Our Forgotten 'Red' Heritage (w/Richard Wolff)
... and some lessons worth (re)learning.
In this conversation, Prof. Wolff and I discuss the “forgotten left” of American and Western history—a left that was known for defending the oppressed and working people everywhere. Its ideas and activism produced some of the most humane and democratic advances in modern life.
The socialist label has risen and receded in the public mind over the decades, for many reasons. Right now it’s having a “moment,” as the expression goes, but its principles have always been with us. As historian Michael Kazin writes,
“Socialists … played a major role in initiating and rallying support for changes that most Americans have no desire to reverse. These include women’s right to vote, Medicare, the minimum wage, workplace safety laws, universal health insurance, and civil rights for all races and genders. All were once considered radical ideas. But vast majorities now consider them the cornerstones of a decent society.”
It’s impossible to do justice to such a broad topic in an hour; instead, we attempt to offer something of an informal overview. We cite examples from American and European history like Vienna’s social housing, free universities, Social Security, Medicare, and labor reform. We also reflect on a few personal experiences which (hopefully) help tie these histories together.
Below are some snippets from what each of us had to say, followed by a full transcript.
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Wolff quotes
“Socialism is capitalism’s self-criticism … capitalism has always produced people who insist we can do better than this system.”
“Nothing guarantees the future of socialism more than the future of capitalism.”
“Americans don’t realize there have been roughly 130 to 150 socialist mayors in U.S. cities, and hundreds more across Europe. They think it’s brand new because their own history has been erased.”
“In Vienna, roughly half the apartments are public or public-private, rents are capped at about 25% of income, and the system was so popular that even the Nazis didn’t dare dismantle it.”
“In economics we measure success by whether people have food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, and health care. If that’s your yardstick, many socialist experiments come out way ahead of our beloved capitalism.”
Eskow quotes
“Social Security and Medicare are essentially socialist programs—we just didn’t dare call them that. But any politician who openly tried to get rid of them would have no future.”
“We talk endlessly about freedom, but the ‘freedom’ to quit one bad job for another bad job isn’t freedom at all—it’s a rigged choice inside a system you never voted for.”
“We have agencies to promote what we call ‘democracy’ around the world, but there isn’t a shred of democracy in the Safeway on my corner.”
“I see hopeful signs everywhere—from Starbucks baristas and Amazon workers who go on strike, to West Virginia locals who refuse to let coal companies fence off their public roads. They may not call themselves leftists or socialists, but they’re people who know the system is rigged and are doing something about it.”
“Someone from the Tea Party told me, ‘Everything you said about the rigged economy would go over well at our rallies.’ I said, ‘Invite me. I’ll go.’”
Transcript (lightly edited; please excuse any errors):
Richard Eskow: Here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot: the generations-long silence about a whole school of leftist thought in this country. I grew up — and I’m not a young man by any means, except of course in my heart — completely unaware of any of this.
I grew up mostly in the ’50s and ’60s. At that point, the only thing we knew about “the left” was that there were “communists and socialists” — like it was one word — and that all of them, as it was communicated to us, were beholden to the Soviet Union. We were told the Soviet Union was a drab, oppressive, life-negating place of breadlines and empty shelves, no supermarkets, and so on.
That view was reinforced for me later. I was too young to be aware of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in ’56, although I went to Hungary later, spent a lot of time there, and learned more about it. I knew, as a 14- or 15-year-old hippie rebel, about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. As far as we were concerned they were going after people like us with guns — people who were anti-war, long hair, all of that. I was definitely a leftist by disposition and thought, but other than this bureaucratic, oppressive image of the Soviet Union, the distinctions were blurred.
For us, socialists and communists meant the Soviet Union. As I got a little older, one of the things I noticed was that among my mother’s friends, the really cool ones — the ones I thought were amazing, brilliant, sensitive, thoughtful — they were all ex-Reds.
People who’ve seen the documentary The Good Fight have an idea of the kind of people I mean; in fact, I think a couple of them are in there. I began to realize Pete Seeger had been one, and others …
All these fascinating people in the ’30s and ’40s were part of this, not only socialist, but communist movement. It was as if that’s where the interesting people went. Then I learned that if you opposed racism against Black people in the 1930s — in the South or anywhere in this country — you basically had no place to go except communism or socialism. The Alabama Communist Party was the only group actively working for Black sharecroppers, for example.
