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[AUTO GENERATED TRANSCRIPT]

Josh Olson 0:02
Do it, man. Do it. Let's just do it.

Dave Anthony 0:06
Do a peep audience people you are listening to the audit with Dave. Dave Anthony and Josh Olson. Who keeps yelling at me.

Josh Olson 0:19
Yes. Yeah, I'm the one who yells on this show that has that as a fact good good call someone

Dave Anthony 0:24
has to bring life to this thing

[MUSIC] 0:40
you see those schools as a back pass fail grade or if they fail fast

you got around Grand jam champagne. This is a yacht

out at

Josh Olson 1:31
this podcast , you know brings life to the audit Dave. It's the people, people at the lever who bring us like they bring you the award winning reader spotted investigative news outlet. If you want to support the show, go you can become a paid supporter to the lever which gives you access to all their stuff and all our stuff, including our bonus content. You can also make a one time contribution that goes too much your work goes and goes just right in today's pocket, because he's got this massive, massive drug problem. Not not to pass judgment on the drug problem or anybody else's drug problem just where it goes.

Dave Anthony 2:12
Okay, the good drug problem.

Josh Olson 2:14
There, no one said it was bad Lemmer news.com/audit you'll see a button for the tip jar take you to our Venmo page you can also go directly to the demo page. We are at the audit at Venmo under businesses and then all of our other stuff you can follow us at Twitter at at the audit podcast and you can even email us at the audit podcast@gmail.com like we got a great one this week. Before we get into a discussion of Praeger universes universe, or your universe universe, the pregnant the prayer unit prayer shared universe great. I want to write those movies. I feel like I could feel like I feel like my brain fortunately off mush. After spending weeks and weeks and weeks watching these things. I could write Prager University movies. Now we're gonna be getting into like their their take on leftism on socialism and communism, which is pretty goddamn hilarious. And of course, we've got a guest who's way overqualified even think about this stuff. So we'll get to that in a minute. comments. I think he's a communist.

Unknown Speaker 3:20
Is he actually call me Oh, call me yeah.

Josh Olson 3:23
Good for him. In case he's not we're just alleging. I can't imagine that with his like, I guess is the right Professor Richard Wolf, who's we talking about in a minute, but I've never actually heard him saying straight up economy. I love the idea of like, this guy is probably America's foremost expert on this subject. And proponent of it going How dare you? How dare you. But Clinton Democrat, you fool. So we got a problem. We got a problem in this country. We do. Yeah. And I'm aware of the fact that you're listening to two gentlemen who both have a little bit of gray in my beard, you know, and Dave Dave's just like full on you see that just like wreck of a man I'm looking at this was a tiger. Yeah. Years of vitality or long past.

Dave Anthony 4:17
I should be in hospice.

Josh Olson 4:19
But I think that gives us more authority to speak on the subject because as an eight year old, Dave, I believe 85 Neither of us believes that. People in their 80s shouldn't be running the country.

Dave Anthony 4:31
I actually a guy, I want to go farther than that. Like, I think that guy there. I I do think there's something unless you're I think maybe art is a thing, but I do think that if you're still wanting to work and you're not an artist of some kind at that age, I think there's something really wrong with you. I think that that like that's not what life is. You know, we already work too much in this country. And then you You get to a certain age and you should be like, I just want to go look at horses and maybe sit on a beach or cloud. I'm just gonna sit next to a tree.

Josh Olson 5:09
Let's follow us around obviously we're talking this week is Who else gonna be talking about when we're talking about people who are too old and government because there's only one. Dianne Feinstein, Feinstein, Feinstein ELLs get it wrong Feinstein, Feinstein, my son returned to work today. She had the classic left side or left side paralysis of everybody who's had shingles that the you know, we all know about that. She looked great. She looked great, though. Like, I'm not gonna listen. It's like it's but Jesus Christ. She's 112. And she clearly just came back from having a stroke and even before the stroke. I mean, I think my favorite I mean, on top of just like repeating herself a lot. In the last year or so. thing were five minutes after her office had announced that she wasn't running again. And she was asked about what informed her decision not to run again. And she said, I haven't made up my mind yet. Yeah, I mean, she's, she's, she's gone. She's gone. And I think we all

Dave Anthony 6:13
you heard the the senator Warnock thing. Right.

Josh Olson 6:17
Which, which, which one?

Dave Anthony 6:20
She went up to the senator from Wisconsin, Rick Scott. And she congratulated him. Tim, for oh, no, Tim Scott. Sorry. She went up to the the black senator. I was okay. And she congratulated him for his victory in Georgia.

Josh Olson 6:47
I'm gonna say something concerning his circumstances. It would have been funnier, she'd come up to the white guy.

Dave Anthony 6:53
I know. Right? Yeah, it would have been funnier. I got confused.

Josh Olson 6:58
Yeah. Chuck Schumer and

Dave Anthony 7:00
confused her black guys. Welcome back.

Josh Olson 7:05
And 50 minutes talking to Chuck Schumer before he realized that she thought he was AOC. Look,

Dave Anthony 7:15
she shouldn't be there. She shouldn't,

Josh Olson 7:17
and said that she's old. It's not that she's old. It's just that she has clearly a medical conditions that are part and parcel of being old that you're far more likely to be suffering from when you are that old. But are Yeah.

Dave Anthony 7:29
That being said, Yeah, you should not be that old. And in office, because think about how old people understand technology and our entire fucking governing. Everything we're dealing with is technology. And you shouldn't have to explain email to someone who has to deal with how to handle AI. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's just basic ship people like it's ageism. Okay. Nobody on the fucking Supreme Court gets it. They're all too fucking old. Everybody's too old in these jobs. They don't know what they're doing. And this stuff is really, really important. And they don't know they don't understand it. They don't know what's happening. Sure they have staff. It shouldn't need staff. It should be younger people doing this.

Josh Olson 8:18
It's it's well, it's clearly her staff in this case. I mean, that is everybody's theory. It's the one that makes the most sense that has just been keeping up the facade so that they can keep their jobs. And it's, it's kind of terrifying. But But you bring up a really good issue, who's the David Sirota just this past week, had a leading artificial intelligence expert named Max Tegmark on the lever time podcast. It's an amazing interview and you should listen to it. It's chilling, there's also hope. But the one thing he talks about and where there is hope is in us getting around quickly to starting to anticipate the issues with AI and regulating to head them off. And Dave has just brought up the most terrifying fucking point in regard to that because even if you can get past the usual unwillingness to do anything quickly, the notion of having people like Dianne Feinstein, in charge of coming up with regulations to deal with AI is jaw dropping, that's psychotic. She we had early understand how her cell phone works

Dave Anthony 9:35
early on in podcasting. There was a patent troll member that basically was saying that he owned podcasting. And he had done like a little literally done like a little drawing radio to internet like it was just like that. And so we a bunch of podcasts marinade, a bunch of people, we asked people to donate we put together a fun, we raise money and then We had hired a couple of lawyers, and one of them went up to Congress and and I would talk to her. And one day she goes Dave, I'm spend most of my time just explaining what the internet is and how email works. Right? And that was that was like five fucking years ago like, These people don't know what they're doing because they're too old. It's it's an EMP bring that up. People go, that's ageism, okay. Whatever you want to call it. They're ill equipped for the job. Our technology is now advancing at a more and more rapid pace all the time. And especially with ai ai. Now we're in a place where technology is going to advance so rapidly, we kind of will have a hard time wrapping our head around the speed with which is advancing. This is a this is a whole new world now. And they don't know the basic shit. My mom asked me once, how do you get into the internet to do your podcast? That's who these people are. They're fucking old.

Josh Olson 11:10
My father, who by the way vigorously agrees that all of these people are tools. And who was around their age? When I did Brownsville, the audio drama that I wrote a couple years ago and bumped them all into CDs, so he could listen to them. Yeah, got a computer. He's got an iPad he's got it's got Apple TV. Yeah, to this day. How do I hear it?

Dave Anthony 11:36
It's not a it's not it's not a fucking knock on these people. They were just raised differently. They did everything they are in 100%. They're gonna be like, hey, my mic, son will have a date over and I go, she was cool. He goes, that really wasn't her that was her hologram will be like, I don't know what's going on. Like, it's gonna that's gonna be the world. Like, I'm not going to understand shit. It's going to be crazy. Also, I'm not in the fucking Senate.

Josh Olson 12:03
Yeah,

Dave Anthony 12:04
yeah. And I brought this up during the election. I cannot tell you how many liberals and women mostly came at me and said, It's too important to have someone who's been in there that long on those committees. And here now you have someone who's been in there that long on those committees. And I asked you, how's it going? Now?

Josh Olson 12:30
Yeah. Yeah. Because how many how many she was gone for, what, 45 days or something. And just the

Dave Anthony 12:37
we could they couldn't get any judges through,

Josh Olson 12:39
couldn't get judges through people like, Well, yeah, they're getting judges through now. It's 45 days off. And keep in mind that the last administration, Donald Trump, I believe, made his administration made a deal with the Democrats to essentially rubber stamp all of his judicial nominees. So they were just whipping them through at top speed on a daily basis. Do you remember not making it easy on the Democrats here? And now you've got her gone? It's insane. It's absolutely remember

Dave Anthony 13:06
when Schumer made a deal that they could go on Christmas break? And the deal was he would pass a bunch of there. Yeah. It's like, what do you what are you doing? So you can go on Christmas break? What are you doing?

Josh Olson 13:18
We don't want to get bogged down in battling back and forth. You're supposed to slow these down. These people are fucking insane that they're, they're stacking the courts with. Yeah. But I think I mean, I think now it's at a point I don't know anyone and it's like the, the pushback the support for Feinstein just seems virtually non existent. I mean, you'll find what she wanted. But

Dave Anthony 13:41
I mean, it's bad when she when she came back, and people saw the pictures. They went, Oh, my God. Like, she looks terrible. She She She looks really, really old. She's you're like, oh, that's n stage old person age. Yeah. But here's but then you've got Dick Durbin. who's like, she can come back when she's ready to come back. I mean, the problem is, is they don't, they just don't care. There's no fight in them. They're all buddies. So they're not going to tell Diane to get her ass back here like they're not. And people like I'm sure Chuck Schumer is doing it behind the scenes How the fuck do you know he's never given you any any example that why would you think that?

Josh Olson 14:27
Yeah. I mean, that's, I always wonder about that, are they? You want to believe that behind the scenes, I'm fine with them working day and night to get someone like her to step down if they're doing behind the scenes and saying nice things about her but but they're clearly not or they're not effective. And now, what does she have same thing like, you know, Obama did talk to RBG back in what was it 2009 When she was diagnosed with a particularly deadly form of cancer, and couldn't get her to step down. And so you're president united states and you know, we It's just it's, it's crazy. You know, this has an impact on human lives,

Dave Anthony 15:05
human lives, but they're thinking of the politics. What they're thinking of is, I believe Gavin Newsom said he would if there was an opening ever when he was in office that he would appoint a black woman. And then now you have an election going on. And there's a black woman running and a white woman and a white dude. And now it's complicated right now he would have to pick a black woman. But can he pick that black woman because she's actually pretty left? He doesn't want that. lets you know that. That's a lot of the thinking here like do they want a do they want a lefty ish? Senator real, real scary to them? Real big problem.

Josh Olson 15:46
But it is all of this. All of this is part and parcel you know, cirrhotic all the Democrats, the Washington generals, it's a it's a it is a good metaphor. Although the Washington generals were supposed to lose, and that was baked in, and I do from time to time wonder if these people truly understand that or if they're just so bad at what they do. Some combination of both, but anyway, it's a combination day for the third time now in close to a decade. You know, a lot of things get lost in the shuffle and you live in situations for so long and you drink the water so long, you forget that it tastes like urine, all the rest, but step the fuck back. Donald Trump is not a hard candidate to beat in a race for an elected office. Yeah, he's, he's certainly not now now that he's been impeached twice, and indicted for financial crimes. And at this major judgment against him. He's now a sexual abuser. For the third time, the Democrats are running somebody who could conceivably lose to him. Yeah. And I think it's all part of the same thing. It's all part of this. Yes, it is.

