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Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Capitalism's Resilience and Its Eventual End: A Discussion with Steve Paxton
In an exhilarating journey through economic history, we welcome renowned author Steve Paxton to our podcast. His works "Unlearning Marx" (Zer0 Books 2021) and "The End of Capitalism" (Zer0 Book 2023) serve as the compass, guiding our exploration. With Steve's insights, we unravel the transformation of societies from feudalism to capitalism and ponder on what might succeed capitalism. His perspective on Marxist theory offers invaluable insights into the possible future economic systems.
Together we trace the evolution of capitalism, from its humble origins in Tudor Enclosure in England to its contemporary form. We find ourselves engrossed in a discussion about capitalism's resilience, its failure to meet the needs of those who cannot enrich the system, and the role of financialization in widening the gap of inequality. As we delve deeper, we also question capitalism's future and the inevitability of its end.
Going beyond capitalism, Steve presents an interesting comparison between his approach and the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). He suggests the idea of the state as an 'employer of best practice.' But what does that mean? Could this be the key to moving past capitalism and creating a more equitable society? We also analyze the impact of AI on future employment and its potential to disrupt the current state of capitalism. This episode promises a riveting discussion on the past, present, and future of capitalism, ending with Steve sharing his thoughts on the implications of AI on capitalism and jobs. Join us for this enlightening conversation!
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Hello and welcome to VARM blog. I'm with Steve Paxton today and we are talking a little bit about his first book, online Marks, a lot about his newest book, the End of Capitalism History, ideology and Progress. I forgot the subtitle. I had to actually look at the book. One of the reasons why I wanted to bring up Online Marksism a little bit is because it actually is related kind of to the theories about how capitalism ends.
C. Derick Varn:Because one of your arguments in Online Marksism that I think is fascinating and something that I kind of agree with is that, regardless of what you think the Soviet system was, what it ended up doing was creating the conditions for capitalism to exist after 1991. The precise debates about the nature of the Soviet Union I've been involved in them for 15 years my eyes glaze over, but I think it is undeniable what actually ended up happening in the USSR. I think when we look at, say, what might be beyond capitalism, looking at such a late comer to capitalism in the terms of post-Soviet Russia might actually be kind of illustrative. I found your use of GA Cohen to make this point kind of interesting. I don't know your precise relationship to analytic Marxism. Before we get into the argument about the end of the Soviet Union? What is your relationship to analytic Marxism?
Steve Paxton:So I guess I'm not enough of a philosopher to regard myself as an analytic philosopher and I'm not enough of a Marxist really to regard myself as a Marxist. So I think Marx has got loads of really good things to say and really kind of loads of valuable insights that we can learn a lot from. I tend not to call myself a Marxist because I think once you do that, then you end up defending things because Marx said them, not because you agree with them. There isn't anyone who didn't say some things that weren't right and there's no need to take Marxist to take the good bits of Marx. You don't have to take everything he said. Obviously there are some things where there's kind of a complex system there and you can't pull one piece out without some of the other pieces collapsing. But you certainly don't have to be on board with everything that Marx wrote and in order to see the value of some of the other stuff you wrote. And nobody expects physicists to call themselves mutinists or something and then end up on Twitter in the middle of the night defending alchemy. The fact that Newton was wrong about loads of that doesn't mean gravity doesn't happen. It's happened, started floating away. So I think I hesitate to call myself a Marxist, even though I use a lot of what Marx, what I think Marx got right, and try and kind of build on that and use that as a kind of a conceptual framework.
Steve Paxton:So I think my relationship with analytical Marxism is that I'm not an analytical philosopher and I'm not a Marxist. Having said that, though I think so I first came across Cohen when I was doing a politics degree and at that point I was late to university. I'd been working till I was 26. I started then and I kind of was clearly interested in left-wing politics, had a look at Marx when I was younger and kind of thought, okay, interesting, but not really interesting enough to get really into it, had a look at a load of other things, wasn't really committed to anything but was still broadly kind of socialist. And then when I read Cohen's book, karl Marx's Theory of History, I kind of thought, okay, now this makes sense. So if you look at Marx this way now I can get on board with it much more fully. So I think my relationship with analytical Marxism is it's what made Marxism make sense to me.
