Episode 220: On Your Marx

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist David Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, press subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurefy all of our precious bodily fluids. The Queen and Pines with no more brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man.

[00:01:22] I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, the baby from the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind is suing the record company and the Cobain estate for engaging in child pornography. You're the judge.

[00:01:44] What's your verdict? Damn. You know, that- Did you know about this? Yeah. I remember the first time I saw that cover. Right. And I thought to myself, that baby's not going to be happy when they're grown up.

[00:01:59] That their little dick was just out there for the world to see. Now I think it's absolutely ridiculous to call it child pornography. And the fucking guy has taken over the years, has taken so many pictures of himself in that

[00:02:12] same position, like banking off of his fame that way, that it's just slimy to call it child porn. To back up a second, you said the baby with his little dick. Do you mean little just because he's a baby or even like taking into account that he's

[00:02:29] a baby? Oh. And like how do you know the size of most baby's dicks? It's, you know, it is- I don't know how much variability there is in baby dicks. But I will say this.

[00:02:43] You know, I had a girl so I have not seen a lot of baby dick. But I do remember a good friend of mine has had two boys and I saw both boys as babies

[00:02:55] and he was a good enough friend that I was there all the time while he was changing them. And one of them was just hung as a baby. This is very weird and disturbing. He was already- he was a hung baby.

[00:03:09] The other one, like, and so I think it was evident even back then. So do you now know that as adults, that pattern has held? I think when they were teenagers my friend told me that that pattern held.

[00:03:25] Like he was laughing about like how they- when they had to take showers together. Like it was evident. This whole thing is very weird and I wish I hadn't brought it up. Because you're telling me that you are like always over your friend's house looking at your-

[00:03:41] Not always. Like he changed its penis is. And then also that like you verified when they were teenagers and his dick was way bigger than, you know, Bobby's little Johnny's dick is- Maybe I have to admit I've just made all of this up.

[00:04:01] Sure you'd be by law, you like to say that your attorney just like texted you to say that. dick qua baby. Getting back to that. Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think there's

[00:04:18] any way to know whether that was a large or small baby dick. No. But but but don't you think it's slimy for him to be suing? Yeah, well yes. And also the fact that like, like

[00:04:31] if he should sue anybody, it's his parents for injecting him sexual slavery. And and he was alienated actually. Yeah, so today we're going to talk about in just an impossible task that we've set for ourselves. Karl Marx to two pieces of

[00:04:53] Carl from Karl Marx and also angles who just kind of never gets any credit but never gets. Yeah. Yeah, he's like it's like when people say Tamler summers and his co-host David Pizarra. I feel afraid. I know it's a really good analogy actually because I think you play

[00:05:12] the role that angles plays for Marx. No, but so we're going to talk about the Communist Manifesto and and then one of his early writings, a strange labor or alienated labor, both of which I think have a lot to offer. Yeah, but in the

[00:05:30] first segment, we're going to talk about something that I'm honestly kind of impressed that you are willing to talk about because you have a personal connection to the do it and that is this recent scandal in the social sciences

[00:05:46] where it turned out that there's fraudulent data in a 2012 study about dishonesty, ironically, as every single person talking about it has pointed out the irony of that, that there was fraudulent data and that one of the

[00:06:04] authors and the author most connected to the data itself is a former guest of the podcast and friend of yours Dan Ariely. So we had some people asking us if we're going to talk about it and yeah, like I said, I'm impressed that

[00:06:22] you're willing to talk about it. So I guess I don't know how you want to frame the conversation. How do you? Yeah, like I'll just start by summarizing sort of what happened. So the blog Data Collado, which is run by three social psychologists who are also data

[00:06:41] sleuths at Great Blog recommended. They along with some people who didn't want to be named posted this blog post uncovering what are pretty damning facts about the data in this study into 2012. Now, the study 2012 was really

[00:07:03] influential. It was a study purporting to show that if you sign something first like an honor statement first and then you engage in some sort of behavior in which you could cheat that you'd be less likely to cheat than if

[00:07:17] you sign something afterwards saying that you were being honest. So like the classic example is tax, like at the end of when you get your taxes done, you have to say like I promise that none of this that I reported this

[00:07:31] accurately. And so the hypothesis was that if you first asked them like I promise that I will report this accurately, it would cut down on cheating. And so this paper had three studies, two lab studies and one field

[00:07:44] study. And it's the field study that was revealed to be fraudulent, at least some of the data being fraudulent. Now, the field study was in collaboration with an insurance company that wasn't named in the original paper. And the

[00:07:58] finding was that when people had to report the number of miles they had driven after a certain amount of time that because driving more miles leads to higher insurance rates, the finding was apparently that people who signed first some honesty statement would be more honest in reporting their

[00:08:21] mileage. And that would result in there being more miles driven in the sign first condition than in the sign after condition. Because presumably they're all likely to drive on average the same number of miles, the two groups. Exactly. Like random, yeah, randomly between those two groups that should

[00:08:43] happen. Now, it turns out that in 2020, the authors of the original paper, including Dan Ariely, who is the one sort of most implicated in this, tried to replicate the original studies and failed and published a paper saying

[00:09:02] that they tried and failed. And they posted all of the original data from their 2012 study. And this is where the data was found to be fraudulent. The way that it was found to be fraudulent was like in a really silly,

[00:09:17] silly way. If you take the difference between time, sorry, miles driven at time one and miles driven at time two, which was supposed to show this difference, there was an equal distribution of all miles. So people were reporting that they were equally.

[00:09:35] So people were equally as likely to have driven 5,000 miles as they were to have driven 10,000 miles 20, 30, 40, which is just super duper implausible, like that just can't and probably mathematically impossible. So that is just really implausible.

[00:09:51] And it turns out that there was good reason to think that some of the values of the time two miles were faked because when real people report how many miles they drive, their odometer, they usually round numbers and none of the values in the time two were rounded.

[00:10:14] I drove 14,231 miles or something like that. That's right. Right. So the chances of it ending in zero or one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine were all equal. Whereas the time one miles weren't like that. You had clear evidence of like normal people reporting miles.

[00:10:33] But in fact, the time one miles actually were split into, and this was the dumbest of all, if you looked at the time one miles in the Excel sheet, half of the time one miles were in one font and half of them were in another font.

[00:10:46] And when you looked at the values for one of the fonts only, you split the data. It has lots of rounded numbers, like what you would expect from normal people reporting odometers. And the second one has no rounded numbers.

[00:10:58] So basically what looks like it looks like what happened was whoever faked these data got some original values, added some random numbers and doubled those values, and then added some random numbers to get the differences. So like they just added, they just had a function where they

[00:11:22] said generate a random number and that will be the time two miles. Everybody, there's nobody who thinks that this isn't completely fake data. Like it with the post was clear in that even Dan Arrelli says it's obvious that it's fake.

[00:11:41] The problem for Dan, who again, yes, is a really good friend of mine is that he was the only of the five authors, the only one who had the data. And he says that he got it from the insurance company

[00:11:54] directly and created the Excel file from the data and then passed it on to his other authors. Of there's only a few possibilities about what could have happened. Can I just be just clarify so he got the data and then created an Excel.

[00:12:10] It wasn't already in an Excel file. Probably not because oftentimes when you share data, you share it in like a raw text format. So like dot CSV or dot TXT Dan is the author of the Excel file. So if it was always Excel, then he faked it. Right.

[00:12:28] But if it was like a text file, then like if I sent you a file that had like all of our download numbers, it would probably be in a TXT and you would import it into Excel

[00:12:39] Why do you say that if they had sent him an Excel file, he definitely faked the data. No. So what I mean to say is the author of the Excel file has to be the first person to have created it. Oh, OK, got it.

[00:12:53] So either he made up the data or he imported it. Okay. And so the possibilities are that he did it, that someone in his lab did it. Somebody working with him like, you know, research assistance or that somebody in the insurance company did. Okay.

[00:13:12] He says that it was somebody in the insurance company and he believes it. The problem is it was long enough ago, like in 2008 or 2009 that they collected the data that nobody can find any records of the data. So the insurance company, not in his email, Dan wasn't

[00:13:27] using Duke, I think Duke email servers. So it's just that the emails just aren't there. Nobody at the original insurance company has been able to track down. They say they haven't been able to track down data. Duke has an active investigation going.

[00:13:44] And so people are sort of left wondering what went on. And yeah, it's like it's shitty because this is a super famous and influential study. And Dan's reputation is kind of at stake here. Right. Now, like I have reasons to believe that it wasn't Dan,

[00:14:03] but I don't know for sure because nobody can know for sure. But here's another interesting wrinkle in it. The three data collada people are friends with Dan, which is kind of tough. And so Leif Nelson, who is the one that I'm friends

[00:14:20] with who's part of data collada, he, Dan and I hung out like a lot during this summer thing that we were at. So they were put in a position where they knew that they had to like call Dan out and, you know,

[00:14:38] and just let it be, like see what happened. But yeah, which I admire them for to be honest. Yeah, I do too. So I guess I'm like my I am not friends with Dan. I think I've met him. You can say whatever you want. You can be. Yeah.