Dave Anthony 17:01
100% It's all part of the same thing. Absolutely. It's it's just, there's no sense of urgency. There's no sense of of, of what the future is. To them. It just seems like it's another election, well, then he'll get in here and we'll raise money, and then we'll come back. And I'm looking at it going, well, if Trump gets in there that like people have said this, but that could be the end of democracy, you could now have, you know, so he gets in there. He already was in there once he wanted to take over. So now he is smart. And now he replaces the military guys. So now all the military guys are in favor of him. And then he does his shit. Like, that's how these guys do it. But they put you know, that's what, that's what Biden ran on Ben Bryden ran on, I'll save you from this guy. And then he did nothing at all to do for Trump. And they're going to end we looked at the polls when Hillary ran, and she was not doing well against him at the very outset. And now you're gonna do it again. And it's all the same thing. It's your right. It's all the same thing. Like,

Josh Olson 18:02
yeah, I don't mind Trump. But Trump running for president that should be an off year we shouldn't be able to go okay, I don't have to be invested at all. Now this one goes.

Dave Anthony 18:10
Yeah, this one is a cooperate. It should be a clobbering.

Josh Olson 18:13
Did you be a force and right now he's, he's killing Biden in the polls. And keep in mind, yeah, I mean, an idiot. And of course, you you know, the only thing worse than Trump is some other Republicans would be more effective. But Donald Trump, in one term, appointed more Supreme Court justices that Obama did into

Dave Anthony 18:29
well, yeah, but that was, you know, Obama didn't exactly they didn't exactly fight when. When they held stolen, stolen Supreme Court justice. Yeah. But then there's the other thing, which is what's going on with the court? Like, the Thomas stuff is now just absurd, how just, it's just corruption on another level. And Dick Durbin is like, I mean, Roberts has got to handle that. No, it's your fucking job. You you, you run that your committee and again, it's all the same thing. This is all the same thing we're talking about. They're not doing anything. Yeah, Biden, right now looks like the guy who turned over government to Hitler. Looks like fucking von Hindenburg. He that's what he that's what he looks like. That's, that's what I'm looking at. I'm just watching them going. Everyone can see what's coming. It's very obvious what's going to happen. And then the other thing is, I've said this before, but if you're not going to do anything about COVID, if you're not going to encourage mask wearing, if you're not going to encourage testing, if you're not going to clean the air, then the old deer can they the older your candidates are the older your officials are, the more chance they have of dying or being harmed. Now, we don't know what happened to find Feinstein. It could be anything but if you have COVID your chance of a stroke. goes up significantly, right? It's like two or three times, shingles. And now you have old people who are. Yeah, shingles. So now you have old people who are more vulnerable than they were before. And that's who you're going to have running for office. It's, it's really madness. It's really, it's wild to watch. Like, it's just like, the delusion level is off the fucking chart.

Josh Olson 20:25
Yeah. And it's not this is not some wild as leftist position. This is not me and Dave saying, you know, capitalism needs to be destroyed. This is a does this is you can turn that switch off here. I just like we're just like, This is insane. This is completely insane. I think the frustrating thing is everybody everybody knows it's completely insane. Yeah, and the people, the people who are working day and night, not to, not to say that publicly, are doing damage to themselves, you know, they're breaking their own brains. But everybody knows. And there's this, it's, you know, it all taps in it all it all part of a one giant holistic package. You know, the, we're starting to acknowledge that loneliness is is a, you know, viral contagion in this in this country right now. And it's like, yeah, it's all part of that. It's all part of yeah, just giving up hope, but not being able to acknowledge it. And it's Jesus Christ. Yeah, those pictures were just horrifying. And I mean,

Dave Anthony 21:21
I was expecting I had the lowest expectations, and the pictures shocked me.

Josh Olson 21:26
Yeah. Yeah. She'll put something of a horror movie, but

Dave Anthony 21:33
I've done and we've never, we've never been in this place in our life, where the Democrats are running the person that 78% of the population in America do not want to run again. That's never happened to Democrats don't want him to run again. Yeah, yeah. And you're going to do that against Trump. Just so I'm understanding you. You guys all get the situation. 70% don't want them to run. And that's the guy you're gonna run against crazy. rapey fascist guy. Yeah, okay.

Josh Olson 22:04
Yeah. I mean, here's the good news is the general public seems to despise Trump pretty pretty seriously, but, but of those two candidates, only one of them has any enthusiasm behind them. Right? That's never good. It's never good to run a candidate with no enthusiasm against the candidate with enthusiasm, even minority.

Dave Anthony 22:27
And you're already you already in the position of, you know, as we get closer to the election, the oil companies are going to raise the prices of oil. We have a recession coming because the Fed has decided we need to have a much more unemployed people. So and then, you know, there's 20% chance we have an Omicron like variant. That's what the scientists saying there's a 20% chance that yeah, so you know, put those, put those things out there. And it's just like, What do you think's gonna happen? You're always running against oil companies now. The oil companies are always gonna raise prices. They've been doing it for like, two or three elections, presidential elections there. That's what they do they raise the prices in the summer to fuck the Democratic candidate. That's, it's just a track record now. So how you going to counteract that? You shouldn't have the guy in office running number one. Yeah, I've never seen anything like this. I mean, every Democrat I know, except for two and my family. Every Democrat I know is in my family is just like, and they're all lives and they're just like, What the fuck is going on?

Josh Olson 23:38
Ma'am? Ma'am? Liberals, we stand with you here at the audit.

Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Our guest this week is Professor Richard Wolffe, who is the professor emeritus at the University of Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the new school. He's the co founder of the journal rethinking Marxism, the author of Understanding Marxism. You've you've seen him on a bunch of shows he's been on our old show the West Wing thing. Absolutely. Well, wonderful. We are knocked out to get him. He is one of the great, great academic political minds, I think of our time. And so because we have such great respect for him what we forced him to watch them. Prager you video. Because we're assholes. Yeah, we're terrible.

Dave Anthony 24:34
Who would do that to someone that they respect?

Josh Olson 24:36
Yeah. Yeah, it's bad.

[MUSIC] 24:44
If you finally had enough of him being college, left wing, get yourself a real degree from Prager University.

Josh Olson 25:04
But yes, let's just jump right into who is Karl Marx? It's presented by a guy named Paul Kanger. Were you familiar with him? And you heard of him? Pfizer? Well,

Richard Wolff 25:15
I don't I don't think I have heard of most of the names that I play. And I obviously know, I know who Nikki Haley is. I know who Tucker Carlson is. I know, I'm trying to remember a couple of others, but most of these. And it's actually significant that I don't know them because I've been teaching Marx and Marxist theory. I taught it at Yale. I taught it at the City University of New York. I taught it at the University of Massachusetts. And I'm teaching it right now at the New School University in New York City. So I literally have 6050 to 60 years of teaching this stuff, during which I have assigned assigned an innumerable number of books and articles. I know the literature I know who's who in the literature. These people I've never heard of.

Josh Olson 26:18
Well, this may seem so so you may leave this with with something new to add to your to your work, because we did some digging, because it's really weird. He's it's the only video he's got on the site. A lot of the presenters do a bunch of them, and there's no profile for him. So we looked into him. He's a hardcore conservative Catholic. He writes political books, of course, one of them guests in post production. It's the basis of a new biopic of Ronald Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid from the director of a movie that actually I think came out last year was the worst reviewed movie of the year or one of them. Some others did not looking promising. But anyway, I wanted you to hear this because I got this brief clip of him on a YouTube show called Thinking in public discussing his book The Devil and Karl Marx, Communism's long march of depth deception and infiltration. And honestly, I completely understand if at the end of this one minute clip you just want to renounce everything you've ever taught because i Are you are you i genuine question because I have not heard this stuff. But are you familiar with the apparently Karl Marx's relationship with Satan?

Richard Wolff 27:26
No, I missed that one.

Josh Olson 27:29
Well, here you go. This is this this could change your life. Sir

[VIDEO] 27:32
Marx's writings about the devil were first discovered by his original biographer, a guy named Franz Mehring, and I know you probably want to get to this. So it might be talking a little bit out of order, but but when when Franz Mehring discovered these writings, he told Marx's daughter you should not let this stuff see the light of day. I mean, this is this, this ad this this is really quite frightening stuff.

Karl Marx had an obsession with Satan. And clearly, even as he sought in every way possible to kill off God, and, and even organized religion. He, he had enormous Sympathy for the Devil, and clearly, in some sense, believed in the devil. Now we're going to talk about what that may have meant, but he clearly believed in a personification of evil,

these poems and his plays, they're filled with destruction, death, suicide pacts, and of all things. I mean, you're you're a historian. Can you name for me any individual that you could think of in all of history, who had two daughters who kill themselves in suicide pacts with their husbands of all things? And Marx writes about, you know, fair maidens pale maiden suicide pacts. Marx had two daughters who killed themselves and suicide pacts with her husband.

Josh Olson 28:55
That's who we're dealing with here.

Richard Wolff 29:02
Want to comment? On by all means, yes. From the beginning of Marx's writings, and particularly after he died in 1883, one of the most important movements that took up his writings and develop them and spread them was an art with a whole set of organizations that came to be known either as Christian socialists, or Christian Marxists. They've had all kinds of articles and books written they've held conferences to which 1000s of people came to explore the shared ideas they found, and I'm not part of that I'm describing what his History shows us. My point is simply that over the 150 years roughly, since Marx's work has been out there in the world, it has, in fact, attracted an enormous number of believing Christians, who found much in Karl Marx's work that they found that they could agree with that they were sympathetic to that they were, you know, emphasizing in their own work. A few years ago, there was an enormous movement, particularly in Latin America, known as libertarian or liberalisation or liberation theology, particularly strong in Brazil. And it reached all through the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, were large numbers of Jesuit priests, among others, embraced Marxist ideas, not all of them, and they made their own interpretations. Anyone who's even a little bit familiar with Marx knows, and understands why there are multiple different diverse interpretations of what he wrote. It is so much the case that any person who writes about Marxism or Marxist theory, in the singular, is clearly uneducated. It would be as if you were talking about religion, but everything you had to say was about Lutheranism. Well, no, I mean, this is important. Is Lutheranism part of religion? Of course it is, it belongs there, it's to be respected. But to represent that interpretation that comes from Martin Luther and is established in the Lutheran church, as if it were a religion, that's legitimate. And you are either off to something not so agreeable, or you're ignorant. And either way you don't come out looking all that good. So are there interpretations of Marx that have been beloved by agreed to worked with by people who believe in God, absolutely huge numbers of them. And they may all be deluded that the gentleman speaking may have it right. And everybody else around the world got it wrong. But the odds on that are, well, let me suggest play the lottery, you got a better chance. It's just not. It's basically nonsense. Let me say a further word. The most famous remark that marks made in terms of the number of times it has been quoted, the number of times it has served as the basis of a book or a doctoral dissertation in a university, is when Mark said, when I criticize religion, I don't forget that it is this is the, quote, a haven in a heartless world. It attracts people, it meets Jim, real needs. And the critique of religion has to understand the genuine need the genuine fear, the genuine desire and hope that religion has been able to respond, because it is a haven in our heartless world, and those of us that criticize capitalism, because that's what Marx was interested in. better understand that the people we're trying to reach include Many who have found solace in religion that needs to be understood, it needs to be respected. And one last example. After World War Two, Marxism really took off. I mean, he had been strong before that, but it really took off, particularly in Europe, and the country where Marxists were the most powerful, in case you're not familiar with. It was Italy. Italy, a Roman Catholic, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. Italy had the strongest communist party outside of Russia itself. And a typical Italian family would include people who went to church Sunday morning, and to the Communist Party meeting, Sunday afternoon and They didn't feel the slightest conflict between them. The party leaders were respectful to the priests and vice versa. They had to live together they understood that they, they discussed their differences. The kind of hysterical fear mongering around Marxism is the behavior of people who are terrified about other things, and got it displaced by some accident, on to onto Marx. And I understand why that would be the Cold War cultivated that. But in terms of everything I know, and I've taught Marxian ideas and Marxist literature for 50 years, he was not interested in Satan, He was not interested in the whole logic in which God and Satan are having a perpetual struggle. When he talked about those things. Rarely, he saw them as displacements of real conflicts in the world, that people were trying to work their way through, but they were using what they had learned a biblical language if you'd like to work those struggles out, and Mark spend time figuring out to his satisfaction, what those struggles were, the religion was simply the starting point to get at the deeper needs that it express.

