Episode 265 – Is Marx Still Relevant? with Steve Maher

Macro N Cheese – Episode 265
Is Marx Still Relevant? with Steve Maher
February 24, 2024

[00:00:00] Steve Maher [Intro/Music]: It was Marx who in 1848 with Engels in the Communist Manifesto wrote about capital’s tendency to expand, to nestle everywhere, to settle everywhere. And it’s that basic expansionary logic of capital that is really behind the globalization that has transformed the entire planet,

Human nature is precisely the capacity to be creative, to imagine a different way of living together and to bring that into being to our conscious and deliberate actions by working together, by fighting for a different world against the class power that is interested in perpetuating things as they are.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We have been striving to find a political economy and understanding of social relationships between capital and the working class throughout our entire podcast. We have worked on this for years and in a lot of ways we’re discovering things for the first time.

And as you all know, I came from being a radical right-wing Christian Republican. I think I voted for every Republican under the sun. And then the world came out from under me during the great financial crisis. The journey is well documented. If you want to check it out, go to our website, realprogressives.org.

But with that, I have been digging into Marx, Engels, Lenin, the struggle of the Bolsheviks and socialism as a whole. And you’ve heard us talk to people like Clara Mattei, who have really brought excellent historical references to the conversation and others who are visionaries like Jason Hickel, who I happen to really aspire to be more like in many ways. But my journey has brought me to a gentleman who I have a tremendous amount of respect for. I’ve watched some of the things that he’s done, both professionally in teaching Marx at university level, but also in his writing. His name is Stephen Maher, and he’s an assistant professor of economics at SUNY Cortland and a co-editor of the Socialist Register.

He is the co-author of the Fall and Rise of American Finance from JPMorgan to BlackRock with Scott Aquanno, published on Verso this year, in fact, just came out, and the author of Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power. All great. With that, I want to welcome my guest to the show.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Steve.

[00:03:34] Steve Maher: Thanks for having me, Steve. Glad to be here.

[00:03:36] Grumbine: Absolutely. One of the things that really drew me to you was in this process of trying to identify who we are in today’s society as workers, as citizens, as voters, as people. And for years, I never had a class consciousness. I always aspired to be part of that wealthy class, the managerial class, the bourgeoisie, I wanted to own capital. I wanted to be a capitalist. And I thought that it was the highest calling in life. We are raised to believe that stuff. And then I’ve come to a different understanding of the world. And it’s led me to do an awful lot of reading on some of the socialist theory.

I’ve read some anarchists, but I don’t have a full, what I would call mature lens by which to combine my other love. And that is Modern Monetary Theory. My activism started in MMT with Stephanie Kelton, Warren Mosler and others from Levy [Levy Economics Institute of Bard College] and UMKC. And it’s been a journey for me, but the journey only got me so far.

Once I understood the financial system, the actual state, and the way it operates, it left me frustrated. People like Joe Biden, who I. really don’t see any commonality in my beliefs, with any of my values, and I heard a lot of great talk from Obama, but I didn’t see it from him either. And at that point, I think I had gone from being a Bush guy to a Ron Paul guy.

And so it’s taken me 15 years to do this migration from right to left, but I’m not just doing it in word. I’m really trying to do it in deed as well and bring this out in these podcasts and the work we do at our nonprofit. So I guess my question to you is, is Marx relevant today? And what is his relevance to the world around us?

[00:05:30] Maher: That’s a great question, Steven and I think Marx is incredibly relevant because Marx provides – all the way back in the 19th century – the clearest and most compelling framework for understanding the basic laws of motion, as he put it, of the economic system that is unfolding around us every single day.

And it provides the most compelling way, I would argue, to understand the relationship between the economy and the ecological crisis. It provides the most compelling framework for understanding the rise of inequality since the 1970s and the shifting balance of class forces since that time. And it provides the most compelling framework for understanding things like the financialization of the economy and globalization.

It was Marx who, in 1848 with Engels in the Communist Manifesto, wrote about capital’s tendency to expand, to nestle everywhere, to settle everywhere. And it’s that basic expansionary logic of capital that is really behind the globalization that has transformed the entire planet over the past couple of decades.

So I think Marx in a way is actually more relevant than ever before.

[00:06:35] Grumbine: Tell us what the essence of Marxian ideology is. What would you say the theory that Marx brought to the fore is the essence of it? How would you describe it?

[00:06:47] Maher: The most important single concept in Marx is the concept of class and class struggle. And the idea that the movement of history and the changing nature of political dynamics in our society, what becomes politically possible, what becomes politically impossible, what kind of a society we live in, what kind of a future we’re going to have, is directly related to, most importantly, the balance between the balance of class forces. And changing the world involves therefore changing the balance of class forces, organizing the working class into a political agent, capable of acting in a way that changes the world and therefore changes itself.