[00:14:58] If I feel I'll just summarize sort of the sense that I get from what I've read about this. It looks really bad for him because when you go through those three possibilities, he's the only one that would have a motive to do this.

[00:15:14] I'm glad you brought that up because I think one of the reasons that I did want to talk about it was because that has been, I think, the biggest sort of like comment that I've seen that would implicate Dan. Why would the insurance company fake data like that?

[00:15:31] And so they would have incentive to fake the data and it could come from a number of reasons. So it could be so Dan has gone around and collaborated with so many people. He was already super famous by the time he started collaborating with them.

[00:15:49] And, you know, it's not like it's the CEO of these companies who's collaborating with Dan. They put some researcher on the case and it could have been in. And in fact, there was a third the third party company that collected the survey data at any of the stages

[00:16:04] of data collection before it got handed over to Dan. I think the people who were collaborating with him or who were in charge of collaborating with him might have felt like they needed to give Dan good, good quote unquote data. Like why?

[00:16:19] Because so that they could continue their relationship with. Yeah. Yeah. Even though nobody even how does it help them? Like to be even be working with Dan? Like, do they get money for it? You know, I so. I don't know.

[00:16:34] No, they didn't get they didn't get paid for it. But you know, imagine that you're like a research intern at a place. So like, you know, Dan, you know that he's famous and you're excited to work with him and he has this hypothesis and you

[00:16:48] you feel some pressure when you look at the numbers. They didn't work out. You feel some pressure to actually like hand over something that would conform to what he was looking for. I think a more plausible explanation of like why the insurance

[00:17:02] company might do it is that and this is what Dan thinks, although of course, defending himself, which is that the survey company dropped the ball and actually didn't have the data ready. And when they when it came time to hand it over to either the

[00:17:18] insurance company or Dan, somebody just made up a bunch of values. And here's the thing that it does look bad for Dan. It's just that I it's such a dumb way of faking data that it's hard to see. Dan really doing this like that's one. Yeah, two.

[00:17:42] Dan, I've collaborated with Dan and I've seen him work a lot. He doesn't touch the data. He doesn't do data analysis. Like he's he's been, you know, like I haven't seen him ever open a spreadsheet even really.

[00:17:56] It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that he would care enough about to get that involved in. But you say that he created the Excel file? Well, so the Excel file came from yeah, a computer that had Dan's Dan's Excel credentials.

[00:18:15] But it could have, like I said, it could have been faked when he got it. He could have been faked when he received it. And so he opened it in Excel and just just used his Excel document. Yeah, right. Or his Excel.

[00:18:26] That's that's actually the Excel document that the coauthors had. Right. You know, so the thing is, I don't want to like mount like some great defense of Dan. It just doesn't mesh well with what I know of Dan. Like Dan says he engaged in the attempt to replicate.

[00:18:44] He was eager to correct the record when it wasn't replicated. He was eager to to post the data in the open science framework. He I know him to care about outcomes. The thing is he's sloppy, so he likes to talk about research findings

[00:19:03] in a way that super simplifies the complexities of research. And he likes telling stories and that's not doing him any favors right now because right he will talk about findings before they're published. He'll talk about findings that he's then gotten wrong, like, you know,

[00:19:16] because because he heard something that sounded good and he wanted to repeat it. And he's been sloppy at the data process, although a lot of us have like anything from 2008 would be terrible if you looked at my dad.

[00:19:28] So, you know, he might make a fool out of me if the Duke like the Duke investigation actually finds out that it was him. It just seems very odd that it would be him. Just like he would have done it better if he was going to do it.

[00:19:42] Yeah, he was and he just doesn't care that, you know, like he doesn't. He said, Gajillion failed studies. Like there was no professional pressure on him to have this finding work. By that time, you know, he'd already published his book as New York Times bestseller.

[00:19:57] But like I do worry about the that this was fraudulent anyway. And people people are quick to condemn all of social science when they see this kind of shit. And it's not hard to see why not why they're doing that.

[00:20:13] You know, I did read that there is like some that there was some disagreement among the authors about how they should respond to the failed replication and that some of them were a little mad at Dana Rielly for trying

[00:20:29] to push to not have it be retracted or not have. So it's not like he was so eager to just get everything out there. Or at least that's not how the co-authors describe this. There's enough that's enough. There's another sort of. So if you run

[00:20:47] like there are studies that I've run that I actually don't think would replicate. I just haven't bothered to try to replicate them, but I would welcome people trying and if they fail, it'd be fine with it. But if I ran a replication attempt and it failed

[00:21:02] and I published like, hey, I don't believe in these findings anymore. Whether or not I should try to retract that original paper is still an open question because some people, me included, don't think that that's what should be a retraction. Like just because it's not replicated does.

[00:21:20] After all, you have essentially two papers. One says yes, one says no. I kind of want them out there in the scientific record, both of them. I would only retract a paper if it turned out data were fraudulent

[00:21:32] or there was some egregious error in the way that I had analyzed it that made it wrong. But he's, you know, the co-authors to throw him under the bus a little bit by saying like they pretty clearly were like pointing the finger at Dan.

[00:21:47] And I worry that a part of it was to like, you know, keep themselves clean by like shitting on him publicly. But wow. Oh, OK. Yeah, I don't I feel like I need to call my lawyers right now just.

[00:22:06] I know, you know, I know they were two research teams, Dan and Nina Mauser, who I know well as well, who is a postdoc of Dan's and then the other three. But all four, to be fair, all four of them immediately distanced themselves.

[00:22:19] And Dan immediately said there is no way that the other four could have had anything to do with it, which I thought was a good thing for him to do. But, you know, like one possibility is we never find out who did it.

[00:22:30] And then it's like, well, what happens to Dan at that point? Right. Like, you know, he would have to sort of claw like one good sign is that, of course, as soon as this happens, people are going to be going through every study that they can.

[00:22:43] Right. And if somebody if somebody engaged in that level of data manipulation, I would say they're probably doing it a lot. Like that's that's the kind of thing that you do in a hurry and right. You do it all the time.

[00:22:59] I wonder, though, like because you mentioned that when we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. And I mean, it's sort of like saying if somebody who who cheats on his wife once or twice, like probably cheats on his wife all the time

[00:23:19] and I don't know that that's true, you know, like, like, I think there's definitely people who just have a pattern of, you know, that that's how they are. And then there are people who never do it.

[00:23:30] But I think there's also in between that, like there's people who just you know, golden opportunity like, oh, look, I could like this. Everything is going well with the study. But if but these data don't help it.

[00:23:43] So but what if I just changed it and then that's it and then never do it again because you realize, oh, that was stupid. It's not worth it. And then maybe even forget about it. Right. Like, you know, like forget even one plausible possibility is that he actually

[00:23:57] just like because he's actually forgotten about, you know, probably half of the stuff he's worked on, one possibility is that if he if he did commit fraud, he actually forgot about it. Right. Which is one of the most that would be so weird.

[00:24:10] So fucked up to like, you know, if he went down for it and he forgot about it. It's like it was like, you know, like fucking someone on Ambien. No, I get what you're saying. I think my intuition comes from the fact that like that level of sloppiness

[00:24:26] seems to be the kind that, you know, it's like you just start getting a little lazy with your text messages when you're cheating. Yeah, you know, you've gone away with it so much that you just like it seems like there might be a treasure trove of right.

[00:24:39] I was at cheating messages before. You know, it's also like, right. So the fact that nobody's found it in his other, you know, any other examples of fraud plus the fact that it was so sloppy and obvious leads you to believe that, you know, yeah, I'm inclined to.

[00:25:00] But, you know, of course, like, like you said, he's my good friend. I'm going to be finding reasons for his innocence. But Dan is pretty dispassionate about stuff. I feel like if he committed fraud and it turns out that, you know,

[00:25:15] that like we all knew he committed fraud, he would he would be OK with me having said that he committed fraud. In fact, I'm pretty sure he's OK with with the authors who published this original article. I mean, the blog post. Yeah, I don't know.

[00:25:29] It's been tough. Like I don't. Yeah, I imagine for him right now. Like he's you know, but do you have a lot of people like talking to you about it? Like is it? Yeah, a lot of people were hitting me up about it

[00:25:40] and wanting to know like what I thought about it, which, you know, is fair. That's like my impulse to that would be my impulse to. But you know what actually has been way worse for him is that he got on the radar of these people who believe

[00:25:55] that there's a global conspiracy where Bill Gates and like the the vaccine and the microchips and like the New World Order and all that in like the Jui conspiracy people. He got on the radar of theirs for saying something like having talked to Bill Gates or something.