But all this came to me much later, and for much of my adult life, honestly, Rick, it never occurred to me to identify myself as a socialist, or even the slightly softer, more qualified “democratic socialist.” I didn’t think about it one way or another. I was aware that I’m well to the left of most European socialist parties, but it just wasn’t in my conceptual universe.
Then I began to discover a universe of brilliant thinkers around the world and in the US animated by these ideas, including Martin Luther King saying the only reasonable system of governance is democratic socialism. Bayard Rustin, the great civil rights leader, was either a communist or a socialist, and he gave that incredible speech about the minimum wage at the March on Washington in 1963.
So, I became aware of this hidden underground current in American history and thought. It seems to me that now, with the election of democratic socialist mayors in New York and Seattle and other candidates rising up around the world—and of course with my old boss Bernie helping to reopen this conversation—socialism has become something that politicians, especially in the Democratic Party, have to contend with again.
That’s why it seems like a good time to open up the topic—we won’t conclude it, because it’s so vast—of this “secret red history of America,” if you want to call it that.
And “red,” by the way, didn’t always mean Soviet or Communist. People don’t realize that the now-overly-centrist British Labour Party, until Tony Blair came along, had The Red Flag as its anthem, which began:
“The people’s flag is deepest red,
It’s shrouded oft our martyr dead…”
—or words to that effect. Pretty hardcore.
So it seems to me we have some looking back to do, to see which ideas have risen and fallen in the tide of American left history — and which ones we might want to take a second look at. What do you think of all that?
Richard Wolff: I could not agree more. By the time I was in high school and beginning to have a brain and ask questions, I turned to my parents — where else? Both of them were refugees from Europe. My mother was born in Berlin, Germany, and my father in the French city of Metz, on the French-German border.
I grew up in those languages and with that culture, even though I was born in Ohio and have been an American all my life. I asked them about politics. They were typical European intellectuals, which in those years meant left of center. That’s just how the culture and educational system worked.
Very quickly I became fascinated with their stories and started asking questions about socialism, because it was one of the major points of view in Europe.
The other thing I want to say, to get into this topic, is that during the recent mayoral campaign here in New York City — I live in a 12-story apartment building and I’m on the ninth floor — I spend a lot of time in elevators. You chit-chat because it’s slow or it stops at every floor.
I was struck by something I hadn’t expected. We now know, because of the vote, but we didn’t know beforehand: almost everybody who got into the elevator was talking about the election and talking positively about a Muslim socialist. White people, Black people, older, younger — it really didn’t seem to matter.
I grew up in the Cold War. People who thought like that kept their mouths shut unless they were sure they were surrounded by people who were okay with it. And yet here they were, talking.
What really struck me was that people were saying, “We’ve had all these corrupt, posturing politicians — Cuomo, Sliwa, and so on. It’s time for America to try something genuinely different. I’m voting for Zohran Mamdani because he’s clearly different.” And everyone would nod: “Oh boy, is he different.”
You could tell he wasn’t winning because he was a socialist; he was winning because he wasn’t like the conventional politician — which, in a different way, is also what happened with Trump.
Richard Eskow: Of course — and in many ways that was true of Bernie too. The socialist label in his case meant he was himself. He wasn’t manufactured.
Richard Wolff: Right. He was honest — a kindly looking older man from a place nobody has any reason to dislike. Vermont isn’t a big city, it’s not a major power center.
Richard Eskow: He talks funny to most people. though not to me —
Richard Wolff: —and there were those famous mittens. In my view, the way he was treated was not okay at all.
Here’s where it takes me. I was struck that people thought Zohran Mamdani was the first socialist mayor. I’ve done enough American history to know that’s crazy. One day I went home and did half an hour of research.
By my estimate, there have been about 130, maybe 150 socialist mayors of American cities. And that’s without even going to Europe, where there are hundreds of them right now and have been for the last 50 years in one country or another — often in most of them.
So here were Americans with the best intentions, telling me they were going to vote for a socialist, but with no clue what socialism meant before 1945 — no historical frame to imagine what it might mean now.
Richard Eskow: Yeah. And that’s a fascinating opportunity. Because if more candidates like Mamdani and others arising now are successful, the novelty will eventually have to be replaced—or at least reinforced —with concrete understanding and depth of thought.
