Hi I'm Laura Flanders.
Today on the show, a conversation about capitalism
and white supremacy with two brilliant minds.
Dr Cornel West and Professor Rick Wolff and
later we hear about one small business that's
operating under a different economic paradigm.
All that and a few words from me on who's
on the hook for the Deepwater Horizon spill.
That's all coming up.
Welcome to our program.
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The great liberation of the middle class.
That's what Karl Marx called the US war of
independence.
Getting out from under feudalism was nice,
but Marx looked to the war against slavery
to empower America's workers.
He didn't, as it turned out.
Largely, he believed, because the newly emerging
capitalist system was never designed to deliver
the longed-for liberty, equality, fraternity,
and democracy.
In fact, quite the opposite.
That's why many are giving Karl Marx a new
look in these troubled times.
Among them, our next guests.
Richard Wolff teaches economics at the New
School University in New York and hosts the
Economic Update Program on Pacifica radio
stations.
Prof Cornel West is the author of Race Matters,
Democracy Matters, and more, and the co-host
of Smiley and West on public radio.
Welcome you both to the program, I'm so glad
to have you here.
-It's a blessing to be here
-Thank you
Let me start with the basics, you two.
Thank you so much.
You've been revisiting old masters.
I know because we did a panel together about
Tom Paine.
You're doing another panel with Gail Dines
and Chris Hedges, Cornell can't make it, but
you're talking about Marx.
Why?
Why are you visiting these folks?
Professor Wolff, Rick.
I think the biggest plug for it now is that
global capitalism is in terrible shape.
It imploded on itself in 2008 and it hasn't
emerged from this crisis, not even by a little.
All the talk about recovery not withstanding,
the mass of people are in very bad shape economically.
The gap between most people on the one hand
and a tiny number of very wealthy people on
the other is becoming a kind of daily obscenity
in everyone's face.
And so people are naturally asking, "Is this
the best we can do?"
And discovering that there's a whole tradition
out there called Marxian theory which says,
"No, we can do better."
And that we have to question a system that
works this way and so they rediscover Marx.
But Marx was a German writing about industrialism
in 19th century Northern Europe.
Is that relevant to people here in the States
in the 21st century?
Especially African Americans?
Oh, I think it's very relevant.
Karl Marx was one of the great prophetic figures
of the 19th century because he had an analysis
of capitalism that kept track of the precious
humanity of working people and poor people.
No one can deny under global capitalism that
there's been an escalation of oligarchs and
plutocrats.
No one can deny that big banks and big corporations
are now dominating government.
No one can deny that working people are not
benefiting to the degree that which hedge
fund folk are.
Wall street people are.
So that wealth inequality and all that goes
with it has, one has to come to terms with
it.
So, in that sense, Marxist analysis is probably
the most indispensable form of analysis to
make sense of a highly financialized monopoly
capitalism in our day.
What did he write about the US?
Did he write much?
Oh, yeah.
He made his living such as it was, working
as a reporter for a newspaper here in the
United States for many of his years.
It was through that that he covered the Civil
War in the United States, and the whole interest
of slavery.
That was very important and he wrote voluminously
about all of that.
This was a man who basically understood that
the promise of capitalism, which he always
likened to the French Revolution ... or you
put it very nicely at the beginning, the slogans
of the French Revolution-liberty, equality,
fraternity, brotherhood.
These were the promise of a capitalism that
would replace feudalism and bring us, finally,
a society that was free and equal and had
all those qualities.
And by the time he's a young man, he realizes
that was a false promise.
Capitalism had indeed replaced feudalism,
but it wasn't bringing us liberty, equality,
and fraternity.
And then he made that great breakthrough and
he taught us capitalism is not the agent for
liberty, equality, fraternity.
It's the biggest obstacle we face to arrive
at that.
And that was the impetus for the work that
he then did to analyze how and why capitalism
operated as such an obstacle.
But how does that work out?
In this country, we're given the idea that
communism, socialism is about control, capitalism
is about freedom.
And freedom resonates.
Resonated with centuries of people in this
country, at least, too.
Well, I think freedom, like everything else-like
beauty and so on-lies a little bit in the
eye of the beholder.
Freedom to do what?
Marx was very clever.
He said, "Yes, you can free a person from
slavery, but what freedom is that if the next
thing they are in enslaved to another system
that treats them very similarly?"
Marx loved to use the phrase "wage slave"
because he wanted to teach working people
that when you move from slave or peasant status
and you're now a wage earner, that may turn
out to be another kind of slavery leading
you to have to recognize that the further
break has to be made.
And then Marx tells us how and why that's
the case.
But that's a tricky sell in the US, or at
least it must have been in Marx's time, Cornel,
because freedom from slavery was a big plus
and to be a wage slave rather than someone
getting paid nothing at all was certainly
a positive.