Josh Olson 36:29
Yeah, and you've hit on the, the, the worst part of doing these episodes in which we have to bring on someone like you who can give such a thorough answer to such a stupid question. So let me apologize for the last time because I'll be here all day, if we have to apologize every time you have to reply to somebody stupid, but let's, let's jump into this one. This is Paul Keating Gore, who's obsessed with Marx's relationship with Satan. Explaining to Prager you viewers, who who is Karl Marx,

[VIDEO] 37:01
ideas have consequences, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes catastrophic, like the ideas of Karl Marx. Born in trayer, Germany in 1818, Marx didn't invent communism. But it was on his ideas that Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet Union, Mal built Communist China, and innumerable other tyrants from the Kim's in North Korea to the Castro's and Cuba built their communist regimes. Ultimately, those regimes of movements calling themselves Marxist murdered about 100 million people and enslaved more than a billion. Marx believed that workers specifically those who did manual labor were exploited by

Richard Wolff 37:45
this is the same kind of assertion that has been used in propaganda wars against just about everybody who has suffered propaganda wars aimed at them, that somehow they are related to mass murder that there seems to be if you can draw some sort of link between somebody you don't like or something you don't like, and mass murder, kind of, you know, then you can sit down, you've done your job, case closed, we're done. And so we have this has been done throughout the 20th century, pretty much once the Soviet revolution happened in 1917. And people were upset by it for a variety of reasons. It became popular on the right wing, the folks most upset by these things, to associate the revolutionaries, whether they call themselves Marxist or socialist, or all the rest of it, with mass murder. And the argument goes pretty much like this gentleman here, that if there was a case of murder you can point to. And by murder, I simply mean, the sudden undesired deaths of a lot of a lot of people. If you can find that in history, then you look for who's in power. And you try to identify if the person or persons in power were x, well, then you can make the claim X caused the murder of these people. Okay? Now, this is stupid. And it's stupid, because war is a very complicated thing. Murder of large numbers of people doesn't usually happen outside of war, occasionally, but mostly it's a war or war related phenomena. And if you've ever done any work, trying to understand war, you would understand that many factors have to come together before there's a war. People don't just Say well wake up one day and say, oh, let's go and kill a lot of people. That's not how this works. Grievances build up, efforts to resolve differences don't work out, and a whole kind of pressure builds up. And then you have a war. And then large numbers of people die. And if you look at the people who run the countries that go to war, since most wars are between countries, so for example, Russia and the Ukraine today, these are wars that countries are involved in. Okay. I don't find it interesting to make this linkage. I mean, I understand that, if you're looking at communist Marxist and socialists, for example, and this is true for every group, you can see them that they were in charge of all kinds of societies for all kinds of yours, and didn't do that. Right. So the first problem is, you've got to admit, unless you really crazy that these communists and Marxists that you're accusing of killing large numbers of people have been in charge of countries for long periods of time, where there was no killing of people. And so now, that may be opens the space that the killing of people had lots of causes, other than who happened to be in power. It will be a little bit like saying the United States is at war with the Ukraine, because of Mr. Biden. That would be stupid. Because he's not, yes, he's in charge. Yes, he gave the final order, if whatever happened, but as he is eager for us to know, Mr. Trump had something to do with it. And Mr. Obama before that, and all kinds of things built up. To attach it to one person is usually stupid. Not I mean, it's not a serious effort to understand. But if we want to play the game, let me play it. And maybe that'll make you think twice about doing it again. The worst war in human history, in terms of the numbers of people it killed, was World War One. A war between Britain fundamentally, and Germany, other countries allied with one or the other of them. It was the most horrible war I believe, in so far in human history, no good, no great achievement that but it was the case. Every single country that participated, declaring war, on the other side, in that country was led by people committed to capitalism. Therefore, in the logic that these people use, I want to bless if I used it, I don't. But if I use their logic, I would have to count the roughly 30 to 50 million people who died in one way or another, directly or indirectly in World War One. And there are estimates that it was larger, much larger, the ability to count in a war is always very difficult, who's indirectly a victim of the war, as opposed to something else is intrinsically difficult to know, blah, blah, blah. But if you're gonna play the game, then let's play it. Before World War One, the previous two centuries, are known in human history as the period of colonialism during those 200 years, a very small number of countries, white ones in Europe and North America. And if you want add, Japan, went around the world snatching areas, carving up Africa, Asia, Latin America, subordinating the people living their true statuses of unspeakable poverty that is lasted to this day in many parts of the world. In the course of establishing and protecting their colonial empires, which were in every case, run by people committed to capitalism. How do we know because they said so they scrape so proudly, they believed they were bringing to the native people. That's the kind of language they use the benefits of modern Christian capitalist society. And they killed it. innumerable, we'll never know, because these natives weren't worth counting. The first book I ever wrote was a study of the British colonial regime in a place called Kenya. It's a country on the eastern side of Africa. When the British arrived there and took over, they made a census. And the census showed roughly 4 million African people living in what was then called the East Africa protectorate, British. My research ended in 1930, the protector It was established in 1895. So I studied a 35 year period, the British ran another Senate census in 1930, around 1930, I went to the British Museum in London, and to the British colonial office, on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, to write to do the research and write this book, which was published by Yale University Press in 1973. If any of you want to look at it, the book is called the economics of colonialism. The second census indicated that the population of Kenya was 2 million plus a little. In other words, the benefits to the Kenyans of 35 years of British colonialism was to cut their population in half. What kind of administration British, what what was their belief? Capitalism? What did they champion capitalism? What did they say they were bringing to East Africa? Capitalism. That's in one small colony.

Josh Olson 47:03
But don't you think that if those British colonialists had been exposed to communism, they might have killed more people? I'm kidding. I can't.

Richard Wolff 47:13
If your idea of social analysis is to count the dead, yeah, you are heading in a direction, I guarantee you, you're going to have a hard time. I mean, the only way let me be blunt and very current. The only way that Ukraine exists at this moment, I'm an economist, I study this stuff. There is no more Ukraine, economically speaking, it's done. It's finished. Its GDP has been cut by at least 35%. Over the last 12 months, that's a kind of unheard of collapse. They are kept alive by us money, a little bit from Europe, but it's mostly us money. They are fighting a war with us provided military equipment, they produce none of their own. Okay, go every day, I don't know 5000 combatants, and maybe another 5000 civilians are killed in the Ukraine. Whatever you think of the Russians in the Ukraine, that's a separate matter. Without the United States providing these weapons, that war would have been over months ago. I'm not advocating it. I'm not saying I'd be happy with that outcome. But the Russians have now taken about a third of the country, there's no indication that it's going to stop. We're going to have to one count the dead Ukrainians and blame them on the United States. Well, if you lose us the logic, the authority that is providing the money, and the weapons to keep that war going, is the United States. Russia said it wants what it calls the Donbass region. It's got it. It's done. It achieved its goal. Sit down and cut a deal is the only rational way out of this horror show. And it's most important for the Ukrainians, because they're the one taking the hit. Anyway, if you add up all the colonial dead, and all the dead in World War One, and let me go on, how about World War Two? That was a war in which yes, that was one out of the 30 countries that were involved that called itself socialist, the Soviet Union. But in case my right wing friends have forgotten, the participation of the Soviet Union was in an alliance with the United States which clearly approved the Soviet participation, which they helped to fund, which they held the arm, etc.

Josh Olson 50:09
And and there were we won the war.

[VIDEO] 50:11
Yes.

Richard Wolff 50:13
But a lot of most of the government's funding the war fighting the war, war capitalist government, so capitalism killed if he used that kind of logic, colonialism, world wars one and two. Here's the irony, whatever numbers you apply to Russia and China, because the other countries, Korea, Cuba, very, very small, whatever numbers, you apply it to Russia and China, they can't begin to compete with the same logic to identify the killers of many millions or more. And by the way, that's not because socialists and communists are better, they just haven't been in charge of very many countries for very many years, we've just eaten them because capitalism has been in charge for at least three to 400 years, the way we account for it in modern history. So they've got a much longer time to do the deep, called mass murder. It's a dead end that kind of argument stupid to begin with. And it doesn't work for the people that are using it. And indeed, if they keep advising people to use it, people like me are gonna use it against them, and they're gonna lose that struggle. I know the history they clearly don't know. It's it's very strange as a way of arguing. And it's a shame that the editors at the Prego you either were unable or unwilling to say, Wow, you can't go that way. That doesn't make any sense.

Josh Olson 51:50
Well, that's it's a recurring theme through all of these. I'm thinking you've you've demolished this guy and his lesson, we might want to move on to the next one. But Dennis Prager himself, talking about the somebody this one is communism, moral. And he gets into this stuff a lot. And it's a recurring thing throughout them. There's nobody. There's nobody working in the Prager University seeing this argument and going, that's wrong. In fact, there's somebody working there going we need to keep making this argument because it it does resonate with a certain type of lot of conservatives and certainly resonates I think a lot of liberals too, which is horrifying.

Richard Wolff 52:24
The first time. The first time I debated My adversary was a guy named Jordan Peterson. I don't know if Yeah, yes, we did. He runs that game, too. Yeah. And when I and when I responded the way I just did with you, he had nothing to say he just sat there. You know, I blindsided him, he, he has a lot of those guys, they have said the same shit over and over again. And in the audience where they say it, nobody says anything, either, because they've heard it before, or they like it. So they have no experience with someone saying, T that's silly. And here are my reasons. You know,

Josh Olson 53:06
it is the thing I had to say with with most of these videos, if not all of them is you just want to put, I guess. Yeah,

Richard Wolff 53:15
just the last point. The first time I heard this, they killed everybody was in the 1950s. I was a little kid. I heard that in my school. I came I think I was in either junior high school or elementary school. I came home. I repeated it over the dinner table. My father said, Let's talk after dinner and took me in the living room and explained to me how and why that was bullshit. But that's how old it is. 50 years ago, all everybody was saying Stalin killed and over and over again. My father explained to me No, that was a war. There was a war called World War One. And then there was a war with the peasantry called agricultural collectivization, and these were war. My father didn't justify it didn't say it wasn't like that. It was awful thing. But since my mother and father were refugees from Europe, who had lived through these wars, you know, they had the authority to tell me how horrible war is which they believed. But the notion of counting dead as a method of establishing the legitimacy of an economic system that is really crude junk.

Josh Olson 54:41
Yeah, no, I agree. And it's, they use it all the time. Yeah, remember, I mean, it's a right it's a it's a leftover from the Cold War. what's astonishing to me as we're doing these shows is how much of that still lives on it in the right, trigger you that

Richard Wolff 54:54
I have to tell you. The cold war is receding, and I'm glad of it But I have not for many years seen a collection of rehash of Cold War themes like this. This is like a time warp what? What you guys sent me or what I find on the website here. I mean, it's just one after another of the rehearsal of these long dead arguments that were popular in the days of, really in the 50s is when I when I encountered all of these.

Josh Olson 55:32
Yeah, yeah. And what's truly astonishing is that some of these get, you know, 1,000,002 million views of the world and that are being shown in schools in 2023. But let's let's go into Dennis Prager himself a big dog this is this one is is, is communism, moral

[VIDEO] 55:50
motives are much less important than behavior. We all know this. If someone has good intentions, but treats people badly, those good intentions mean nothing, as it is with individuals, so it is with governments. Capitalism might sound less noble than communism, the individual pursue success to the best of his abilities. That's capitalism, versus everyone shares everything equally. That's communism.

