed with almost in a prenatal way, and that it's a discovery of what is already there rather than the producing of something.
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Through the transmission from teacher to student. But anyway, that's a different discussion. What I'm curious about is this process of growing self-consciousness among the proletariat class, whether we have not seen the reverse take place in our time precisely through the stupor that consumerism engenders in the, not only the consumer, but that very class in terms of
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facilitating with every possible means through the entertainment industry through television and so forth,
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militating against any kind of dawning of self-awareness about the amazing product.
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I think that's absolutely correct. In the latter part of the 19th century, and in the 20th century really down through the almost the 1990s, in fact, outside of the US.
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In the US it changed a little bit earlier. The working class was very self-conscious. There were working class parties, socialist parties.
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In fact, to this day, socialist parties are the other side of politics in Europe. Many, many governments are socialist governments, socialist are in part of power and so forth. It's happened really locally in America, but very rarely.
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I think that's absolutely right. What capitalism learned in the process of its own history was a couple of very important things. First of all, it learned the importance of ideology.
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And while Marx tried to, as he said, rem the curtains of ideology, wanted to destroy ideology.
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Can you define ideology?
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The ideology is a set of assumptions that one has that define reality for you. These are the elements of reality. This is the way they interact. This is the objective of life and so forth and so on.
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That's what you believe.
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It's what you believe. But you may believe in platonic, some kind of platonic basis of knowledge.
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But from the Marxist point of view, what you believe is the way in which reality exists for you and the function of science is in fact to destroy that screen, that mask of all.
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Oh, sure. It's an unmasking, yeah.
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Exactly. Yeah.
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So the capitalists learned that very well and learned to use that very well. They also learned how to develop instruments for ideological defeat of the opposition of the movement.
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So those include things like entertainment, even literature, by the way. News.
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Just look at our news broadcast today. Where do you find it?
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Lately in a few fugitive places and criticism in our news.
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My due criticism, not of the political kind, right?
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The Fucchian was only one of these people who argued that politics had come to an end.
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The next stage of that is that all that remains is administration.
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Right. Right.
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So think about how we refer to our government as the administration.
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I think that's very much a part of this picture.
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The way in which languages used forms are understanding of reality.
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So if over the generations you were able to convince that even the, and you hear this on television, every single day,
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we are the middle class.
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What's interesting is where are the other classes? You've got a middle class and an upper class.
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So who are the lower class, right?
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Well, in America it's very much racial groups and so forth.
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The white middle class, the steel worker, who is a member of the middle class, looks as well as a worker perhaps.
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But indeed America has been very successful in all of this.
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A point does come, however.
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And I think that this is also in Marx's understanding of the nature of the world.
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A point does come where real reality and ideological reality enter into a certain kind of mutual negation.
|
| 00:29:02.000 |
And we're reaching that point now.
|
| 00:29:05.000 |
Indeed, we've reached a point in America in this last crisis where people are now beginning to understand.
|
| 00:29:11.000 |
And you see this by the way in many magazines and newspapers.
|
| 00:29:16.000 |
People are beginning to understand that the system doesn't work quite right.
|
| 00:29:20.000 |
Yeah. But let me probe this thing about ideological manipulation.
|
| 00:29:25.000 |
You said that capitalism has been very astute in the way it's gone about perpetuating ideologies and getting people to buy into ideas that don't correspond necessarily to their class interests and so forth.
|
| 00:29:37.000 |
But let's face it, the Marxist regime, that's a communist regime around the world,
|
| 00:29:43.000 |
and having bought into the premise that ideology is a very important driving force,
|
| 00:29:51.000 |
tried by every means available to take control of the ideological agenda and to manipulate it.
|
| 00:29:58.000 |
But they did, why have Marxist regimes or let's say communist regimes done such a bad job and such a...
|
| 00:30:04.000 |
How can the capitalist system be so brilliant at this and communist regimes be so inept at it?
|
| 00:30:09.000 |
That the communist regimes were inept at it because their ability to produce the kinds of instruments, mechanical instruments often.
|
| 00:30:22.000 |
And the kind of society that at least would give some support to their ideology was very poor indeed.
|
| 00:30:30.000 |
Their abilities were very weak in those regards.
|
| 00:30:32.000 |
But why?