Oh, no doubt, no doubt.
I think Marx was also preoccupied with what's
missing in the slogans of the French Revolution.
Which is democracy.
See, Marx was part of a radical democratic
tradition that says that the voices of those
at institutions must shake the direction of
those institutions.
So, wage slavery is another form of undemocratic
governance to the degree that which work worker's
voices, and of course Brother Wolff talks
about this with unbelievable eloquence and
insight in his recent works, that the voices
of workers are not heard.
And so America talks about it's love of democracy
but when it comes to the workplace, our workplace
looks very cryptofeudalistic in terms of those
at the top dictating [and shaping the destiny
of those with unions.
But, I mean, Brother Wolff lays this out.
Do you want to come in on that?
Sure, I mean, Cornel says it very nicely and
summarizes it.
When you go to work in the morning, in a capitalist
system, you're walking into a place where
what you do, how you do it, what's done with
the fruits of your brain and your muscle are
all handled by a tiny group of people, over
whom you exercise no power at all.
They can fire you, and do when they think
it's in their interest to do so.
This is the opposite of democracy.
In a democratic workplace, you would say every
person-every man and woman who is part of
this participates in making the decisions
since they all have to live with the results.
That's the democratic idea.
And the modern capitalist enterprise is the
negation of democracy.
That's why it's always been so bizarre to
imagine a system so fundamentally undemocratic
in its workplaces should present itself as
the agent or the bringer of democracy around
the world.
Talk about our relation to the world in all
of this.
Is everywhere seeing a kind of revival of
interest in Marx in the same way that we're
seeing it in this country?
I wouldn't say it's in the same way, but you're
seeing revivals of people inspired by Marx.
Even people who don't know that they're inspired
by Marx because Marx's influence is so indirect.
Let's remember, you know, Marx is an exile
from Germany, lives in England, writes in
the middle of the 19th Century, and by now,
Marxism is a reality in every country on the
face of this planet.
That's an astonishing spread.
It is, in a sense, everywhere.
And so it's rediscovered periodically because
it's repressed periodically so we kind of
have that struggle back and forth.
But just to pick three examples, in Alberta,
Canada, there's an election which brings to
power for the first time people who have been
influenced by Marx.
In Greece, we have a whole new shift of a
society led by people who are self defined
as Marxist.
And now in Spain as well, a radical alteration.
We see everywhere that a capitalism that can
function as unfairly, unjustly, and unequally
as this one is producing, as Marx, by the
way, suggested it might, it's own critics
and it's own grave diggers by the very way
it operates.
Now, Cornel, you've been in the civil rights
movement a long time.
Go back to the 60s, the 50s.
There was more Marx, if you like, in the civil
rights movement of those days than there is
today.
Fair enough?
Cornel West: Oh, absolutely.
I come from, black people, who ... our very
way of engaging in collective expression ... jazz
is democratic, symbolic action.
Every voice is lifted in the orchestra.
There's not one monolithic patriarchal figure.
Count might call it the Duke Ellington band,
but his voice is one voice against Johnny
Hodges and the others.
Every voice must be heard in the collective
performance.
Same is true in the workplace for Marx.
But also, and I would add, even with Marx,
because I was blessed write a book that's
called "The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist
Thought" over 30 years ago.
It's democracy on the one hand, but it's individuality
on the other.
Marx comes out of Schiller.
He comes out of German romanticism.
He's concerned about the precious humanity
of every individual, including working people's
individuality.
So individuality and democracy go hand in
hand, just like in Count Basie's band.
Individuality and democracy go hand in hand.
So, there was deep overlap.
That's why Martin Luther King, Jr. ended up
a democratic socialist.
And in the black tradition going back to reconstruction,
you had that interesting flowering of individualism.
People out from under slavery, running for
office, and building new towns.
But also this incredible co-investment, investment
in each other.
Cooperatively owned farms, property.
Public education and so forth.
But again, I draw a distinction between individuality
and individualism.
You see, individualism tilts in the capitalist
direction.
Individuality is radical democratic levelers
Marx.
I was part of a conversation not so long ago
on the web organized by, among others, our
friend Gar Alperovitz and the issue was raised
by Angela Glover Blackwell of PolicyLink that
you could have a new economic system, as we've
had new economic systems in the past, that
fail to be inclusive, and that are taken apart,
in effect, through their lack of inclusivity.
Going back to the 30s, why where farm workers
and domestic workers cut out of fair labor
standards act laws and so on and so forth.
What are we doing now to make sure that doesn't
happen again in this discussion about a new
economy, Rick?
I think it's the notion of inclusion is crucial
in all of this.
That is, when I, for example, talk a lot about
workers cooperating, redesigning the very
basic institutions that produce the goods
and services we all depend on, inclusion is
the central motif.
It's a democratic process of including every
single person.
