January 27, 2020 • 37 mins
John Maynard Keynes, the founder of macroeconomics, thought he knew what his grandchildren would be facing today. He imagined that capitalism would be almost over by now, having simply been a means to greater ends. About other things he was right; about capitalism being over, he was very, very wrong. Today's guest, Malcolm Harris -- editor of The New Inquiry and author of the book Shit is Fucked Up And Bullshit: History Since The End of History -- believes today's kids will have it even worse. Bethany and Malcolm have a Gen-X-meets-Gen-Y conversation about our future economy.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Bethany McLean and this is making a killing interviews,
exploring the headlines you thought you understood, and finding the
long term lessons we can all learn from today's business stories.
I'm at Bethany mac twelve on Twitter. My guest today has,
among other things, a talent for writing catchy titles. Malcolm Harris,
(00:22):
who's an editor at The New Inquiry and an admirably
outspoken writer, published a recent piece in MIT's Technology Review
entitled Canes was wrong, gen Z will have it worse.
Malcolm is also the author of Kids These Days, and
his forthcoming book is entitled Shit is Fucked Up in
Bullshit History Since the end of History. Let's get some
(00:45):
generational clarity out of the way for context and disclosure,
I am squarely in gen x. Malcolm, as you'll hear
in the interview, is deeply gen y. In other words,
a millennial. My kids still elementary age are gen z.
I have no idea what any future grandchildren would be
called or what kind of world they'll be living in.
(01:05):
John Maynard Keynes, on the other hand, thought he knew
what his grandchildren would be facing. In his popular essay
from the early nineteen thirties called economic possibilities for our grandchildren.
The founder of macroeconomics wrote about the world a hundred
years in the future, which is pretty much now. He
imagined that capitalism would be almost over by now, having
(01:25):
simply been a means to greater ends. In his books
and in his articles, Malcolm seeks to understand where Canes
got it wrong and defies the cultural impression of millennials
as tantrumy teenagers. Instead, he tries to understand what made
millennials the way they are, burned out, waiting later and
(01:46):
later to get married or have kids, terrified of debt
yet saddled with it, focused on technology inefficiency, but also
trying to have a larger purpose in life than work
for work's sake. Malcolm writes that a yuk of poll
found that support for capitalism among Americans under thirty fell
from thirty nine percent to thirty percent between two fifteen
(02:09):
and twenty eighteen. That's fourteen percentage points below the average.
At the same time, the prime age workforce of twenty
thirty was born between nineteen seventy six and two thousand
and five. So if Malcolm's right, his answers helped paint
a portrait of the economy of the future, and who
doesn't want to know more about that. I'm so excited
(02:31):
to dig into this today and grateful to Malcolm for
coming from Philly to meet me in New York. Hi, Malcolm.
So let's start with John Maynard Came's. I think it's
a name most people have heard, but you hold different
things out of his writing than other people have. What
made you gravitate toward him? Well, one of the reasons
I picked Cane's to focus this essay around was this
(02:53):
prediction about twenty thirty and realizing that the workers he's
talking about are all of them are already born, so
we could sort of assess this pre foundational prediction in
his thought empirically. Now it's about time we can look
around and see if that was true or not. And
he gets a lot of credit for being empirically right
about a lot of things throughout his work. But when
(03:16):
you look at this this sort of foundational question of
what is capitalism for, he seems like not right. And
what was his answer to this foundational question what's capitalism for?
It's to relieve us of necessity so that we could
focus on our species energy on things that aren't necessary
to being alive, like art and music, creativity, knowledge. I'm
(03:41):
I'm going to come back to that in terms of
what the meaning of life? Maybe, Oh dear, that's a
weighty conversation for today. But why do you think he's
wrong when you talk about the empirical evidence showing that
he didn't get it right? What do you look at
since the crisis two thousand and eight, there's been a
reassessment about achievements of capitalism, you know, or past the
Cold War. We don't have something else to compare it to,
(04:01):
so we can sort of look by its own standards
how capitalism is doing. And what we're seeing is not
the sort of accelerated pace of people's lives increasing in quality. Instead,
we've seen wages for most people level off, technology advantages
few instead of many. And that's not what was predicted.
(04:23):
And why do you think that is what's gone wrong?
Was Cans wrong or has something gone wrong to make
him wrong? Have there have been policy choices that have
made him wrong? What he misunderstood was the system is
built on exploitation at its very base, so that over
time things are going to get worse. Like that is
the nature of capitalism, and that's what marks it predicted
years before. So I'm going to come back to that.
(04:45):
But there is this great quote by Cans about capitalism
that I've always loved, which capitalism is the astounding belief
that the most wickedest of men will do the most
wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. Does
that kind of sum it up to you? Yeah, Well,
it's certainly justified a lot of wickedness, right, and that
this is the natural state of being. It's only through
(05:05):
this wickedness, through this self interest, that we can achieve
our collective interest. That's certainly the bill of goods we
were sold for a long time, at least as American.
You're one of the grandchildren that Caines wrote about. How
do you feel about where we are? Not optimistic, especially
in the face of ecological crisis. So my parents live
in a small town called Cloverdale in northern California, and
(05:27):
this year they had to evacuate from their evacuation because
of fires. You know, That's that's the level of crisis
we're looking at. Is our country's on fire, their whole
continents on fire. It does that's who we're looking at
and that's going to be an annual phenomenon for a
lot of people. Is that a metaphor to you is
the ecological state? And the fire a metaphor to you
(05:48):
for the state of capitalism? Well, it's it's very literal, definitely,
but we can also read it as a metaphor, right.
And I got involved in politics through the anti war
movement when I was when I was a kid or whatever.
We invaded Iraq two thousand and three and there was
a group, a coalition called World Can't Wait, and their
their logo was a World on Fire, and there said,
we can't we can't wait to get rid of the
(06:09):
Bush regime. You know, the world, world can't wait. The
world's on fire. And now I look at those posters
and I've been thinking about them a lot lately because
you can see the fires in Australia from space like
these are these are literal? Is that what shaped you
the anti war movement? Is that what made you start
thinking about these broader economic questions? Or were there other
forces at work in shaping your worldview? That was my
(06:31):
entred into organized politics. I think left wing politics. I
came of age under under the Bush administration, the George W.
Bush administration, and it was a very scary time to
be alive. And a lot of the things that we're
seeing now the consequences of the Trump years, those things
were set in place during the Bush years. And so
we saw, you know, the Department of Homeland Security being built.
(06:53):
We saw this crackdown on domestic protest that's gone on. So, yeah,
it was the state of the world to push me here,
and it hasn't gotten any better. What made you turn
your eyes toward economics instead of continuing to focus on
anti war? What made you decide that economics was fundamental
to understanding where we were. So I graduated from the
(07:15):
University of Maryland in twenty ten, which means I was
a sophomore when the financial crisis hit, and at the
time I was organizing with a left wing student group
to organize against tuition increases on campus because this was
a central ide question for students on campus for accessibility
of education and a national issue of educational affordability, and
(07:38):
when the crisis hit, we were looking for some way
to link this to our campaign around tuition increases. So
you're saying, what's the relationship between these tuition increases, the
huge increases in college educational costs and housing prices, and
we didn't really know what the answer was, or if
there really was answer. We just sort of figured there
had to be at the time. But that yielded this
(08:01):
whole research project that me and a friend worked on,
and out of that came sort of my first work
on student debt, which is where my project started. And
so you have maybe I'm going to call it counterintuitive,
maybe contrarian, but you've got a view on student debt.
Tell us about that. Well, I don't know if it's
it's contrarian these days. I mean when I first started
writing about it was twenty eleven, which was Preoccupy Wall Street,
(08:26):
and I wrote this piece for this journal n plus
one about the way that student debt had been set up,
in the way it was increasing out of control, and
that it wasn't clear that people were going to be
able to pay this debt back at the time. Up
until then, the assumption had been that all educational debt
was good debt, because for every dollar you invest, you're
going to get one x back in terms of wages
for your better qualified job, you learn to code or whatever, whatever, degrees.