Josh Olson 56:21
But can we just go one more second, because I think he says something amazing right after this.

[VIDEO] 56:24
But it is capitalism that has produced freedom. And it alone has lifted millions from poverty, while communism as kept millions impoverished. And without exception, crushed freedom. Capitalism for all its imperfections, enables a decent society. Communism, whatever, its stated intentions leads to evil, evil.

Richard Wolff 56:49
Okay, you know, so even before we get to the Yeah, the cuckoo shit about evil? Yeah, let's go back. The term capitalism. I'm a professor of economics. So that's the field in which I work. But what I'm about to say applies in other fields as well. If you're going to use a term like capitalism, it means you distinguish it from other things that aren't capitalism. Otherwise, it's like saying, what what do you have as a pet, and you answer an animal, that is not going to help anybody, because you haven't distinguished the thing enough to make it cognizable. Because if you're asking about a pet, you already knew it was an animal, because most people don't have pet plants, or rocks, right? So you've got to be able to say, dog or cat. And what that means is, and I don't mean this to be abstruse, this is really simple, you have to be able to say, it's a dog, on the basis of a shared understanding between you, and whoever you're talking to, what differentiates a dog from a cat, from a parrot from a lizard, or any other thing you might have as a pet, right. So if you're going to talk about capitalism, you're going to have to sooner or later, if we don't all agree, you're gonna have to provide a definition. You can move, you can work with any definition you want. That's your freedom. What what you can't do is talk as though capitalism was equally understood by everybody else in the world the way you do. And this is particularly stupid. If your definition is one that no economist I know, left wing, right wing, or in the middle, would have ever heard of, or would speak. Because that's so dumb, that would embarrass you, even in a cocktail party, after three martinis to talk such junk out of your mouth, you really, you'd really be hurting your own reputation. What do I mean? Having an individual pursue the best he can or whatever language that he used to

Josh Olson 59:17
be to pursue success to the best of his abilities under capitalism? Yes.

Richard Wolff 59:22
every economist I know assumes that human beings do that as part of what it means to be a human being. Right? They do it in slavery, they do it in feudalism. They do it in ancient village economies, they do it in capitalism. And guess what, they do it in socialism, too, because this is part of how human beings develop and how they train their children and all of the rest of it. So the notion that you're going to link people pursuing the best life that they can to capitalism would be the equivalent of saying, capitalism is a system where people Breathe deeply and feel better. Why? Yeah, no doubt they do. But this doesn't distinguish capitalism from anything. It's noise. You're making noise out of your mouth. And you know, you're getting as much meaning out is if you're fighting, you know, I mean, stop. It's so crazy.

Josh Olson 1:00:22
People wear shoes on their feet when they go outside,

Richard Wolff 1:00:26
isn't it? I really get to that. Now we now we come to communism, where everybody shares everything equally. Love it. I have known I have known innumerable Marxist socialists and communists in my life, both American and another. I've never heard any of them ever say anything like that. Nowhere does Karl Marx, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or anybody else say such a thing. The moron they're speaking on the screen, he says it. He attributes his definition, as if it were the universally known one. Unbelievable beer. It says if I said, American democracy is all about killing Native Americans. What? That doesn't distinguish Americans, a lot of people killed native people when they got there when they were Europeans.

Josh Olson 1:01:33
Well, but then once he said to the premise, and then he goes, and now I'll tell you why that's bad.

Richard Wolff 1:01:37
Right? Now we come to the perhaps the oldest argument and that is, so far, everything I've seen is really old, Cold War legacy crap. But there has been a recent revival of one point he makes so that there isn't only 50 years old, it's also circulating right now and has been in the last few years, including by some very smart people that I know. I don't agree with them. But I know them I know the work that they do. Here's the argument. Yeah, capitalism has lots of warts and wrinkles and bad things. But it is responsible for the fact that the standard of living in the world today is markedly better than it was a century ago or two centuries ago. And therefore, we should give credit to capitalism, for having overcome the impoverishment, for lack of a better term. That was the norm a two or 300 years ago. Okay. Now, there are a number of arguments that don't work, here. But it takes me a minute if you allow me first, please. Yeah. First, slavery could say that feudalism. Every system that has lasted for several 100 years, has improved the standard of living people who defended slavery, let's remember I said that. To this day, there are white Southerners who talk like this. What's wrong with slavery, we took those black people in there horrible, blah, blah, blah, in Africa. And we brought them over here. And we gave them a much better life as a slave than they had before. We were gifting them something. Slavery was not a pain and a difficulty. It was a plus. And you know, like with a wild horse shit, there's a grain of truth in that bullshit is the horse an hour ago.

Dave Anthony 1:03:50
That is something our our first president said George Washington believe that having his slaves was better than them being free. Absolutely. He treated them better. That's our President, our first president.

Richard Wolff 1:04:03
I've given talks in the American South to an audience, then very nicely received, then there's a q&a at the end of my presentation. And people have asked me this question about slavery. They find this a perfectly reasonable way of thinking. But my first reaction is, what you're claiming for capitalism has been true of every other. You don't need capitalism, to have economic development, we call it to have the gut you don't need it. Number one. Number two, according to the United Nations, now, I can imagine a right winger won't give that any credence but according to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, these are all sub parts of the UN. The most amazing achievement in raising people out of poverty. record numbers in a record short time, the record for that is held by the People's Republic of China over the last 20 years. That's the truth of it. About 800 million out of the No, which is more than half their people were at a level everybody measures as poverty 30 years ago, and they're not anymore. And the Chinese competition, of course, that's good for their PR and all the rest, I understand that. But if you're going to really say, I'm going to evaluate systems, according to how many people in what kind of record time can we lift out of poverty, capitalists have no lock on who did that best never did. Now, the third and most important, most important comes down every effort, every effort to improve the mass standard of living, of the working class, in every capitalist society has been blocked, obstructed, and fought against by the capitalists in that society. I'm going to give you just one example. Here in the United States, people decided that some workers were getting paid so low, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, that we had to pass a law called the minimum wage, a law which said, No employer can pay any worker less than some rock bottom floor. Okay. This was in the depths of the depression, when people were really suffering that we passed that law. Workers had tried to get that law for half a century before that. And we're always blocked by capitalist, if the capitalist one credit now for what they tried to block for 50 years, thereby delaying for the mass of those people, the kind of decent life they could have had if the capitalist didn't do it. Well, then let's keep the register clear here. You don't just get credit, when the workers finally overcome your opposition, you asshole. You have to take the blame for blocking it for 50 years ago, let me give you an up to date example. Periodically, the minimum wage in this country has to be raised because prices are going up. Right. So the last time method the US Congress does this. The last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States was in the year 2009. Okay, folks, the prices you know it, everybody watching knows it. The prices of food, you know, bread, butter, milk, Coca Cola, ice cream, any eggs, anything in a supermarket? I can tell you, because I keep track of this, since 2009 has gone up by between 20 and 30%. Has the minimum wage then raised since 2009. No. In other words, and why not? Because the Chamber of Commerce and every major business organization led by the fast food industry, the retail industry, why? Because they pay the bottom of the you know, it's Starbucks, it's the McDonald's. It's all that shit. They lead the way and the business community, and even a Democratic president, in charge of a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress in his first two years, could not bring himself asshole that he is to do anything about this. In other words, the capitalists fight every step of the way against raising the standard of living of the mass of people. When they finally lose the fight. When they finally can't stop it anymore. They want us to give them credit for what they fought again. It's mind bending, that asshole and Prager, we lifted you didn't lift anything. You didn't you you don't know what lifting is, you're making this shit up. Because you can't face the fact that you are the biggest obstacle to a rising standard of living that the working class the vast majority has. And so you turn around Having lost the eventual battle to prevent this and act as though you deserve the credit. Man. You have to take your hat off to the sheer balls you have to have thought quote me to talk like that. It's, I'm assuming you're gonna edit this.

Josh Olson 1:10:08
But here's the thing that always gets me East Prager and one of the impacts on me when I watch these, he cast these things in such stark moral terms that you find yourself. I mean, we did an episode last week where I'm just like, I said, this, this man actually is evil. When you start doing what he's doing, and you start trying to cast it, and in terms of good and evil, and you're taking the positions he is you, you find yourself going, Yeah, okay, let's talk about that. Let's talk about good and evil. Let's talk about how genuinely evil what you're doing right now is Dennis Prager. And it's, it's such a,

Richard Wolff 1:10:42
my mind. And my experience. And I would say this, if I were in a debate, but I would say it with an edge, you know, I mean, I know how to do this. And I would, they would have a hard time. I'm not being anywhere near as harsh as I can be. It's usually a sign that you don't really have much of an argument, you don't know quite how to support what you're saying. And so you retreat, almost like a child, to child like, terms, is not good, is bad, is evil. It's just, it's really bad. And if you talk to a psychologist, what's going on, there is all of us, I assume you like me, were brought up as little kids, with parents who told you this is good. And that is bad you did what you just did here is bad and bad and good touches everybody. It's a way of touching. At almost a subliminal level, you're taking people back to a time when they learned to distinguish the good and the evil and begin to absorb the value system, their parents were instilling in them. And it's because you can't make a logical or reasoned argument that you're reduced to sort of playing on on people's. It's like advertising, you know, it's showing you Yeah, you know, it's showing you a bar of soap on the screen. And there's a three quarters naked young lady, lathering herself up with the soap, and the advertiser understands, he knows you need a nice young lady to be naked in your vicinity. And this is very attractive, and you would like to have that. And he's suggesting that by buying that soap, you get a little closer to that eventuality. You know, maybe if I talk good and evil, I will get you to agree with me. Because the arguments I have either I don't have them, or they don't seem to work real well. So I've got to kind of go and do this other move. It's like the soap is really crappy, and doesn't smell good. So they gotta tell you, it's going to improve your sex life, because otherwise you're not gonna buy it.

Josh Olson 1:12:59
Right? Well, let's, let's keep going here and with,

[VIDEO] 1:13:03
right, increasingly, people either ignore or deny the evil of this ideology, which within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism, and deprive more people of human rights and tortured and killed more people than any ideology.

Josh Olson 1:13:27
Right, I didn't know that you'd have a problem with any of this or,

Richard Wolff 1:13:30
again, it's just, you know, what catches me to things in the middle of the screen that I am looking at, is a headstone like you would find in a cemetery with a, you know, a Christian cross on the headstone, and then the upper right hand corner, modern totalitarianism, and you think to yourself, This man he's not aware of I don't know, Ganga is con, or he's not aware. I mean, what was classical, totalitarian, the Emperor's in Rome, the chiefs in innumerable tribes, the colonial masters and in every little corner of the colonial he's, he's

Josh Olson 1:14:15
differentiating, he's saying This is modern totalitarianism.

Richard Wolff 1:14:20
Yeah, but he said he created modern

Josh Olson 1:14:23
life. But what's the difference? I guess, is my question. Yeah. What is the difference between modern Well, communist I showed you?

Richard Wolff 1:14:31
And also, I mean, again, if we're gonna go back and court should people, does he? I don't know if he's Catholic or not, but if you're brought up in the castle, he's Jewish. He's Jewish. Yeah, more Shame on him. Anyway, if you were Catholic and brought up in a Catholic tradition, you learned about the Inquisition. You learned that there were the 100 Years War, the 30 Years War, that for 500 years of European history, Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other in innumerable numbers. All right. So therefore, am I going to make a statement the Catholic Church committed mass murder upon Protestants and vice versa? What if I, if I reasoned the way this guy did? I'd be free to do that. But it's stupid. What what are you doing? Modern totalitarians, whatever that is. It can take lessons from all of human history to figure out what they're doing. And some of them do it that way. I don't see anything particularly different in the forms of totalitarianism. You see now from those that you saw 200 years ago, 500 years. I mean, they have different tools. We were different level of society. But the notion that power is concentrated, which I assume is what he means by totalitarianism, and that there were leaders who, who had as total power, as one could hope to have in the circumstances of their time. You can find this over and over again.