So that when you go to work, you are not going
as a drone.
You're not going to be told what to do, how
to do, where to do it, where to do it.
You're going into an institution, the workplace,
where you are as much a controller as a controlled.
Where you share all of the functions with
everybody else.
That's a radical new way to describe the workplace,
which, for most adults, is the single most
important expenditure of their time.
Five days out of seven, eight hours of the
day, you're in the workplace, as most adults
are.
And therefore, to make that really democratically
inclusive, that's a radical transformation
of any society, and is why Marx is important.
Because he pointed us as to how and why that
would be the next step beyond capitalism in
a way that no one else really was able to
do at that time.
You talk about worker determined enterprises.
Right.
Elected and determined.
There a lot of people that would say that
the street hustlers are a pretty worker determined
enterprise.
Are there models out there that excite you,
Cornel?
That you see where people are developing these
kind of ways of working together that maybe
we don't call new economy but it's out there
happening.
I think there's a lot of worker cooperative
efforts.
In Spain, and again Brother Wolff talked about
it in his book, and there anarchist brothers
and sisters play a very important role because
they're concerned about worker cooperative,
too.
Proudhon and others talk about this as an
overlap.
I think the big difference is ... one of the
reasons why people are afraid of Marxism is
because they think of Lenin, they think of
Pol Pot, they think of Mao, they think of
professional revolutionaries running political
parties rather than his rich analysis, his
deep love of working and poor people ensuring
that they can live lives of decency and dignity
and therefore talking about cooperatives and
not always tied to professional political
parties that dictating x or y.
Soviets without Bolsheviks.
That's the Kronstadt Rebellion.
That's the council communism of Gorter and
Pannekoek and others.
That's very much tradition that we're a part
of.
But when you get to Mao and Lenin, that's
what people think of automatically.
They say, "Oh, no, you got some professionals
dictating to workers what to do."
No, that's authoritarian again.
It's not democratic.
That's like trying to transform Duke Ellington's
band into a military band.
It's not going to work.
You're not going to get the improvisation
and the rhythm that you need.
Now, of course, front line communities, communities
of color, less privileged communities are
better at this because they have to be.
Then the elites are very happy being in that
1% that has the same amount of wealth of half
the world's population, or whatever it is.
Does Marx have any insight on how do we flip
the balance of power, Cornel?
Well, I think Marx had a cosmopolitan sensibility.
He's open to all persons, no matter how oppressed
or less oppressed who are interested in being
... willing to be part of a cooperative enterprise
that put working and poor people at the center.
I think, you know, you and I would agree that
there's a rapacious individualism, even among
poor people, among blacks, and browns, and
reds, and women, and gays, and lesbians, and
so forth.
But we do have rich traditions of cooperative
activity among peoples of color and gays and
lesbians and so forth.
And we're up against one heck of an entrenched
power elite, no?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And yet, as Marx himself explained, when the
people who run the capitalist system keep
running it for their own profit, and the number
of them become smaller, and those of us who
are watching our futures and our hopes disappear
as they do it, they are, in the end, undercutting
their own capacity to survive.
I think we're at a time in the history of
capitalism when we are all spectators to a
self destruction awaiting us to become no
longer passive but active in making sure that
the passing of capitalism leads up in a place
where we will be happier as human beings to
be in.
And that's a heavy burden on us, but there's
not much else we can do because otherwise
we're going to let this system take us down
with it.
Last word, Cornel?
That's very real.
That's very real.
We've got impending ecological catastrophe,
we've got possible nuclear catastrophe, and
we've got capitalist catastrophe tied to white
supremacy, male supremacy, and all the hatreds
of Jews, Arabs, Muslims, gay, lesbian.
We are in a dark moment.
Marx had a blue sensibility.
He was keeping track of the darkness and the
thickness of evil, but he knew resistance
was always possible.
I love that about him.
And I am cheered by the fact that we are even
having this conversation.
And you two have it a lot.
Thank you so much, both of you for coming
in.
Thank you.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Get more information and more on this conversation
at our website.
Manju Rajendran has been making waves as an
organizer and activist since she was a teenager.
We recently got a chance to talk to her about
the ways in which her family's restaurant
has been successful at modeling an anti-capitalist
way of doing business.
Here's Manju:
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Five years ago, our family began an incredibly
journey to start a food justice restaurant
called Vimala's Curry Blossom Cafe and it's
named after my mother Vimala Rajendran who
has been cooking since she was seven.
She's an incredible, incredible cook.
And she's an incredible cook because she cooks
with love.
Like she thinks of it as her ministry, as
her social justice work, as her art form,
as her vehicle for change.
And it is a huge contribution to social justice
work.
It began after 18 years of a community kitchen
that we ran out of our home.
And even the creation of the community kitchen
was a kind of inadvertent thing.