C. Derick Varn:So in your book on learning Marx, which also is kind of not repeated but reconceptualized in the second chapter of your book, the End of Capital, you do make the argument, more or less using Cohen and historical facts, to argue that the outcome of the Soviet system is was a capitalized Russia and actually a lot of the Warsaw Pact as well, if we're really being consistent and coherent about it, and that this was actually kind of a vindication of a Marxist view of history. For my audience, who may not have read your book yet, can you like just signpost that argument?
Steve Paxton:Yeah, sure. So I guess I mean the vindication thing is, that's not a new thing that I'm saying in the book, that's something that people have said, but I think it's something that doesn't get said enough. Is that Marx? If you look at the Soviet Union and Marx, it's very tempting, for you know, obviously right wingers kind of they want to blame, they want to throw Marx out because of things that they say happened in the Soviet Union. But the way Marx looks at history is that it's kind of some people view it very much in stages, and I think Cohen does that as well. I kind of think sort of phases maybe is a more productive way of looking at things.
Steve Paxton:But either way there is a kind of progression there, and before a certain type of economic structure can come to dominate a society, there are certain preconditions that must be met. That's true of socialism, and Marx says that you can't have socialism until you've already had capitalism, because capitalism is the only thing that can produce enough productive capacity to provide material abundance. And without material abundance, if you try to have socialism before you've got to that point, then socialism will fail. Briefly, really, because if you are trying to share things out equally, when there isn't enough stuff, you're just going to deliver short thoughts to everyone and everyone's pissed off and then the whole thing will collapse. So Marx says that from a theoretical point of view.
Steve Paxton:And it's definitely the case that Russia in 1917 did not have advanced capitalism. That's just totally uncontested. So according to that, from that point of view, theoretically, according to Marx, the Russian Revolution was destined to fail. You can be more specific than that. He wrote to Russian revolutionaries in 1881, who had kind of written to him and said kind of sounds like we're saying if we have a revolution it's going to fail. And he kind of wrote back and said, well, yeah, sorry guys. He did give them a bit of a way out, though. In the next year, in 1882, in the preface to the new I think it was the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, he said that Russia might be a revolution in Russia, although it was backwards and wasn't really the place where you could have a successful revolution. It could succeed if it proved to be the catalyst for revolutions in the more advanced capitalist economies, and then the revolutionary regime would be able to benefit from the advanced productive capacity of Germany, england and the USA if those places had socialist revolutions, so he did give them a kind of a get out.
Steve Paxton:Obviously, that didn't happen, and so from Marx's point of view, the Soviet Union was destined to not achieve socialism. So that's in the book and I can obviously go into more detail on that. I've skipped over that really quickly there. But that's not a particularly new thing that I'm arguing in the book. That's a kind of a view that various people have expressed about Marx's theory of history and the Soviet Union. The thing I'm saying in the book, which I think I'm not aware of anyone else saying, is that if you look at Marx's theory of history, there are also certain preconditions that must be placed before you can have the development of capitalism, and none of those were in place in 1917 either, certainly not in any kind of widespread sense in the Russian Empire, and yet they were all in place in 1990. So, and obviously they had to be in place, because capitalism is now some form of kind of capitalism is now what we have in Russia. So you can argue then that that period really from just if you go to just before the Russian Revolution, from say in 1860, during the 1860s the serfs were emancipated in Russia, so that was kind of the end of serfdom in Russia. That's much later than anywhere else and it's a bit kind of sweeping reform. It doesn't actually, although it's a legal thing, it doesn't really make any very much material difference to the Russian peasantry before 1917. So you can kind of say it's kind of trivially true and indisputable that Russia was a feudal society in 1860 and was a capitalist society in 1990. So whatever happened in between was the transition from feudalism to capitalism. That just is the case. What I'm arguing in the book is, as well as that being the case, that also fits in very well with how Marx describes the transition from feudalism to capitalism happening in England from kind of 1500 to the start of the 19th century, and that lots of the things that he says have to be in place before capitalism can happen are the things that happened during that period from 1860 to 1990.
Steve Paxton:And the Soviets we tend to look at the Soviet Union and judge that they were claimed to be building socialism. I think they were trying to build socialism, so we judge them. Did they succeed in doing that or not? And I think another way and a useful way of looking at the Soviet Union is just forget what they said they were trying to do, or forgot, or what even they were trying to do. Look at what they actually did, which was mostly firefighting. They were mainly just trying to survive, just trying to protect the revolution and the revolutionary regime. They were under fire right from the start of the Civil War. Foreign intervention, capitalists, encirclement, world War II, all this kind of stuff. They were just constantly had their backs against the wall and just had to do whatever they could do in order to survive. But what they ended up doing was to put in place those things that Marx says you need before you can have the emergence of capitalism.