And so if we’re talking about politics in any way and the need to have a different kind of society, even if we’re just talking about how to implement significant reforms short of revolution, we fundamentally need to look at the need to mobilize and organize the working class.

[00:07:45] Grumbine: When you say the working class, things have changed since Marx wrote so much of his work. We have a very different society today with computers, decentralized work without a common shop floor. People are working from home. They’re alienated from one another, much less the work they perform. How do you see class in that sense?

How do you see the working class in modern society?

[00:08:13] Maher: Well, Marx himself understood very well that one of the most important social dynamics unleashed by capitalism is the individuation of workers. The fact that workers approach society as individuals. separated from each other, isolated from each other, and that overcoming that was not something that was going to happen naturally.

If you read the manifesto, one of the points that Marx makes about the need for a working class communist political party is the need to form the working class into a class. This would be a political task. This wasn’t something that was automatically going to happen by itself. The organization of the working class into a class, into a coherent political agent, was a political project.

That would have to occur through a process of organizing, political organizing and institution building, party building. And so I think Marx would be very comfortable with the idea that capitalism would lead to this kind of individuation and isolation of workers and alienation of workers, as he put it.

And it’s true. our working class has changed. The centralization of labor within these gigantic manufacturing facilities, which Marx did think could lead to a certain homogeneity among workers to today, when we have an extreme fragmentation of the workforce, working from home, working in highly individualistic modes of work.

And that makes the challenge that much harder. But what’s the same is that there’s a large number of people, the vast majority of people in society, who have nothing to sell on the market but their own labor power. So when they approach a market society, a society of universal commodity exchange, in which all goods and services are allocated according to individual market transactions, those individuals have no commodity to sell except for their own labor power. And that means they have to sell it to a boss and they’re compelled to work for a boss in order to survive. And so those individuals still very much constitute the working class. But at the same time, one has to also recognize, I think, which is what you’re getting at, that we have contradictory relations to the capitalist system.

I would consider myself a member of the working class, a part of the working class, somebody who in order to pay my rent and pay for my grocery bill, I have to work for a boss and that’s alienating in the sense that I don’t have control over my own work. Our workplaces are not run in any kind of a democratic way whatsoever, for the most part, they are highly authoritarian and despotic, in the sense that you are subordinated to the power of a boss who you did not vote for, who you have no power over, who is not accountable to you in any way other than in the event that you and your fellow workers in that workplace can band together and withdraw your labor power, cause a crisis for that economic institution, that business, and compel change through class struggle.

So I would consider myself part of the working class in that sense. But at the same time, I have a pension fund through my job at SUNY Cortland. And I, once a month or so, check out my passive investment fund and see whether it’s gone up or down, etc, and so my interests are tied to the stock market and the appreciation of financial assets that I own.

And so we have contradictory relationships to the system. And Marx also recognized this. In Capital, Marx says he’s going to analyze the system in terms of the roles performed by individuals in relation to the economic system. And in my role as a person who owns a pension fund, I have interests that are very close to those of capital.

In my role as a worker, when I go to work and subordinate my creative capacities to the dictates of the boss, who I didn’t vote for, and is not accountable to me, I’m a worker. And obviously the balance generally tends to be closer to one side or the other. Comparing me to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, for example, will make that pretty clear.

[00:11:50] Grumbine: It seems like we are always living in a weird split-personality styled world. We crave low prices. We wanna sell our stuff for the highest price. This is all part of, I guess, society today. I don’t know whether that’s just a social construct or human nature. But it drives different behaviors that are always seemingly contradictory.

Help me understand what Marx’s view on that was, because it seems to me like that impulse, that drive for better than your friend, having more toys than your friend, all these things have been baked into our heads for so long. Help me understand that. Help me see that through a Marxist lens.

[00:12:37] Maher: I think one of the most important. Ideas that Marx puts forward in that respect is this idea of the fluid nature of human nature. What is human nature? Human nature is something that we construct historically. It is the capacity of human beings to make ourselves, to make our society, to determine the nature of the world in which we live and how we live together.

And so therefore the forms of what one might call subjectivity, the forms of consciousness, the ways of thinking. That we think of as common sense or human nature in one particular historical period are in fact, historically relative. Those forms of consciousness, those forms of subjectivity, those ways of thinking and being

are contingently related to particular historical epochs, particular social systems and social orders. And by and large, the mental conceptions we have about the world are those of the dominant social order, which reinforce and legitimate the dominant social order. In market society, that means individualism.

That means individual competitiveness. That means acquisitiveness and egoism and selfishness. And so there’s a certain critique one sees out there on the left a lot of the time, which is that the problem with capitalism is that people are just too greedy. It’s corporate greed that’s the problem. These ethical or moralistic condemnations of unvirtuous behavior on the part of elites.