So when I was, I guess, 12 or 13 a bunch of
women from my - the neighborhood that I grew
up in invited my mom to come out for dinner
for her birthday and they said to her "the
abuse that you're living with is unlivable,
we have to come up with a strategy to get
you out of there," and she said "It's not
feasible, I don't have my own independent
immigration status and I don't have the financial
means to get away".
And they said to her, "Well every time we
walk by your house, you invite us in and you
feed us.
What if we were to give you a little bit of
money for that exchange and you give enough
food to feed our families."
And so she started cooking big amounts of
food, and we would do a little Indian food
takeout out of the side door of our tiny little
home, and she would save cash from this and
was raising her own small independent income
and that sort of positioned her so that one
day when the opportunity came to run away
unexpectedly, we hit the road.
And we left.
We lived underground for a few weeks and we
were homeless for a time, living in various
people's, whatever they could offer us to
stay.
And we kept the community dinners going through
this process.
People would put whatever they could afford
in a jar and take home as much as they needed.
Then after 18 years of this a jealous restaurant
owner called the Health Department and they
told the Health Department that we were doing
this.
They said "You've gotta bust this" [laughs]
And so, my mother called me in tears and said,
the Health Department just called, we have
to call the food back in, we were going to
be serving out in this place, she told my
brother to go and bring all the food back.
Tell all the people to come back to the house
and eat the food.
So they ate it all.
And the next day we kind of began strategizing
over the phone.
I was living in Chicago at the time and she
said if you and your brother and your sister
are willing to come home and help this restaurant
launch then I'll do it.
And so I said yes, and I moved home from Chicago.
We had our soft opening at the time of the
US Social Forum in Detroit.
And we pay workers a living wage, we source
most of our produce and meat from small local
family farms.
We work hard to have as much shared decision
making as possible, we reduce waste in big
ways.
We're part of the pilot composting program
in our area, and compost tons and tons of
what most restaurants have to throw away.
We're part of a national organizing effort
to try and fight for a living wage for all
restaurant workers.
We're serving healthy locally sourced, affordable
food in a mixed class, mixed race space that
really shifts the dynamics around the Southern
table.
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That was Manju Rajendran recorded at the Allied
Media Conference in Detroit.
If you have a story about a business that's
making change, let us know.
BP‘s settlement for the Deepwater Horizon
spill was great headline-grabbing news recently.
Five Gulf coast governors as well as the US
Attorney General took the opportunity to claim
glory for the largest settlement with a single
entity in American history.
But who’s in deep for the Deepwater?
Beneath the headlines, it looks as if you
and I might be.
In case you missed it, under terms announced
July 2, British Petroleum agreed to a record-breaking
$18.7 billion to resolve claims related to
the massive oil spill in the Gulf in 2010.
Five states stand to gain from the payouts
over the next 18 years: Louisiana will receive
approximately $6.8 billion according to Governor
and GOP presidential contender Bobby Jindal.
In her announcement, A.G. Loretta Lynch declared
that ever since the spill the Justice Department
has been “fully committed to holding BP
accountable” and to restoring the environment
and the economy of the region “at the expense
of those responsible, not the American taxpayer."
But if that’s what the DOJ committed to,
it’s not exactly what they got.
As we’ve mentioned before, when corporations
agree to pay out compensation, they can claim
a tax deduction.
Restitution, unlike a criminal penalty or
fine, can be written off as just another “cost
of doing business”.
Of that $18.7 billion, the Justice Department
seems only to have tied $5.5 billion to criminal
Clean Water Act violations.
The rest will likely be tax-deductible, even
though a New Orleans judge ruled BP guilty
of gross negligence.
$18.7 billion is a hefty sum, but it's one
that the public will largely be on the hook
for.
It seems to suggest that bad behavior can
lead to just another corporate windfall.
No maybe it's no wonder that five years after
the Gulf of Mexico disaster, a Southern California
coast was coated in crude oil this spring.
If the DOJ had seized BP’s assets and taken
over control, now that might have sent a real
message.
Tell me what you think.
Write to me, laura@grittv.org and thanks.
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What does it take to go from a moment to a
movement?
Today we're dedicating the entire Laura Flanders
Show to a special report from Baltimore.
People in Baltimore are tired of just sitting
idle, waiting for change to happen so we're
going to make change ourselves, whether it's
through breaking the curfew, civil disobedience
or daily protests, whatever it is, we're going
to do it.
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Today on the Laura Flanders Show, Andrew Cockburn
discusses what's wrong with the way the US
fights war, George Bush, let's hear it for
George Bush - he was actually quite restrained
in his use of diplomative drone assassination,
because he prefered to capture people and
torture them.
Later in the program, we look at the story
of Fahd Ghazy.
Fahd Ghazy was one of the first men to arrive
at Guantanamo.
He was just a few months past his high school
graduation.
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