|
| 00:30:33.000 |
Ah, the other thing...
|
| 00:30:34.000 |
They start up as underdeveloped countries.
|
| 00:30:36.000 |
And here's a little bit of history with certainly help.
|
| 00:30:39.000 |
Marx makes very clear that capitalism is absolutely an essential prelude to the next major of history.
|
| 00:30:45.000 |
Every stage of history is a prelude to the next major history.
|
| 00:30:49.000 |
The revolution takes place first, the so-called revolution takes place first in Russia.
|
| 00:30:53.000 |
One of the poorest in least developed countries in the world.
|
| 00:30:56.000 |
Lenin understood this in 1921.
|
| 00:30:58.000 |
Lenin understood this and returned Russia partially to a kind of capitalism, the new economic policy.
|
| 00:31:05.000 |
Which was intended to develop use capitalism as a way of developing Russia so that it could eventually become truly socialist.
|
| 00:31:13.000 |
Stalin didn't understand it.
|
| 00:31:15.000 |
So, Stalin was really a very rigorous ideologue.
|
| 00:31:19.000 |
He read the text only and only understood what the text said.
|
| 00:31:23.000 |
He stopped that policy completely.
|
| 00:31:26.000 |
Chinese have done this brilliantly.
|
| 00:31:29.000 |
Chinese have their revolution.
|
| 00:31:30.000 |
They have their physical revolution, their social revolution, the cultural revolution.
|
| 00:31:34.000 |
And they reached the point where they realized they had to go back to capitalism.
|
| 00:31:38.000 |
Which is what we're now witnessing.
|
| 00:31:40.000 |
From Marx's point of view that Chinese are doing exactly what they should be doing if they were following a Marxist prescription.
|
| 00:31:47.000 |
What will happen in the end?
|
| 00:31:49.000 |
The West with its belief in its own system, as soon as it eventually commonism will disappear in China because capitalism and liberalism is over.
|
| 00:31:59.000 |
But a good Marxist will come along and say, "Boy are you guys hoodlings."
|
| 00:32:03.000 |
What can we know for sure which way it's going to turn out?
|
| 00:32:06.000 |
Nobody can know what history for sure.
|
| 00:32:08.000 |
Now you would call Marx in the history for sure.
|
| 00:32:11.000 |
But, in Marxism, there is another element which is very important to keep in mind.
|
| 00:32:16.000 |
And that is the importance of individual initiative.
|
| 00:32:20.000 |
Marx really understood that history was propelled forward by the actions of individuals.
|
| 00:32:26.000 |
People make history.
|
| 00:32:27.000 |
Not laws make history.
|
| 00:32:29.000 |
Laws are only descriptive, but it's people who have to make history.
|
| 00:32:32.000 |
And, consequently, we can say, "Well, it may be that people will begin to understand that there's something wrong going on in China with this extreme capitalism that they have.
|
| 00:32:43.000 |
Functioning very much the way Marx himself understood capitalism to be functioning."
|
| 00:32:48.000 |
And you get the development now in China, for example, of social democratic schools of thought, which are critical of this so-called capitalist road to development.
|
| 00:32:59.000 |
So, again, Marx gives us the key to understanding that.
|
| 00:33:04.000 |
The real Marxist is far less ideologically committed to the idea of history as a preordained path of development than as the capitalist.
|
| 00:33:15.000 |
Well, a few questions then for you, Marx.
|
| 00:33:18.000 |
How drapers in American Marxists, he has this quote that I wrote down.
|
| 00:33:23.000 |
A few thinkers have been so badly misrepresented by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike than Karl Marx.
|
| 00:33:31.000 |
I think-
|
| 00:33:32.000 |
I agree with that, I'm happy to say.
|
| 00:33:33.000 |
You agree with that.
|
| 00:33:34.000 |
Yes.
|
| 00:33:35.000 |
I think most people who call themselves Marxists are ideologues, and they don't realize that Marx really was anti-ideology and very profound.
|
| 00:33:47.000 |
What is the word social democracy? Is that how you would understand the essence of the Marxist, let's say, recommendation or prescription at this stage in history?
|
| 00:33:57.000 |
Well, I think that social democracy, by the way, is itself an outgrowth historically of Marxism.