But really what Marx is talking about is that’s not really the right way to see the problem. The reason why corporations maximize profits isn’t because they’re nasty people. As my mentor, Leo Panitch used to say, the bourgeoisie doesn’t eat babies for breakfast. They’re not villains. They’re not nasty people. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re compelled to maximize profit. And therefore compelled to maximize the exploitation of labor by the basic laws of motion of the social order that we live in. And so it doesn’t matter if they’re nice guys or not, they may be, they may not be. What matters is that regardless of how they are as individuals, as ethical subjects or whatever, whether they’re nice to their neighbors or donate to charity, as business people, as capitalists, they are compelled to maximize the exploitation of labor.

They’re in a competitive struggle with other capitalists. And it’s the same thing with the working class, the forms of individualism you’re referring to, the forms of egoism and competitiveness you’re referring to are a social product and human beings have not always lived in market society. In fact, the majority of human history has been characterized by very different forms of human social organization going way back to the origins of modern man.

And so we’re looking at a historical product that’s relatively recent. But fortunately for us, human nature is precisely the capacity to be creative to imagine a different way of living together and to bring that into being through our conscious and deliberate actions by working together, by fighting for a different world against the class power that is interested in perpetuating things as they are.

And so we can, through acting on the world to transform the world, we also transform ourselves. That’s a basic principle of Marxist theory and Marxist politics. By acting on the world to change the world, we simultaneously transform ourselves through the act of struggle, to the act of building collective solidarity, etc we become different and we also make the world different.

[00:15:56] Grumbine: What is this concept, the inevitability of socialism? I hear this in various circles. What does that mean to you when you hear someone say the inevitability of socialism?

[00:16:09] Maher: Well, I would not say that socialism is inevitable. And in fact, given the situation we’re now in, I’d say the odds are against it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think it would be better and that we shouldn’t fight for it. I think we should, I think we have to recognize seriously and soberly the situation that we’re in and how much of an uphill struggle we’re facing, even getting socialism on the agenda in a serious way, let alone achieving it. And I think a materialist analysis that is to say an analysis that’s grounded in a realistic appraisal of the conjuncture of the situation we are in, rather than engaging in wishful thinking is the starting point for any kind of serious politics.

We need to begin from a serious analysis of the structure of state power, the balance of class forces, the nature of the organization – the global organization – of capital today and what we’re up against. The weakness of the working class, which is incredibly weak, especially since the 1970s. And that has to be the starting point for a serious Marxist analysis of what we’re going to do.

We have to begin by acknowledging soberly and seriously the scale of what we’re up against. Now, that being said, I think the promise of socialism remains very much one that is necessary for us to achieve if we’re going to get out of the mess we’re in, in terms of the climate crisis, especially first and foremost.

But I think, to get back to your question, the point about the inevitability of socialism and that you’ve read that in Marx and so on. Marx himself went through a really interesting evolution in terms of the inevitability of socialism or the teleological, one might say, nature of history. Teleological is a term from Aristotle and Plato and so on, which basically holds that there’s a kind of pre-given process that history or that any developmental process is going to go through. It’s pre-given towards a fixed endpoint that is known in advance.

In the case of history, we would say socialism is known in advance, and the telos of history would be one in which things are just automatically evolving toward this pre-given fixed endpoint called socialism. And Marx himself went through an evolution on that question. I think in Capital, he was mixed on that.

I think there’s passages you can read and see very much a teleological interpretation of history in which he sees the blind march of historical forces leading inexorably toward that socialist endpoint. But I think in Capital, you could see that he’s very much also questioning that at different times.

And by the time Marx died, he wrote a very famous set of letters to this person in Russia called Vera Zasulich, who was basically asking Marx long after he’d written Capital or several years after he’d written Capital; ‘I’m part of this Russian political movement that’s grounded in peasant communes. And having read Capital, am I to believe from that, that we have to first go through capitalism in Russia’ – which was at that time, not a capitalist society, it was a peasant society – ‘that we have to first go through capitalism in order to then automatically reach socialism? Or can we circumvent that process and go straight to socialism instead of first going through capitalism?’ And Marx undertook a really extensive correspondence with these people involved in this political movement and learned Russian, sought out original Russian sources and studied the matter very closely and ended up concluding that there’s nothing in Capital that one should take to conclude that you would inevitably have to go through capitalism or inevitably have to go through a fixed set of stages before you can reach socialism, but that socialism could be achieved without first going through capitalism without going through a fixed historical teleological process. And I think that reading – that more open and dialectical, one might say – reading of Marx, whereby we’re looking at a struggle between social classes, whereby we’re seeing history as the outcome of contingent conflicts between contending social forces. An open process whereby conflicts between opposing forces, class forces, especially. History is driven forward by the temporary resolution and back and forth between these contending forces.

