Hello, this is Dr. Harriet Fraad on 
Capitalism Hits Home, an interpersonal update.
This is a show about the intersection of capitalism,
class, and our personal lives.
Today's podcast on Capitalism Hits Home is
about what is class?
What is a class revolution?
What does it mean when we talk about feudalism,
capitalism, state capitalism, socialism, and
communism?
These are words bandied about, but we don't
really know what they mean, and we don't learn
about these revolutions in school.
So it's important to learn about them now.
However, before I begin today's podcast, I
want to tell you about some developments that
have very important ramifications for our
personal lives.
First, an update on Epstein, who I've covered
in previous podcasts.
That's particularly relevant because the way
Epstein and his cohort of billionaires and
powerful men treated young women affects everyone's
personal life.
Epstein's death has been declared a suicide,
which is widely accepted even though there's
ample evidence to make us question.
There was a treasure trove of videos of powerful
men raping young girls that Epstein provided.
These videos were blackmail opportunities
for Epstein to make money.
A treasure trove of such videos was found
when the FBI invaded the locks on Epstein's
New York mansion, now worth about $100 million,
opened the safe and found all these files.
What has happened to these files incriminating
billionaires and presidents?
No one seems to know.
How interesting.
They seem to have disappeared, and there's
radio silence on their contents.
Similarly, the flight logs from the Lolita
Express, on which Trump, and Clinton, and
many powerful men flew in order to land on
"slave island" and rape young women – who
were drugged, and if they tried to escape,
were forcibly brought back – those flight
logs have similarly disappeared.
How interesting.
In addition, there's interesting facts around
Epstein's quote "suicide."
Epstein was in the metropolitan prison system,
which is controlled by Barr, Trump's – one
of Trump's – most enthusiastic apologists.
In that facility, it is mandated by law that
there are cameras posted outside the cell
of anyone who has attempted suicide, as Epstein
did.
Interestingly enough, both of those cameras
outside Epstein's cell were broken.
Another rule not to be broken is that when
an inmate has tried to commit suicide, that
inmate needs a fellow inmate in his cell at
all times.
Somehow the head warden, under the supervision
of Barr, allowed Epstein's cellmate to be
taken out of the cell.
So he was alone.
The marks on Epstein's neck, according to
the autopsy of the government, indicated suicide.
According to the autopsy of Epstein's lawyer,
the broken hyoid bone – which all autopsies
agree is usually associated with strangulation,
not suicide – the marks on his neck were
similar.
The guards that were supposed to check on
Epstein every half an hour – one was recruited
from a different job for this job, which isn't
her job.
The other was on a second part, a second shift,
and tired.
How interesting is that?
Those two guards are the only ones being prosecuted.
How interesting.
The head warden, who is responsible for this,
under the supervision of Barr, has not been
penalized.
He was merely transferred, with the same,
in the same position, with the same salary,
to a different prison.
These things are not being questioned.
Across the United States, people refer to
Epstein's suicide.
How interesting.
That's certainly questionable.
And so here again, in terms of capitalism
hitting home, you have wealthy, powerful men
who are allowed to regard women as sexual
snacks, and rape them, and assault them – whether
they're Alan Dershowitz, famous lawyer; or
Prince Andrew, monarch's son; or Jes Staley,
president of Barclays Bank; or any of the
many others.
No one is asking questions.
If you don't – money talks in this society,
and it seems to speak very loudly.
And many voices here are silenced.
In addition, I want to call attention to two
other developments which vastly affect personal
life in America.
One is that the recent mortality statistics
show that Americans are dying younger than
they used to.
That's interesting, but what's more interesting
is which Americans are dying younger.
And this has been reported by The Economist
magazine as well as a study by MIT.
The bottom one percent – the one percent
that earns the least – die, if they're men,
on an average of 14 years earlier than the
top one percent.
The lowest percent of women die on the average
of 10 years before the highest, or the middle,
of American men and women.
So you have mortality depending on income.
Life itself is 10 to 14 years shorter if you
don't have money than if you have quite a
bit of money.
That's certainly relevant when we look at
how capitalism hits home: who's dead and who's
allowed to live.
A third development which really affects how
capitalism hits home is the new figure that
now couples live together more frequently
than they marry.