|
| 00:34:04.000 |
So, that Marxism is in dead.
|
| 00:34:07.000 |
It has also continues to do that.
|
| 00:34:10.000 |
Yeah, I'd never said Marxism, I said communist in its opinion.
|
| 00:34:13.000 |
But Marxism is certainly not dead.
|
| 00:34:15.000 |
And social democracy was Marxists up until when Germany was in '57 when the social democratic party finally abandoned.
|
| 00:34:23.000 |
And the Italian Communist Party abandoned Marxists much, much later.
|
| 00:34:27.000 |
And then abandoned itself as well.
|
| 00:34:30.000 |
But the idea of social democracy is a very deeply Marxist idea in the following way.
|
| 00:34:38.000 |
You can't have democracy in any domain if you don't have it in all domains.
|
| 00:34:43.000 |
You can't have something called political democracy in any real sense of the term if you haven't also got social and economic democracy.
|
| 00:34:50.000 |
Is that really true, though, Mark?
|
| 00:34:52.000 |
If we think of the case of the United States and the founding of the country, there was something through the constitution that was more or less a kind of political democracy, but in actual social and economic relations, it was millions of miles away from achieving that.
|
| 00:35:07.000 |
It wasn't that.
|
| 00:35:08.000 |
In fact, it was the democracy of a very small group of people.
|
| 00:35:11.000 |
Well, there.
|
| 00:35:12.000 |
There was people who were landowners who had white skin, who could pay taxes at a certain level, who could pass a literacy test.
|
| 00:35:19.000 |
Which wasn't very many, a large proportion of the population at the time.
|
| 00:35:23.000 |
Well, is that democracy?
|
| 00:35:25.000 |
Political democracy, I remember an essay that Hannah Arendt writes about the French Revolution, I think, and says that the problem, the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution
|
| 00:35:36.000 |
and why one was successful and the other one failed, is that when the French Revolution came about, there was this revelation of the unspeakable abysmal poverty and misery of the vast majority of the French population.
|
| 00:35:50.000 |
And at the political class who should have instituted laws, institutions, those things which I believe have a lot to do with the shape that history is state.
|
| 00:36:02.000 |
I understand that people are the authors of them.
|
| 00:36:05.000 |
But rather than having the luxury to focus on that, they spent all their time trying to address the economic inequality and to redress the social and economic situations.
|
| 00:36:17.000 |
And therefore, politically, it was not able to succeed.
|
| 00:36:20.000 |
Whereas in America, it had the good fortune to be a wealthy country with natural resources.
|
| 00:36:25.000 |
That sort of poverty had not become ingrown over centuries of not millennia.
|
| 00:36:30.000 |
And therefore, they could successfully bring about a political constitution that took priority over.
|
| 00:36:38.000 |
And then the social and economic situation kind of followed in the wake of the establishment of a political system that we would call republic.
|
| 00:36:48.000 |
Let's not call it political democracy. Let's call it political republicanism.
|
| 00:36:52.000 |
I disagree with your use of the word republic there because you can have a Nazi republic, a communist republic, fascist republic.
|
| 00:37:00.000 |
Well, let's say a system of government in which the sovereignty lies with the citizens and not with a particular dynasty or a state.
|
| 00:37:10.000 |
And it's a very difficult word to define. It's an abstract word. Let's say that we have a political system which the struggle in which to expand the electorate and the participants on the political side has been an ongoing struggle.
|
| 00:37:25.000 |
Remember how late it was, the women got a vote in America. Remember how late it was, the blacks got the freedom to vote in America.
|
| 00:37:33.000 |
Long, long, long after the establishment. But you would agree that the constitution that paved the way for these kind of equality.
|
| 00:37:41.000 |
The constitution certainly made it possible. But I'm not sure the family fathers have that in mind.
|
| 00:37:47.000 |
No, I don't. No, one of the interesting things though is that if you go back and read Martin Luther King, you'll note that Martin Luther King fighting for various things also understood very clearly that social and economic democracy were absolutely essential if you're going to have democracy.
|
| 00:38:01.000 |
But in America today, who really controls the political levers? Certainly not you and I.
|
| 00:38:09.000 |
So, well, maybe you do. I certainly know that I don't.