[00:20:05] Grumbine: When I spoke with Clara Mattei, her work really brought to light the impact of the Bolshevik revolution, at least in terms of outside of Russia, the massive overreaction to seeing workers and the people take control of their country and depose the czar and bring about this socialist state. I know that in your recent book, there’s a lot of stuff that has happened, phases in American economic and political thought since 1970.

That whole reaction, you can see it come out all throughout history. You could see it after World War II as they wanted to go into Korea and Japan and China. It’s been a nonstop goal of ending any potential for communism. So I think not only are we dealing with a red scare still from McCarthy times, but the constant, not just education, it’s not just political, it’s in everything from our television shows to water cooler talk. The anti-communist thought process is so prevalent in this country. Can you talk a little bit about what that is based on; capital trying to protect itself in some way… but a lot of things in the institutions that make up the American political state came as a result of trying to block Joseph Stalin.

Help me understand the US perspective from your vantage point, of the anti-communist push.

[00:21:48] Maher: Well, the world we live in now effectively has its origins in 1945, has its origins in the aftermath of World War II, when the American state became the dominant global empire and set about the task of, for the first time in history, organizing a global capitalist system that was singular and unified. A single global capitalism rather than competing national capitalisms or competing nationally-based capitalist empires as had been the case previous to World War II, which was the process, the conflict between these great capitalist empires, which led to the two world wars. That came to an end in 1945, that phase of history and the United States set about creating a singular global capitalism and uniquely throughout the entirety of capitalist history.

And that meant going about the task of integrating every state in the world into this capitalist empire. And the primary threat to its ability to do that was the existence of an international social system that was organized along entirely different principles than capitalist ones. Not to say it was good, the Soviet Union is not a model society for a future socialist state in any respect to my mind.

But nevertheless, it was not able to be integrated within global capitalism. And so the American state, as it was going about the project of making global capitalism, integrating both states in the global core, European states, as well as states in the global periphery, into that global capitalist system, it had to discipline both peasants and working classes. It had to marginalize and defeat and crush – often extremely violently, as in the case of Vietnam, for example – communist parties and movements. And it had to also crush and discipline its working class at home as a critical foundation for its ability to undertake this international project, this global project of making global capitalism. And disciplining the working class also meant disciplining the unions because trade union rights had emerged from the intense class struggles of the 1930s. As a result, working class people won the right to organize and form unions with legal protections during the new deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt. Those were not handed down from above. Those were hard fought victories from below. And so trade union rights that had to be managed, and the way that trade union rights and trade union forms of organization would exist was then the object of social conflict between those who wanted them to be much more political and much more expansive and those who wanted them to be contained and limited and to basically serve as ways of regularizing industrial conflict, class conflict and stabilizing the social system.

And through a protracted struggle, through a protracted period of McCarthyite politics and demonization and intimidation, the trade union movement of the United States was ultimately thoroughly de-radicalized, thoroughly depoliticized and effectively adopted a model of so-called business unionism that gave up any claim, any pretense to fighting for a different world, to fighting for a different political order, different social order.

And instead became… saw its horizons as limited to wage militancy and increasing the benefits to the individual working class people who are members of those particular unions in those particular sectors, rather than seeing themselves as part of a class-wide solidaristic struggle for a different kind of society, even a social democratic one, even the very limited horizon of a social democratic state excluded from this.

And the limits of that came home to roost in the 1970s. When the wage militancy of the trade union movement, the continued wage militancy of the trade union, that is to say, the organizing working class struggles around simply making wage gains through strikes, that militancy, in the context of the post war boom coming to an end by the late 1960s, resulted in a profit squeeze crisis for capital, which was resolved with the rise of neoliberalism and the development of a much more authoritarian state and the crushing and defeat of the trade union movement, which is still ongoing today.

So I guess I would answer your question by saying this was a matter of the depoliticized marginalization of socialist ideas was certainly the result of McCarthyite attacks from the state. But it was also a result of the limited imagination of the trade union movement itself and the limited leadership role that it played in creating and organizing working class struggles throughout the whole 20th century.

[00:26:35] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:27:26] Grumbine: I spoke with a gentleman who wrote a great book called Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns. And he works with Sarah Nelson, who is president of the Association of Flight Attendants. A big voice in modern politics and in modern struggle for what you’ve seen the airlines do working with the autoworkers strike.

This is just a blip on the radar though. It’s encouraging. I guess you got to start with a trickle before you can get a river. But in this case, though, Joe Burns’s book talks specifically about how corporate unions aren’t what we’re looking for and how important it is to have a class struggle unionism approach to unions. The idea of blending and combining struggles together to produce a larger, more powerful movement through class struggle unionism. What do you think about that? It sounds like that’s what you’re advocating.

[00:28:26] Maher: Yeah, I think one of the tasks of socialists today is to transform the unions. Very much along the lines of what people like Sarah Nelson are talking about as a starting point from being very narrow corporatist institutions, as say institutions that are primarily fighting on behalf of individual groups of workers to improve their lives, to increase their wages, to increase their benefits at the workplace, into being oriented toward building the power of the working class as a class.