I’ve put a pretty critical eye on what I know of Mamdani’s work. There are some errors in it, to be perfectly candid. For example, his webpage once misstated how marginal tax rates work. It said, “We’re going to tax income over a million dollars at 2 percent, which means a person who makes one million dollars a year will pay $20,000 more.”
That’s wrong; it means a person who makes two million dollars a year will pay $20,000 more. But overall I’ve been impressed that he draws on a lot of good ideas and serious thinking.
I have the feeling that if we go back through history, as a few people like Jodi Dean and others have done (even, if not always, focused on US history), we’ll not only find inspiring figures— brave, smart, heroic people but also ideas that are ripe for renewal.
Richard Wolff: Absolutely. I’m even thinking of doing that research now, just so in conversations like this we can talk concretely about what various socialist politicians or thinkers — or people who were both — have actually done in the world that someone like Mr. Mamdani ought to study.
For the last 50 years, the city in Europe everyone visits to learn about socialist housing is Vienna, in Austria. It’s absolutely stunning. Roughly half the apartments in Vienna are publicly owned and operated, or are run by public-private partnerships. Rents are kept at about 25% of your income, whatever your income is. Everything is affordable.
This system was created by socialists at the beginning of the 20th century, when they basically took over the politics of Vienna. It became so popular that even during the Anschluss period, when Hitler took over Austria and therefore Vienna — killing Jews, banning Roma people, and committing all the other horrors — he and the fascists who ran Vienna could not touch that housing system. The population would have turned against them and made their rule impossible.
What does it mean that in Europe one socialist government after another has succeeded in things like that? Today, eight or nine European countries, including all the major ones, don’t charge tuition for universities. Higher education is considered a public service for those who can pass an exam.
Then there’s the National Health Service model, which eliminates the endless waste and cruelty we see in our system — cruelties that are about to get worse as premiums go up because Republicans refused to continue pandemic-era subsidies.
In Europe, my French relatives, if they get sick or injured, go to the doctor and get treated. No money changes hands. It’s just not part of the transaction.
When people ask, “How can that be?” I tell them: if you want to go to Central Park and have a picnic with your friends, you grab a blanket and a sandwich, go to the park, throw the blanket down on the lawn, and sit and talk. You don’t pay to get in. That’s not how that “product” — a beautiful park with manicured lawns and landscaping — is organized. It’s handled in a different way.
Are there people picketing Central Park saying it’s a communist plot? No. And if they did, they’d be ridiculed. Same idea.
Richard Eskow: Exactly. And of course, Social Security is essentially a socialist program. Medicare is essentially a socialist program. We just didn’t dare call them that in US politics.
Many politicians want to cut these programs, but if any of them openly said, “I want to get rid of Medicare. I want to get rid of Social Security. I want to cut the benefits in half,” they’d have no political future, because these programs are immensely popular.
Social Security even has the word “social” in it, as if FDR were flirting with the term. Harvey Kaye, the historian, published a book of FDR speeches. I found something from 1910, when FDR was running for or serving in the state senate, where he said, “Just as we say individuals have liberties, communities have liberties too.”
I asked Harvey, “Is he trying to dance around socialism here?” Because that’s how I interpret it. It’s unlike what most state governments let cities do, or what the federal government nowadays lets states do.
If a community decides — like Vienna did — that it wants to build public housing, someone like Zohran Mamdani is going to face enormous obstacles from the state and federal governments.
I’m one of those people who thinks FDR didn’t go far enough. When people talk about a “new New Deal,” I say, “That’s a start.”
The other part of this, for me, is recognizing that wherever you live in this country — unless you’re truly in the middle of nowhere — there’s probably a socialist or left history there.
While you and I were talking, I looked up my hometown of Utica, New York. In 1935 the New York Socialist Party issued a new manifesto there. There were 19th-century utopian communities I already knew about — the Skaneateles community, which followed Fourier, and the Oneida community. Schenectady, down the road, had a socialist mayor, which I also knew. His right hand, his chief press secretary, I think, was Walter Lippmann, who later became a famous, not-especially-leftist commentator.
The great Irish socialist revolutionary — I always mix up which Connolly — spent some time in Utica. So this isn’t only a source of ideas; it’s an indigenous, deeply rooted American school of thought. Don’t you think?