[00:26:09] I don't remember what it was. Bathing in foreskins. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, he's like, you know, he's part of that group that goes out to the forest like once a year. Yeah. He's been getting like death threats from people for like a month or two now, like every day.

[00:26:25] So it's like QAnon people like, like. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's been just sort of like labeled as one of the basically I think he said something. I know that they think that he's one of the people who wants to engage in population control, right?

[00:26:43] Like just like let a bunch of people die. So weird. So fucking weird. You know, yeah. You know, whatever it turns out to be, I just want to know. Yeah. Like the worst thing will be to not know.

[00:26:58] Just want to know what happened and and like get the correction on record. The email thing, I guess is the last weird thing. But I don't know to what extent, like, you know, if it's really from 2007, 2008, like. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:12] You know, like the fact that there's no record of it is very strange. It is very. You would think the insurance company has records, yeah, which is all it's almost like more understandable if nobody has records

[00:27:24] than if Dan said he had no records and the insurance company was able to immediately produce them. Yeah, you know, when Mark Hauser got caught for fraud, they they couldn't find the original emails from back back when he was doing that stuff, like typing in fake numbers.

[00:27:41] But one of his more diligent students whose name shall not be mentioned kept detailed paper records the moment she had suspicion of it. And, you know, who knows who that is, but did you know that Laurie Santos has a very successful podcast?

[00:27:57] I have heard that she is now pretty much the Davos Queen. Yeah, she's Davos Queen. She's in charge of the means of production right now. She moved from proletariat to like upper like ruling class very quickly.

[00:28:15] Yeah, there is this point where, you know, I guess there is a similarity here. Laurie is now such a superstar Yale that that I think you just start dealing directly with like the provost and the president.

[00:28:29] Like your department doesn't even have anything to do with what you do. I think I think she's at that level. Right. No, she's going to the meetings. She's going to like Mr. Burns is mansion. I mean, a hundred burns did go to Yale.

[00:28:48] Yeah, no, it's we're so glad to have served as the stepping stone. I don't know what role we would play in the Marxist, the Marx system. But it's a good one. We're so happy to be the petty bourgeois. We're the petty bourgeois, exactly.

[00:29:05] You know why somebody would want to fake data? Actually is the pressures of the market, the pressures of that's right. That would provide a motivation for anybody. And yeah, we'll talk about that. The inexorable force of oppressive force of capitalism when we get back

[00:29:29] this episode of Very Bad Wizards is sponsored by Nord VPN. You know, I like to go through our download statistics every once in a while. And I see that a lot of you are listening from other parts of the world.

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[00:31:53] It is everything that the slack you say.

[00:32:43] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time that we like to take a moment every episode and thank all of our listeners who get in touch with us, who get involved in the Very Bad Wizards community.

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[00:34:28] How that could end up working for us. I like how people were, you know, Joe Rogan's recent controversies. People were like, yeah, oh, Joe Rogan's getting canceled now. We're like, yeah. Tell that to like multi-million dollar dealers, Spotify. Like he's been silenced.

[00:34:49] Right. And it's like 10 million listeners on the phone. Can't. I know. Like we will be we will give reasonable Vax scene like discussion here. No, Iver Mechden. No. Speaking of that, we should we should give a shout out to two podcast appearances that we've made recently.

[00:35:09] So what reminded me is I was on the Decoding the Grooze podcast with two lovely chaps where we talked largely about the Weinsteins. Weinsteins, apparently. And really the whole. Yeah, I think they all this time. I think they're trying to evoke Einstein.

[00:35:28] But some people have already gotten mad at me for for that appearance. So I'm not going to say really. But most mostly good response. Yes. And I was on a podcast that I love called Weird Studies.

[00:35:43] And we talked about Twin Peaks Firewalk with me, the David Lynch movie, and how that connects to the Twin Peaks story more broadly. And I'm very happy with how that turned out. I have so much respect for those guys

[00:36:01] and the opportunity to talk with them about something that I care about so much and something that they were able to offer so much insight to was it was great. Like this is what podcasting, unalienated podcasting is all about.

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[00:38:47] All right, let's get to our main topic for today, the spirited views of Karl Marx. And we are looking at two of his works today, the Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848, which he wrote with Friedrich Engels. It's kind of the art garfunkel of the Marx Engels.

[00:39:06] Yeah, it sounds like it. But but it sounds like Engels didn't even actually write it like. I think he did a lot for the manifesto. He didn't for a strange labor, which is the second. I think he's more like the promoter of the ideas.

[00:39:21] But I think he was pretty influential in spreading and championing them and also clarifying some of Marx's ideas, which sometimes needed clarification. Yeah, yeah, actually, I know you're about to launch into the intro. But I found the manifesto much easier to read than the strange labor.

[00:39:40] And I was wondering if that was because of Engels. I bet it was. It was his influence because he kept at it, you know, like even though the English translation came like 25 years later, 30 years later, I think all the different translations,

[00:39:54] which he was spearheading, I think just getting all that done. Yeah, the second piece is called a strange labor. And this comes from, I think, unpublished economic manuscripts of 1844, because it's kind of an excerpt that we have.

[00:40:10] And this is where Marx develops his theory of alienated labor under capitalism. He wrote both of these before he turned 30, which is pretty unbelievable. And it makes me feel very bad about the first 30 years of my life.

[00:40:28] Now, here, whatever you might think of communism, as you understand it, or as it may have manifested itself the few times some version of it was tried. I think it's undeniable. He was definitely onto something in these two pieces,

[00:40:44] and I think in his body of work in general, about the kind of the inherent ills, the problems of capitalist structures, the contradictions. I taught these two pieces a couple of times in my political philosophy course recently,

[00:40:58] and I was pretty struck by how prophetic Marx can be about certain elements of capitalism like globalization and the consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of fewer and fewer people. And also, and this is part that I love, just how his analysis

[00:41:17] exposes the ideological or philosophical underpinnings of a free market system. He Marx pulls back the curtain, Dave, on philosophy. He shows the gap between the pretensions and what it's often actually doing or serving as. And I tend to like that kind of thing, as you might know.

[00:41:37] Like, you know, in that way, I think he's kind of like Thomas Kuhn, you know, but doing for just the history of, you know, human civilization. Yeah, right. Super wide in scope. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:41:52] All right. So I'll just give a brief summary of these pieces to get us started. And maybe I'll start with a strange labor and then we'll see how it goes. Like I said, feel free to interrupt me.

[00:42:03] It's been a struggle trying to figure out how to present this in any kind of concise way. But so strange labor, which I think you're right, is a little bit more obscure in terms of how he, how it's written.

[00:42:18] But I think like with a lot of Marx when he's being obscure, there's some insights there. And so this is where Marx says that capitalism necessarily leads to an alienated workforce, at least for a large percentage of the population.

[00:42:33] According to Marx, human beings like we have a kind of essential nature as creative and productive animals. We make stuff, we transform the world around us with these creative, productive powers. That's kind of what separates us from other animals.

[00:42:50] But the way capitalism works with its increasingly specialized forms of labor. So I think of somebody working in an Amazon shipping facility or workers making parts for automobiles or iPhones. First of all, they're making a product that doesn't belong to them,

[00:43:07] that they don't have any control over how it's used. It owns them more than they have. No, it's not theirs. They don't understand how it works because they don't need to. That's one of the benefits of specialized labor. And it's just boring monotonous shit work that doesn't reflect

[00:43:24] their creative powers in any way. They're only doing it so that they don't starve, so that they can feed themselves or their families. And so this is what Marx says alienates workers from their products and also from the activity, the human activity of labor.

[00:43:43] The workers don't see themselves or their identities reflected in the products or the activity of labor. Labor for them is not a means of self-expression in any way. And so they have this division of their life where they can only

[00:44:00] develop themselves as human beings in their leisure time or free time. This is a thing that he thinks is very new, this distinction between free time or leisure and work that you just didn't have in earlier economic systems where this idea that, OK, this is my workspace

[00:44:18] where I just have to do the stuff I need to do to live. And then there's this little time and often it's very little free time. However much they're lucky to have, that's where I develop myself as a human being.

[00:44:29] So, you know, I think we are lucky enough to actually have one of the most unalienating forms of labor that it's possible to have in a capitalist system. But I think Marx is definitely on to something and not just for people

[00:44:48] who work in factories, although that's what he focused on, you know, the people who work in factories where they're just kind of parts of they're like an appendage of a machine when they're there. And I couldn't help but think of. Metropolis by Fritz Lang, yeah, you know,

[00:45:07] it's the imagery of the workers just feeding feeding the machine and then eventually being fed to the machine. And of course, Modern Times, the Charlie Chaplin movie where I mean he's very influenced by these ideas and he's just somebody who

[00:45:25] takes a wrench, that's his whole job on a factory line to take a wrench and twist it one way. And he ends up getting sucked up into the machine. And Marx has this idea that this is how this is how the bourgeois

[00:45:37] capitalists see labor and the products themselves have a kind of power over. Like it's not only that the product doesn't belong to them that they make. It's that it's actually something that's hostile. It has power over them.