(08:51):
You get it's going to rebound to you. All Educational
investment was a good idea, And around twenty eleven is
when people start looking at the totals, when we're looking
closely to a trillion dollars or whatever it was at
the time, and say, this doesn't make any sense. This
can't possibly be true, especially after wages had tanked during
(09:12):
the recession and had not rebounded in the way the
people expected. And you're looking at the numbers of the
average student os tens of thousands of dollars in debt,
and they're just making enough to get by, especially at
increased housing costs and transportation costs, and it just wasn't
lining up, and people kept paying because there really isn't
any alternative at the individual There is not right, they
(09:34):
come after you in bankruptcy well, and people kept in
rolling as well, although the enrollment did level off a
little bit around this time when people start drawing these
numbers into question, But people keep in enrolling because you
have an individual level. If you ask any expert, what's
the best thing I can do to increase my wages,
they'll still tell you to go to school, and they'll
still be right but you look at a collective level,
(09:55):
clearly that same dynamic isn't operating. It's not working. So
I think you're right. It's not contrarian now to be
terrified about the levels of student debt and what that means,
and even very hardcore capitalists are worried about what it
means in terms of financial crisis. But I think you
are contraying and that you've taken that into a broader
(10:15):
critique of the educational system at large. Yeah, and that
when we look at these jobs that aren't showing up
the way they're supposed to, and you still look at
young people who are putting in tons of not just money,
but also their time and their effort, huge amounts of
time and effort to get these educational degrees whatever certifications
(10:38):
at a time when there's more competition for them than ever.
Where is this value going Who is benefiting from all
of this? And there are some people who like to
throw up their hands and say, well, no one's really
benefiting from this, But that doesn't make any sense to me.
And so you can look at the economy and look
at who has been benefiting from this acceleration in human
capital development and the shift in costs from the state
(11:01):
and from corporations. Two workers themselves to train themselves on
behalf of companies that are going to hire them later.
And you can look at corporate profits which have never
been higher. Right, the DAO is at new records every year.
It seems like while people seem to be still suffering
out there, and it's because that's who's harvesting the profits
from this. You know, better trained workers are easier to
(11:23):
find than ever before. So we're making ourselves fodder for
the system. I shouldn't say we, You the millennials have
been making themselves fodder for the system. I mean the
equation was supposed to be the better educated you get,
the better job you get. And at an individual level
that still sort of makes sense. But if you look
at a societal level, if a bunch of people educate themselves,
(11:45):
they take it upon themselves, they spend the money they
invest in themselves to educate themselves, well suddenly they are
a lot more educated people and the cost that you
need to spend to hire one of them goes down.
In the old educational models, that's supposed to mean increased
scale of production. Right, They're like, well, there are a
lot of cheap, smart workers, we can expand production. That
(12:07):
hasn't happened. Instead, we've seen the ruling class just basically
grab as much of those profits as they can jack
up their own stock prices, and they've been very successful
at it. And for you, that shows up in the
gap between the stupendous rate of productivity increases and the
same time flat wages. Absolutely, and that whole wedge is
just increased ruling class share of the economy. That's nuts.
(12:31):
Why do you think it is that millennials and all
of us have been complicit in that system because it
takes all of us being complicit to make it work. Well,
it's hard to say what complicity looks like, right, say, like, well,
given this, there should be a nationwide rebellion of young people,
you know, in all of our major cities. They should
just like you know, run into the streets and say, no,
(12:53):
we won't do it, We don't want to pay this anymore.
This is wrong. And that happened. That happened in twenty eleven,
and happened again, you know, during Black Lives Matter years after,
of different groups of mostly young people in both cases
refusing the status quo, and they called in the army
in both cases, and you have to understand that, like
they've been called in the army in Hong Kong, right,
(13:14):
Like that's a really it's a really aggressive step to
take by a state to crack down on their own population,
and they did it in city after city in the
United States. When you look back Unoccupied, do you think
it was a success. It's too soon to tell. I
guess I think there are some limited ways in which
it was a success. That we put this sort of
(13:36):
class language back on the map. Yeah, back on the
national radar. I think you don't have the Bernie Sanders
campaign the way you do now without Occupy changing the discourse.
You also have student debt as an object of discussion
in the way that it wasn't before the people recognize
that it's out of control, and you have this sort
of coalescing of a generational political perspective that I think
(13:57):
starts would occupy. On the other hand, it shows the
sort of limits of protest as a strategy, which is
ultimately what Occupied turned out to be is what kind
of national protest, and protest only works until the point
they don't want to listen to you anymore, and they've
shown the government, and these are democratic mayors and democratic
cities who called in their police and used chemical weapons
(14:19):
in city centers to clear them. It's an interesting point
because I think part of the point you're making is
that this question that's going on by millennials of the
system actually is a bigger threat to the system than
most people realize, and maybe that response to the occupy
movement shows what an existential threat it is. Yeah, it's
going to be interesting to see what the next cohorts
(14:41):
draw from our experiences or draw from their own experiences,
what people like the Sunrise movement or Extinction rebellion, especially
the climate protesters in general, draw from those experiences and
their own experiences. We'll see tactically what they end up thinking.
Coming back to millennial how would you explain to a
(15:03):
politician or someone my age what's made millennials the way
the way they are? I mean, I think it goes
back to the exactly what we've been talking about, which
is this break in correlation between productivity and wages, and
up until this nineteen seventy nine early eighties, you see
these numbers rising together in a way that indicates a
(15:26):
sort of shared national prosperity, and that shared national prosperity
was the grounds for sort of Keynesian type thought that
this is getting better for everyone, sort of along the
same line, and for a number of reasons. When you
hit nineteen eighty, which is also when this millennial cohort
starts being born, those two break and wages stay flat
(15:48):
and productivity keeps going up, and that gap between the
two of them is an increased rate of exploitation. So
you'd argue that it's not so much that millennials have
had unrealistic expectations about what the world should be like
for them. It's that there's something fundamentally wrong with the
world as it's currently structured, so that millennials are right
to be dissatisfied. Yeah, well, I think you see that.
(16:10):
With me. That's a break between sort of millennial gen
z categories is that I was raised in the era
of you can be anything you put your mind to,
you know, the world is yours, etcetera, etcetera. We were
sort of supposed to be this Keynesian generation where we're
finally able to be creative. We'll all be able to
be creative in our own ways, etcetera. Etcetera. At least
(16:32):
that was the bill of goods sold to our parents younger.
When I talk to scholars who work on the younger cohort,
whatever we want to call it, currently, they don't see
that same sort of expectation. There is a lowered level
of expectation where they don't expect to win every time.
They're not expected to win every time. They're just trying
to like cobble together enough good experiences to make them employable.
(16:57):
And then that can become a self fulfilling prophecy. Right,
if you don't believe in a better future, how do
you possibly get a better future? That's fart of it.
You've talked about this idea of helicopter parents, and you're
actually less critical of helicopter parents than some of us
who are older are, And you think there's a reason
for it. So explain that when I started writing Kids
(17:18):
These Days, when I was working on that book, i'd
sort of had a pretty critical view of helicopter parents
because I had the stereotype sort of built in my
mind of an upper class mostly moms who are putting
their thumb on the scale to help their kids who
are already pretty advantage within the system. But the more
I read research about other classes of parents who are
(17:40):
stuck doing the same kind of work, the more I
realized that that was a rarefied picture. That most of anything,
they are not rich. Most helicopter parents are working class,
because most people are working class, and so you have
most what we'd call helicopter parents helicopter moms because again,
mostly moms, while we're talking about, are just trying to
(18:01):
get their kid by, right, They're people trying to create
some level of generational progress for their child, which if
their child has a learning disability or trouble in school
and one way or another they're laned badly, that can
be a full time job just trying to keep your
kid on track academically to go to a state college
(18:23):
or a community college such that they might be able
to participate in the twenty first century economy in some
way that's not totally stagnant. So you'd see helicopter parenting
not as a sign of entitlement, but rather as a
sign almost of terror. Yeah, well, just most people aren't entitled, right,
it's not the reality of American life, and the stereotypes
(18:45):
that we are given of entitled people are mostly written
by entitled people. You wrote this in kids. These days,
every authority from mom to presidents told millennials to accumulate
as much human capital as we could, and we did,
but the market hasn't held up its end of the bargain.