Richard Wolff: Absolutely. Socialists have led strikes in this country. Many of the great strikes we still celebrate — the shirtwaist factory strike in New York City, the general strike in Seattle — are often treated simply as “labor history,” but they were led by socialists, inspired by socialists, and they created more socialists.
The great writers of our culture we still celebrate — Jack London was a socialist, and Americans grew up on him. Mark Twain didn’t call himself that, but it’s easy to show how many of his comments, including the way he portrayed the Black friend of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, were early indictments of institutionalized racism.
Figures like W.E.B. Du Bois — a leading figure in the African American community all his life — make that decision at the height of the Cold War to join the Communist Party. He wanted to say, and did say, that he was giving his support to the institution that had fought harder than any other against racism.
He was making the same point you did about Alabama: American communists were way ahead of their time in understanding what racism meant, fighting it, and making it a principled commitment.
It really is a storehouse of efforts, experiments, and attempts to break through.
When people ask me, “What is a socialist?” I usually answer, “someone who thinks we can do better than capitalism,and devotes some effort to doing that.” It’s a bland definition, but it does the job.
Richard Eskow: It does. And to me it’s also shorthand for people who think we can do better together — by cooperating — than we can by competing and working against each other. At root, that’s what it is.
Gus Hall, who led the American Communist Party in the 20th century — and I’m not an especially big fan of anyone who followed the Soviet line, especially after the ’50s — nonetheless had one great line about communism. Someone asked him, “What is communism?” He said, “20th-century Americanism.”
He was trying to say: barn raisings, village fêtes, folks helping folks — The Grapes of Wrath, right? “Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” That spirit.
That outlook got a lot of directors and screenwriters blacklisted in the 20th century, but to me it’s not something exotic. It’s Social Security, Medicare, affordable housing, healthcare — people helping each other, people training in the medical professions to heal people. Call it what you want; that’s what it is.
You’ve also made an important distinction, because some people will say, “Yes, but socialism is oppressive. It crushes the human spirit and individuality.” You’re one of the people I first heard use the phrase “state capitalism” to describe the Soviet Union.
I’m not saying everything the Soviet Union did was wrong — far from it. I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, actually as an agent of capitalism, a consultant to the State Department. I’m trying to make amends for that now.
One of the things I remember when communism ended was that you suddenly started seeing homeless people on the street. You hadn’t seen that before. People started losing access to medical care. My area was health-care economics, and they had no idea how to provide it in the new system.
At the same time, it was very hierarchical. You had to wait eight months to get a phone when you moved. There were shortages and long lines. It was frustrating.
So when you described the Soviet Union as “state capitalism,” that resonated with me. It wasn’t democratic at work. It was hierarchical.
One thing people need to know is the range of thought in the US and abroad that says, “It doesn’t have to be like that.” There’s anarcho-syndicalism, libertarian socialism, and so on. I knew some of the anarcho-syndicalist veterans of the Spanish Civil War when I was young. There are many different ways you can organize a society.
Where I am with the left, as you probably know, is this: as the crisis of capitalism intensifies, to quote another Communist, let a hundred flowers bloom. Let a thousand schools of thought contend. Let people talk about how we want to organize things better.
I think many people will be amazed — unless they’re already hardcore left — at the profusion of imaginative ideas we’ve missed out on in this country.
Richard Wolff: Someday someone will write the book listing all the things we dismissed, swept under the rug, or refused to confront — like Vienna’s housing system, and a thousand other things we could have learned from.
Those countries are willing to talk about what they learned from the United States. But here, in the “empire,” we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking the fountain of all wisdom is us, not the complexity of the human race.
A woman whose name now escapes me — I’ve had her on my show — wrote a very funny book titled something like Why Sex Was Better in Eastern Europe When the Communists Were Still There. Her point was that there were no homeless people, and there was an insistence on work-life balance. You weren’t expected to work three jobs just to get by.
The irony, she said, was that young and not-so-young men and women had more time and energy for a decent sex life than the harassed people in the so-called free world.
If you want the liberty of sexual fulfillment, you have to be concerned about people’s workday lives and home obligations. If much of your consumption is organized collectively, you don’t have to do everything yourself. Someone else runs the laundries; someone else prepares the food you pick up at the canteen on your way home. That leaves you with more time that is truly your own.
Where is that calculated in our system? It isn’t.
Richard Eskow: And there’s a concept, as you know, called “shadow work” — all the tasks we have to do under this system that we shouldn’t have to do. I think Ivan Illich, the Catholic philosopher, coined it.