C. Derick Varn:So I mean, there's actually Beg's a question and this is the first chapter of how capitalism ends which is actually how does capitalism begin? What are the preconditions for capitalism from your view of Marx?
Steve Paxton:Sure. So one of the things is that I mean, I guess the place to start with that is what is capitalism? So there's no, I don't own the definition of capitalism. Marx doesn't have one single place where he says this is what I think capitalism is. You have to kind of pick up these meanings. And actually Marx doesn't own the definition of capitalism either. So it is a contested thing. So you've got a kind of plump for something and I've gone and I think this is consistent certainly with a lot Marx's approach for a kind of a structural definition of capitalism in which most people are proletarians, which means that most people own no means of production.
Steve Paxton:They don't own any productive resources. The only way they can earn their living is to go, is to. They do own all their labour power and the way they own a living is to go and sell their labour power to a capitalist who does own means of production and resources, and you can go and work for them and you get paid wages. So you're free, in that you're free to go and sell your labour power to anyone, but you're also unfree in that you have to sell your labour power to someone, otherwise you're going to starve. So that's a kind of a definition of capitalism in its sort of purist sense. And the reason why that definition is kind of expressed like that is because it highlights the difference between capitalism and pre-capitalist economic structures. So the in most pre-capitalist economic structures people were not free to sell their labour power to anyone. They were told who they most. Immediate producers were told who they would have to work for. They might be able to work for themselves a bit and to feed themselves, but they would also have to. They would owe some labour to a local Lord of the Manor. And I mean, I'm being very kind of trying to be brief, so there are always lots of intermediate shades and lots of complications, but I'm trying to give the kind of the ideal, typical expressions of these situations.
Steve Paxton:So one of the first things in order to one of the first things that has to be created in order to allow capitalism to emerge is that you need to separate the worker from their means of production. So pre-capitalist workers in England didn't kind of own their means of production in the way that we might think of that now, but they had certain rights over the means of production they used. They couldn't usually sell them or bequeath them, but they had a right of occupancy, which might be a right that was passed down through the generations. But that right also came with obligations. You had to go and work for the local Lord. You couldn't just go off to another village and work there. So even if you wanted to go marry someone outside the village, you'd need permission. Often travelling would just need permission. So people were kind of tied to the land and they were tied to their local Lord. But they did have some rights of possession, that probably you know a small amount of land that they could grow food for themselves on, and also rights to use common resources so they could graze an animal on the common and they could collect firewood from the spinny or whatever.
Steve Paxton:So the first thing that needs to be done before capitalism can emerge. Capitalism is a system where people don't own anything and don't have any attachment and aren't tied to the land. So the first thing is that you've got to tear people off the land, and one of the other things you have to do is Marx says that you have to combine the pigment property of the many into the huge property of the few, so to basically get all these individual producers with their tiny little plots of strip farm land. You need to do these two, two sides of the same process. One is you get the people off the land and the other is that you then impose the land into bigger farms. And that was happening.
Steve Paxton:There were kind of two phases of that.
Steve Paxton:In England there was a Tudor enclosure which was significantly was opposed by the state.
Steve Paxton:The landlords were doing it, people starting to see land in a different way and starting to realize that they could make a load of money if they, if they evicted the tenants.
Steve Paxton:And then there was another one Once the Civil War had happened and we'd reduced the power of the monarchy down to a constitutional monarchy and and the kind of the bourgeois are interested had established itself with political power. Then the second phase of enclosure was parliamentary enclosure, where acts of parliament just went through all the time, thousands of them. Almost every village in England you can look up its active enclosure, which is basically when the Lord of the Manor just said just all this land you've all been using for all this time, that's mine now and you don't have any, so off you go. So this kind of process created the two main things that Marx sees as crucial for the development of capitalism. One, which is a label, is a landless workforce and the other is the concentration of productive resources by land and mineral resources and things like rivers that you need to power water mills into the hands of a few capitalists.