We already know that the mass of 18- to 35-year-olds
don't marry, and that the latest development
among married couples is married couples without
children.
But in the latest studies of cohabitation,
the reasons people give for not marrying – which
certainly affects their personal lives – are
that they don't have the security to plan
for the future, and they certainly don't have
the financial security to plan for children.
Before the 1970s, people loved one another,
got together, decided to marry, to raise children,
counted on the fact that they'd always get
a job and make a living.
Now that's no longer the case.
Both people have to work, and if both people
are working and we have scant or no paid maternity
leaves and paternity leaves, then what are
people going to do?
Day care, on average – which isn't the finest
day care, but decent day care – costs about
the same cost as a community-college tuition:
about $10,000 a year.
Not that many couples can afford that.
And already 85 percent of America's kids are
in substandard day care, crowded in front
of televisions in wet diapers.
So this is not a tenable future.
So that people live together, but they don't
marry because they don't have the security.
Now I want to launch into the topic for today.
What is class?
What is feudalism?
capitalism?
state capitalism?
socialism?
communism?
What do these words really mean?
Well, they all affect personal life because
personal life is very different in these different
systems.
And we have to understand that no system that's
human is pure.
There's always variety, as there always is
amongst us.
So, for example, the New Deal was in many
ways in the United States a socialist period
in the United States, although it was never
declared that way.
Taxes were levied on the highest incomes.
The taxes were 98.6 percent on the highest
incomes.
But now, the highest-income people don't pay
their taxes.
They get good tax lawyers, and put their money
offshore.
Romney bragged that he paid 13 percent on
his taxes – more than his employees, of
course.
Trump brags that he paid no taxes at all,
and also that he's very rich.
But that was a socialistic period in the United
States, where the top incomes were taxed heavily
in order to finance Social Security, Medicare,
unemployment insurance in a depression.
And the reason that was agreed to is the capitalist
system had broken down.
And capitalists at the top agreed with their
wealthy capitalist president, Delano Roosevelt,
that in order for the capitalist system to
continue, they better be taxed to pay for
these programs.
Because at the time, the communist and socialist
parties organized hundreds of thousands of
marchers in the streets of New York and other
cities.
And the farms, had to do something about farmers,
because the Iowa militias were killing judges
that condemned family farms.
And there were pitched battles in the streets.
And so the people at the top felt threatened
enough to be taxed.
Now, they obviously don't.
So there's always a mix of some kind, according
to the circumstances.
And we have to understand that a system is
called feudal, or capitalist, or socialist,
or state capitalist, or communist because
of the dominant system.
Now what system is this?
In order to define class we can ask three
basic questions: Who produces the goods and
services in a society?
Who gets to receive the fruits of those goods
and services – the profits?
And who gets to decide where to distribute
those goods and services?
So you can look, let's say, at a big company
we all know about which is – well, I hope
this is all over the country; I think it is
– which is McDonald's.
The workers who produce the burgers, and the
people who produce the frozen burgers they
use, and the frozen french fries, are given
a salary.
They're employees, because capitalism is a
system of employers and employees.
They create the profits that McDonald's appropriates.
And then the board of directors, representing
the owners of McDonald's, decides what to
do with those profits: whether to mechanize
further and therefore be able to lay off people,
whether to expand their menu, whether to expand
their stores – whatever it is they want
to do.
The people who do the work don't have a say.
They may go on strike, as many are for $15
an hour, but they're still – so they have
an impact, but the basic decisions are made
by the employers, the board of directors of
McDonald's, in the capitalist system.
In feudalism, serfs produce the wealth of
the society.
Serfs created the agricultural produce and
gave a certain portion to themselves so that
they could reproduce and survive – not an
elegant portion but a portion – and the
rest was appropriated by the lord of the manor
to use for whatever he decided: whether it
was to expand his lands by invading a neighbor,
whether it was inviting more courtiers to
live at the palace, or whatever.
And that system was justified by the Catholic
Church's ideology that determined that the
serfs were required by God himself to work
for the lord who appropriated their wealth.
Parenthetically and interestingly, the church
itself was a huge feudal lord, owning many
feudal estates.
That was feudalism.
So if we ask these questions: who produces
the goods and services, who appropriates the
profit from them, and who makes the decisions
about what they're used for, we can see what
kind of a class society we have.