And that means also unemployed people and immigrants and queer people and everybody who is experiencing the oppression and dispossession that is the heart of what defined the working class in contemporary capitalism. And I think that’s really just in the very beginning stages, but there’s very promising signs, I think, along the lines that you just described. And Joe Burns stuff is really good. But at this point, these are isolated cases. These are isolated examples of promising struggles. We need to find a way of getting beyond these isolated rebellions into a much broader, more substantial and deeper working class struggle. And that has to involve politics. There’s always going to be limits to what trade unions can achieve, because after all they’re unions, they’re organizing workers at the workplace. And they are dependent on the profitability and success of the corporations or the firms that the workers who are members of the unions work at. Or if the firm goes out of business, there’s no jobs.

Therefore there’s no union. So there’s always going to be limits to trade union struggles. And whereas while unions play an important role in building class solidarity and class consciousness, ideally, there’s always going to also be a need for a political organization that is able to bridge across the different trade unions, across the different sectors, across the different components of the working class, and really play this leading role in articulating the working class as a political force and fighting on behalf of a clear and specific political agenda.

And that involves working within unions and across unions. Any socialist party would have to have organizers who were working within the major unions and then articulating together the different individual struggles of those present in those different unions across the entire working class, but also working on community struggles and community campaigns, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, gay rights, all of these struggles should be seen as part of one struggle of the working class for justice and liberation. And that’s not something that one just claims or says should be the case. That has to be institutionally and organizationally made into one coherent struggle. through the development of a political instrument, a political party, or a political organization, which hasn’t really gotten anywhere in the US, partly because of the difficulties of the two-party system, etc. So it’s a big task. This gets back to what we were saying earlier about the scale of the challenge we face, just getting socialism on the agenda. But certainly, class struggle unionism is an important starting point, I think.

[00:31:21] Grumbine: I’ve been loudly saying this, that we need to build dual-power parallel systems. We need to produce a countervailing force that is not ebbing and flowing with election cycles, with what I call the oligarch Olympics of these political games of manufactured consent, that we need something along the lines of something similar to what the Black Panthers had done. In terms of organizing locally, educating people in class struggle, mutual aid. When I think about society today, how we get people to have that awakening, to me, without having a place for the working class to build power and to provide a counter to capital. I don’t think you can have a general strike. I don’t think that you can do the kind of actions that people typically rush to the altar to say, let’s have a general strike.

[00:32:23] Maher: Yeah…

[00:32:24] Grumbine: I think you’ve got to earn a general strike. And I think you’ve got to have those mutual aid, legal aid, food, housing, shelter. I think you need to have a plan for the plan.

[00:32:34] Maher: Absolutely.

[00:32:35] Grumbine: What do you think of organizing in modern society, given what we’re up against?

[00:32:40] Maher: I think those are really important observations that you just made. One of the most important political thinkers, Adolf Reed, calls neoliberalism capitalism without a working class opposition. That’s how he defines it. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. We have a situation in which the balance of class forces, especially since the 1970s, has tilted so decisively toward capital that even just winning relatively minor reforms is going to involve very intense struggle.

And I was a big supporter of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. And I think one of the lessons of Sanders is that the kind of base you’re describing, which is absolutely the political orientation we should have, just wasn’t there. Not only was it not there to win the Democratic nomination, it wouldn’t have been there had he become president to actually implement a meaningful agenda that goes beyond what Joe Biden has done.

No matter how hard Sanders himself may have tried, he’s still governing a capitalist state. He’s still one individual sitting in the White House. And if he doesn’t have a very significant class movement that’s present, his ability to achieve much more than very limited token type gestures would be hard to imagine.

And obviously it’s the case that Sanders’ defeat, for example, came at the hands of a Democratic Party that engaged in all kinds of chicanery, etc to undermine and marginalize him. That’s obvious, but we have to expect that this is the real world. We don’t live in a civics textbook. Reality, we live in the real world and that’s the kind of opposition we have to expect is going to happen to any kind of serious class oriented political project and we have to organize the forces necessary to overcome it.

And that’s just the starting point. If we can’t defeat the Democratic Party through primary elections, how are we going to take on the Department of Defense? If you’re talking about a transition to socialism, for example. Or the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department or all the various different apparatuses of power that are not going to play fair just because we won an election, even in the event that we were able to.

So the only way these very significant centers of power within the state and across society are going to be able to be confronted in any kind of a significant way that puts something like socialism seriously on the agenda. Requires building precisely the kind of base you’re describing requires going door to door, building solidarity, doing political organizing and building a deep base in the working class and preparing people for the scale of the struggle that’s ahead.