Do you think there's something wrong just inherently with the
notion of human capital. There's definitely something wrong about how
(19:07):
we understand the concept of human capital. We think about it.
It's something that belongs to you once you've achieved it, right,
because it seems like a wage. Right, I got a degree.
I earned a degree. The degree belongs to me, but
it doesn't belong to me in a way that other
commodities do. I can't sell it, right. All I can
do is work. And so human capital is how labor
(19:27):
appears to capital once it's been hired. Right, human capital
or to a state that's trying to compete with another state.
So human capital theory emerges in the sixties from these
neoliberal ideas of national competition. Can America keep up with
the Soviet Union in regard to human capital production? Are
we producing enough scientists and engineers so that we don't
(19:50):
get wiped out by the USSR? At the time, the
answer was no, we weren't. And that's where the Higher
Education Act comes from. Right. They're assessing a work force
that belongs to either the state or to a company
that's trying to think about them in terms of say
human resources or whatever. It's workers capacities as interpreted by
people who are putting those workers to work. The worker
(20:12):
themselves doesn't own your human capital. You can't sell your
human capital. All you can do is sell your labor,
which is the only commodity you have. And so we
get this idea twisted because you think that you can
accumulate human capital and that it's something that it's somehow
accrues to you. Yeah, that's that's something to belong that
belongs to you. But the truth is it just is you,
that is who you are. Only other people can put
(20:35):
that human capital to work. You're not actually a capitalist,
You're just a person. Right. What do you make of
the role that we all play in enabling this. I'm
coming back to this idea of complicity because you break
out these lines between consumers and workers, and yet we
who are workers are also consumers. Right, So in other words, yes,
(20:55):
we all enable an Amazon, right because we use the service.
Maybe you don't, But how do you break out that
line between who's a consumer and who's a worker when
all we're all some of both. Yeah. Well, that's why
I try not to look at consumption as a basis
for politics, because that just means being alive on a
capitalism right. You have to buy things. You have to
buy food, you have to buy shelter, and so when
(21:18):
you start talking about people as consumers, you're already just
talking about a very limited kind of choice where what
you can buy is what's for sale on a market,
and you have to buy something, especially when it comes
to say food and shelter. That's why I think it's
important to look at class as a question of capitalists
and workers and the question of do you work for
(21:38):
someone else or do other people work for you, and
that this is the central division that explains everything that's
going on in our economy. You know, we're calling the
one percent of the nine nine percent, but that's what
we're talking about is people who own assets, people who
make money by owning things, and people who make money
by working, who's only thing they have to sell is
(21:59):
their own labor. Time, the central division that explains everything
I like that. It's a big one. It's it's it's
definitely everything. There's still other divisions, you know, other class
divisions within our society that are all still important. So
I don't want to make it sound like there aren't,
but that's a key one right there. Right. I guess
it strikes me that, if that's right, that millennials are
(22:20):
still somewhat complicit in their own fate. In other words,
a lot of this is being engineered by millennials. But again,
break it down that it's not necessarily millennial versus gen X,
it's one percent versus ninety nine percent. Is that perhaps
a better way of thinking about it? Right? The generational
analysis is important to understand the capital relations. Right, it's
through these generational identities that we're sort of starting to
(22:44):
understand the relation between capitalists workers. The divisions that constitute
society aren't I think, generational divisions. It's not like we
need to get the baby boomers. They're all responsible for
what's happened. And like you said, there are millennials whose
fault this is, right, Mark Zuckerberg's little millennial, Jared Kushner's millennial.
They are people who are profiting from this who are millennials.
They're underrepresented among people who have profited from what's going on.
(23:07):
It's age skewed. So generational analysis points us to a
direction where we can start to understand these questions. But no,
it's not fundamentally a question of age. We've related to
these developments differently depending on how old we are. First
of all, do you think it's possible that Canes isn't
wrong but we're just getting there more slowly? No, I don't.
(23:30):
People have suggested the possibility. He's you know, he put
some caveats in people. Some people say it's population growth,
which I don't really believe. I don't think. I think
population growth is always a distraction when people bring it up.
Or wars, which you suggests would be a problem, and
there were some definitely some wars in between would push
unders wars. But no, you can see that things are
(23:52):
getting worse, right, like the questions of climate collapse. We're
not on a positive trajectory, right, and to think that
as and some people want to look at the world
and look at the market and say, well things are
getting better. Yeah, yeah, we have this like some climate issues.
Think of it sort of like the hole in the
ozone layer. They're like, yeah, there's this problem, but we
can fix it and things are still going pretty good.
(24:14):
There's a really strong contingent for that perspective, Yes, very strong.
I might even put myself in all come back to that.
But you can't brack it off the whole ecology, right,
you can't brack it off the state of the earth.
Like then you're the dog with the coffee cups saying
things are fine as your house is on fire, like right,
(24:35):
things are literally on fire, you know, And that's effect
and die off in insect populations that are heating of
the ocean. They're just things where the bees are seriously
and we haven't begun to understand the impacts, or we're
maybe just beginning to understand the impacts and the scale
the impacts are and how they're going to affect people.
And it's going to be continent wide at a time
(24:56):
yea devastation. So to you, the ecology is front center,
whereas my generation perhaps has segmented it or we've compartmentalized
and said, well, there's this economy and then there's the ecology,
and isn't terrible that this is happening to our world?
But the economy is separate, whereas you and perhaps millennials
see them all as a piece. Yeah, we are the world, right,
(25:18):
we are the environment. And it sounds sort of hippy dippy,
accept it's really true, except you know your factories are
going to burn too. Do you think even if Canes
had been right, do you think that is the primary goal?
Would that have led to happiness, peace, and prosperity for
all if we could just work lass No, because the
(25:38):
question of the amount of hours were worked. Right, The
idea was that we exist as a society and that
we all together want to reduce the amount that we work.
But that's not how we're composed. Right. If you view
the world in terms of classes, you have a ruling
class that wants to get the most out of all
their workers, profit as much as they possibly can. And
(25:59):
it doesn't matter that Jeff Bezos can't possibly imagine ways
that he could spend as much money as he has. No, Right,
it's kind of interesting to think about that, because that's
just not how they're oriented, right. It's not about working
less are having enough. It's just about emploiding as much
as you possibly can out of the rest of the world.
And then workers, you know, if you're trying to work less,
(26:19):
you're trying to retire, right, that's the goal of every worker.
That's about work, you know, getting your most you can
out of your life. It's a diametrically opposed goal with
the goal of the people who are employing you. Except
I would challenge that in that the employers the one
percent work harder than they ever have either. And maybe
that goes to a more fundamental critique of capitalism or
(26:40):
the current system in just a broad human context, that
it's not working for anybody, but nobody's not working, right, Yeah,
at a certain point, work becomes a luxury good for
some of these people. I think, does Mark Zuckerberg have
to work? Like, of course, not working is a thing
he chooses to do because he enjoys it, right, because
his work is ultimately just bossing other people around. Well,
(27:03):
perhaps I think work is more fun if you get
to boss instead of be bossed and you don't actually
have to do it. And absolutely well, and I think
it's not structurally homologous with what the rest of us do,
which is work to get enough money to pay your rent.
Do you think that you'd be happy if you didn't work,
if you didn't have work, and yeah, absolutely, really totally, really,
(27:24):
what would you do with yourself? I mean, because there's
an argument that work is the meaning of life, right
that without it, without that feeling of productivity or that
feeling of contribution, it strips life of its meaning. In
other words, if we were headed into a Keynesian world
where we didn't have to work, is that what we
should be aspiring to. So in a post work world, though,
I mean, we still do all sorts of things. The
(27:45):
difference is that because we still have to clean up
after ourselves, we still have to produce food, we still
have to shelter ourselves, we still have needs as a
society as well as you know, higher needs as a species.