Josh Olson 1:16:11
And fascinated by uses of things like when he talks about torture, I think we're culturally, you know, when I think torture right now, the freshest thing in my mind, of course, is not torture that's been done by communists. And in fact, it was Ron DeSantis, who could conceivably be the next Republican nominee, we recently found out oversaw torture, such as at Abu Ghraib. I'm pretty sure that was not in the name of communism.

Richard Wolff 1:16:35
No, I mean, the biggest example around the world these days of torture, is Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, all of that all of that the United States is the perpetrator of this, even the lame efforts to talk about war crimes in the Ukraine. That doesn't excuse us whether that those claims are true or not, I don't know him. But let's assume for the moment, they're true, that the Russians did it that the Ukrainians one or the other or both. That doesn't excuse that clearly, torture has been used my awful lot of different people in an awful lot of struggles. You know, my lie in Vietnam, I mean, all the drones we used to bomb weddings in Afghanistan, come on, what is that? It's almost as though and maybe this is something you might want to explore. I've been through a lot. You know, I'm older than you guys have been around a longer time. And I gotta tell you this, the level of propaganda spilling out of Washington around this ward, his little war in Ukraine, beats anything. I remember, I know that I don't think we had this in the Vietnam War. We were gone home. The Vietnamese were bad communists. I don't Yeah, we had all that, but not the level of craziness. And I wonder whether there isn't something going on. That requires otherwise sane people to talk like this?

Josh Olson 1:18:12
Yep. Yep, yep. Yep. Let's get back to our good

[VIDEO] 1:18:18
buddy, Dennis Prager. How can we explain this? There are two ways. One is ignorance. People just don't know the truth about communism. The second is willful blindness. People know the truth, but choose to ignore it because the truth about Communism is horrors is too painful to confront.

Richard Wolff 1:18:38
Okay? This is very simple, has nothing to do with communism. The cheapest, the cheapest debating ploy in the world, is to refuse to recognize that there are alternative points of view to your own. And therefore follow that up. Once you do that, you'll have to explain why anyone would hold a point of view different from your own, since you believe your own has some kind of absolute truth to it. You have to then explain if I've got the truth, and I encountered John or Mary who disagree with me. It's either ignorance or perversity. This argument is as old as the human race. It means you cannot allow in your world. Other perspective. He can't say communists see the world in a different way, or Marxists do and I disagree with them for this and that. He can't do that. He has the right one. He's doing God's work. And you have to explain how any other person in their right mind wouldn't be lining up parroting what I say and as either ignorance or perversity,

Josh Olson 1:20:04
they will want to I want to stick to that for a minute because this is and again, they are not an accredited, you do have a university. But this is ostensibly an educational organization whose videos are showed in schools and I have followed you, your work I've I've read your work, I've seen you on things we both have. And as vigorous and as powerful as you are at making your cases. You generally do have always my experience, do what you have done here, which is when you come to a differing viewpoint, examine it acknowledges difference, acknowledge where you think it is coming from? How, if you found out that a fellow professor that you worked with was teaching this way that was teaching? I mean, this is literally my way or the highway?

Richard Wolff 1:20:50
That's what it is.

Josh Olson 1:20:51
How does how does that fit into an academic situation out is that there is a person maintain a job?

Richard Wolff 1:20:59
Well, I mean, if you're asking me, Are there people like that? And do they maintain their jobs? I hate to tell you, they do what they do for all the reasons you understand. For example, you know, if you're sleeping with the chairman of the department, all kinds of things are possible that are not possible. If you're not. If you're your father is a donor to that university, all kinds of things are possible that for other people wouldn't. So are there people who get away with that? Yes. But if I were you, you could go to many, a professional administrator of a school or a teacher in a school and point to one, one of these passages and say, I know, you're a decent teacher, and I know you take the profession seriously. And therefore you teach people that there are points of view, different from theirs. And that doesn't make a person evil. And it doesn't make a person perverse in the history of the human race. If you encounter people who disagree with you, and you think you're right, and they're wrong, it's not a big step, to shut them up, to put them in jail, to exile them to kill them, we have to learn that it's normal to have multiple different points of view. We all come from different families, different traditions, different life experiences. So of course, we see the world differently. And it's interesting, and a good part of life to explore how other people see the world, because it'll make you think about your own way a little bit. It's how you learn, and to squelch it by calling it either ignorance or perversity or that is really dirty pool. And you shouldn't be teaching, you shouldn't be showing the students in your high school or whoever the hell they show this stuff to

Josh Olson 1:22:58
high schools and universities. Yeah, and

Richard Wolff 1:23:00
universe, this, you're teaching them that the way to deal with people who disagree with you, is basically to make them evil, and ignorant and a whole lot of words that justify not giving them the respect that human beings Oh, each other. There is always thank God, there is always a core of people in almost every school, who will who agree with you on that. And if they thought they were showing young people something that really went against that if you could take this section and demonstrate their watch this for 30 seconds, you'll see that what else are they going to do that you're going to force them into a difficult choice. But in a way, that's what your project is designed to do? Right?

[VIDEO] 1:23:51
We have a moral obligation to the victims of communism, not to forget them, just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of slavery

Josh Olson 1:24:00
is that we've done a couple of videos where Prager has essentially stated that were it not for the police and laws, he would be incapable of controlling his own sexual urges. I would say outside of that. This might be the worst thing I've heard him say. Yeah.

Richard Wolff 1:24:21
That my reaction is the victims of anything and everything should stay in our minds, because it may contribute to making fewer victims in the future than we have achieved in the past. That part I can buy and that part I can accept. But this invitation to single out communism, as though it had some special purchase on victimization is somewhere between stupid and hateful, because what it is is a call to single out one particular player in the production of victims, when history is full of lots of other players that have been conveniently left out of this story. And in response, I'm gonna give you some examples. Okay? If I wanted to invite hatred of Catholics, I would talk about the Inquisition, I would go into great detail in giving you examples of the elaborate tortures, developed in Spain at a particular point in time to justify excruciating destruction of human beings and victimization. If I were differently focused and wanted to invite hatred of Christians, as a whole, I would describe the second half of 1000 years of feudalism, namely, that point that comes after the 16th century, because of the wars between Catholics and Protestants, in which they slaughtered each other. We even have names for them, the 30 Years War, the 100 Years War, because that's what they were. They were long periods of time, where Catholics would mobilize and mow down Protestant villages, and vice versa. And yeah, I mean, it was awful. No question. There were horrible. victimizations, no question. And they were done in the names of the same God, that presumably the Christian one, the Catholic version, or the other Protestant version, but what I really want to be inviting hatred of Christians, because of that story, let me continue. Europe, colonized Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the process, it did unspeakable things to masses of people. Perhaps the most famous example, is when the Belgians took over what came later to be called the Congo, because of the name of the river there, the Congo River, all right, they systematically cut off fingers, noses, ears, and arms of people, partly to punish them for minor infractions, partly to identify them in terms of where they came from, who they were the slaves of, wow, slavery has been practiced by many different people. Are we going to condemn all of them and invite everybody to hate on them? Lots of Europeans did that. And by the way, slavery wasn't the only in the south, it was in the north New York, part of the history of New York City is the history of the slave. There's a slave market in New York City, et cetera, et cetera. The United States, was involved in several wars in Asia after World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. There were massacres of all kinds in all of them. If you don't remember, think of the word like me lie. Some of you may remember the my lie or me lie massacre that was uncovered, and that we admitted to and punished. Should we invite hatred of Americans, because in four different wars, over half a century, they killed. That's where drone warfare was begun by the United States. In those places. That's where we had innumerable cases where the drone killed a wedding party or a funeral party, because it had missed them miss understood the intelligence, that there were these people, blah, blah, blah COVID-19, the United States allowed more than a million people that die. It did an awful job of protecting should we should we talk about the victim is winning the world is going on, and maybe the biggest of all, world wars one and two. World War One, there was no country that wasn't capitalist that was involved in that World War Two, there was one country that wasn't a capitalist country, the Soviet Union, but it was the ally of the United States in that war. And those wars together killed between 50 and 100 million people, many of them under the worst conceivable right? We we don't invite people to hate Germans because of the Holocaust. Right that the there are some people who do but we generally frown on them, because it's a dangerous path to go down. Very few people are immune from finding someone in their history who did awful things to other people? What would we

Josh Olson 1:30:04
do invite we do invite hatred of Nazis, which, yes and Nazism but that's a very specific ideology in which their acts are connected specifically in directly to their ideology. And you can make those connections easily. It seems to me that what all these people never get around to doing is drawing a line from the, the ideology of communism, therefore must lead to this, like where is it in communism that says you have to do these things? Yeah, it doesn't

Richard Wolff 1:30:33
know where and all of the great fear theorists have famous names. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, these people, you know, Nazis at a certain point. And even they are complicated and hating what I have no idea what it means to call on hatred. This video actually calls people to hate something, an idea and it's very short distance from hating an idea to hating a person. Nazis. Nazis were complicated people too. And by the way, I say this. My first language is German. My mother was born and raised in Berlin, Germany, most of my family was in fact killed in the Holocaust. I say all this to you. But the idea that I should hate Germans strikes me as totally bizarre German music among them, you know, I listened to Beethoven, Brahms and Bach, and I marvel and Mozart, and what those people accomplished, it's great music. I want to understand why there is an ideology called Nazi ism, and why they would lead people to die in huge numbers in ovens and all the rest of it. But the idea I should hate German, I don't even hate Nazis. I mean, I don't like it. If you identify as a Nazi, I'm going to be worried about being in the same room with you. I get that. But call me on people to hate No, no, I'm not interested in that at all. I want to finish the thing about World War Two unspeakable things were done by all the participants, that if you go to Germany, they will take you to a city, a very important city in the north, called Dresden. And then they will show you pictures of the bombing by the Allied Forces UK, US and so on the bombing of Dresden, that was a wholesale slaughter of innocent people. Oh, yeah, it was out of Nazi Germany, I get that I under but, you know, there's war and there's war. And I understand we have the right to identify people who have been victimized to protest that victimization, whether you're a Nazi, or a communist, or a socialist or a capitalist, you abuse people like that. You ought to be called to account. You want to be held accountable. But calling folks to hate one, pick out one of all of these, don't do that. Either make it blanket or shut up. Because otherwise, what you're doing is you're taking away the legitimacy of calling people out, because you're only calling out a particular bunch. What the hell are you doing? You're you're you're detracting from the seriousness of what we have done to one another as human beings, by only selectively being outraged. So you haven't produced a video about how we ought to hate and then fill in the blanks of all the others. And I've only given you a small mattering of people who have done really hateful, awful things.

Josh Olson 1:33:52
Yeah, and he kind of goes along for another couple of minutes in the same vein. And again, it's never it's just about these awful things that these selected countries and administration's and whatever you have done, who all happen to be communist, there's never any attempt to actually link it to communist ideology. But he does finally bring it back to the world we live in today. And I want to skip ahead a little bit to that. Because it's

[VIDEO] 1:34:21
here, and those who do not confront real evil often make up evils, like systemic racism and 21st century America, or toxic masculinity or patriarchy that are much easier to confront.

Josh Olson 1:34:37
So somehow, if you don't hate communists, it makes you believe that I don't know what that there's no systemic racism is apparently his thesis.