|
| 00:38:12.000 |
I own a few shares like every one employee at Stanford, I think that, you know, my salary is probably so caught up in the endowment and the investment of the institution that if Stanford were to go broke, we would all kind of go broke.
|
| 00:38:23.000 |
So I suppose we're all co-opted by the capitalist system in one way or another.
|
| 00:38:28.000 |
Let me say the phenomenon which I find quite interesting these days, and that's the Tea Party movement right now. Who are these people in the Tea Party? And I've been reading articles about them and so forth.
|
| 00:38:37.000 |
These are the people who feel left out of the political process. The political process is managed by a very tight group.
|
| 00:38:47.000 |
You know that. And the Tea Party happens to be of many of us are worried about it because it appears to be on the right, the right and the politics, which I believe it is.
|
| 00:38:57.000 |
But the fact is it's a group of people who feel dispossessed. They have the right to vote the same as everybody else. But that doesn't seem to overcome their feeling of being dispossessed.
|
| 00:39:08.000 |
And I think that's a very important point.
|
| 00:39:11.000 |
But, Mark, wouldn't you say as a Marxist that that is false consciousness on the part of these Tea Partyers that instead of feeling dispossessed and that they have to regain control of the political process, what they're probably really reacting to is the fact that the rising important thing is that the
|
| 00:39:26.520 |
the rising importance of other minority groups and that their dominant their class which used to be a dominant class of white.
|
| 00:39:33.520 |
You know, that this this class itself is weakening and therefore they don't want more participation in government.
|
| 00:39:40.520 |
They want it's a restoration of their own power.
|
| 00:39:42.520 |
I think that's absolutely right. But they're being dispossessed by these other groups as well.
|
| 00:39:46.520 |
So that the the issue of dispossession remains the issue we have not succeeded in building a social democracy alongside the
|
| 00:39:55.520 |
political democracy. There are societies where that that has happened but ours certainly does not happen to be one.
|
| 00:40:03.520 |
And Scandinavia would be the place that you would look at.
|
| 00:40:05.520 |
And maybe it's the place I would look to as a model for for development and a model for for the kinds of society that I would like to see develop, particularly in the third world today.
|
| 00:40:16.520 |
They're they have troubles but their troubles are a consequence of globalization and the crisis of globalization.
|
| 00:40:22.520 |
Not troubles not troubles with social democracy per se.
|
| 00:40:26.520 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:40:27.520 |
I've been to Scandinavia earlier this year and it seems like on the one hand an addenic sort of situation where you go to Denmark and and there's a great deal of well being there's general kind of prosperity not obscene wealth if you want.
|
| 00:40:44.520 |
Equaled distribution or kind of equitable distribution and and everyone seems very happy.
|
| 00:40:51.520 |
But from my point of view I guess an American who's used to the conflict being such a addiction.
|
| 00:40:58.520 |
It is you know I always get in trouble with my European listeners when I go back to this issue so I want to apologize to them in advance.
|
| 00:41:06.520 |
But if everything gets resolved in the way let's say Marx would have recommended or that the social democracies of Scandinavia or present what does one do with oneself.
|
| 00:41:17.520 |
This is where someone like Fukuyama had a point which is that even if history comes to an end and liberal democracy let's say social democracy.
|
| 00:41:26.520 |
Resolves all the basic fundamental material economic injustices there's something in human nature which is driven to distinguish me from my fellow man what he called the hypothymia this drive to be to be different from others and that you're never going to eradicate this.
|
| 00:41:46.520 |
So sort of phenomenon from human nature that we can't just rest at our ease in the Garden of Eden because we get bored and boredom will always sponsor some other kind of getting getting us into trouble because basically there's something perverse in human nature that if we're not always causing trouble for ourselves we don't know what to do with ourselves.
|
| 00:42:06.520 |
That is an incredibly American and I would call bourgeois position.
|
| 00:42:13.520 |
But bourgeois wants complacency the bourgeois wants complacency.
|
| 00:42:17.520 |
No they don't.
|
| 00:42:18.520 |
Because bourgeois wants peace of their rule peacefulness for their rule but they certainly believe in competition and believe in striving and believe in individualism.
|
| 00:42:29.520 |
You don't.
|
| 00:42:30.520 |
Those kinds of values myself.