But the difference is the production thereof is not alienated, right,
It's you're not doing it for someone else. So it's
the difference between like working at McDonald's and cooking dinner
(28:06):
for your friends. There's a big difference between that. One
is a like rewarding, enriching experience that furthers our connections
to each other, and one is subtractive. One you're waiting
till the clock is done. You want to go do
something else you want to get out of there, you're
selling that part of yourself. Would you argue in the
end that Marx has it right? Do you see any
(28:27):
flaws in his thinking or that Marx had it right?
I suppose it's a better way of putting it. Well,
I think there are major gaps in his work. But yeah, absolutely,
I'm a Marxist. I understand the world as in terms
of antagonistic class conflict. And what would you do with
the argument that if you look at where Marxism has
been employed, whether it's been the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cuba,
(28:50):
that that hasn't worked out particularly well. In other words,
how do you think about the real world application of
the theory? Well, I think there are a number of
lessons that we can learn from the experience of state socialism.
For the record, Cuba's bees are actually been pretty good shape.
So if we're comparing, we're comparing along the lens of
the population, the lens of the population, which is not negligible.
(29:13):
Dental know their bees are actually really good shape. I
did not know that. Yeah, well, and as is there
they live longer than we, you know, as long as
we do with a lot less healthcare expenditure. So it's
not like every part of state socialism has failed in
the way that we like to think about it. But
that's not where my ideology is. And I think we
(29:34):
can learn a lot from those experiments and where they failed.
I think masculinism is like a huge, huge lesson we
can take from the state socialist experiments that were ostensibly
feminist projects and in some way seriously feminist projects. But
we're still led by men overwhelmingly to failure. So you
think it would be different if it had been led
(29:55):
by women, if if feminism are within a feminist approach
to socialism. I think it's absolutely crucial moving forward, and
as a way to learn from the failures of state socialism.
So you see the failures of state socialism more as
specific to the ways those let's call them experiments were conducted,
rather than necessarily pointing to a fundamental flaw with Marx's
(30:18):
way of thinking. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, Well,
on the part of Marxism is developing according to our
what we learn, right, it's a science, it's not a religion,
and so Marxists have been plenty critical of those projects
that we're done in Marx's name, and that's interior to Marxism,
So it's a criticism is part of the game, right yeah,
(30:41):
fair enough? Does something always go wrong with the implementation
of a system, though, I mean, could you argue that
perhaps capitalism hasn't been implemented is it theoretically was supposed to,
But perhaps Marxism could never be implemented as it is
theoretically supposed to either. In other words, it's practicality is
always the rub. People certainly do argue that all the time.
(31:01):
It might be one of the most common arguments, but
I think the only the only capitalism we can judge
is the one that exists, right It's a real worldwide
system that has existed for x hundred years and it
has it's rapidly on its way to destroying the entire planet,
which is the only thing that we've ever had. So
(31:22):
insofar as we can without the planet, we are for sure.
So that's an issue, right, Yes, in terms of before
like empirically reflecting on the qualities of our system, the
fact that it's going to like burn down the ground
that we're standing on or flooded, that's a pretty serious issue.
(31:43):
And so you can construct in your mind, a different
kind of capitalism that doesn't do this. But honestly, even
the Canes is a good example, right of a different
kind of capitalism that we haven't really seen, that's led
by government led investment, social investment, etc. It still calls
for this constant growth, which is the real basis of
(32:06):
the capitalist system. Is this continual growth and the idea
that you could just build and build and build and build,
and that that would add up to more, and that
you wouldn't have to pay for it in some way
in terms of the resources you're drawing, so there wasn't
going to be you know, a ying to that yang
is really the basis of capitalist thought, and I think
(32:27):
that that's wrong. There have been people who have said
it's wrong. You know, from the first time they heard
the idea, right, we have all sorts of indigenous thinkers
who went in encountering this sort of colonialist capitalist accumulation mindset,
had said that's nuts, Like you're going to break this
whole thing really fast. And so you believe that need
to feed the beast is inherent in capitalism and we
(32:48):
can't keep feeding the beast? Is that another way to
say it. Yeah, Well, here's let's try this. I think
abundance is a social relationship. Capitalism believes that abundance is
a question of technology and accumulation, that we're going to
get enough stuff so that we finally have enough and
then we can we can share it. Yeah, And I
think abundance is we have enough now. You know that
(33:10):
if we shared what we have now, that would be abundance, right,
it would be abundance. We had a lot less than
we have now and we shared it. Abundance is a
question of how we're relating to each other through objects,
not this question of accumulation. Do you think humans are
ever nice enough to share it willingly? Yeah, I think
most people would be very happy to do so. I
(33:30):
think we've been we've been set against each other in
a system of exploitation for a long time, maybe five
thousand years by some accounts, but that's actually not that
long in terms of the history of our species. You know,
we've got a prehistory is one hundred thousand years or whatever.
So maybe this is just a blip. So you think
we're innately better than we are, that our real selves
(33:52):
are human truth is better than we're acting, not that
we're actually acting out the true ugliness of humanity. Yeah.
I don't know if there's any anything more innate about
us than there is anything innate about panda bears. But
I think we're certainly capable of a lot better. If
you had to predict how things shake out, if you
were to be writing Kames's letter to your grandchildren, what
would you say? Oh, jeez, I hope there's still something
(34:17):
worth building on at that point. So you've got to
be optimistic even to write that letter at this point,
And you wouldn't even necessarily be optimist. I am, I
think I am. And so I think that you're a
cynical optimist. Yeah, well, I'm a realist. I think people
often say what I'm saying is cynical because I believe
(34:37):
that the system can't fix itself and we got to
tear the whole thing down. But I think looking back
at the fifties or something and saying, oh, we had
things right there, we need to go back to that
relationship between capital and labor by strengthening the unions or whatever,
I don't think that's optimistic. I think that's delusional. That's
fundamentally misunderstands the last sixt seventy god seventy years now
(35:02):
of history, and so I don't think I'm being pessimistic.
I think I'm trying to be optimistic and realistic about
where we go from here, which is that we're still
in history. And so if I'm writing a letter to
whatever grandchildren, that means that history has kept going in
a hundred years from now, we're going to be in
something really really different from what we are now. One
(35:23):
way or the other. I think that's indisputable, and so
I gotta keep hope in my heart that it's going
to be the good way and not the bad way,
which means that the basic orientation of people toward the
planet has changed from one in attitude that's extractive to
one that's you know, participatory, imminent, right, you know, you
(35:44):
recognize yourself as part of the world. So I think
they're going to have a lot more to teach me
than I'm going to have to tell them. That's interesting,
and perhaps it's deeply optimistic to believe that there is
a different way, right, to not feel trapped by history
as it's been, and believe that there's a history your
future as it could be. Right, Yeah, I think it
definitely is, but I still got it, you know, so
(36:05):
we're going to call you the terrified optimist. I'm going
to work on the right phrase anyway. Thank you so
much for coming to talk. It was really interesting. I'm
still perhaps two mired in my gen x outlook to
agree wholeheartedly with Malcolm. I see where capitalism has gone
off the rails, but I still tend to subscribe to
Winston Churchill's famous maxim that capitalism is the worst possible
(36:30):
economic system, with the exception of everything else that's ever
been tried. Perhaps the answer is that I'm just more
cynical about human nature than Malcolm. Is. That said, we
use the word indisputable a few times in this conversation,
and what is indisputable is that whether you think Malcolm's
critique is right or wrong, the numbers show that belief
(36:50):
in capitalism is indeed faltering, and the ways in which
that plays out will determine the world our children and
grandchildren live in. And if you're interested in hearing more
from Malcolm, please pick up a copy of his new book,
Ship is Fucked Up in Bullshit History Since the end
of History. Maki a killing is a co production of
pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth
(37:13):
Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison McClain
no relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin
is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski. Our music is
by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin
and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McClain. Thanks so
(37:34):
much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac
twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.