Dave Anthony 1:34:53
Yeah, well, essentially, they just, they just, they, they take everything bad on the world and they say that's communist Right, that's all they're doing. That's all. Like,

Richard Wolff 1:35:03
that's all those people have ever done. It's a very primitive idea. You want people not to like something you associated with everything you think they already don't like. And even that last year, right? American, a certain part of the United States is very upset by notions like systemic racism or patriarchy, or those other things. And so you say, you see, you're upset about that here. Now, join what I'm asking you to do, because we're all together in being upset about x and y. So that's why you ask people and I have it all my life because I, I have my students in my class and I draw them out. What do you think Marxism means? What do you think socialism means? What do you think anarchism means? And what I've learned over the years, is something I'm gonna maybe even relevant to you here. I've learned that for most of my students, where I've taught, which is Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and then occasional lectures all over the country, but there I've been a teacher you on for long periods of time in those three states. Here's what I discovered that for most of my students, the following words, communism, socialism, Marxism, anarchism, or synonyms. They use that folks use them interchangeably if they use them at all. But for them, this is all one murky mess of bad things. When I first encountered this years ago, because my background is more European, you know, my father was French. So I grew up speaking German and French. I mean, I was born in Ohio, I've lived here all my life. But I had language facility because my parents were immigrants. So I first I had a bad idea, I thought a lot of Americans are really uneducated. That was wrong. What I was picking up was how these words had been introduced to these students over their lives. They had been introduced by their parents or their teachers, or their ministers or whoever in their lives. As synonyms, these are all the bad thing, the foreign thing, the and so there was no need to be clear about the boundaries between them. So but if you're a European, and you're given an executive, French or German, you grow up understanding that a communist Is this a socialist is this. An anarchist is lat because they're in your neighborhood, or they're in your family, or they're in your school, or so. And, and there are people you know, and that kind of look like you, and you know, you can hate communists, if you're amped is one, if every time you know you're ever gonna have to I mean, seriously, ya know, in my, in my French family, there would be in France Sunday afternoon, if the weather's okay, you bring your family together at somebody's house. And everybody either bring something or cook something, you know, the French are crazy about food and wine, they bring a bottle of wine and blah, blah, blah. But often, Uncle Harry will get into a fight with cousin Louise, why one of them is a right winger, one of them is a left winger, but they both brought food, which they give each other. And after a few drinks, they're all giggling and laughing and all the rest of it. But you can't make people hate each other. If they're in that kind of a situation. Americans. Because of the Cold War, Americans were able to be told these horror stories about people they never encountered or saw the left wingers and they were many in America got so scared, they kept it secret, you wouldn't even know you would discover that after Harry died, you would discover papers of Harry that he was a socialist, or he was a communist. And you would scratch your head and say, Oh, my God, he never let on. Yeah, you've never let on because if you want to have a fight with everybody all the time, but in fact, yeah,

Dave Anthony 1:39:36
my Yeah. My wife recently. My my son who I think was 12 at the time, he came and asked her and so what's a communist? And her answer was, well, there's one in the other room. Why don't you go ask him? And so then we had a big one talking about communism. But how many people in America have that exact? Exact nobody does? I did Absolutely,

Richard Wolff 1:40:00
if I had like your son, it came, I came home from school with some friggin horror story was about the time that we would have to periodically crawl under our wooden desks. Because that was going to protect us from the fireball of the atomic bomb in case it came. So you kind of you know, I'm nine years old, I come home freaked out, you know, because it my family bombs, and then some people I've lived through that. So I said, What is this communism? And my father very smart said to me, what did they tell you? And I repeated it. Yeah. And then he took me in the other room and said, Okay, here's the way it is. And but he told me and I remember the look on his face, you've got to keep this to yourself, don't repeat what I'm telling you, to your teacher, they won't understand. And it'll just be difficult. And, you know, I didn't get that much attention from my father, I got so much attention from him on this, I tried 12 different ways to have this conversation again, as often as possible, because I was basking in his concern. In his, the the emphasis he gave that he and I were together, figuring out how to manage this situation. I loved it. And it had an enormous effect on me. Normally, there was

Josh Olson 1:41:23
a, my good friend Harlan Ellison moved to New York in 1955. And it was so you know, at a time when just you're being told on a daily basis of the evils and the threat to communism posed. And being curious, he went to the I think, the American Communist Party headquarters in New York, and he said it was for old Jewish guys at a mimeograph machine.

Richard Wolff 1:41:44
Yeah, exactly.

Josh Olson 1:41:49
But let's, let's wrap this one up, it's kind of going back to something he talked about earlier. But it's just it's so astonishing. This is what they do. This is how they do things here.

[VIDEO] 1:41:59
The Book of Psalms states, those of you who love God, must hate evil. If you don't believe in God, here's another way of putting it. Those of you who love people must hate evil. If you don't hate communism, you don't care about much less love. People.

Dave Anthony 1:42:19
I can never, I can never get past the fact that this is, this is just a huge Christian country. And yet, all of these people who have these deep rooted beliefs in Jesus have the essentially opposite political view, which is capitalism is, is the opposite of everything Jesus preached essentially. And I can never, I can never make that work in my brain, how they can believe that. And then, at the same time, say, you know, I follow the path of Jesus, and it's like, well, then why do you want everything for yourself?

Richard Wolff 1:42:58
But also but calling, calling on you to hate evil? Or are you to hate communism? Those are abstractions. Those are ideas. What does it mean about the word hate? Is a bizarre word to keep invoking specially for

Dave Anthony 1:43:21
when I look at these videos, I think that they're essentially they want they obviously want an other they always wanted other right. But it seems to me like they're keeping this they want leftist always over there in case they do get in one of their bloodthirsty runs want to start violence. That's how this always seems to me when I watch it. It's like they want this group there to hate to attack if need be.

Richard Wolff 1:43:49
Yeah, I mean, look at it. The reference to patriarchy, they want anybody who's critical of gender relations to be a hateful other. Right? You know, a great man, what a crazy idea of systemic racism, they don't want there to be. They don't want to be troubled in their own ways of thinking. And so they, they, they other, you know, it's what the Nazis did. Germany was in trouble, and the evil was the Jew. And you get until you end up, if you follow this logic, you end up killing the evil in a way, that's the end point. You denounce it. You reject it, and then you kill it. I mean, it's the end of the story. It's how you ultimately remove evil. Look in your eye ecology. There's a there's a whole strain of literature and analysis that explains suicide, that way that you come to believe that there's evil inside you, and you have to get rid of it. And in the end and you kill yourself in a peculiar way of getting rid of the evil, this whole notion that the world is divided, divisible into the good and the bad. German philosophy, which is what I know best Hegel, Marx, they always insisted that those things are deeply intertwined, that you don't hate or love things you hate and love things. There are moments when you hate your wife. That doesn't mean you don't love her, it means you're a human being and in the complexities of life, you have lots of different moments. If you come down on yourself, because you have a moment of hating her, you're gonna do more damage to that relationship, than if you understand that there are moments when you're gonna hate her, and she's gonna hate you. And you have to work your way through that. And then your relationship will be better and stronger. You have to have that. Otherwise, you're gonna be in one a shitload of trouble in your life. Yeah, that's what

Dave Anthony 1:46:05
the Buddhist Tibetan Buddhists would call having compassion for yourself having compassion for that side of yourself. That's right. Rach fuller. Yeah,

Richard Wolff 1:46:14
my wife's a psychotherapist, she will tell you if she was sitting here, that one of the things she does with her clients, you know, she sees lots of people in her office, is to get them to understand the legitimacy of having compassion for yourself, you are the product of a difficult childhood. Most of us are, and you better come to terms with it. And along the way you did things that weren't good and are shitty. And you have to understand that criticize yourself sure over outgrow it. Sure. But do it with compassion for yourself. Otherwise, you're going to create as many problems as you think you're solving. This is widely understood. This kind of thinking that you're getting here is very primitive. And it's it's good and bad, right and wrong, evil and noble. And you have a you're invited to legitimately hate over and over again, the choice of the word hate is extraordinary. Why isn't why is this not criticize socialism? Here's a some faults in social.

Josh Olson 1:47:28
Here's a crime of communism. Skipping over

Richard Wolff 1:47:31
all of that, you're saying these people are beyond conversation, beyond debate, be non disagreement. They are hateful to the point. You don't have to worry about the details, hate them, hate them, refuse them reject them, there's a very short step to kill them. Yeah,

Josh Olson 1:47:55
I will say this in their defense, they do differentiate between communism and socialism insofar as Dennis hates communism and thinks it's evil. And he and this is the title of our next video, we're about to jump into socialism, apparently it's a big sin is it just makes people selfish. Let's let's listen to some of this.

[VIDEO] 1:48:14
Whatever its intentions, socialism produces far more selfish individuals, and a far more selfish society than a free market economy does. And once this widespread selfishness catches on, it is almost impossible to undo it.

Dave Anthony 1:48:31
I can't even I can't even understand how you get there. Just basic, just if you just have a basic grasp of what socialism is, if you just if you just know these, these countries that are brushing up against socialism, Sweden and Denmark and whatever, how you view the countries that are more socialist than others, as more selfish. I can't even understand how his brain gets to that point.

Richard Wolff 1:49:01
Well, by experience for what it's worth, is that Americans have for a very long time lived in a very isolated igloo. Yeah, which they could indulge every conceivable kind of nonsense about what everybody agreed was bad and not when not want it. Socialism and communism. I have been in the room with very smart people who have taught me a lot much to learn. And then suddenly when the conversation comes to socialism and communism out of these otherwise nice people, smart people comes junk. I mean, just just silly junk. Yeah. And I look at them and this has happened to me all my life. I look at what's going on. I know you. I know you're capable. I know you're capable. You have taught me subtle relationships. You're really good at So what are you doing? It's like a person who every time you have seen them is appropriately dressed or when we go to the beach, they have a swimming suit. When we have a formal event, they've got their tie in their jacket. Okay. And now it's, you know, your friend's birthday party, and they arrive with no pants and a balloon over their head. And you realize what the hell's going on here. You know, you see an anomalous, weird situation. So here's the example I'm going to give you. I'm an economist. So I go all the time. This has happened to me as recently as last week. So it's in my head. And we're discussing this than the other, and outcomes, the following sentence from a professor of economics. Well, socialism has never worked. And I look. And I say, what what do you mean by he doesn't work? You can you can't run a society that way. I said. But you know, there are societies that call themselves socialists. Yeah. They don't work. They don't work. How, what does that mean? I asked. They don't function. They don't, they don't produce goods and services for their people. So I look at them. And I say, okay, China says it's a socialist country, it calls itself socialism with Chinese characteristics. Okay, so socialism, that what they think they got, for the last 30 years, the GDP of that country has grown three times faster for all those years than the United States. What do you mean, it doesn't work? The single most important objective of most countries in the world is to stop being poor, and to grow rich. China has done it in shorter time for a bigger country than anyplace else on Earth. They are a big fat success. What are you talking about? You know, they look at me when I do that. And one of two things happens. Either they begin to have that look of a puppy, a puppy that does shit on the rug, and you came home, and you're looking at the puppy and the puppy is looking at you and a puppy understand before you say anything, what just happened couldn't and shouldn't have happened. Or if they don't give you the puppy dog look, they start talking about how there's not enough freedom in China. And I have to interrupt them and say, you know, I got all kinds of agreement and disagreement with you about freedom, but I wasn't talking about the freedom. I was talking about something else. Can we stay with that? You're an economics professor, we're used to staying with the economics and bracketing the other. Not that the other isn't important it is. But that and then they get upset. And then the conversation quickly dies, because they got nowhere to go. Right? But so you have to ask yourself, this is a smart person is a nice person. What the fuck happened here? What's going on? And the answer is, they've been in countless living rooms, cocktail sessions, class rooms, where this kind of junk is spoken to one another. And everybody nods, because saying socialism doesn't work is edifying as as a as a noise. And so you issue that noise out of your mouth. Other people are equally edified. They nod and you are reinforced in the legitimacy of saying that, and then they come into a room where I'm sitting, and suddenly they have a weird experience. It's not legitimate, and they don't quite know what to do. And I don't know what to do. I don't want to make an enemy out of this person. I don't want to hurt their feelings. But you're you're talking junkie though. It just is. And by the way, when I go to Europe, I never get this. This is very, I get people who don't like China. No, no, lots of those. But this kind of crap. No, no, you can't be

Josh Olson 1:54:13
let me ask you a question though. Because there's that great I keep thinking that men can quote the was it never argue with the man whose job depends on not being convinced? These are economists you're talking about? What what happens to them? If they all start talking like you?