[00:45:50] And if they don't do their part, they can be fired and they can starve and the better they do, that just makes somebody else rich. It doesn't make them rich. The description of the worker as a commodity is like what really nailed it for me like that.

[00:46:07] The worker has become a commodity. That is it's just a replaceable piece of the manufacturing machine. And if you see the worker kind of, I don't know, I don't fully understand to what extent Marx thinks the worker is aware of it.

[00:46:23] But however much the worker is aware of it or not, they are still alienated. Like I think Marx, you see this in the manifesto too, like under feudalism where say somebody would make shoes or somebody would make a clock or something like that.

[00:46:40] And that would be their job. They're there, you know, they're a lower class. They're just a craft person. But they they can see themselves reflected to some degree in their work, you know, like this is I'm the shoemaker.

[00:46:53] I make this kind of shoe and I see it through and I'm proud of it. And people come and they and yes, I have to kick a huge amount of my what I get for it to the various, you know, lords and guild masters or whatever.

[00:47:10] But this but that at least is not alienating. There is some kind of pride you can take in your work. You're not just a cog in the machine. You're making the product, the product wouldn't exist without you. And and that's what capitalism has just completely done away with.

[00:47:25] Take you take pride in it. You you do it from beginning to end or at least oversee the production of beginning to end and the product is yours and you have some of you in the product. Yes. And it's a it's a exactly how I think. Right.

[00:47:39] And that has been stripped away from us pitilessly by capitalism. Again, like I feel in some ways it's unseemly almost for us to talk about this because that's just not how it is. Well, that yeah, that's exact.

[00:47:54] That's one of the things that I want to talk about, you know, like in this grand division of bourgeois and proletariat. What what what class are the very, you know, it seems there's a sort of a complex stratification of of kinds of labor.

[00:48:14] And yeah, we have unions, you know, barely these days. I mean, you saw what happened in Alabama when workers tried to unionize in Amazon factory. There was just a massive, arguably propagandistic. I don't know the right. No, I was referring to us as faculty. Oh, I'm not.

[00:48:35] You might have a unions. No, I mean, we're not recognized. There is a there is a national union of faculty, but apparently, but I don't think it's recognized by anybody. So OK, there is a couple other aspects of this alienation.

[00:48:52] Certainly workers see themselves exploited by their, you know, the factory managers, their corporate bosses. And so they see themselves and their interests as very separate from the interests of the bosses. They also see themselves in competition with other laborers.

[00:49:11] And so they find themselves alienated from other human beings, too. So this is so Marx has this idea that under capitalism, we become consumed by self interest like that's it just naturally leads to an atomistic or socially isolating form of life,

[00:49:28] a kind of every man for himself ethic that alienates us from our fellow human beings. And we almost, you know, if you look at sort of the guiding philosophies behind the Enlightenment and the capitalist ideals, they start out with human beings as these self interested atoms.

[00:49:52] Even theories of justice view us that way, sometimes behind available ignorance, sometimes in a state of nature. And we almost think of this as some essential feature of being human, but Marx says no, that's just a product of being in a capitalist system.

[00:50:07] That's the kind of ideology that will develop in that system because we have been alienated in this way from our fellow human beings. The last thing is and this is a little more confusing to me, but this idea of being alienated from our species being or

[00:50:25] like species essence. And I don't know how much of this I got from a strange labor or how much of I get from just maybe secondary material on this stuff. But I think the basic idea as I understand it is that the underlying

[00:50:42] ethic of capitalism creates in us this slew of desires and needs that all ultimately boiled down to money like to transactions. We so we become and this is something I think we can all relate to. Become these constantly consuming machines because that's how capitalism

[00:51:01] needs us to be for the economies to grow. So and then the more we consume, the more money we need, which leads us to work more and more in this kind of alienating way. And so that even in our free time, we become alienated from the more

[00:51:15] kind of spiritual, essential and creative selves that Marx thinks is part of a kind of human essence that we're being torn up, that's being sort of separated within us by capitalism. And I like like it probably sounds this part is a little murky for me,

[00:51:34] but I also think like again, he's onto something. I mean, if you think about how our phones have just they have transformed us, like turned us into different kinds of people. And a lot of these technologies that are the result of capitalism spreading wherever it can spread.

[00:51:54] They have this kind of dehumanizing quality to them. And that's really hard to escape. You can try to resist it, but it will find you and and for most people, it will ultimately take you over like in ways

[00:52:09] that you to the extent that we can even make sense of this idea that there is some real me, you know, it that's being perverted or at least separated by this kind these kinds of technologies that are just constantly arising and creating more and more just consumer needs.

[00:52:30] Yeah, no, I think there used to be less alienation in jobs that weren't so so many of Marx's examples are from obviously from like factory jobs in the Industrial Revolution, which were just terrible, terrible conditions.

[00:52:49] But the alienation has spread because I don't think that it used to be the case that people with, I don't know, jobs in the service industry or something like working for somebody else. At least maybe it was my naivete, but it seems like people are more

[00:53:09] and more alienated, feeling alienated in those jobs in like an ever increasing large, larger chunk of the jobs, larger percentage of the jobs. And because they're getting nickel and dime to part of their getting nickel and diamond, because I think that's so it's becoming increasingly clear

[00:53:28] by say the unwillingness of Amazon or of whatever to increase. Yeah, Uber to increase the wage, increasingly clear when you're not getting when you're still getting paid the same minimum wage that people were getting paid 20 years ago or whatever, that you are not valued. You are a commodity.

[00:53:48] And so I think that consciousness of the alienation has grown. So what did you think more broadly of the two pieces? I mean, this is the first time you've read them, right? Yeah, it was like a Marx virgin pretty much at this point. I really liked them.

[00:54:02] I mean, I think I mentioned before that that I found a strange labor a little harder to read. And I think I was more excited about the manifesto because I sort of was it was unexpectedly good. So I found just speaking broadly, but when reading the manifesto,

[00:54:19] first thing and I texted you this is that I was surprised at how poetic the language was. And it was a really sort of a powerful piece of literature that I didn't expect. I didn't expect it to be literature.

[00:54:37] As you were saying, the sort of prescient description of capitalism and how it takes over as I read it. You know, look, I've never liked to think of myself as a communist, but as I was reading it, I was like, fuck, if this isn't

[00:54:54] an even better description of capitalism today than it was of capitalism. At the time. Yeah. Yeah. 200 years ago. It is the way that he describes the tendrils of industry creating finding markets, the need to grow, finding international markets in order to increase profit, creating wants

[00:55:21] in as many individuals as possible in order to make more money. Yeah. Like being the sole goal of industry. Yeah, there's a quote here, the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.

[00:55:36] It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. It's true that that's just so much more true today than at the time. It's so much more true. And the leaders of industry, you know, part of the thing I want to talk to you about is where

[00:55:52] where do people like us who are not only comfortable in our living, we actually work in jobs that give us meaning. Where do we where do we fall in this in this divide? But increasingly, wherever it is we fall, what's clear is that

[00:56:12] the means of production or that the capitalist machine is in the hands of fewer and fewer people who are incredibly self interested and and hell bent on growing, growing the market. And I couldn't help but think I love Apple, for instance,

[00:56:31] but the way that Apple salivated at the thought of China opening up to commerce and the ability to now find a literal billion people who might buy their products for the sake of the growth of the company and the way that the ethics of a company

[00:56:57] sort of like Apple or like Google when they go to China get get subjugated. So they end up doing things or justifying the things that they do to appease largely unjust Chinese government in order to grow the machine. Right, that's sacrificing of even the individuals, morals,

[00:57:16] even the probably any given employee of Apple would not have this. But it doesn't matter because the desire of the mark is the most important, the driving desire. And so it's, you know, at one point, Mark says, look, I'm not. It's not that I'm blaming the capitalists.

[00:57:31] And in some sense, it's true like that it just has it takes over. It's an idea that has spread and it is a practice that has spread largely because it's so good. It's almost like there was a natural selection for capitalism in humans that sort of ran rampant.

[00:57:47] Well, that's how it works, right? It's not like just these evil fat cats who are just just get hard at the idea of exploiting workers in the worst possible way. There might be some of those people, but the point is like

[00:58:01] if you have a small town hardware store and you're paying your workers really well and but your prices are a little too high because of that, you can't survive like you're probably just going to end up getting swallowed up by the the Walmart that comes in.