I'm Bethany McLean and this is making a killing interviews,
exploring the headlines you thought you understood, and finding the
long term lessons we can all learn from today's business stories.
I'm at Bethany mac twelve on Twitter. My guest today has,
among other things, a talent for writing catchy titles. Malcolm Harris,
(00:22):
who's an editor at The New Inquiry and an admirably
outspoken writer, published a recent piece in MIT's Technology Review
entitled Canes was wrong, gen Z will have it worse.
Malcolm is also the author of Kids These Days, and
his forthcoming book is entitled Shit is Fucked Up in
Bullshit History Since the end of History. Let's get some
(00:45):
generational clarity out of the way for context and disclosure,
I am squarely in gen x. Malcolm, as you'll hear
in the interview, is deeply gen y. In other words,
a millennial. My kids still elementary age are gen z.
I have no idea what any future grandchildren would be
called or what kind of world they'll be living in.
(01:05):
John Maynard Keynes, on the other hand, thought he knew
what his grandchildren would be facing. In his popular essay
from the early nineteen thirties called economic possibilities for our grandchildren.
The founder of macroeconomics wrote about the world a hundred
years in the future, which is pretty much now. He
imagined that capitalism would be almost over by now, having
(01:25):
simply been a means to greater ends. In his books
and in his articles, Malcolm seeks to understand where Canes
got it wrong and defies the cultural impression of millennials
as tantrumy teenagers. Instead, he tries to understand what made
millennials the way they are, burned out, waiting later and
(01:46):
later to get married or have kids, terrified of debt
yet saddled with it, focused on technology inefficiency, but also
trying to have a larger purpose in life than work
for work's sake. Malcolm writes that a yuk of poll
found that support for capitalism among Americans under thirty fell
from thirty nine percent to thirty percent between two fifteen
(02:09):
and twenty eighteen. That's fourteen percentage points below the average.
At the same time, the prime age workforce of twenty
thirty was born between nineteen seventy six and two thousand
and five. So if Malcolm's right, his answers helped paint
a portrait of the economy of the future, and who
doesn't want to know more about that. I'm so excited
(02:31):
to dig into this today and grateful to Malcolm for
coming from Philly to meet me in New York. Hi, Malcolm.
So let's start with John Maynard Came's. I think it's
a name most people have heard, but you hold different
things out of his writing than other people have. What
made you gravitate toward him? Well, one of the reasons
I picked Cane's to focus this essay around was this
(02:53):
prediction about twenty thirty and realizing that the workers he's
talking about are all of them are already born, so
we could sort of assess this pre foundational prediction in
his thought empirically. Now it's about time we can look
around and see if that was true or not. And
he gets a lot of credit for being empirically right
about a lot of things throughout his work. But when
(03:16):
you look at this this sort of foundational question of
what is capitalism for, he seems like not right. And
what was his answer to this foundational question what's capitalism for?
It's to relieve us of necessity so that we could
focus on our species energy on things that aren't necessary
to being alive, like art and music, creativity, knowledge. I'm
(03:41):
I'm going to come back to that in terms of
what the meaning of life? Maybe, Oh dear, that's a
weighty conversation for today. But why do you think he's
wrong when you talk about the empirical evidence showing that
he didn't get it right? What do you look at
since the crisis two thousand and eight, there's been a
reassessment about achievements of capitalism, you know, or past the
Cold War. We don't have something else to compare it to,
(04:01):
so we can sort of look by its own standards
how capitalism is doing. And what we're seeing is not
the sort of accelerated pace of people's lives increasing in quality. Instead,
we've seen wages for most people level off, technology advantages
few instead of many. And that's not what was predicted.
(04:23):
And why do you think that is what's gone wrong?
Was Cans wrong or has something gone wrong to make
him wrong? Have there have been policy choices that have
made him wrong? What he misunderstood was the system is
built on exploitation at its very base, so that over
time things are going to get worse. Like that is
the nature of capitalism, and that's what marks it predicted
years before. So I'm going to come back to that.
(04:45):
But there is this great quote by Cans about capitalism
that I've always loved, which capitalism is the astounding belief
that the most wickedest of men will do the most
wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. Does
that kind of sum it up to you? Yeah, Well,
it's certainly justified a lot of wickedness, right, and that
this is the natural state of being. It's only through
(05:05):
this wickedness, through this self interest, that we can achieve
our collective interest. That's certainly the bill of goods we
were sold for a long time, at least as American.
You're one of the grandchildren that Caines wrote about. How
do you feel about where we are? Not optimistic, especially
in the face of ecological crisis. So my parents live
in a small town called Cloverdale in northern California, and
(05:27):
this year they had to evacuate from their evacuation because
of fires. You know, That's that's the level of crisis
we're looking at. Is our country's on fire, their whole
continents on fire. It does that's who we're looking at
and that's going to be an annual phenomenon for a
lot of people. Is that a metaphor to you is
the ecological state? And the fire a metaphor to you
(05:48):
for the state of capitalism? Well, it's it's very literal, definitely,
but we can also read it as a metaphor, right.
And I got involved in politics through the anti war
movement when I was when I was a kid or whatever.
We invaded Iraq two thousand and three and there was
a group, a coalition called World Can't Wait, and their
their logo was a World on Fire, and there said,
we can't we can't wait to get rid of the
(06:09):
Bush regime. You know, the world, world can't wait. The
world's on fire. And now I look at those posters
and I've been thinking about them a lot lately because
you can see the fires in Australia from space like
these are these are literal? Is that what shaped you
the anti war movement? Is that what made you start
thinking about these broader economic questions? Or were there other
forces at work in shaping your worldview? That was my
(06:31):
entred into organized politics. I think left wing politics. I
came of age under under the Bush administration, the George W.
Bush administration, and it was a very scary time to
be alive. And a lot of the things that we're
seeing now the consequences of the Trump years, those things
were set in place during the Bush years. And so
we saw, you know, the Department of Homeland Security being built.
(06:53):
We saw this crackdown on domestic protest that's gone on. So, yeah,
it was the state of the world to push me here,
and it hasn't gotten any better. What made you turn
your eyes toward economics instead of continuing to focus on
anti war? What made you decide that economics was fundamental
to understanding where we were. So I graduated from the
(07:15):
University of Maryland in twenty ten, which means I was
a sophomore when the financial crisis hit, and at the
time I was organizing with a left wing student group
to organize against tuition increases on campus because this was
a central ide question for students on campus for accessibility
of education and a national issue of educational affordability, and
(07:38):
when the crisis hit, we were looking for some way
to link this to our campaign around tuition increases. So
you're saying, what's the relationship between these tuition increases, the
huge increases in college educational costs and housing prices, and
we didn't really know what the answer was, or if
there really was answer. We just sort of figured there
had to be at the time. But that yielded this
(08:01):
whole research project that me and a friend worked on,
and out of that came sort of my first work
on student debt, which is where my project started. And
so you have maybe I'm going to call it counterintuitive,
maybe contrarian, but you've got a view on student debt.
Tell us about that. Well, I don't know if it's
it's contrarian these days. I mean when I first started
writing about it was twenty eleven, which was Preoccupy Wall Street,
(08:26):
and I wrote this piece for this journal n plus
one about the way that student debt had been set up,
in the way it was increasing out of control, and
that it wasn't clear that people were going to be
able to pay this debt back at the time. Up
until then, the assumption had been that all educational debt
was good debt, because for every dollar you invest, you're
going to get one x back in terms of wages
for your better qualified job, you learn to code or whatever, whatever, degrees.