Richard Wolff 1:54:31
I have to tell you, it doesn't look like there's a risk of that happening.

Josh Olson 1:54:36
From their point of view, what happens to them? If they go Oh, shit, you got a point there. What happens to them if they started just

Richard Wolff 1:54:45
they're more these days than they ever used to say that it is happening to me, but it's still not very frequent. I think what happens to be honest with you is that they begin to need To make explanations for what's wrong with me. In other words, this is going on allege that something must have gone cuckoo in or around me, but it's difficult for them, because I'm a professor like them. And if anything, my pedigree, the among academic economist, everything pedigree has to do with where you went to school.

Dave Anthony 1:55:32
You, you went with you went with the big ones. That's right.

Richard Wolff 1:55:35
Yeah, they are all intimidated. I know what they shouldn't be. Nothing goes on. I'm telling you if you ever want to know, that all goes on there. But these are institutions and a lot of time and a lot of money hyping themselves. And that has worked. The American intellectual community is absolutely convinced that in the toilet of Harvard University, it doesn't smell having been in that toilet countless times. While I was at Harvard for four years, I can assure you think like normal, right? This is the way but anyway, so they have a problem with me, because? Well, let me give you an example. I use it these days, I didn't use to my classmate at Yale, getting my PhD was Janet Yellen. She's in the sat in the same room, read the same books and articles, heard the same lecture from the same professor, as I did. I know exactly what her education was, because it was the same as mine. Right? I watch her up there talking stuff. I know, she knows is not true. Or unless we're not friendly. So maybe she changed in the intervening years? That's possible. I wouldn't know that. But she knew that the things she's saying now, our nonsense. Our teachers own gods that, you know, and that was, I have to say, so they look, they don't know what to do with me. I've got all these pedigrees. I'm supposed to be like them, in a lot of ways I am. But not here. And for them, it's awkward. It's always been awkward.

Josh Olson 1:57:30
And the problem is, you tend to make sense and backup your arguments in ways that Well,

Richard Wolff 1:57:36
I made a decision. My first job offer was at a place called Johns Hopkins University, that would have kept me in the Ivy League because it's one of the Ivy League schools. So that would have kept me in that circle. And I was young, I had just gotten married, and my wife and I sat down. And I turned down the job offer from Johns Hopkins University economics department, and took a job instead, at the City College of New York economics department. My professors at Yale called me in and told me that I was a lunatic. I had just turned down a filet mignon dinner in order to eat rancid corned beef hash. And that this was a sign that I was gone. And they threatened me. They thought they were doing me a favor, they really did mean to help me. They told me, you can still undo this decision. Make a call. Explain that you were ill don't do this. And then the threat. We can't write letters for you. And the way academic jobs go, at least at the up at the top. It's not about anything other than a phone call. Your senior professor calls a senior professor at x school, they have a friendly chat. And then you get hired. That's how this is done. And they were telling me we can't proceed. Because you you just had sex in public with a kangaroo and that's out of order. We can do it. You know, it was like that it was even just that's the way this works. Anyway, I can I can I respond to the business about selfish? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let me respond. The notion that there's something about socialism that tends to make you selfish, strikes me as having the same quality of truth as saying that there's something about socialism that gives you stomach aches, or that makes your nose run, or that gives you a bad cough. It's so stupid that it begs, for people to be kind to a person who actually thinks that because they need professional help. Having said that, let me remind you that the single most frequently repeated slogan, endorsing capitalism is attributed to Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations. And the quote goes roughly like this. If every person pursues their own individual self interest, it will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number, as if we had been led to that outcome by the invisible hand of God. That's where the invisible hand comes in. notion if you understand that slogan, if you understand that quotation, it is the greatest single rationalization of selfishness ever uttered in the world, it is a statement that the pursuit of your own interest pretty much what selfishness means, is okay. Because in some mysterious way, as led by the invisible hand of a God who is also invisible, it's worked out to be the best for everybody. This is a legitimation of selfishness. It says you can pursue, you don't have to worry about the larger good, you don't have to worry about the community. You don't have to worry about anything other than pursuing your own self interest. Because capitalism works it out, as if led by God's invisible hand to that outcome. Every student is told that they're not told the thing

Josh Olson 2:02:02
that Prager Prager hits hard to in a million different videos. Yeah, I'm absolutely, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, he talks.

Richard Wolff 2:02:11
There's nothing in the canon of Marxism, socialism and communism, which I know a lot about, there is no equivalent slogan, or aphorism or quotation, that would be anything like it, you are required. And by the way, I would argue that most religions, certainly the Christian religions, Judaism, Islam, are actually clearly saying the other, you are responsible, you are your brother's keeper. You're not just your own keeper, you're your brother's, you know, you are responsible for the community, for the collection of people from the end according

Josh Olson 2:02:56
to their ability to each according

Richard Wolff 2:03:01
all of those religions, and also socialism and communism are about your, your collective responsibility. You're the product of a collective, and your job is to take care. Because literally, you were created by other people. And you were nurtured by other people. And you kind of got to pay back, what was done to make you there, et cetera, et cetera. That's why you're supposed to honor your parents. Mr. Amazing.

Josh Olson 2:03:32
I had never seen kickback. You know, a lot of issues with Obama. But even when he said you didn't build that was one of the few times I heard him say something that I just went flat out like, Yes, I did not expect and the pushback on that from from Democrats. I was astonished.

Richard Wolff 2:03:50
I love the Delta Blues, your black people's blues music from this app. There's a whole bunch of songs that have in common the following thing. I am a man, but I did not make myself. Americans hate that. They really want to believe in the quote unquote, self made man, which is an absurd contradiction. But, but the blues music understands. You know, I didn't make myself if you ever gonna have compassion with yourself, you have to recognize you didn't make yourself and there were things along the way that were hard for you. And that shouldn't have been done to you. And you got to kind of work your way through. Anyway. Strikes me.

[VIDEO] 2:04:44
Yeah. Here's an illustration. In 2010, the United States President Barack Obama addressed a large audience of college students. At one point in his speech, he announced that young people will now be able to remain on their parents health Insurance plan until age 26. I don't ever recall hearing a louder, more thunderous, or more sustained applause than I did then had the President announced that a cure for cancer had been discovered, it is highly doubtful that the applause would have been as loud or as long. But what were they so happy about, to be told that you can now remain dependent on your parents until age 26 should strike the young person as demeaning, not liberating. Throughout American history, and for that matter, all of Western history, the great goal of young people was to become a mature adult, beginning with being independent of mom and dad. Socialism and the welfare state destroy this aspiration in various European countries, and now increasingly in the US, it is becoming common for young people to live with their parents well into their 30s and not infrequently beyond. And why not? In the welfare state taking care of yourself is no longer a virtue. Why? Because the government will take care of you.

Dave Anthony 2:06:10
Wow, it's just so it's just such a mishmash of stupid.

Richard Wolff 2:06:14
Yeah. Really? I mean, I have to tell you, I don't know if you can get this in. But it is it sort of it takes your breath away. It's so stupid. Yeah, that really, you're not used to refuting that, because most people wouldn't dare say such a thing, if even

Josh Olson 2:06:34
the notion that more adults are living with their parents, because they're selfish, as opposed

Richard Wolff 2:06:42
is the way I would do. If you really believe that you shouldn't be taken care of by others, you should be on your own, then the first thing we should do is have a 100%. estate and inheritance tax. Yes.

Dave Anthony 2:07:01
100%.

Richard Wolff 2:07:03
Well, either way, that was the logic of doing that societies have done that in the past. And the argument was very simple. You don't have an equal chance, if one of you is piss poor, and you know, you're born into a piss poor family, she's born into a rich family, we all know what's going to happen, one of you is going to go to a private school, the other one isn't, one of you is going to have tutors, if you have a problem. The other one is, you know, one of you is going to not be bothered by the belief, the other one is going to be bothered by them all the time, blah, blah, but we all know, we all know. So you have an inheritance tax, because that's the only level playing field. That's the only arrangement where we kind of all start with the same. And then we do as well as our capabilities enable us to do so that was always been the idea. So if he, if this man wants us to take him seriously, he would have to advocate the much larger question of inheritance and estate taxes, which is conveniently left out, but even greater, what is even four thing, every European country has a national health insurance, you don't have to wait till you're 26. To have it the whole life talk. If American, the Europeans must be basket cases of human beings who have no independent at all, because they have a national insurance, they don't have to applaud if you get into 26. It's my family, man, I have my French family, I know what they get. They get sick, they go to the doctor. That's it. It's yeah, you don't pay anything. We've got a card, if you're a French citizen, you're part of the National Health. Whenever you have an injury or an illness, you go to a doctor, you show him the card, he sticks the card in the computer, that's the end, you don't pay anything. He gets the site away from the government, and you don't pay it taken out.

Dave Anthony 2:08:59
I was 24 I hurt my knee playing basketball. And then I just walked on it for a year and a half until somehow it got better. Because that's the American healthcare system. I couldn't afford to fix it. That's so that's why they were applauding because they don't want injuries that can happen or anything else. They just want their life. You

Josh Olson 2:09:20
don't want one emergency room visit and your Yes, it's

Richard Wolff 2:09:25
the implication of his argument is that if you have money, and therefore you can buy health insurance, then then you deserve it. Because you don't want to damage people by giving them the money or the insurance without the money. So then it becomes a question. If you have the money, you take care of yourself. And if you don't well then you know fuck you. Yeah. And yeah, I don't. We're not supposed to call that selfish.

Dave Anthony 2:09:56
As did we also talk? Can we also talk about the fact that this man and who is speaking, in no video no has a child, we can't know.

Josh Olson 2:10:06
The other place which I'm saving for about no.

Dave Anthony 2:10:08
He has a child who he has running his consultant firm, who he pays a salary to. So he literally just shovels money to his child while making this video. But that's what they always do. They always scream about the thing that they're most mad about, as always what they're doing,

Josh Olson 2:10:28
right? Oh, we'll just wait, let's move on, then. Because we're gonna get to a good version of

[VIDEO] 2:10:32
entitlements create citizens who lack a character trait that every human should have gratitude. You cannot be happy if you are not grateful. And you cannot be a good person if you're not grateful. That's why we constantly tell our children say thank you. But socialism undoes that. After all, why would a person be grateful for receiving an entitlement? Who's going to be grateful for getting what they're entitled to?

Richard Wolff 2:11:04
Yeah, editing their their stupidity there is he doesn't even understand what the words mean. an entitlement is something that the community as a whole determines you get. In other words, it's the society that this determines what an entitlement is, Social Security is something that was established in the community of the United States, put up to a vote in the elected Congress. In other words, all these so called entitlements were gifts given by the community, to its own members. In other words, if you're entitled, when you're sick, to a visit from your pastor, if you're a church going person, and you get sick, it's common, at least in many churches, that the cleric of your institution comes to visit you and see their how you're doing and offer the help and the usual things that priests and ministers and rabbis do. Okay, you, are you entitled to it? Well, sort of. That's what the church does. But of course, you say thank you, you appreciate that the community has established your entitlement to it. Otherwise, entitlement starts having disconnected from the universe and drops out from the sky. Or even worse, is something selfishly done by the individual. The individual isn't the one who gives you these entitlements. The importance of Obama making this statement is his in his position as the head of state, he's announcing that the state apparatus is going to change the rule to give you another five years of this, but it's a gift of the community, as is everything else that we call

Josh Olson 2:13:04
and speaking up. And speaking up, I want to I want to play another clip for you that wasn't part of this. But in 2020, Prager University saw a 55% $12.3 million increase in contributions from the year before, and a $15 million increase in net worth, at the beginning of COVID. In 2020. Prager himself that a series of videos downplaying the severity of the virus. Shortly after that they took out a little more than $700,000 in PPP loans, which were then forgiven. So here's Dennis in a fireside chat from October 2020. After getting his loan forgiveness,

[VIDEO] 2:13:43
I have friends, I people I know. Not only in America, who because of the lockdowns in their countries and in America have no job. So they're given a government handout. They they are so depressed over getting money that they didn't earn. That is good for them. That is such a good statement on their part. By the way, I have off I do believe this. I don't speak hyperbolically. I avoid exaggeration. I so what I'm about to say may be wrong, but it is not an exaggerated point. As far as I'm concerned. I believe it is harder for most people to get off the addiction to free money than it is to get off addiction to heroin.