[00:58:16] But even if you don't, if somehow you can keep it open, then you have to cut costs in in ways. And ultimately, the that has to end up on the worker because to the extent that, you know, Walmart can get cheaper

[00:58:32] products wholesale, but then also pay their workers less, give them less benefits. They will do it. And if you can't compete with that, you will just get shut down. Well, it's amazing because and the way it works is that like you would think

[00:58:47] that that those practices of Walmart would be so distasteful that people would rebel against it. But the the way that it spreads is I can get a TV at Walmart for $100 cheaper. I'm going to get it there.

[00:59:00] Yeah. And it's it just so there's a piece that I want to read. This is in the manifesto into their place. Step free competition accompanied accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it and the economic and political sway of the

[00:59:12] bourgeois class, a similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production of exchange and of property as a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, which was nothing in the time of Marx

[00:59:28] compared to the way it is now, right? Is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. You know, like we created something and we can't control a golem

[00:59:39] like we've a beast that has now taken over and is eating us as individuals alive and eating more. There's a part in in here where Marx says it's eating up members of the bourgeois class, right, who thought they were part of the bourgeois

[00:59:53] exactly. And now they find themselves as proletariat. Right. And you see that that's another thing that I was like, well, this is so much of what's been happening lately is, you know, you think and there is some sort of pride in thinking of yourself as like, you know,

[01:00:08] I've small business on it. I'm skilled. I'm a yeah, I'm skilled. I have made my my life like I'm doing what I like. And now because of Walmart, I'm actually relegated to just just like a factory worker is making calls. Right. The non-alienated worker is

[01:00:25] he just can't compete in a capitalist system. This is like and so they end up getting swallowed up by in and becoming proletariat themselves having to work in a more dehumanizing situation that doesn't allow them to have that kind of pride

[01:00:42] in their work or see their work as a kind of expression of self. And this just yeah, we don't know how to stop it. Now there's there's sort of a separate thing like sometimes you get to this. I think when overproduction happens because we're constantly producing

[01:00:56] more stuff, but we're also increasingly emissary rating people to the point where they can't like afford to buy the stuff anymore. Then that leads to recessions or depressions. And so he so Marx thought that, you know, there's going to be these periods

[01:01:12] of boom and bust and it's in the period of busts that proletariat can will maybe make some connections that might ultimately lead to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Like should we take a step back and just talk about like his idea of history and how it works?

[01:01:32] Yeah, yeah. So because that's because it's very cool. This is a very cool. But by the way, that the I don't think I remembered that the opening words with the opening words are, but certainly have heard them and like versions of them in parody many times.

[01:01:48] A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. Yes, it's so daunting. And he meant it more. He means it in that threatening way. But also, of course, he thinks that that's like a good thing. Ultimately.

[01:02:04] Also a very famous opening line to the first section of the manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Put no, I mean, all written. Right. So what does he mean by that? Well, OK, as I understand it, Marx has this view

[01:02:23] that the engine of historical change, like the thing that transforms human civilization is our productive capacities, right? We're productive creatures. We create things and and this takes place. It has to take place within some sort of economic structure that will always feature different classes, including like

[01:02:44] in a pressor class and an oppressed class or an exploited class. So in ancient Rome, ancient Rome and the slaves and the plebeians and the patricians in ancient Rome. So you have these different classes under feudalism. You have serfs and lords and then serfs being the lowest,

[01:03:02] lords being the highest, you know, besides the king. And then in between you had guild master, it's and apprentices and journeymen. I don't know what the journeymen were. It could be that journeymen are apprentices. I don't know. And then in capitalism, you have the bourgeoisie,

[01:03:18] the people who own capital and property and then the proletariat, the people who work for wages and create profits for the for the capitalists. And you always have class antagonisms within these structures because there's always an exploited class and people who want to keep on exploiting.

[01:03:35] But the thing that leads to revolution, according to Marx, the thing that leads these things to transform into a new economic structure is when the existing arrangement starts to hamper productive capacities. So you have this pretty stable feudal system. But then people started traveling across the world.

[01:03:58] They discover, you know, the new world. Now all of a sudden the feudal system starts to restrain human productive potential. So here's how he describes it. In one word, the feudal relations of property become no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces.

[01:04:15] They become so many fetters they had to be burst asunder. They were burst asunder. And into their place, stepped free competition accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. And that leads to capitalism.

[01:04:35] So once that happens, now these existing antagonisms, it will give the upper hand to be exploited class and they will burst them asunder. And you might think that that's like a good thing. But I think Marx almost has this kind of nostalgic view of feudalism.

[01:05:02] In because at least there are these examples of unalienated labor within it. He has. So this is how he describes this. He says the bourgeoisie has put an end to all feudal patriarchal idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man

[01:05:21] to his natural superiors and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man, the naked self-interest than callous cash payment. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation. He's just a good writer.

[01:05:42] That's good shit right there. When I say he's being nostalgic, it's like because under feudalism, at least there were these kinds of bonds that were created. Like there was a kind of no bless oblige where the feudal lords felt responsible for their serfs and their guilds.

[01:06:01] And there was at least some kind of social sense of obligation on both sides that was less alienating than just this icy self-interest egotistical calculation being just the underlying ethic of the capitalist system. Now, it's not like Marx wants to return to feudalism.

[01:06:23] He doesn't even think that's possible. But he thinks that I think what he wants to do is rid us of this idea that this was something noble, you know, this kind of this revolution that we were defending the rights of human beings and introducing a new liberal order

[01:06:42] that was respected, the freedom and autonomy of everybody. He thought that was just bullshit. That was just the kind of guiding ideology that allows for a free market system to be maintained. Yeah, he describes the bourgeoisie as revolutionary,

[01:07:02] that they played this this role in in history as initially historically revolutionary because they, you know, the world outgrew the system as you describe. Again, it's one of those cases where, you know, trade increases, exploration continues, people are coming back with, you know, spices

[01:07:23] and and silks from another country and they want some. Right. So currency becomes super important and that allows you, you know, fungible currency to get the stuff that you want. Demand increases, you know, you start making your shit, you need you hire more people to do it.

[01:07:45] And you could just see how this would start from like very, very basic foundations that aren't again, aren't evil or anything like that that then take over in part because and this is one of the things I want to talk to you about in part because

[01:08:05] there is something that is very satisfying about this. There is a need that is getting fulfilled by this new market economy. Yeah, we want shiny new shit. You know, and also you want if you're like, you know, a guild master

[01:08:22] and you you're making shoes or clocks or whatever. And all of a sudden there's this demand for your product and you can really raise yourself up, make more and more money. But you still are like have to kick back like most of your money to the Lord.

[01:08:38] Like that's going to start to seem like this is bullshit to you. And when they say no, but don't you know, like the Divine Right of Kings and Robert Filmer or whatever defending this as some sort of sanction of the natural order. That's horseshit.

[01:08:53] You're just that's your ideology because like it makes you still able to exploit us. Now you get enough momentum because you have a lot because the trade also allows you to connect with these other, you know, the bourgeoisie to connect with each other.

[01:09:09] And now you have and now it's off with their heads, you know, it's guillotine. So the merchant class all of a sudden becomes the most powerful class. And I remember when I was a kid learning about other stratified societies where merchants were never at the top.

[01:09:26] But it sort of confused me because as a kid growing up in America, like being a powerful business person, like that was like if you were a rich millionaire who had your own like companies, that was obviously the top like position to be in society.

[01:09:43] So I was like, how are these old systems? Like not have the merchant class at the top. But but yeah, the merchant class takes over as as the economy changes. And now there are armies for hire. Yeah, you know, exactly.

[01:09:56] You know, it's what's a great I think this is why like mob movies are often just metaphors for this because mobs and mob families have a kind of feudal structure where, you know, and the merchants

[01:10:08] are like the captains who have to kick back to the to the dons or the people working under the cappellards. And and there's always this pressure to just break free of the system. And that's how a lot of these families become undone.

[01:10:24] And a lot of the arcs, the narrative arcs is that this unrest, you know, ends up leading to its own destruction. And people start just thinking, all right, I'm going to I'm going to rat out

[01:10:35] by because I because it's like, you know, what are they doing for me? All they're doing is taking a huge percentage of the like my hard work. That's how it that's how I think it felt to the merchants under feudalism.

[01:10:46] Right. And there is the the social structures that were sacred where, you know, the Don is the Don or the chief is the chief and the America code. And yeah, and that's going to be that's becomes nothing in an pure exchange economy.

[01:11:03] And there's a quote here that I just loved. He has constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable

[01:11:20] prejudices and opinions are swept away. All new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air. All that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face

[01:11:33] with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. That stripping away of the sacred that was brought on by the power of an exchange economy is so spot on, I think. This podcast is sponsored by Better Help Online Therapy

[01:11:54] and you can check out betterhelp.com slash VBW. You know, David, life is full of stress and stressors. It doesn't matter who you are, what you have. Your life is probably stressful. Can I tell you about a recent stressor in my life?