I talked a little bit about feudalism, in
which the lord of the manor appropriated and
distributed the wealth created by his serfs,
and that system was destroyed through history
and also through the yearnings of the mass
of people for something else besides a life
of serfdom.
They rebelled; they yearned for better lives.
The slogan in the French Revolution, which
was characteristic of the capitalist revolution
that followed feudalism, was "liberté, égalité,
fraternité."
Liberty, equality among people, and brotherhood
among people.
And because it was a capitalist revolution,
the society was divided between employers
and employees.
The employees worked to create the wealth
of the employer, who appropriated that wealth
and decided how to spend the profits.
Workers have no control in a capitalist system.
They don't have control over what they're
producing, whether they get fired or not (unless
they have a strong union), what they produce,
whether they get new machinery, whether they
get laid off because things are automated.
They don't have control of that, and the employer
has control over that.
They get a salary, a wage as employees, and
the employer or his board of directors makes
the decisions.
Socialism grew out of the feeling, and the
reality, that capitalism didn't bring liberty
because of financial enslavement or financial
poverty.
It didn't bring equality, because capitalist
societies are noted for their inequality.
The United States now, which has the fewest
socialistic measures, has the greatest inequality
of all the 30 developed countries in the world.
Even though in 1970 we were the most equal,
now we're the least equal.
And so socialism is becoming more interesting
with the democratic-socialist alliances and
people like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
State capitalism is more typical of what happened
in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.
In state capitalism, bureaucrats decide what's
produced, how it's produced, and how it's
appropriated and distributed.
That's also a capitalism of employers and
employees, and the bureaucrats decide how
to distribute the goods, how to distribute
the money – not the people who produce the
wealth.
Communism is a rare system enacted in the
world.
In the world today, it's practiced in a community
called Mondragon, which is a city of about
110,000 people, all working in collectives,
communes, cooperatives.
No person in that cooperative, or representing
that in their governing body, is allowed to
make more than six times what the average
worker makes.
Imagine what the CEOs would do if they couldn't
make more than six times what the average
workers in their corporation make – like
the McDonald's Corporation, or at Amazon,
where Jeff Bezos has $150 billion and is about
the richest man in the world.
What would happen to him if he could only
get six times more than the poor pay that
his workers get?
At any rate, in Mondragon, the way things
are organized is that every cooperative makes
decisions cooperatively.
Everybody has to participate; participation
is mandatory.
And they elect representatives to a larger
body that makes the bigger decisions for the
wider collective.
When I was visiting Mondragon, I went to see
their biggest co-op, the Fagor Industrial,
which makes household appliances: refrigerators,
stoves, dishwashers.
Every two hours a buzzer went off.
And when I asked what that was about, they
said that the workers in this cooperative
decided that any more than two hours at a
given production job was bad for the person
on the job.
And so they switched to a different job.
They had big decisions they had to make because
Mondragon is in Spain, and during the recession
there were fewer people buying second homes,
fewer household appliances were bought, and
their orders were down.
And in this cooperative they had to decide
what to do about it: whether some people would
be fired and they would save money that way,
or they would each get less money and work
five days a week, or they'd get less money
and work fewer days a week.
They all decided together to get less money
but work only four days a week.
But that was a joint decision of how to distribute
the income that came in.
And it was a decision made by the workers,
who then appoint people, elect people, to
the council that decides what to do overall:
how to invest in, whether to invest in, the
universities (they have two universities there),
in technological innovation centers, in health
care, and other things.
So that's really a communist society.
And we have to look and see what our goals
are.
If their goals are, if our goals are, equality
between people so no one has economic power
over anyone else, in addition to equality
of power we need to look – because we want
a society that's fair and equal among people,
that no one has economic or social power over
anyone else – we can look at societies and
different class societies in terms of whether
there's equality, whether they create kindness
between people, whether they create the well-being
of most people.
So we have to look at each class system and
decide from a personal, kind of homey, point
of view which creates the greatest relationships
of equality, and kindness, and well-being.
We have to evaluate the societies by looking
at the way people are treated in them – especially
those who have the least economic and political
power, who are children, and women, and often
ethnic or racial minorities.
Some class revolutions and the changes they
made are things we will study.
They're all changes that, sadly enough, we
don't learn about in school.
Thank you for listening.
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