I don’t think we can begin by telling people, oh, it’s all going to be puppy dogs and ice cream cones once you vote for us that’s not realistic. It’s going to be hard. There’s going to be setbacks talking about a transition to socialism, let alone just winning universal health care. There could be a protracted social crisis.

It could be incredibly difficult, and there’s going to be a long fight that’s required in order to get anywhere. And people have to be prepared for that. In the event that they’re not, I think you can expect that you won’t win. So this has to be a long, hard project of organizing and building a base of working class people who are prepared to take on the scale of the struggle that we’re going to have to face in the event we want to even win significant reforms, let alone socialism.

[00:35:50] Grumbine: I think that’s incredibly important. What you just said. Now I’m going to build on that with the French Revolution. This wasn’t just some sort of working class revolution. It was a bourgeois revolution, and you had the royalists and a counter-revolution and shortly thereafter, they went back to the monarchy.

There’s always a counter-revolutionary force to every revolution. And by revolution, I don’t mean picking up guns. I’m talking about the political revolution, a revolution of the spirit, a revolution of what could be vs what is. There’s a whole bunch of ways to have a revolution. I guess my point is, I think that people as a whole, having these kinds of epiphanies, having these kinds of awakenings, it’s unfortunate that people that hit hard times tend to be the ones that wake up.

And I’m curious as to your thoughts on an awakening of the working class.

[00:36:56] Maher: Yeah I think Steve, the question that you’re raising here is several different issues. Primarily, I think you’re talking about the question of socialist transition. What would that look like? Does a socialist transition involve picking up a gun and shooting the US military? I hope not, because if so, I don’t think we have much of a chance. So if the conceptual revolution or socialist transition that we’re working with here is that we have to get in a fight with US military – armed struggle with US military – I don’t expect that will turn out very well. The other piece of that is that at no time in the history of the US, or Europe for that matter, has it been the case that these small vanguardist Leninist organizations have been able to gain more than a very marginal support from the working class.

They’ve never had mass appeal among the working class groups advocating armed, struggle, etc. And I think there’s a reason for that. I don’t think that way of approaching things is desirable for people. And I don’t think that it would ever succeed at building the mass politics that is needed in order to bring about something like socialism. So we need a different path. We need a different kind of politics than the old micro-sect armed struggle, waving 1917 flags, waving Lenin flags We need a different political organization than that, I think. And we need a different kind of politics than that, a different kind of sense of what socialist transition would mean.

And I think in this respect, the issue you’re raising is how to learn the lessons from the past. And that means looking back at the alternative path out of capitalism that has been thrown up across the 20th century, which was European social democracy, the Finland, Sweden, Norway model. And I think that too has failed.

Those parties did succeed in building much more support and at different points in time, a mass base for their political programs and their political organizing. But that too has failed. Those parties initially set out to achieve socialism, supposedly. And what happened was across the 20th century, instead of transforming those capitalist states and transforming those capitalist societies, they were transformed by those capitalist states absorbed within the machinery of the capitalist systems that they are at different times governing.

And so how do we find a path forward that is neither European social democracy, the fight for incremental reforms within capitalism, whereby, as we’ve seen across the 20th century, those reforms become ends in themselves and the socialist horizon, the idea of a qualitative transformation from a capitalist society to some other kind of society is pushed off into the indefinite future as the reform process becomes an end in itself.

And those parties ended up becoming major. Institutional pillars of neoliberalism pushing forward market reforms. Look at the Blairite labor party. Look at Keir Starmer today in the UK, giving up what’s left of the climate commitments of the UK labor party just this week. So the idea that these parties represent anything other than a complete dead end is something that we should be very conscious of.

And so it’s a matter of trying to build a politics that neither falls into this trap of social democracy, of getting absorbed within capitalism. Of getting absorbed within the capitalist state, of ultimately serving to marginalize and deflect socialist challenges from the left in order to institutionalize and consolidate, in this case, the neoliberal regime, which has been so damaging for working people. And on the other hand, the micro-sect Leninist party. So what does that leave us with as a conception of socialist transition and socialist organizing? What does that leave us with? And I think the lessons that we’re talking about are very current in the sense that we’ve just seen the defeat of Sanders and Corbyn inside the center left parties in the US and UK, the Democratic Party and Labor Party, respectively.

And we’ve also seen the defeat of a stream of new parties that were formed across Europe in the form of Syriza in Greece. Right? Bloco in Portugal, Podemos in Spain, these new parties that formed within these states that had proportional representation and those parties too have been largely defeated.

Their radical potential has been sidelined. And they now, for the most part, are in coalitions with the traditional center-left social democratic parties. So we need to look at all of this history as a series of experiments and we need to learn from it. And we need to use it as the basis for crafting a new politics

in a search for a new political organization, which I think we’re still looking for. And I think there’s been some promising moves in that direction in the recent past, including the rebirth, the rejuvenation of the Democratic Socialists of America, and in terms of the Sarah Nelsons of the world that you were talking about earlier, but I think we still have a ways to go and it’s going to be a difficult process of figuring this out.