|
| 00:42:31.520 |
No I do not.
|
| 00:42:32.520 |
What do you believe of?
|
| 00:42:33.520 |
I believe in cooperation.
|
| 00:42:35.520 |
I believe in the improvement of human welfare in all domains.
|
| 00:42:42.520 |
And in a way I'm kind of inspired by Marx's statement that under communism which is kind of communism not so yetism.
|
| 00:42:51.520 |
Under communism human beings will finally be freed from necessity so that I can be a poet or a musician or this or I can do everything I want to do or do nothing about what it is not.
|
| 00:43:00.520 |
The only true freedom comes when you are no longer constrained by the need to make a living and to strive with you so that my salary will equal your salary.
|
| 00:43:09.520 |
But Marx, an educator here at Stanford and as an American citizen you also became a citizen of Bhutan we can talk about that in a moment.
|
| 00:43:17.520 |
But what I'm referring to is the kind of satisfaction you might get in being a radical minority in a country that doesn't necessarily want to hear a whole lot about Marx that is resistant to any kind of a polo ghee on that front.
|
| 00:43:34.520 |
Students who need to be jolted out of their complacency that you are your whole life has been devoted to shaking up a system which is so complacent with itself and that you find yourself at as I'm saying with a
|
| 00:43:47.440 |
challenge and therefore there's a purpose there if it were all resolved we would still be facing this problem that what do we do next.
|
| 00:43:56.440 |
I don't believe that anyone really believes that everything will eventually be resolved not even Fukuyama and his people would have thought that.
|
| 00:44:08.440 |
There are always other problems there are existential problems there are aesthetic problems and so forth that will always be faced with.
|
| 00:44:16.440 |
The idea of living in a kind of change this garden of Eden that happened once and failed.
|
| 00:44:24.440 |
Exactly.
|
| 00:44:25.440 |
I have more faith in our ability to be creative and I don't believe that the achievement of a degree of moral society and a degree of equality will never have exactly.
|
| 00:44:39.440 |
You know, Mao Zedong saw very clearly one of the great contributions he made of the Mao Zedong.
|
| 00:44:47.440 |
Was the idea of contradictions.
|
| 00:44:51.440 |
He said that there will always be contradictions between men and women between the inner consonants and the seashore between the mountain tops and the valley bottoms.
|
| 00:45:00.440 |
And since that was a very beautiful almost Chinese metaphor of Mao-di Chinese.
|
| 00:45:07.440 |
The fact that life is always going to be evolving and always going to be changing.
|
| 00:45:11.440 |
The question is are we always going to be subject to the drudgery of making a living under adverse conditions.
|
| 00:45:19.440 |
And presumably the Marxist Communist state which does posit an end point to that kind of history says that no, in the final stages of this whole process that is described in Daskapitha.
|
| 00:45:34.440 |
We get to the point where people, every citizen is freed of this sort of necessity and is free to become an artist and to pursue self-realization.
|
| 00:45:43.440 |
That is more in the manifesto and some other manuscripts of the Daskapitha.
|
| 00:45:49.440 |
But indeed he does say that eventually that is the goal.
|
| 00:45:52.440 |
That is the objective.
|
| 00:45:53.440 |
That is hopefully will happen.
|
| 00:45:55.440 |
But it was so vague.
|
| 00:45:57.440 |
You have almost exhausted the vocabulary he used in that statement.
|
| 00:46:01.440 |
So that is kind of pie in the sky.
|
| 00:46:05.440 |
When I die and go to heaven and me God, wow.
|
| 00:46:09.440 |
Let me quote something from Marx where he writes, "It is the ultimate task of philosophy which is in the service of history to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms.
|
| 00:46:26.440 |
Once religion, the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked."
|
| 00:46:34.440 |
That is very interesting because we are talking here about self-estrangement as the condition that we are still in, but that presumably at the end of the process described by Marx, we would overcome self-estrangement or alienation.
|
| 00:46:49.440 |
So in the meantime, however, religion is a holy form of human self-estrangement.
|
| 00:46:55.440 |
Philosophy, its vocation is unmasked.
|
| 00:46:58.440 |
And of course this is one reason why I think many academics have a natural affinity to Marxism as a methodology of always unmasking because it also serves as a pedagogy to show a student how you can unmask something that is hidden.