[01:12:12] Sure. You know, with this whole COVID thing, we're back at school and some schools are better than others. I can't complain too much. My school has been good with the COVID response. But as things are getting a little more serious and people are reporting more and more cases,

[01:12:28] I'm actually teaching a class with like 900 students and I look out into the sea of faces of kids just sitting right next to each other. And it's stressing me out. It's just stressing me out. You just see them as little viruses. They're just little vectors.

[01:12:42] They're like germs everywhere. And maybe that will cause you to start feeling strain in your relationships, hopefully not. Otherwise, our relationship might be a little strained and you could probably use the chance to unload, get it out, talk to somebody who is unbiased about your life,

[01:13:03] someone who isn't going to judge you or take sides on anything. And when there are things you can't tell anyone or feel like you can't unload to family and friends because they're too close to it, that's what therapy can be. Better help is customize online therapy

[01:13:21] that offers video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. That's nice, actually. Like another Zoom call. It's like it's not worth it, like even if it would improve my well-being.

[01:13:38] It's much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours. So unload all those stressors, get some unbiased feedback. You'd be pretty surprised at what you might gain from it. See if it's for you. And this podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp.

[01:13:58] And so very bad wizards, listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash VBW. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash VBW for 10% off your first month. Thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. Yeah, and it's interesting because on the one hand

[01:14:22] he seems to think that capitalism just does away with all that kind of the bullshit, the prejudices, the religious underpinnings of a lot of these economic systems and leaves us with nothing. But then he also thinks that no, no, we have a guiding ideology.

[01:14:41] It's just its language is just the language of liberalism, broadly speaking, that shows us to be in some sense just these atomistic creatures that need to be protected from each other and that who's that with property that needs to be protected

[01:15:00] from from theft, from from other people taking the property. And so like I think Marx, you know, we might think of John Locke or like enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Hume that they've kind of come to the rescue and saved, saved civilization from the more primitive religious

[01:15:20] kinds of ideologies that were going hand in hand with the feudal economic structures. But actually they are just no different. It's harder for us to see because when you're within the system, it's very hard for you to see it. I read a quote here.

[01:15:34] He says, don't wrangle with us so long as you apply to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property,

[01:15:51] just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, the ruling class made into a law for all. A will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of existence of your class. And then just I love this line, the selfish misconception

[01:16:08] that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social form springing from your present mode of production, form of property, historical relations that rise and disappear and the prog-aggressive production, this misconception you share with every ruling class that preceded you.

[01:16:27] You saw it clearly in the case of ancient property and feudal property, but you can't see it or you're forbidden to admit that you see it in the case of your own bourgeois form of property. I mean, that's really interesting whether you agree

[01:16:41] with it or not, this idea that it's hard to see it when you are within that economic structure. But if you look at these more ancient forms of economic structures and you look at those ideologies, like it's pretty obvious that they're there to justify and keep

[01:17:01] the ruling class in power. Is it the same with us? Yeah, I mean, like Push comes to shove, I disagree. You know, I firmly believe that these liberal notions of justice and enlightenment ideals about justice and respecting the individual, I think that

[01:17:25] whether it came from the rise of capitalism or not, I think it needs to be judged independently. And I think that it is much better than the systems that it took over in that any individual has a shot of being treated well.

[01:17:46] But I have to admit it is tied to a very basic notion in capitalism, which is anybody can rise up. Right? The idea of mobility by engaging in and participating in the markets is really it seems really tied to those notions of individuality.

[01:18:06] And especially like rights to property, right? Property rights. And this is something. It was like he was shouting at libertarians, like just from from, you know, 100 years ago, he's like shouting at libertarians. Yeah. And also, you know, and it's not like this didn't exist.

[01:18:20] I mean, John Locke's whole theory is is often used as a defense of private property. But I mean, so one of the things that came to mind as I was reading this was the protests last year. And it was just kind of amazing that you had,

[01:18:39] you know, what is clearly real injustice in the way the police are and have been throughout our history, treating black people and just people in general. And then you saw this, this, you know, what I think both of us saw as a really almost encouraging,

[01:18:56] inspiring form of protest against police violence. And then all of a sudden just this crackdown from the media, from I mean, we certainly in our own way bore the brunt of this just this outrage at the fact that, you know, there were these

[01:19:16] there were these protests which occasionally led to riots, which occasionally led to the destruction of private property. And we're kind of thinking, OK, yeah, that'll happen. You know, anytime there's going to be protests, there's the possibility of violent protests. But that's kind of not the issue.

[01:19:30] That's not the main issue here, you know, that a target got broken into or got some windows broken or whatever. And yet these it just shows how these things are in place. I think you see it with Biden pulling out of Afghanistan. Big money and corporate property interests

[01:19:47] are at work at every level, including the ideological level. Now, that just seems right to me. And you see it when there is pressure on it. Like you see how these systems and institutions all jump into place. Yeah. Now, I think what you said about

[01:20:05] you should still evaluate these theories independently. Like, yeah, I think Marx thinks that's not possible. Yeah, yeah, it's clear that he does. And I think for the first time, I really understood what materialism like what his materialism means. These things rise out of these relationships

[01:20:22] and they are a product of them. And, you know, I get it. It's like a I mean, I think everything you said, actually, is not inconsistent with me still wanting to be able to evaluate these differently and still thinking we made some progress in terms of individuals, justice,

[01:20:43] like notions of justice and individuality. Right. But but it's absolutely true that that you clearly can see that money is driving everything is to threaten any of any of the institutions that are, like you said, big money. Threaten that and you'll see you'll see what happens.

[01:21:05] And again, it's not like there's some master plan or these like Mr. Burns is that, you know, like at his mansion and they're all figuring this out. Yeah. And the fact that there are fat cats clearly, right, the fact that there are Bezos and Mark Zuckerbergs and whatever

[01:21:24] I think can can lead to a sense that you're describing where we just need to find the people behind the curtain and everything will be OK. Right. When in reality, those people are are, you know, one part of the large system that's at fault.

[01:21:41] Right. In their own way, they're part of the machine too. Yeah. And it is interesting that that power and wealth has accumulated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And so so someone like Bezos can buy a newspaper and in sort of like

[01:22:01] transparently behind some of the machinations. But that doesn't mean that it's not like the military industrial complex isn't a thing. Yeah, it's exactly it's a self-sustaining process that leads to the kinds of like media reaction when we pull out of

[01:22:23] somewhere that they were going to make a lot of money if we just stayed there forever like they wanted us to. I'm sure there are evil fat cats who are trying to just get a kick out

[01:22:32] of a lot of people suffering so that they get wealthier and more powerful. But that's not like the mark. Mark's idea is it's that these systems arise. They have to arise. Right. And even then, you'd say like like these fat cats,

[01:22:47] they might have power, but they might not have evil intent because they don't need to like for this to happen. All they need to do is respond, quote unquote, rationally to the market and make the moves that will increase profit revenue and drive up the stock price.

[01:23:08] And in doing that, that sort of becomes enough to just keep feeding. Yes, decisions to get made because stockholders will be happy. That's where the ideology plays a complementary role. I taught business ethics for like two years that yeah, that was one of the things

[01:23:24] I had to do at University of Minnesota Morris off just not a fun thing to teach because the philosophical literature on it is is kind of brutal. But it's it's taught so wrong. I like I've been so I've guest lectured and I have friends who teach it

[01:23:40] and it's like, why are you telling them about content? I don't think business ethics like it needs to know. No, I feel like all it's giving it is all it's giving them is a way to justify unethical decisions. Exactly. Right.

[01:23:53] And in fact, there is this kind of debate between like stockholder theory and stakeholder theory where, you know, the stockholder theory side is that the right thing to do is whatever is best for your stockholders. And so they have and there is this kind of capitalistic ethic

[01:24:10] that I think is built on this idea of like rationality, like you said, where again, that's all they need to justify all sorts of things that you might think are brutal and horrific and exploitative and leads to a lot of suffering and misery.

[01:24:26] But from their perspective is just part of, you know, this is how the world works. If you if you don't maximize in that form, right, somebody else will and then they'll take over. It's interesting. I want to talk to you a bit about like there's a lot

[01:24:43] that he talks about in a few places about in the alienation thing as well about children being exploited. Yeah. In the alienation part, he talks about children being exploited by their parents. And it made me think, yeah, I guess run rampant capitalism was super super exploitative of children.

[01:25:04] And then I thought, well, it still is in like these other countries like we we've risen above with child labor laws that are enforced by communists. Yeah, it's still there. And it's not that that's not I don't think incompatible with Marx's idea.