[00:41:46] Grumbine: I went to see Dead & Company in Northern Virginia, which is a very wealthy place. You see these titans of the military-industrial complex, banking, monstrous buildings. Remind me of the ports in China, massive. That is what we’re taking on. We are in this weird world where capitalism has managed with all the death it’s wrought, with all the pain and suffering, help me understand how capitalism has remained so resilient.

[00:42:20] Maher: Well, and this gets us back to Marx, the fundamental category that Marx elaborated on in his work was value. The question he starts out from really is what is economic value? Where does it come from? How is it produced? And it turns out that that is the core question in understanding how an economic system functions.

We just see a price on a particular commodity, and we just assume that price is in some way connected to an intrinsic way to that commodity. This water bottle is $23. Somehow that $23 is just part of this water bottle. It’s in the water bottle somewhere. And it turns out that what you’re actually looking at there is a social relation, that $23, that price tag, when you’re in the supermarket and you’re surrounded by price tags, all the different commodities around you and labels around you, those are social relationships.

Those represent a connection that you have to thousands of workers all around the world who produce those commodities and brought them to that place where you’re able to purchase it in the grocery store. And so this is what Marx called the commodity fetish. What appears to be the property of these things, these commodities that we exchange for money, other things, this interaction between things, this interaction between the money in my wallet, and the commodity that I want to purchase is in fact a social relation between people.

And so what we have is a situation in which because of the commodity fetish, we have material relations between people and social relations between things as Marx describes. And this foundational category that is in fact a social relation exists in motion. That’s one of Marx’s most important points.

Value exists in motion. Capital is value in motion. Capital is self-expanding value. Value that has become an automatic subject, as Marx describes it. And the moment that motion stops, you have a crisis. Accumulation stops. There’s an economic crisis. But the fact that capital is value in motion also means that it’s very fluid, that it’s dynamic, that capital is capable of continuously restructuring and evolving and developing as part of an organic totality that is a social system.

And so capitalism is riven by contradictions, the contradictions between classes, but also the contradictions between use value and exchange value, the contradictions within the capitalist class, between finance and industry potentially all manner of contradictions in organizational forms, contradictions within the state, between democracy and class rule.

Many different contradictions at the heart of the capitalist order that we now live in, but capitalism evolves in the context of these struggles and the context of these contradictions through the movement of these contradictions. And it’s constantly restructuring and evolving and developing as these contradictions move around.

And so it’s been able to be incredibly dynamic and resilient precisely because of this. It internalizes these contradictions. It turns every limit, as Marx says, into a barrier to be transcended. Capitalism doesn’t like limits very much. As I said, it’s value in motion. The minute that the motion stops, you have a systemic crisis.

So when it confronts limits, it turns that limit into a barrier, which it overcomes and transcends. And in the process of transcending that barrier, it evolves and changes and restructures. So what’s interesting about capital is how it evolves over time, how it’s restructured, how it changes, how it responds to different contradictions.

And that’s exactly where the managed capitalism of the Keynesian era comes from. It was a response of the system to class struggle from below and capital responded as the state organized reforms, which restored the legitimacy of the system, extended some benefits to the working class that would demobilize the class struggle from below and satisfy enough of the demands of the working class, so as to restore order. And as we saw in the 1970s, that politics of class harmony and managed capitalism proved to be unviable. Capital ran into a profitability crisis and again, had to restructure. It had to roll back those hard fought victories for the working class in order to restore profits and to resume stable accumulation, shifting the balance of class forces back toward capital as we saw capital globalize.

With the rise of finance and the extension of capitalist globalization, you’re opening the low wage workforces of the global periphery, huge number of people entering the global proletariat to exploitation. And that has the effect of restoring profits as well by slashing labor costs. So restoring class discipline then became part of capitalist restructuring coming out of the 1970s, leading us to the moment that we’re now in.

And so I think the most important thing to recognize about capital is how dynamic it is. And how it’s capable of evolving in order to address contradictions that inevitably will arise. As long as you have capitalism, you’re going to have crises. It’s a contradictory system and it moves through these crises and evolves in relation to these crises as they’re addressed and the system is restructured, thereby paving the way for the next crisis.

[00:47:20] Grumbine: It’s like cancer. It seems like it just goes through the body and wherever it has an opportunity to colonize, it does. And whenever there’s a disaster, there’s a solution for capitalism. I have a hundred thousand other things I want to ask you. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. This to me, I think is probably one of the most important things that I am struggling with in terms of being able to frame, present, and better put together an understanding of how to not only view and assess, but combat mass privatization.

The idea that capitalism has to eat up the public space to survive. And you see this in the UK as they’re losing their NHS, the US top export is neoliberalism and privatization. It seems like it’s being cheered on by the working class. They don’t realize, I think, fundamentally that the reason why privatization exists is because the government itself is allowing privatization to occur.