(08:51):
You get it's going to rebound to you. All Educational
investment was a good idea, And around twenty eleven is
when people start looking at the totals, when we're looking
closely to a trillion dollars or whatever it was at
the time, and say, this doesn't make any sense. This
can't possibly be true, especially after wages had tanked during
(09:12):
the recession and had not rebounded in the way the
people expected. And you're looking at the numbers of the
average student os tens of thousands of dollars in debt,
and they're just making enough to get by, especially at
increased housing costs and transportation costs, and it just wasn't
lining up, and people kept paying because there really isn't
any alternative at the individual There is not right, they
(09:34):
come after you in bankruptcy well, and people kept in
rolling as well, although the enrollment did level off a
little bit around this time when people start drawing these
numbers into question, But people keep in enrolling because you
have an individual level. If you ask any expert, what's
the best thing I can do to increase my wages,
they'll still tell you to go to school, and they'll
still be right but you look at a collective level,
(09:55):
clearly that same dynamic isn't operating. It's not working. So
I think you're right. It's not contrarian now to be
terrified about the levels of student debt and what that means,
and even very hardcore capitalists are worried about what it
means in terms of financial crisis. But I think you
are contraying and that you've taken that into a broader
(10:15):
critique of the educational system at large. Yeah, and that
when we look at these jobs that aren't showing up
the way they're supposed to, and you still look at
young people who are putting in tons of not just money,
but also their time and their effort, huge amounts of
time and effort to get these educational degrees whatever certifications
(10:38):
at a time when there's more competition for them than ever.
Where is this value going Who is benefiting from all
of this? And there are some people who like to
throw up their hands and say, well, no one's really
benefiting from this, But that doesn't make any sense to me.
And so you can look at the economy and look
at who has been benefiting from this acceleration in human
capital development and the shift in costs from the state
(11:01):
and from corporations. Two workers themselves to train themselves on
behalf of companies that are going to hire them later.
And you can look at corporate profits which have never
been higher. Right, the DAO is at new records every year.
It seems like while people seem to be still suffering
out there, and it's because that's who's harvesting the profits
from this. You know, better trained workers are easier to
(11:23):
find than ever before. So we're making ourselves fodder for
the system. I shouldn't say we, You the millennials have
been making themselves fodder for the system. I mean the
equation was supposed to be the better educated you get,
the better job you get. And at an individual level
that still sort of makes sense. But if you look
at a societal level, if a bunch of people educate themselves,
(11:45):
they take it upon themselves, they spend the money they
invest in themselves to educate themselves, well suddenly they are
a lot more educated people and the cost that you
need to spend to hire one of them goes down.
In the old educational models, that's supposed to mean increased
scale of production. Right, They're like, well, there are a
lot of cheap, smart workers, we can expand production. That
(12:07):
hasn't happened. Instead, we've seen the ruling class just basically
grab as much of those profits as they can jack
up their own stock prices, and they've been very successful
at it. And for you, that shows up in the
gap between the stupendous rate of productivity increases and the
same time flat wages. Absolutely, and that whole wedge is
just increased ruling class share of the economy. That's nuts.
(12:31):
Why do you think it is that millennials and all
of us have been complicit in that system because it
takes all of us being complicit to make it work. Well,
it's hard to say what complicity looks like, right, say, like, well,
given this, there should be a nationwide rebellion of young people,
you know, in all of our major cities. They should
just like you know, run into the streets and say, no,
(12:53):
we won't do it, We don't want to pay this anymore.
This is wrong. And that happened. That happened in twenty eleven,
and happened again, you know, during Black Lives Matter years after,
of different groups of mostly young people in both cases
refusing the status quo, and they called in the army
in both cases, and you have to understand that, like
they've been called in the army in Hong Kong, right,
(13:14):
Like that's a really it's a really aggressive step to
take by a state to crack down on their own population,
and they did it in city after city in the
United States. When you look back Unoccupied, do you think
it was a success. It's too soon to tell. I
guess I think there are some limited ways in which
it was a success. That we put this sort of
(13:36):
class language back on the map. Yeah, back on the
national radar. I think you don't have the Bernie Sanders
campaign the way you do now without Occupy changing the discourse.
You also have student debt as an object of discussion
in the way that it wasn't before the people recognize
that it's out of control, and you have this sort
of coalescing of a generational political perspective that I think
(13:57):
starts would occupy. On the other hand, it shows the
sort of limits of protest as a strategy, which is
ultimately what Occupied turned out to be is what kind
of national protest, and protest only works until the point
they don't want to listen to you anymore, and they've
shown the government, and these are democratic mayors and democratic
cities who called in their police and used chemical weapons
(14:19):
in city centers to clear them. It's an interesting point
because I think part of the point you're making is
that this question that's going on by millennials of the
system actually is a bigger threat to the system than
most people realize, and maybe that response to the occupy
movement shows what an existential threat it is. Yeah, it's
going to be interesting to see what the next cohorts
(14:41):
draw from our experiences or draw from their own experiences,
what people like the Sunrise movement or Extinction rebellion, especially
the climate protesters in general, draw from those experiences and
their own experiences. We'll see tactically what they end up thinking.
Coming back to millennial how would you explain to a
(15:03):
politician or someone my age what's made millennials the way
the way they are? I mean, I think it goes
back to the exactly what we've been talking about, which
is this break in correlation between productivity and wages, and
up until this nineteen seventy nine early eighties, you see
these numbers rising together in a way that indicates a
(15:26):
sort of shared national prosperity, and that shared national prosperity
was the grounds for sort of Keynesian type thought that
this is getting better for everyone, sort of along the
same line, and for a number of reasons. When you
hit nineteen eighty, which is also when this millennial cohort
starts being born, those two break and wages stay flat
(15:48):
and productivity keeps going up, and that gap between the
two of them is an increased rate of exploitation. So
you'd argue that it's not so much that millennials have
had unrealistic expectations about what the world should be like
for them. It's that there's something fundamentally wrong with the
world as it's currently structured, so that millennials are right
to be dissatisfied. Yeah, well, I think you see that.
(16:10):
With me. That's a break between sort of millennial gen
z categories is that I was raised in the era
of you can be anything you put your mind to,
you know, the world is yours, etcetera, etcetera. We were
sort of supposed to be this Keynesian generation where we're
finally able to be creative. We'll all be able to
be creative in our own ways, etcetera. Etcetera. At least
(16:32):
that was the bill of goods sold to our parents younger.
When I talk to scholars who work on the younger cohort,
whatever we want to call it, currently, they don't see
that same sort of expectation. There is a lowered level
of expectation where they don't expect to win every time.
They're not expected to win every time. They're just trying
to like cobble together enough good experiences to make them employable.
(16:57):
And then that can become a self fulfilling prophecy. Right,
if you don't believe in a better future, how do
you possibly get a better future? That's fart of it.
You've talked about this idea of helicopter parents, and you're
actually less critical of helicopter parents than some of us
who are older are, And you think there's a reason
for it. So explain that when I started writing Kids
(17:18):
These Days, when I was working on that book, i'd
sort of had a pretty critical view of helicopter parents
because I had the stereotype sort of built in my
mind of an upper class mostly moms who are putting
their thumb on the scale to help their kids who
are already pretty advantage within the system. But the more
I read research about other classes of parents who are
(17:40):
stuck doing the same kind of work, the more I
realized that that was a rarefied picture. That most of anything,
they are not rich. Most helicopter parents are working class,
because most people are working class, and so you have
most what we'd call helicopter parents helicopter moms because again,
mostly moms, while we're talking about, are just trying to
(18:01):
get their kid by, right, They're people trying to create
some level of generational progress for their child, which if
their child has a learning disability or trouble in school
and one way or another they're laned badly, that can
be a full time job just trying to keep your
kid on track academically to go to a state college
(18:23):
or a community college such that they might be able
to participate in the twenty first century economy in some
way that's not totally stagnant. So you'd see helicopter parenting
not as a sign of entitlement, but rather as a
sign almost of terror. Yeah, well, just most people aren't entitled, right,
it's not the reality of American life, and the stereotypes
(18:45):
that we are given of entitled people are mostly written
by entitled people. You wrote this in kids. These days,
every authority from mom to presidents told millennials to accumulate
as much human capital as we could, and we did,
but the market hasn't held up its end of the bargain.