[01:25:21] I think he would probably think that sometimes, you know, the people who are fighting against just purely unfettered free market, they will have little victories and because he talks about unions and he talks about, you know, whenever proletariats can get a little political power,

[01:25:39] sometimes they can use it. But the but the arc will be for the rich to get richer and the exploited class to get poorer and more alienated. And maybe I think you could probably argue against Marx that at least in, you know, maybe we've exported

[01:25:59] are the worst kinds of poverty to other countries. It's not that there is no poverty. There's a lot of poverty, but maybe the standards of living even for the poorest people have gone have gone up rather than down since like the late 1800s, early 1900s.

[01:26:17] But ultimately these class antagonisms are going to get stronger and stronger because of this idea of alienation. Like work has not gotten less alienating. I think it would be fair to say over this period of time.

[01:26:34] But I was going to ask you where we where do we stand? This is what I want to talk about. Like we're obviously in a class that's different. But I remember when I was in graduate school, that there was a large union push.

[01:26:46] Yeah. And in that union push for graduate students, there was a desire to align that the graduate student union aligned itself with like the local I think local 34 or something, which was like the Channiders. Right. And I remember thinking. That seemed disrespectful. We're not that. Yeah, we're not.

[01:27:06] I don't feel that kind of alienation. I certainly don't feel oppressed. Well, so on the one hand, it's not like we have property and like and we're making people work for us. I guess you have grad students, but like, you know, I like,

[01:27:19] I think the reason we have such unalienating jobs is that we're granted so much autonomy. But with that autonomy isn't like having a lot of people work for us. Like I mean, I suppose you could you could

[01:27:34] describe the people who keep the university going as in some ways. Yeah, the staff. You could and then. But I think the other thing that we've seen that's very consistent with like a Marx kind of prediction is that the rise of just adjuncts, the percentages of adjuncts

[01:27:52] who are just getting paid shit and without benefits to do a ton of becoming becoming a commodity. Truly truly becoming a commodity, which allows us to have better teaching loads and and have this. So in that way, maybe we are kind of oppressors and, you know,

[01:28:11] and in that sense, like this kind of solidarity that you might expect us to have with our fellow adjuncts. And of course, like I support them, I want them to get. But I I'm not like put my own job at risk to improve the conditions of adjuncts.

[01:28:29] And so like, I think, you know, that's a tricky thing about where we are. We do benefit from a system, a university system that is increasingly exploiting its faculty and probably its staff. Yeah, I just sometimes I feel as if our faculty.

[01:28:53] So this happens sometimes when when the university makes a decision that the faculty disagree with. It's happening right now with decisions that the university is making about not allowing anybody to go online with their courses, which has the faculty pretty upset.

[01:29:10] During those times, people remember, I think they remember, but I think they need to remember more that this is a university run by a corporation. Yeah, it is a board. You know, it has a bottom line.

[01:29:25] They meet like I've been on committees that meet with the people who run the university. And I'm luckily friends with, say, my former advisor, who is the president of Yale, who you are real ruling class. I well, like I like to. I don't. Yeah. Just yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:29:49] He told me he has two jobs. One job is to raise funds, right? To travel around and raise money as the president. And the other job is to keep the Yale corporation happy. Right. It's just not for state schools, but for all private universities.

[01:30:07] They are just a business and we are, right, as become becomes clear whenever we disagree with the university. We are not in any control. We are just right because you're dependent on students being wanting to pay tuition and alumni wanting to give to the school.

[01:30:26] Getting this is true for state schools, too, because I assume Cornell is not a for-profit university, right? No. So the only difference is that we get some money, but not much. I think it's like 30 percent of the budget comes from the state.

[01:30:40] If that and so actually have a Cornell estate, too. So there are some of that. Yeah. But you know, it's just if you pay someone enough, they will stop thinking about these structures, right?

[01:30:54] And I am solidly in that class of people who get paid enough money to not complain. And also you're just not exploited. Like like and I don't feel I don't feel I mean, you could.

[01:31:06] You might argue in some in some general sense that there is exploitation going on. But it's not I'm certainly not. I don't feel like a factory worker. Yes, this is one of the reasons why I instinctively just don't love all

[01:31:22] the academics on social media acting like our job is like we're these huge victims. And I know, yeah. Like the other thing that I had just in my mind as I was reading all this to discuss with you is like capitalism, like I really like it.

[01:31:43] I love the stuff. I love the what what it's done in terms of creating new things for human beings. I love that we have amazing technology and we have cures for diseases that we might not have had because of these markets. And like it's hard for me

[01:32:07] to go full communist much to the chagrin of my significant other. OK, so I think Marx thinks like whatever you want or however you might feel, maybe you just hit the lottery in a capitalist system and you've been able to

[01:32:21] you know, you're the beneficiary of a lot of people for sure who have it much worse than you. And so, you know, and that's separate from you liking like the new whatever. I thought I have Apple. I'm coming out on two weeks.

[01:32:37] I like the Apple Watch or all your nerd shit technologies that make you get rock hard. But I want to just because you said something interesting that we then changed the subject, but about how work has become more and more alienating. Increasingly, even if, you know,

[01:32:57] standards of living have by some metric risen in the last hundred years. And one of the I think you like you said servers like and people who maybe work at restaurants that are more increasingly treating them poorly, paying them like shit.

[01:33:15] And you see that with the unemployment, right? As soon as people got these unemployment benefits, they didn't want to go back to work and that led to this outcry like, oh, look, now we can't. We can, you know, we have all these openings that we can't fill because

[01:33:31] they're they're taking the unemployment. But you could fill them if you just paid them more and gave them more money. You absolutely amazing. It's absolutely amazing how that happened. And it's just like this, this just to act shocked that people don't want to work

[01:33:48] for you like after the government gave them like literally $1,200. You know, and like, you know, maybe $600 a month or something like that. If that based on what they were getting before. But like, yeah. And then to be like, there's nothing we can do.

[01:34:01] We have to stop these benefits. Well, no, there is some. There's definitely something that they could do. Maybe is to just treat them better, have better working conditions. But then the question is, can you then compete with the other restaurants who aren't doing that? Yeah.

[01:34:15] And so this is how this thing maybe starts to unravel. But I think one thing. So the reason I wanted to put off your question about whether we want a more communist or socialist system is because I want to talk first just

[01:34:28] about the idea that Marx kind of thought that this was just going to naturally happen, that capitalism has these contradictions within it that will ultimately lead to a proletariat revolution. And, you know, at least in Western Europe and the United States, this hasn't happened.

[01:34:48] It's happened very few places with not much success, lasting success in any in any of them, at least as far as I'm aware. But which is super interesting in the question of why we can maybe probably won't have time to get to.

[01:35:04] But yeah, yeah, I think I want to do more Marx because this is just our first sort of scatterbrained foray into it, hopefully, or at least one other episode. But anyway, like I think capitalism has more tricks up its sleeve maybe than Marx thought.

[01:35:20] But you see some of these pressures building, right? You see like it's a different world since 2008 than it was before then. And there's so much more unrest, so much just more explicit alienation and resentment and anger that's been building.

[01:35:38] And, you know, as you might expect, we tend to play this up as race, increased racism and increased prejudice. And we never talk about it as a kind of class conflicts because that's not good for the system. But, you know, you you might think that we are

[01:35:58] getting towards a breaking point with capitalism as awesome as it as it is in terms of producing things that you love and I love and all the great television shows and movies and all these things that that have been made

[01:36:13] possible by capitalism, the strains on the system that come from an increasingly alienated workforce that just doesn't give a shit. It feels like they have nothing to lose at this point and they don't feel in any way bound to the kind of political ideology that cements like

[01:36:36] the ruling class in place, that we might be leading towards some kind of self-destruction, even if it doesn't necessarily look like it's going to then unfold into the kind of communist system that that Marx predicted it would and had to.

[01:36:55] Yeah, it's interesting to think about the growing dissatisfaction. Like you can it's palpable, you know, and I think that that current circumstances make it even more clear, like you said, the people who didn't have to work, they got a little taste of not being exploited

[01:37:11] and they don't want to go back. There's a reddit, a subreddit called anti work or slash anti work that that pops up on my feet every once in a while. It's just such a clear example of the kind of alienation that that Marx described. And I'm curious.

[01:37:29] I mean, so capitalism, it's not just the cool, shiny stuff. But you know, when I was talking about medicines and technologies that have actually improved people's lives, I think was brought about by capitalism. But when it becomes so clear that you would rather people die

[01:37:49] so that you can keep this machinery going, it's so evident as it is now it seems like something is going to happen. Something has to happen. And whether that thing is just an increased call for socialist policies, hopefully, I hope so.