I believe you’re thinking of Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence makes this point beautifully. The subtitle is important because it highlights the independence this kind of organized society gives you.
You’re not dependent on your employer’s willingness to let you leave when your child has a cold. You’re not dependent on two incomes just to have a place to live. Those things make life easier.
When I was behind the Iron Curtain, the rule — at least in Hungary — was “8–8–8”: eight hours of work, eight hours of recreation, eight hours of sleep, five days a week. We know Americans who are fortunate enough to be employed work more hours than most people in the developed world.
Real independence means you don’t have to work 60 hours a week to make ends meet. Childcare doesn’t have to break you. Childcare could be free. And of course, women — and therefore everyone — will have better sex if they’re not tremendously stressed and overworked all the time.
Professor Ghodsee has a lot more to say than that, but sex sells, as they say. Socialists, take note.
Richard Wolff: She makes a very good, careful, nuanced case. The important thing isn’t whether you agree with every point, but recognizing the validity of the overall idea: do you work for the economy, or does the economy work for you?
In economics, we’re supposed to measure the success of an economy by whether it provides food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, and medical care in adequate quality and quantity to the population. If you use that standard, the socialist countries come out way ahead of the capitalist ones.
And then there’s civil rights and civil liberties. There’s an enormous range of what people call “socialism,” and that includes an enormous variety of civil-liberties and civil-rights regimes.
It’s as if I said, “Let’s compare capitalism,” and my examples were Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. Yes, they’re capitalist, but they’re not necessarily your best examples. Choosing them reveals that you want to make a particular point.
The same is true if you use the Soviet Union as your sole example of socialism. In the first ten years after the revolution, it was a fountain of creativity like few countries have ever seen — in poetry, music, film. Mayakovsky and so many others.
Were there big gulags then? No. The regime was not yet particularly rigid. Under what Lenin called the New Economic Policy, they allowed a great deal of economic freedom for individual businesses. That’s what they did then; they did other things later.
My point is: even if you use the USSR as an example, don’t cherry-pick only what suits your argument. That’s a cheap shot, and not what serious people should do.
Richard Eskow: Absolutely. And this connects to the way we define freedom. There’s that old French line, rephrased by Anatole France, that the poor man has just as much freedom to sleep under a bridge as the rich man has to ride over it in his carriage. That’s not real freedom.
The “freedom” to engage in organized theft from others isn’t real freedom either. It’s the freedom of a predator — the wolf — while the sheep are imprisoned and slaughtered.
We could pile on metaphors, but the point is: freedom means something deeper. I’ll give FDR his due: he started that conversation, even if he quit too soon. He named four of the probably ten freedoms he should have named: freedom from want, and so on. People should be free from fear that they won’t survive, free from starvation and deprivation, free from lack of housing, free to become the people they’re capable of being, free to help each other without being accused of sinister motives.
Mutual aid is one way to express this. There’s a group of communists in Alabama who fix cars in their neighborhood for free — they’ll put up a sign: “Got a taillight ticket? Come by, we’ll fix it.” There are a million ways we can demonstrate real freedom.
Richard Wolff: What about freedom for the 97% of Americans who aren’t employers? How about the freedom not to live in fear that the 3% who are employers will take your job and income away?
Richard Eskow: Exactly. And the freedom to know that when you go to work you won’t be subject to arbitrary, cruel, manipulative, sadistic, or insensitive behavior — which is an everyday reality for millions of workers.
We recognize now that serfs under feudalism didn’t have freedom, but we still repeat, “You’re free to do whatever you want in this country.” Really? You’re “free” to quit your job if you don’t like it — with nothing else lined up? You’re “free” to tell your boss to go bleep himself or herself?
There’s a reason a song called “Take This Job and Shove It” was such a huge hit in the 1970s. I was disappointed the lyrics weren’t about bosses — it’s about being so mad at your wife that you say to your boss, “Take this job and shove it.” That was a fake-out.
But that line — “Take this job and shove it” — is one of the most heartfelt, relatable expressions in American culture.
Richard Wolff: That’s how I teach the system. I say: the only “freedom” you have is to leave your job, and the only place you can go is another job with another employer. You’re back at square one.
You’re allowed to pick who gets to frighten you with the risk of losing your job. They don’t necessarily have to punish or hurt you directly, because you self-censor. You’re so afraid of losing your job that you censor yourself, saving the employer the trouble.