Do you think there's something wrong just inherently with the
notion of human capital. There's definitely something wrong about how
(19:07):
we understand the concept of human capital. We think about it.
It's something that belongs to you once you've achieved it, right,
because it seems like a wage. Right, I got a degree.
I earned a degree. The degree belongs to me, but
it doesn't belong to me in a way that other
commodities do. I can't sell it, right. All I can
do is work. And so human capital is how labor
(19:27):
appears to capital once it's been hired. Right, human capital
or to a state that's trying to compete with another state.
So human capital theory emerges in the sixties from these
neoliberal ideas of national competition. Can America keep up with
the Soviet Union in regard to human capital production? Are
we producing enough scientists and engineers so that we don't
(19:50):
get wiped out by the USSR? At the time, the
answer was no, we weren't. And that's where the Higher
Education Act comes from. Right. They're assessing a work force
that belongs to either the state or to a company
that's trying to think about them in terms of say
human resources or whatever. It's workers capacities as interpreted by
people who are putting those workers to work. The worker
(20:12):
themselves doesn't own your human capital. You can't sell your
human capital. All you can do is sell your labor,
which is the only commodity you have. And so we
get this idea twisted because you think that you can
accumulate human capital and that it's something that it's somehow
accrues to you. Yeah, that's that's something to belong that
belongs to you. But the truth is it just is you,
that is who you are. Only other people can put
(20:35):
that human capital to work. You're not actually a capitalist,
You're just a person. Right. What do you make of
the role that we all play in enabling this. I'm
coming back to this idea of complicity because you break
out these lines between consumers and workers, and yet we
who are workers are also consumers. Right, So in other words, yes,
(20:55):
we all enable an Amazon, right because we use the service.
Maybe you don't, But how do you break out that
line between who's a consumer and who's a worker when
all we're all some of both. Yeah. Well, that's why
I try not to look at consumption as a basis
for politics, because that just means being alive on a
capitalism right. You have to buy things. You have to
buy food, you have to buy shelter, and so when
(21:18):
you start talking about people as consumers, you're already just
talking about a very limited kind of choice where what
you can buy is what's for sale on a market,
and you have to buy something, especially when it comes
to say food and shelter. That's why I think it's
important to look at class as a question of capitalists
and workers and the question of do you work for
(21:38):
someone else or do other people work for you, and
that this is the central division that explains everything that's
going on in our economy. You know, we're calling the
one percent of the nine nine percent, but that's what
we're talking about is people who own assets, people who
make money by owning things, and people who make money
by working, who's only thing they have to sell is
(21:59):
their own labor. Time, the central division that explains everything
I like that. It's a big one. It's it's it's
definitely everything. There's still other divisions, you know, other class
divisions within our society that are all still important. So
I don't want to make it sound like there aren't,
but that's a key one right there. Right. I guess
it strikes me that, if that's right, that millennials are
(22:20):
still somewhat complicit in their own fate. In other words,
a lot of this is being engineered by millennials. But again,
break it down that it's not necessarily millennial versus gen X,
it's one percent versus ninety nine percent. Is that perhaps
a better way of thinking about it? Right? The generational
analysis is important to understand the capital relations. Right, it's
through these generational identities that we're sort of starting to
(22:44):
understand the relation between capitalists workers. The divisions that constitute
society aren't I think, generational divisions. It's not like we
need to get the baby boomers. They're all responsible for
what's happened. And like you said, there are millennials whose
fault this is, right, Mark Zuckerberg's little millennial, Jared Kushner's millennial.
They are people who are profiting from this who are millennials.
They're underrepresented among people who have profited from what's going on.
(23:07):
It's age skewed. So generational analysis points us to a
direction where we can start to understand these questions. But no,
it's not fundamentally a question of age. We've related to
these developments differently depending on how old we are. First
of all, do you think it's possible that Canes isn't
wrong but we're just getting there more slowly? No, I don't.
(23:30):
People have suggested the possibility. He's you know, he put
some caveats in people. Some people say it's population growth,
which I don't really believe. I don't think. I think
population growth is always a distraction when people bring it up.
Or wars, which you suggests would be a problem, and
there were some definitely some wars in between would push
unders wars. But no, you can see that things are
(23:52):
getting worse, right, like the questions of climate collapse. We're
not on a positive trajectory, right, and to think that
as and some people want to look at the world
and look at the market and say, well things are
getting better. Yeah, yeah, we have this like some climate issues.
Think of it sort of like the hole in the
ozone layer. They're like, yeah, there's this problem, but we
can fix it and things are still going pretty good.
(24:14):
There's a really strong contingent for that perspective, Yes, very strong.
I might even put myself in all come back to that.
But you can't brack it off the whole ecology, right,
you can't brack it off the state of the earth.
Like then you're the dog with the coffee cups saying
things are fine as your house is on fire, like right,
(24:35):
things are literally on fire, you know, And that's effect
and die off in insect populations that are heating of
the ocean. They're just things where the bees are seriously
and we haven't begun to understand the impacts, or we're
maybe just beginning to understand the impacts and the scale
the impacts are and how they're going to affect people.
And it's going to be continent wide at a time
(24:56):
yea devastation. So to you, the ecology is front center,
whereas my generation perhaps has segmented it or we've compartmentalized
and said, well, there's this economy and then there's the ecology,
and isn't terrible that this is happening to our world?
But the economy is separate, whereas you and perhaps millennials
see them all as a piece. Yeah, we are the world, right,
(25:18):
we are the environment. And it sounds sort of hippy dippy,
accept it's really true, except you know your factories are
going to burn too. Do you think even if Canes
had been right, do you think that is the primary goal?
Would that have led to happiness, peace, and prosperity for
all if we could just work lass No, because the
(25:38):
question of the amount of hours were worked. Right, The
idea was that we exist as a society and that
we all together want to reduce the amount that we work.
But that's not how we're composed. Right. If you view
the world in terms of classes, you have a ruling
class that wants to get the most out of all
their workers, profit as much as they possibly can. And
(25:59):
it doesn't matter that Jeff Bezos can't possibly imagine ways
that he could spend as much money as he has. No, Right,
it's kind of interesting to think about that, because that's
just not how they're oriented, right. It's not about working
less are having enough. It's just about emploiding as much
as you possibly can out of the rest of the world.
And then workers, you know, if you're trying to work less,
(26:19):
you're trying to retire, right, that's the goal of every worker.
That's about work, you know, getting your most you can
out of your life. It's a diametrically opposed goal with
the goal of the people who are employing you. Except
I would challenge that in that the employers the one
percent work harder than they ever have either. And maybe
that goes to a more fundamental critique of capitalism or
(26:40):
the current system in just a broad human context, that
it's not working for anybody, but nobody's not working, right, Yeah,
at a certain point, work becomes a luxury good for
some of these people. I think, does Mark Zuckerberg have
to work? Like, of course, not working is a thing
he chooses to do because he enjoys it, right, because
his work is ultimately just bossing other people around. Well,
(27:03):
perhaps I think work is more fun if you get
to boss instead of be bossed and you don't actually
have to do it. And absolutely well, and I think
it's not structurally homologous with what the rest of us do,
which is work to get enough money to pay your rent.
Do you think that you'd be happy if you didn't work,
if you didn't have work, and yeah, absolutely, really totally, really,
(27:24):
what would you do with yourself? I mean, because there's
an argument that work is the meaning of life, right
that without it, without that feeling of productivity or that
feeling of contribution, it strips life of its meaning. In
other words, if we were headed into a Keynesian world
where we didn't have to work, is that what we
should be aspiring to. So in a post work world, though,
I mean, we still do all sorts of things. The
(27:45):
difference is that because we still have to clean up
after ourselves, we still have to produce food, we still
have to shelter ourselves, we still have needs as a
society as well as you know, higher needs as a species.