[01:38:06] But look at what happened when Bernie tried to run two times. Very popular and the whole system just geared against like that happening, making it not happen. I feel like some there was some victory there that's latent. I feel like maybe we're circling up into

[01:38:24] making, you know, maybe Bernie was a good foil for somebody who came along, who was well, I'm not I'm not going full communism, but I'm going to increase maybe some social welfare programs and then slowly, but surely we can get to somebody. But that was Bernie.

[01:38:39] He wasn't openly advocating for communism. He was just advocating for universal health care. And yeah, so no, it's what just to say to say it like the more to have a contrast with someone who seemed more extreme like Bernie. I mean, Bernie got labeled a communist hardcore.

[01:38:57] Right. And I think that's why he lost. But it's not an accident that he got labeled that way. Right. Like absolutely not. Right. Yeah. It's in its crazy that somebody who is advocating for basic like things that we

[01:39:10] might, basic human rights that you say is a Lockean liberal ideal, but like something like basic human rights like that he gets dismissed so easily. And I think but I think the other thing you said that I think is spot on is

[01:39:24] seeing seeing what's going on as a class struggle. That's something that's been increasingly on my mind, that it's not to say that race racism doesn't exist or injustice based on race don't exist. It's just increasingly clear to me that so much of what ends up as racism,

[01:39:45] say like policing, increased policing and low income neighborhoods. That it's an economic thing that it's like it's it's unfortunately paired with race. So it's so co extensive in some cases with race that it's hard to see how much of it is class.

[01:40:07] And again, it races, I think still is around. But we were not. I don't think we're seeing clearly about the class. Yeah, because but I think it's again, it's no accident that we're not seeing it clearly that it because it's not

[01:40:20] portrayed in that way and the people who try to portray it in that way are demonized, often demonized as as racists themselves. Because the thing that they can't have is a solidarity among the working classes. And so they create these kinds of divisions within them.

[01:40:42] And this is something that's been, you know, that's been going on forever. And you saw it, I think in the more radical like areas of civil rights that it's when like Malcolm X started going to all these other

[01:40:56] kind and trying to unify, you know, then he's taken out. And this is something again, I don't think it's conscious. It may be conscious by some people at some level like J. Edgar Hoover or something like, you know, but like but this is just how it plays out.

[01:41:12] And it's really like if you're alert to it, it's very frustrating. It's really frustrating to see to see it happen because it does just get in the way. It's such an obstacle to the kinds of reform

[01:41:27] that would end up actually like easing some of the pressure on capitalism, you know, like that that's that's the contradiction. I think that Marx is kind of talking about is, you know, all the conditions come together. FDR is able to do the new deal.

[01:41:42] And that actually stabilizes things for a little while, not for that long. But for a little while. But then you don't have that again. People are saying Biden is trying to do. But the thing is, if they could somehow it would actually be better.

[01:41:56] It would make people a little less alienated, feeling like they were valued more, feeling a little less likely to engage in any kind of civil unrest. It's just like that's not the way capitalism works. It can't do it.

[01:42:09] It doesn't have the structures in place to kind of think with that kind of foresight, you know? And that's and yeah. And that's the role that I think government should should play. You know, it's it's supposed to exist for that. Yeah. I love it saying it.

[01:42:25] It's supposed to exist sort of independently of the market and be able to regulate it. But like, yeah. And then you saw when you try to have campaign finance reform that just that goes out the window and now you have corporations funding like the

[01:42:42] political careers of any major person with any kind of power. Yeah. Yeah, by the way, Boots Riley is the person I know all my communism from. Yeah, listening to him like from college. Sorry to bother you, right?

[01:42:57] Yeah, about like alienated labor and he the way he chooses to portray alienated labor is literally a black guy having to act, you know, use a white voice at his job. And of course, like this idea that the capitalist machine, if they can turn

[01:43:15] people into horses and make them work harder. Yeah, he's a really strong champion of socialist and communist ideas. Yeah. And he gets shit on a whole lot by everybody in part because he's extreme, right? Like he is calling for revolution, which is a part.

[01:43:30] We do need to talk more about Marx. Yeah. Because we haven't gotten to the part about that this is a call to revolution. Like a lot of what Boots Riley says, I disagree with. But people don't like it when black people, like you said, when they go,

[01:43:49] when they start peeling back, you know, Dave Chappelle in his own way sort of talks about this too. Yeah, absolutely. It's just money and he's like it. And he even says like, I'm not black. I'm Dave Chappelle, like I'm rich.

[01:44:00] So like I get to see some of this. Like it's not at some level, it's really not about race. It's about how much money you have. Yeah. Yeah. But it's in the people with a power's interests to think about it as anything but

[01:44:15] class, it's not like they just want for like to just create racial tensions just for the fun of it. It's just that's a way of getting people not to see these kinds of problems as class problem. Yeah.

[01:44:32] Should we put should we put a pin in and talk about Marx some other time? Because I think there's your problem. I could sense in you a frustration that there's so much you want to talk about that you couldn't talk about.

[01:44:41] Well, just this last part about how he thinks it's going to come unraveled. And I guess the, you know, this is maybe it could be there's a lot of us we could talk about. But just how the obstacles to organizing

[01:44:57] among the proletariat seem greater, I think, than he anticipated. And I think Marx thought that, you know, the conditions would get bad enough and the bourgeoisie would have to enlist the proletariat in certain political efforts and giving them like the tools to then lead to the uprising.

[01:45:18] It just doesn't feel like we seem more increasingly alienated, but we don't. It doesn't seem like people are more organized. If people seem less organized and there's more just, you know, interclass, intra class antagonisms. I genuinely think that what Marx couldn't have anticipated is the rise of consumerism.

[01:45:41] And you know, he talked about religion being the opiate of the masses, like I see consumerism really as as being the opiate nowadays where the people who are alienated from their labor and work these shitty jobs and live for the weekend.

[01:45:56] Save up to buy a jet ski, you know? And they get excited about it. And the thought that there are things that you can purchase to make you happy because you're not happy in life is such a powerful.

[01:46:10] It's such a powerful feature of capitalism and one that is like a drug. You know, I love watching YouTube videos of like tech reviews. Every once in a while, they pause and say like, I feel like I don't want to

[01:46:24] contribute to this mass consumerism where you throw away the iPhone you had last year because you want the new one and they say it sincerely. Yeah, but they just go. I mean, they keep on reviewing gadgets, right? Like it's it's I think so it's such a powerful

[01:46:39] like even if you can't purchase things, the thought that you might be able to in the future, you keep working, it's going to keep people working. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not that he doesn't talk about consumerism, I think. And I think in although I haven't read capital

[01:46:56] does copy, but I think like he does talk about this kind of consumerist. Even in the manifesto, he's right. He talks about the creation of new wants. Yes, which is yeah. Yeah, new exactly, which is something I think he might not. He underestimated the extent of it.

[01:47:13] That's right, because you can get an HDTV from China now, you know, for like 200 bucks or something. Yeah. And how is that not built off of the exploit workers, but you're you know, you have a shitty factory job. You can come home to that and some beer.

[01:47:30] Yeah, exactly. And I think the thing that he might not have anticipated is just all the different ways that these consumer products distract us and like, you know, it's you don't want to go to like the union

[01:47:44] organizing meeting when you could just go home and binge watch, whatever. That's totally. I mean, Shane, I live I live for the weekend sometimes to binge watch shows. You know? Yeah, absolutely. And that has kind of a stultifying effect where I think Mark's thought like maybe

[01:48:03] you might use your free time to see like how, you know, you could or you ought to be living and that that would build the tensions or maybe that the the hours would get so long that you wouldn't have any time for any kind

[01:48:18] of distractions that would keep your mind off revolution, but like it does seem like there's this sweet spot where you can because things have gotten so cheap and the meat, the ways of distracting yourself

[01:48:32] are so myriad that, you know, that leads to a kind of stabilizing or at least it gets in the way of any kind of real organizing that would need to happen for any kind of serious revolution. Right. Right. No, totally. I think that's totally right.

[01:48:49] And there is a way in which capitalism to continue itself throws bones out. Yes, exactly. It does like that's like it has more tricks on its sleeve than I maybe Mark's could have known and I think that that's a big one.

[01:49:05] But yeah, and also like you said, the dream of being one day, you know, somebody who will be in control of your own fate and in control of your own destiny and yeah, like I hope we talk more because we haven't even talked

[01:49:17] about this in relation to criminal justice and civil rights and culture and all of that. So there's a lot more to talk about. Yeah, I was just going to say, I'm glad to have another like something to look forward to.

[01:49:30] Like it's always good to have things that we can turn into multiple episodes. Yeah. It allows us to stop having to think so hard about it. But you know, I'm glad I finally understand critical race theory now that we were at the manifesto. All right.

[01:49:47] I guess we're done for now because this is a beast. But join us next time on Very Bad Wizards, listeners of the world.