Richard Eskow: And that extends to our political and media classes. They can’t say everything they think, either. The ones who instinctively self-censor are the ones who rise to the top — with disastrous results for everyone.
Why aren’t jobs like other democratic institutions, with people having real autonomy? Why don’t workers elect their bosses? You’re a “democracy at work” person. Why don’t we have democracy at work?
Under Reagan and others, we got a bipartisan wave of ESOPs — employee stock ownership plans. But how far does that get you if all you’re doing as a worker is putting more of your financial destiny in the same hands that already control your life? If it’s not accompanied by real power-sharing, it’s just another way to enrich the boss.
Richard Wolff: Absolutely. Here’s the contradiction. You have a country that celebrates democracy by insisting that mayors, city councils, and members of Congress must all be elected every few years so you can at least vote against them.
But when you cross the threshold into your factory, office, or store, you enter a realm where democracy has never existed. The people at the top — the owner, the board of directors — have the power. You don’t. They hire and fire you; you don’t have that power over them. You don’t elect them, you can’t recall them.
You accept an absence of democracy in the place where you spend the best part of five out of seven days every week. You profess commitment to democracy, but somehow, from the beginning, the workplace got excluded from it. Where did that come from?
Richard Eskow: Right. And the early Christians, by the way, were communists — small-c communists. They lived communally.
It’s fascinating, Rick. While you were talking, I was thinking: we have all this rhetoric about democracy, about how the whole world should be democratic “like us” — which is a separate question in itself. We have the National Endowment for Democracy and a whole apparatus to “support democracy” in Asia, Africa, and around the world.
Meanwhile, there’s a Safeway on the corner not far from me, and there’s no democracy in that Safeway. Why are we sending people to lecture Asia on democracy when we don’t have it right here at home — in the workplace?
That’s part of this conversation about American socialism. Workers are discouraged from organizing. If they’re lucky they can strike, but even that’s hard. It’s all very close to home — and it’s not far from the Capitol or the State Department. For them it’s a 20-minute drive. They could come up and I’d show them around.
What do you think?
Richard Wolff: A very wise person once said to me — I must have been complaining that socialism seemed in retreat and capitalism was “winning” — “You don’t have to worry about that.” I said, “Really? Why not?”
He said, “Because socialism is capitalism’s self-criticism.” Capitalism has produced socialism from the beginning. There were always critics of slavery alongside slavery, critics of feudalism alongside feudalism. There have always been critics of capitalism; socialists are among them.
And then he gave me the punchline: “Nothing guarantees the future of socialism more than the future of capitalism.”
Richard Eskow: That’s a great line. And it helps explain something a lot of us have noticed: the current system, and the level of inequality it produces, is inherently unstable.
Even if all of us critics of capitalism disappeared tomorrow — which some people would love — it would still be unsustainable. It’s doomed because it’s structurally unstable. Imagine a huge box sitting on top of little boxes, and you keep stacking heavier boxes on top. Eventually it falls. That’s accelerating inequality and centralized political control.
So the question becomes: what happens when it all falls down? Do we have a humane, collective, collaborative, community-based system we’ve been building in anticipation of that moment? Or do we find ourselves under the thumb of the incipient fascism we see every day?
My sense is, if it’s not one, it’ll be the other.
Richard Wolff: Exactly. If it’s a system run by capitalists at the top who monopolize power throughout the economy, and then use the wealth they give themselves to buy the political system because they know how vulnerable they are, then when the system breaks down, they don’t want to shoulder responsibility.
Like children, they want independence and freedom without responsibility. When the you-know-what hits the fan, they look for scapegoats.
We scapegoat immigrants. We just watched a government execute people in little boats in the Caribbean without a court, without trial, without a judge, without habeas corpus, without any of the legal rights we’re supposed to value. Summary execution. No appeal.
What’s going on? You demonize them. You say, “They’re the reason we have a drug problem. They’re the reason the economy isn’t working for you.”
You can mobilize people that way, and then we all watch on television as heavily armed ICE agents beat on desperate migrants — some of the poorest people on the planet — as if they were the cause of our problems.
When a system that doesn’t allow democracy runs into serious trouble, it makes everything worse through demonization and scapegoating. That’s its go-to response.