But the difference is the production thereof is not alienated, right,
It's you're not doing it for someone else. So it's
the difference between like working at McDonald's and cooking dinner
(28:06):
for your friends. There's a big difference between that. One
is a like rewarding, enriching experience that furthers our connections
to each other, and one is subtractive. One you're waiting
till the clock is done. You want to go do
something else you want to get out of there, you're
selling that part of yourself. Would you argue in the
end that Marx has it right? Do you see any
(28:27):
flaws in his thinking or that Marx had it right?
I suppose it's a better way of putting it. Well,
I think there are major gaps in his work. But yeah, absolutely,
I'm a Marxist. I understand the world as in terms
of antagonistic class conflict. And what would you do with
the argument that if you look at where Marxism has
been employed, whether it's been the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cuba,
(28:50):
that that hasn't worked out particularly well. In other words,
how do you think about the real world application of
the theory? Well, I think there are a number of
lessons that we can learn from the experience of state socialism.
For the record, Cuba's bees are actually been pretty good shape.
So if we're comparing, we're comparing along the lens of
the population, the lens of the population, which is not negligible.
(29:13):
Dental know their bees are actually really good shape. I
did not know that. Yeah, well, and as is there
they live longer than we, you know, as long as
we do with a lot less healthcare expenditure. So it's
not like every part of state socialism has failed in
the way that we like to think about it. But
that's not where my ideology is. And I think we
(29:34):
can learn a lot from those experiments and where they failed.
I think masculinism is like a huge, huge lesson we
can take from the state socialist experiments that were ostensibly
feminist projects and in some way seriously feminist projects. But
we're still led by men overwhelmingly to failure. So you
think it would be different if it had been led
(29:55):
by women, if if feminism are within a feminist approach
to socialism. I think it's absolutely crucial moving forward, and
as a way to learn from the failures of state socialism.
So you see the failures of state socialism more as
specific to the ways those let's call them experiments were conducted,
rather than necessarily pointing to a fundamental flaw with Marx's
(30:18):
way of thinking. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, Well,
on the part of Marxism is developing according to our
what we learn, right, it's a science, it's not a religion,
and so Marxists have been plenty critical of those projects
that we're done in Marx's name, and that's interior to Marxism,
So it's a criticism is part of the game, right yeah,
(30:41):
fair enough? Does something always go wrong with the implementation
of a system, though, I mean, could you argue that
perhaps capitalism hasn't been implemented is it theoretically was supposed to,
But perhaps Marxism could never be implemented as it is
theoretically supposed to either. In other words, it's practicality is
always the rub. People certainly do argue that all the time.
(31:01):
It might be one of the most common arguments, but
I think the only the only capitalism we can judge
is the one that exists, right It's a real worldwide
system that has existed for x hundred years and it
has it's rapidly on its way to destroying the entire planet,
which is the only thing that we've ever had. So
(31:22):
insofar as we can without the planet, we are for sure.
So that's an issue, right, Yes, in terms of before
like empirically reflecting on the qualities of our system, the
fact that it's going to like burn down the ground
that we're standing on or flooded, that's a pretty serious issue.
(31:43):
And so you can construct in your mind, a different
kind of capitalism that doesn't do this. But honestly, even
the Canes is a good example, right of a different
kind of capitalism that we haven't really seen, that's led
by government led investment, social investment, etc. It still calls
for this constant growth, which is the real basis of
(32:06):
the capitalist system. Is this continual growth and the idea
that you could just build and build and build and build,
and that that would add up to more, and that
you wouldn't have to pay for it in some way
in terms of the resources you're drawing, so there wasn't
going to be you know, a ying to that yang
is really the basis of capitalist thought, and I think
(32:27):
that that's wrong. There have been people who have said
it's wrong. You know, from the first time they heard
the idea, right, we have all sorts of indigenous thinkers
who went in encountering this sort of colonialist capitalist accumulation mindset,
had said that's nuts, Like you're going to break this
whole thing really fast. And so you believe that need
to feed the beast is inherent in capitalism and we
(32:48):
can't keep feeding the beast? Is that another way to
say it. Yeah, Well, here's let's try this. I think
abundance is a social relationship. Capitalism believes that abundance is
a question of technology and accumulation, that we're going to
get enough stuff so that we finally have enough and
then we can we can share it. Yeah, And I
think abundance is we have enough now. You know that
(33:10):
if we shared what we have now, that would be abundance, right,
it would be abundance. We had a lot less than
we have now and we shared it. Abundance is a
question of how we're relating to each other through objects,
not this question of accumulation. Do you think humans are
ever nice enough to share it willingly? Yeah, I think
most people would be very happy to do so. I
(33:30):
think we've been we've been set against each other in
a system of exploitation for a long time, maybe five
thousand years by some accounts, but that's actually not that
long in terms of the history of our species. You know,
we've got a prehistory is one hundred thousand years or whatever.
So maybe this is just a blip. So you think
we're innately better than we are, that our real selves
(33:52):
are human truth is better than we're acting, not that
we're actually acting out the true ugliness of humanity. Yeah.
I don't know if there's any anything more innate about
us than there is anything innate about panda bears. But
I think we're certainly capable of a lot better. If
you had to predict how things shake out, if you
were to be writing Kames's letter to your grandchildren, what
would you say? Oh, jeez, I hope there's still something
(34:17):
worth building on at that point. So you've got to
be optimistic even to write that letter at this point,
And you wouldn't even necessarily be optimist. I am, I
think I am. And so I think that you're a
cynical optimist. Yeah, well, I'm a realist. I think people
often say what I'm saying is cynical because I believe
(34:37):
that the system can't fix itself and we got to
tear the whole thing down. But I think looking back
at the fifties or something and saying, oh, we had
things right there, we need to go back to that
relationship between capital and labor by strengthening the unions or whatever,
I don't think that's optimistic. I think that's delusional. That's
fundamentally misunderstands the last sixt seventy god seventy years now
(35:02):
of history, and so I don't think I'm being pessimistic.
I think I'm trying to be optimistic and realistic about
where we go from here, which is that we're still
in history. And so if I'm writing a letter to
whatever grandchildren, that means that history has kept going in
a hundred years from now, we're going to be in
something really really different from what we are now. One
(35:23):
way or the other. I think that's indisputable, and so
I gotta keep hope in my heart that it's going
to be the good way and not the bad way,
which means that the basic orientation of people toward the
planet has changed from one in attitude that's extractive to
one that's you know, participatory, imminent, right, you know, you
(35:44):
recognize yourself as part of the world. So I think
they're going to have a lot more to teach me
than I'm going to have to tell them. That's interesting,
and perhaps it's deeply optimistic to believe that there is
a different way, right, to not feel trapped by history
as it's been, and believe that there's a history your
future as it could be. Right, Yeah, I think it
definitely is, but I still got it, you know, so
(36:05):
we're going to call you the terrified optimist. I'm going
to work on the right phrase anyway. Thank you so
much for coming to talk. It was really interesting. I'm
still perhaps two mired in my gen x outlook to
agree wholeheartedly with Malcolm. I see where capitalism has gone
off the rails, but I still tend to subscribe to
Winston Churchill's famous maxim that capitalism is the worst possible
(36:30):
economic system, with the exception of everything else that's ever
been tried. Perhaps the answer is that I'm just more
cynical about human nature than Malcolm. Is. That said, we
use the word indisputable a few times in this conversation,
and what is indisputable is that whether you think Malcolm's
critique is right or wrong, the numbers show that belief
(36:50):
in capitalism is indeed faltering, and the ways in which
that plays out will determine the world our children and
grandchildren live in. And if you're interested in hearing more
from Malcolm, please pick up a copy of his new book,
Ship is Fucked Up in Bullshit History Since the end
of History. Maki a killing is a co production of
pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth
(37:13):
Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison McClain
no relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin
is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski. Our music is
by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin
and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McClain. Thanks so
(37:34):
much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac
twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.
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