Josh Olson 2:14:34
So I've done a lot of digging, and I can't say it's been completely thorough because there's a ton of videos and he does a lot of radio shows. But I have never been able to find a single instance of Dennis Prager expressing gratitude or humility for the government handout they got in 2020 which should not be surprising.

Richard Wolff 2:14:50
I love I love the doing everything for yourself. Yeah. Did he build the roads upon which his automobile ride is right Did he cleaning the roads upon which his automobile rides? When he claimed

Josh Olson 2:15:06
internet, delivering these missives to us?

Richard Wolff 2:15:10
Yeah, I mean, everything I did myself, it is the illusion of the self made man. It is the need the desperate erasure of all of his dependencies. Talk about toxic masculinity. I mean, his is a caricature of a disease. What this man has, he really believes he's made it on his own. What? What Yeah,

Dave Anthony 2:15:40
it's, it's really, this. This particular, this particular thought, this is a conversation, one of the most frustrating conversations I've ever had in my life was with my 19 year old nephew, who was trying to explain to me he knew a guy who had a ranch and he didn't need the government. And you just go through Well, what about the poisoned water? That might happen? What about the you go through all the things that government provides for you? And they their brains, like you just watched their brains break? Because they have since day one, Ben told they did it all themselves. And they didn't need anybody's help. And they did this by themselves. And Prager is the greatest. He's a perfect example, who, someone who's been showered with conservative money to create propaganda. That's all he is. He's taking money from other people to do propaganda. That's his job. He's not a self made, man. He's not doing anything, but just taking money from rich people. That's all he's doing.

Richard Wolff 2:16:38
Anybody who's inherited a nickel is not a self made man, you were made by your father, or your mother, or whoever left you the friggin money. And that's why I mean, I'm glad you're doing this. And I admire that you have the patience to listen, which you apparently do over and over again. But you know,

Josh Olson 2:17:04
it hurts. It hurts. It's a it's a small price to pay to get to spend.

Richard Wolff 2:17:10
No, you're right. I know you're right. And really, I can give you independent reinforcement. Because this comes from my students, I hear all that every one of these things in one form or another. But I'm indulgent with my students. They're young people, they're they're interested in trying to think about it. Sure, they come out with this horseshit, that's what they heard from their uncle or their mother, or whatever it was. And I'm not, I'm not going to beat up on them, because I want to persuade them. And so I go out of my way to be understanding and I tried to introduce, and most of them are open to another way of thinking. It's these older people that have been spewing this horse crap all their lives. The other ones have a hard time getting out from under. They've been in that little room that I told you about, where everybody nods in agreement to the horseshit. They keep recirculating, you know, meanwhile, between you and me, and I have lots of criticisms of China. So it's not that, but the Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank. They they're walking away with this. I mean, did you Oh, yeah. You see a week ago. We're in Ukraine, the British our allies are about to send the Ukrainians depleted uranium, yes. Lunatic behavior. And the Chinese arrive with the Shiites and the Sunnis arming on shaking hands exchanging ambassadors. One side is walking away with the economics. And he's beginning to walk away with the politics. And this side is figuring out, you know, what, which way is up and having a hard time with the question? You know, what? Really, I have and I've not had this before in my life, I have the sense of a system literally disintegrating.

Dave Anthony 2:19:00
We I wondered, I wondered that about you, because you've been around. You've been watching this for much longer than we have. And to us it feels like it's disintegrating. But I also haven't been, you know, teaching as a professor for years. About this.

Richard Wolff 2:19:13
I would tell you, I didn't until recently, I didn't. You know, I didn't. There's an old joke among Marxists. I'll let you in on one right? Here we go. Marxists are very proud for having predicted 10 of the last four recessions. Right, that's a joke. But you know, like, jokes, it has its grain of truth. You know, monsters have been brought or systems falling apart. Oh, so I don't want to go anywhere near there. I am honestly impressed by capitalism's difficulties that it was able to survive. You know, I have that feeling about the Roman Catholic Church. I can't believe all the things that went wrong with that church. And here it is, it's still there. And I still have that part of my family and my friend who go to church who have their kids enrolled in a Catholic school, all of that. All of that. I'm amazed. And I think it's something that you have to think through try to come up with an explanation. What are the means by which this institution, given all its problems, has been able to survive? And I say that about other wisdom too. But whether

Josh Olson 2:20:28
it's the same thing,

Richard Wolff 2:20:30
the last two or three or four years, you know, what's happening to many problems have accumulated. Yeah, and you can't solve six of them at the same time. Look at us, we are raising interest rates to stop an inflation. But it goes the banks. So are to save the banks, we are having the government backstop all the deposits. But that floods money into the economy, which is the equivalent of pouring kerosene on the inflationary fire, it's gonna make it. It's like when you're very old and sick, and the doctor comes in and says, We can't do anything anymore for this person. They've got the following 11 diseases, if we give them medication, for one, it worsens the other. If we give them medication for two it clashes with the medication for nine. We're done. We can't we can't we can't yet. That's what that's what our economy is, is heading if it isn't already there.

Dave Anthony 2:21:31
Yeah. And it's, it's I the past couple years, I've been looking around going, Oh, everything's broken. Like every education system, you go through everything, the healthcare system, everything's broken. And, you know, it's like you said, there's the enormity of trying to fix that is unbelievable. Yeah.

Josh Olson 2:21:53
Let's, let's let Dennis go out on this one, because we're almost at the end of it.

[VIDEO] 2:21:56
But the truth is that capitalism and the free market produce much less selfish people, teaching people to work hard, and take care of themselves and others, and that they should earn what they receive.

Dave Anthony 2:22:10
My God put him in a mine, put him in a fucking coal a coal mine for 50 fucking years and tell me about hard fucking work. Put him in a mind.

Richard Wolff 2:22:22
Notice, I mean, not not that he would have any trouble but taking care of others notice he two slips, eat. You know, it's interesting, though, taking care of others. But yeah, he's in that self made. crazy place. He's also his ignorance is a maybe that's worth exposing capitalism and the free market. Capitalism is a market system. That's stupid. I don't know how else to do it. But again, it's the stupid that flies because everybody says the same stupid to one another. So what passes for, okay? What's wrong with it? Capitalism is in no way unique about having markets. Capitalism is in no way unique about using markets, free markets, whatever that term means, I suppose not interfered in by the government is something that has existed in many systems that are not capitalist. He doesn't understand any of that. Nobody's ever bothered either to teach him or he can't learn. Let me remind you. Slavery is not capitalism. In slavery, one person can own another. We don't have that in capitalism. In slavery, the person who owns the other person doesn't have to pay anybody wages, work gets done. But all wages exist, no salaries exist, none of that. The slaves do the work. But that's because they're the property of the master for whom they work. So there is no need for wages. There is no need for anything. Okay. Do they have markets in slavery? Yeah. The slave market as whole at what it was a market where you buy and sell things, you know, markets that the government regulated, often not, so therefore, it would be a free market. You know, what the slaves did in the American South, they made cotton, you know, how cotton was distributed by the market. Moron and the slavery had market, the bone called capitalism, the market system, because that's just wrong. You don't know enough to understand, you know, everything I just told you is true. You just never had anyone put it together for you. Good luck. It's in feudalism. By the way, in the Soviet Union, In there were always markets in China today, there are always markets. So markets are a mechanism used. Haha in all of these systems, therefore it's not a way to distinguish capitalism from anything else. You roaring it it. You use it that way or the market system. No, you're not stuck private property. What the hell you think the slave plantations were public property? They were private property. Stop you, you idiot. You haven't even figured out what it is you're celebrating. Because if you're celebrating markets, then what's wrong with the slave market? That's a market. People are buying and selling. Cotton is a market they're buying and selling and everything else they produce. Stop. If you're celebrating markets, then you're endorsing slavery. You're nasty, man. You know what the levels of stupidity here begin to be stumbling over to

Josh Olson 2:26:09
that seems like a great place to go out. Dennis Prager has driven our guest Professor Richard wolf into just a sputtering I listened to many interviews with you, sir, I've never heard you go off to that extent. But that is the problem we face doing doing this. Yes.

Richard Wolff 2:26:33
That's why I'm willing to do this with you. And that's why i i literally I mean it I applaud you for doing it. This is stuff that has to be done. If left in this country is gonna get anywhere. It has to get in the trenches with this kind of mentality. And at least try to get the people who hear that shit to hear something else to hear it we hate to hear and all right, well, we'll get them all I get that. But you will do important work, lessening the likelihood that people will find all of that shit. Reasonable.

Dave Anthony 2:27:08
And that's why I love Tik Tok because I on there, my son watches someone like a Prager says thing. And then another person comes along and slowly breaks down why it's stupid and does not make sense. And it's just all garbage and tick tock is educating kids on that stuff. In a fantastic way.

Richard Wolff 2:27:29
Well, you know, they may have canceled it today. I know.

Josh Olson 2:27:34
The Chinese Yes.

Richard Wolff 2:27:35
Yes. All Chinese?

Dave Anthony 2:27:37
Oh, no, I'd rather have Facebook on it. Yeah.

Richard Wolff 2:27:43
Think a lot more people are vulnerable to hearing the critique than you might imagine. That's what I've a lot of my students who didn't know what they were getting. They didn't know me, they signed up for the course because, you know, they needed to get it over there. Yeah. But they have these ideas. But when you begin to challenge and they find that very interesting. No one's ever done that with them before. And they're quite open to it. So I mean, yeah, I think you'll be surprised all kinds of people are gonna find it interesting. Because they've never heard a critique of that stuff. You know, Uncle Harry's ended around the Thanksgiving table and everybody. And they were very, they don't like very anyway, so they'd like to hear, but

Josh Olson 2:28:30
yeah, exactly. We want to sincerely thank Professor Richard wolf for enduring this torture with us. We'll be back next week. With a little bit of a departure. There's something we've always wanted to discuss. And there's a weird and tenuous connection to Prager, you. So we're gonna be kind of using that as an excuse. But that's all I'm gonna say. For now. It's gonna be a very fun one. Very interesting, I think. Remember, if you want to support the show, there's a few ways you can go about it. First, you can become a paid supporter to the lever. This will give you access to our bonus content, and there's it'll give you access to the letter premium podcast feed with extended interviews and tons of special bonus content. And if you'd like to make a one time contribution that goes to me and Dave and Brian and Colin, you can leave a tip at labor news.com/audit There's a button for the tip jar, it'll take you to our Venmo page or you can go directly to Venmo. We are at the audit at Venmo on businesses. And remember you can follow us on Twitter at at the audit podcast or email us at the audit podcast@gmail.com We'll be back with more this next week. And now prepare to surrender your brain to Colin McCoy aka diesel boots reckless and irresponsible earworm of a theme song.

[MUSIC] 2:29:43
Good morning class. Today we're learning all about socialism, deviant sex and devil worship. And how cool they are Oh Jimmy science fiction is next week. If you finally had enough of him being college left wing, get yourself a real degree from Prager University is here to give everyone free vaccine sciences commie plot. Our professors can't be bought all textbooks are Soros free at Prager University? My pronouns are he and him are no more guilty. No more blame. No more hetero white male shame. No weeps on your family tree at Prager University

Josh Olson 2:30:59
want to thank our incredible support team, Brian siano, our free floating agent of chaos aka research guy

Dave Anthony 2:31:08
and also Colin McCoy who does all of our music. You can also find him he out there and music world He is known as diesel boots.