Richard Eskow: As a final thought, I’d add that I see signs of what we might call an uprising around us — hopeful, positive signs.
You see it in the obvious places: greater interest in unions, more public organizing in places that seemed impervious before, like Amazon and Starbucks, and community organizing against ICE — including in my own area, with ICE-warning systems and mutual support networks.
But you also see it in less “predictable” places if you think in stereotypical left terms. For example, in West Virginia there was an organized revolt of locals — I think it was in McDowell County — because the authorities started giving public access roads over to coal companies. The government, so owned by coal interests, put up fences: “This is for the coal companies.”
People said, “Hell no.” I guarantee you most of them would not call themselves socialists, leftists, or even Democrats. But they said, “Hell no, you’re not taking our roads.” They laid down in front of trucks, broke locks, did what they had to do — and they won.
That’s a hopeful sign. Now we can say to them: there’s an entire history and framework for what you’re doing. It connects to your water, to runoff from excessive mining, to your health — everything.
We saw the truckers’ revolt you and I have talked about, when they didn’t want to be forced to get vaccinated. Whatever you think about the issue, that was working people organizing and resisting. Anywhere people are organizing, as Tom Joad says in The Grapes of Wrath, “I’ll be there.”
This is the time to go to them and say: “Here’s the tradition you’re part of.” You don’t have to be so “pure” that you only preach to the converted.
After I gave a speech at a Treasury Department protest, a writer from a right-wing paper came up to me and said, “Everything you said could have been said at a Tea Party rally.” I said, “Invite me — I’ll go.”
I think there’s an incipient spirit out there. You know what I’m saying?
Richard Wolff: I do. I got invited several times to Tea Party events and had some surreal conversations. The organizers were very polite. I asked, “Do you know who I am?” They said, “Oh yeah, we’ve watched your videos — that’s why we invited you.”
They were so interested in my criticism of what was going on — which they agreed with — that the fact I was coming from the left didn’t matter much to them. They felt, without using these words, that we had more in common than what divided us.
To their credit, they reached out.
Richard Eskow: I was talking to a friend at the University of Maryland who mentioned my show, The Zero Hour, to someone in Chicago. The guy said, “Yeah, I’ve watched it. But he has Richard Wolff on a lot, and Richard Wolff is a Marxist.”
My friend, who isn’t a historian or economist, said, “Yeah, but he makes sense. He makes so much sense.” That’s what matters. You’ll always get people who say, “I won’t listen to you.” But it’s the others — the ones who say, “Yeah, that makes sense” — who are crucial.
That’s why I tell people one of the best critics of capitalism right now, in some ways, is Tucker Carlson.
Richard Wolff: That’s right.
Richard Eskow: He may be abhorrent on a lot of other issues, but he’s eloquent on infrastructure and the neglect of basic public goods. He’ll say, “They’re sending billions abroad. Go look at the nearest bridge and see how well it’s maintained.”
We should all be saying that.
Richard Wolff: My father, because he loved me and took care of me, gave me some advice when I started drifting toward my leftist corner. He said, “You can say anything in America, as long as it doesn’t sound like you’re talking socialism or communism. Be careful with your words. Keep it simple, in terms people can understand, because they’re struggling with these things themselves.”
I believed I did that. But people close to me would still ask, “Have you been influenced by Marx?” I couldn’t lie. I didn’t want to. I was angry at the idea that I should. Of course I’d been influenced by Marx. I pick up Marx, I learn.
I’ve also learned a great deal from Adam Smith. I’ve taught The Wealth of Nations. Smith loved capitalism, and I learned to see it that way from him. Marx was a critic; I learned to see it that way from him.
Why do we read film critics? Because we’re interested in how different people see the same movie. We have a richer experience if we hear both the critic and the admirer and let those ideas percolate.
So when people asked, I said, “Yes, I’m a Marxist.” My father warned me: “Don’t say that. It’ll mess up your career. You won’t get ahead.” I said, “I think the times are different. I think I can do it.” We agreed to disagree.
He’s gone now, but to be fair, he knew what he was saying. Neither he nor I could have imagined, in the 1960s and ’70s, that I’d ever be able to talk about a critique of capitalism at this scale, with mass distribution.
In the end, it kind of worked out.
Richard Eskow: It did. And I’ve learned from Adam Smith too. He said corporations should be chartered by the state based on their social usefulness — so you really can learn something valuable from everybody.