|
| 00:47:17.440 |
We professors always like to shine by showing a metaphor, how a metaphor works in a literary text that might not be apparent to the student and so forth.
|
| 00:47:25.440 |
What do you make of, do you believe that the true vocation of philosophy is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms?
|
| 00:47:34.440 |
Well in all forms, that is just the unholy forms.
|
| 00:47:36.440 |
I think that from the Marxist perspective, philosophy has a function in history and that function is a critical function.
|
| 00:47:47.440 |
And that is supreme function of philosophy.
|
| 00:47:51.440 |
And I would accept that. I think the references you are making were very much appropriate for the age in which Marx himself was living.
|
| 00:47:58.440 |
In his work on Foyermark the point is made that man creates God in his own image and then forgets he created him and becomes a slave.
|
| 00:48:07.440 |
And this is very, very significant because from Marx's point of view man is the creator of religion.
|
| 00:48:14.440 |
And therefore once man knows it consciously, man has the ability to reclaim ownership.
|
| 00:48:20.440 |
And I think that is a metaphorical, it is about religious ideology, but it is also about human beings in society.
|
| 00:48:30.440 |
Once I realize that I am the source of wealth, I have an ability to reclaim my ownership of that wealth.
|
| 00:48:37.440 |
And I think this is very cool, that's what freedom is for the Marxist, is the self-recognition.
|
| 00:48:45.440 |
How do I recognize myself only through unmasking the ideology that veils my perception even of myself?
|
| 00:48:53.440 |
Well how much of self-recognition is connected to the kind of historical materialism of Marx where the ultimate essence of reality is an immaterial essence, or am I simplifying too much?
|
| 00:49:08.440 |
Because to recognize oneself as a material being, a number of human beings find that too disenchanting a view of myself, and if that's what it means to recognize myself, I would rather continue to deceive myself.
|
| 00:49:22.440 |
Many scientists would argue that in fact recognizing yourself as a material being is a fantastically glorious and beautiful thing.
|
| 00:49:30.440 |
Because if I recognize the fantastic intricacies, let's say at my body, and of all the things that which my body is capable.
|
| 00:49:37.440 |
And the relationship between our body and my mind, how if I have a sick pancreas, my view of the world will change, that's remarkably not only is it a wondrous thing, but it's also remarkable liberating because then I can take control of my body.
|
| 00:49:55.440 |
That's by the way one of our common themes these days is that we should have control of our bodies and the way they function.
|
| 00:50:01.440 |
Yes, that's materialism, absolutely. And our knowledge about material world and our use of the material world develops over time.
|
| 00:50:12.440 |
Mark, can I ask you about the work you do in Bhutan and how this collaboration evolved between you and the Royal Government of Bhutan and what is so fascinating to you about this?
|
| 00:50:30.440 |
I think there's a lot of personal history involved in that, which we shouldn't waste time on. My family is Bhutanese, so I'm attached to the land in a very personal kind of way.
|
| 00:50:43.440 |
I think Bhutan has a very small country as you know, but it has got a vision of a future.
|
| 00:50:54.440 |
And it's one of the very few countries, in my opinion, in the third, fourth, or even fifth world, whatever the bottom of the barrel is called these days.
|
| 00:51:05.440 |
That really has a very strong social, economic, political vision of the future, which is locally called Gross National Happiness.
|
| 00:51:15.440 |
And I find that very exciting. And I'll just end that by saying that I've got three grandchildren who are Bhutanese, and I want to improve the country they work, they rely on them, simple as that.
|
| 00:51:29.440 |
And you find there in the political reality that Mark's system is still very relevant.
|
| 00:51:34.440 |
No, no, no, no, no. Mark's system is a method analysis. Mark'sism is a tool.
|
| 00:51:41.440 |
And it helps me to look at Bhutan and ask questions that will make me understand how that society functions, perhaps a little bit more clearly than somebody else.
|
| 00:51:52.440 |
Right? Mark'sism practiced or used properly is a very rigorous tool, incidentally.
|
| 00:52:02.440 |
If you're truly using it in the correct way, it doesn't allow you to see things other than as they really are.