The concept of private property within Marxist theory, help me understand that relationship and bring it to today.

[00:48:32] Maher: That’s also a really important question, Steven. It gets us back again to the limitations and the impasses of social democratic politics, which is that, yes, social democratic parties and working class struggles in support of those agendas. They won important victories, real important victories for the working class in terms of expanding social services, universal healthcare, etc But the way that those were implemented was very top down. It was very bureaucratic. It was incredibly alienating and problematic, and that created the terrain that made possible the Thatcherite attack on those very services. That like the social democratic parties themselves, which are very top down and rigid and hierarchical, they have never been predicated on trying to give workers an active role in crafting politics and becoming politically engaged in an active way.

Instead, they say, okay, don’t worry. Our technocrats in charge of the party are going to figure out the best possible deal we can get for you within capitalism without causing an economic crisis. In the event we cause an economic crisis, we fully accept we have to roll back anything that’s responsible for that crisis.

We don’t want to damage capitalism, we don’t want to damage accumulation, but there’s space within capitalism for some gains and our technocrats in charge of the party, they have figured out what that program should be and they’re going to fight for it. All you need to do is go knock on doors for us and get people to vote for us and we’ll take care of it from there.

They’re not predicated on involving working class people in an active way in politics and themselves becoming political and developing in a way that allows them to take control of their lives. And so the welfare states that these parties built in the post-war period were also very hierarchical and top down, and they were based as much on maintaining social discipline as they were on extending social services, which isn’t to say that’s not better than privatization and the elimination of all of those things.

But certainly the fact that was how these services were organized, incredibly alienating, it created the terrain that made possible the Thatcherite attack, which was very popular at the time. Now, today, I think privatization is mostly unpopular in most contexts, and it’s mostly been a disaster… hasn’t worked very well… and that’s for a variety of reasons, including reasons of accountability, but the people don’t particularly like seeing their services eroded while private companies running those services rake in profits.

And I think the quality of people’s care has gone down. In the case of the NHS being continuously, gradually piecemeal privatized. You see the same thing happening in Canada as the right-wing government in Ontario, for example, of Doug Ford, is trying its hardest to gradually privatize the healthcare system.

And there’s struggles against that. But I think the important lesson for socialists here is that we need to have a different conception of how these social services and how the state should be organized. What should the relationship be between the state bureaucrats or the state employees, public sector workers, and the communities that they serve?

Should it be one in which they’re regulating and policing the recipients of the benefits that they’re giving out? Or should it be one in which these individuals are much more embedded organically with the communities that they’re working with and democratically accountable to them and the communities that are receiving these programs and various forms of social assistance actually play a direct role in themselves?

Deciding how they’re implemented and running them. And it’s a completely different model that we have to think through. I think of how these kinds of social welfare programs could be organized and set up, which would make them much harder to attack that very alienating top-down bureaucratic nature of the Keynesian welfare state really was part of the basis for the Thatcherite attack that people ended up very enthusiastically supporting in the 1980s and 1990s, even in the form of Tony Blair as head of the Labor Party.

So I think we have to think through a fundamentally different kind of state. The task for socialists is not more state or less state. That’s a social democratic question. The task for socialists is what kind of state do we want? Not just more state, but a fundamentally different and more democratic form of state that promotes new forms of democratic participation in the running of society, including social programs, but also the entire economy.

[00:52:44] Grumbine: I really appreciate this. This was fantastic. Can’t wait to talk to you and your other co-author on the new book. I can’t wait to read it. I did get to hear you, on the People’s Forum, wonderful presentation between your co-author Steve, tell everybody where they can find more of your work.

[00:53:03] Maher: Thanks a lot, Steve. It’s been great talking with you. The book is available from Verso, you can get it on Amazon or anywhere. And this article’s on Jacobin and certainly the Socialist Register, which I’m the co-editor of, we put out starting the next volume. I just got made the co-editor of this a couple of months ago, following the unfortunate death of my late mentor and former Socialist Register co-editor Leo Panitch.

We put out an annual volume, which is full of excellent socialist analysis of conjunctures and situations all around the world. So that’s always a good place to start too.

[00:53:35] Grumbine: That’s just fantastic. I really appreciate your viewpoints and I appreciate you being gentle, walking me through this and having a great conversation It was very kind of you. I appreciate it.

[00:53:46] Maher: Thanks very much, Steve. I really appreciated it.

[00:53:48] Grumbine: All right. My name is Steve Grumbine I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. Please consider donating to us. We are a 501(c)3 nonprofit, Real Progressives.

By all means, go to our website, realprogressives.org. On behalf of my guest, Steve Maher and myself, Real Progressives, Macro N Cheese, we are outta here.

[00:54:15] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.