|
| 00:52:11.440 |
Now, that's a tremendous philosophical problem, which I -- we don't have time to get into.
|
| 00:52:16.440 |
But I think it does force you to a degree of truth, which is otherwise.
|
| 00:52:20.440 |
And therefore, it -- it encourages you to think of ways to solve problems in other than the usual traditional fashion.
|
| 00:52:28.440 |
Yeah, and what I'm interested in in the connection with Mark'sism is Bhutan speaks about -- puts emphasis not so much on the gross national product of the country, but what they call the gross national happiness.
|
| 00:52:39.440 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:52:40.440 |
This is a fascinating concept.
|
| 00:52:41.440 |
Well, the idea is not in contrast to gross national product, as I keep saying and everybody else keeps saying, you have to have gross national product.
|
| 00:52:52.440 |
In order to have gross national happiness. That is a way is exactly what Mark's are.
|
| 00:52:56.440 |
You have to have capital accumulation in order to move ahead to a more just society.
|
| 00:53:02.440 |
But the idea is that -- remember Bhutan is a Buddhist country.
|
| 00:53:07.440 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:53:08.440 |
That the state has responsibility.
|
| 00:53:10.440 |
The society has responsibility to assure the well-being of all its members.
|
| 00:53:15.440 |
Now, it doesn't have any responsibility to make sure that I am personally happy that I and my wife get a long well together,
|
| 00:53:23.440 |
but it certainly has a responsibility to make sure that, for example, economic conditions don't interfere in my relationship with my wife.
|
| 00:53:32.440 |
Look how many marriages that Mark's himself said is the capital is a little destroy the family.
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| 00:53:39.440 |
And it does by introducing the economic element into the family, which becomes very crucial.
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| 00:53:44.440 |
A lot of marriages in the West breakup because husband isn't making enough money or whatever.
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| 00:53:49.440 |
You know the argument as well as I.
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| 00:53:52.440 |
And the idea of gross national happiness, the state has the responsibility.
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| 00:53:57.440 |
It's written into the Bhutan's Constitution to assure the well-being of all people to assure the full employment, to assure medical care.
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| 00:54:08.440 |
Now, we haven't got the resources yet.
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| 00:54:10.440 |
We've worked very hard to begin acquiring these resources.
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| 00:54:13.440 |
But the goal of the society is that.
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| 00:54:18.440 |
So can I take it, Mark, that you do not subscribe to a Therovian principle that that government governs best, which governs least?
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| 00:54:28.440 |
Yeah, that's not just the Therovian idea.
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| 00:54:30.440 |
I mean, some Chinese were arguing that in 2005, a hundred years ago.
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| 00:54:34.440 |
So it's an old idea. Do you believe in a strong state?
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| 00:54:37.440 |
I believe in a strong state. I absolutely do, because we live in the reality of a modern industrial society.
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| 00:54:43.440 |
We live in the reality of a globalized world. And the question is, what institutions are available to us to assure our well-being in the face of contrary impulses?
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| 00:54:56.440 |
Well, my last question then, given that you, as you mentioned earlier in our conversation, the political economic reality nowadays is that nation states or states no longer control the administration of capital,
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| 00:55:11.440 |
but that it's these para-national, multinational, let's say corporations and so forth.
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| 00:55:17.440 |
If that is indeed the case, what role remains for the traditional state in the 21st century?
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| 00:55:26.440 |
Well, I think there are two answers to that.
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| 00:55:29.440 |
One of the roles of the 21st century state is in fact to defend its people against these other forces.
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| 00:55:37.440 |
And that's a very serious question. And by the way, in the WTO, given the failure of the Doha Round, which over the last few years, shows that the states are beginning to understand that that's one of their roles.
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| 00:55:51.440 |
The other answer to your question is, I don't know.
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| 00:55:54.440 |
Namely, we work at history. History itself is a labor. I don't know what our product will be, but we have to start with that question and then see where it takes us.
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| 00:56:05.440 |
That's a very honest answer. I appreciate it. It's been a fascinating conversation, Mark.
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| 00:56:09.440 |
Thank you for coming on to entitled opinions. We'll have you back when you return from your next excursion to Bhutan.
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| 00:56:16.440 |
Thank you.
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| 00:56:17.440 |
Thanks again.
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