C. Derick Varn:So how do you, how do we see this developing in the way that it has developed? I mean, one of the things that is controversial amongst socialists and Marxists is whether or not we should periodize capitalism, which I tend to think we should for a variety of reasons. But what do you see as developing the first, say, 100, 150 years of capitalism? Because you kind of you state you see capitalism as more or less a 300 year project. There are other I sometimes push it 100 years back or the beginnings of a murky period of like 150 years in the 50th century, where you kind of in the beginning of the things, but it's not a system that is inactable yet. So what really do you think happens in that first 100 years of capitalism that maybe leads to where we are now?
Steve Paxton:So I think I mean, I think it's interesting when you say about periodizing it and also so when I said earlier that people tend to look at Marxist view of history, kind of in his in viewing history happening in stages, and I was kind of like maybe phases is better.
Steve Paxton:I'm not really sure semantically if that is an improvement or not, but what I'm trying to get out, I think, is that the view we want to avoid is that you have this kind of long period of feudalism and then there's maybe a decade of turmoil and then we then it's capitalism, and then you have 300 years of capitalism and then we're going to have a decade of turmoil and then we'll be into socialism, and I think things don't actually work like that. So the picture is more like we have feudalism and for kind of maybe 300 years we're going through a transition from feudalism to capitalism and by the time we finished that transition we may be able to really start the transition away from capitalism into something else. And it's almost as if the transitional phases last as long as the as the actual periods themselves, and you never quite get to that kind of pure capitalism that when that I described earlier that you know the situation where if you don't sell your labor power you'll just start, because that's not true Already. That's not true and you know it's good that that's not true. That we have welfare states shoddy that they are in most places but if you don't work you'll be really poor or you might be destitute. But you're probably not going. In most modern capitalist economies You're not going to kind of is not a case of work or self. So we've already got a mitigation of capitalism and that's been around for quite a while and that you know we never really got to that, that kind of true sort of capitalist ideal, because those things probably don't exist. They're good as theoretical models and they're good to seek, you know, to talk about what, try and understand what is going on, but that doesn't mean that the pure version of it must exist in history somewhere, otherwise it's an invalid concept.
Steve Paxton:So I think one thing in terms of what happened in the first hundred years of capitalism is that it's consolidation really. So there's a lot of political consolidation and I think the so that transitional period from maybe 1500 to 1800, there's really two phases to that. There's kind of the emergence of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the, you know not quite as a threat, not at the expense of yet, but as a threat to the feudal order. And that really culminates then in the 1640s and from then till the end of the 17th century in kind of a lot of political turmoil and that's the bourgeoisie, where the bourgeoisie kind of rests power from the feudal order and then after that then it's really a period of consolidation and that's when they really push forward with enclosure and the lots of other political stuff really.
Steve Paxton:But that's the political world catching up with the economic reality. That's already happened. The reason why the bourgeoisie are able to do that is that what's already happened is given them sufficient economic power and sufficient clout to be able to seize political power and to hold on to it and to dictate the terms of what comes next. So I think it's you know it's important to see the kind of that sequence and what's important there, and the same when you're talking about Russia. You know it's the material kind of changes and technological changes and the changes in kind of ownership and power. In that sense that dictates kind of what the limits of the political people who hold political power can and can't do.
C. Derick Varn:So in chapter three of your new book you really talk about contemporary capitalism and there's a big case to be made that it's a very different thing in this early capital that we're talking about. What do you see as the current trends, and also, have the trends change since the book was written to now, given like shifts in central banking policies and stuff like that?
Steve Paxton:So I think, yeah. So I think I guess the contrast with earlier forms of capitalism is that, although we might not like a lot of the results that we get from capitalism, there was kind of a, there was a like, an internal logic to it. It made some sense somewhere. People who were already rich enough to be capitalists wanted to be richer, and the way to enrich themselves more was to sell their sell stuff to us and to each other. And if you want to sell stuff to people, the more you can make it what they want, then the better. The more, the easier is to sell it to, and so for.
Steve Paxton:To some extent there is a logic there in capitalism that says if you want to be rich, then make things easier, make life easier for people and find ways to produce more of things that people want. And that's why Marx thinks capitalism is the thing that, the only system that can give us this kind of material abundance, because capitalism is really good at creating more stuff. But for those reasons capitalism is really good at creating more stuff. People are inventive and greed is a huge, huge incentive and propels people to invent all kinds of things. Not that it's necessarily always the people that are actually doing the inventing that are getting the rewards, but the people that are doing the investing in that. But when you kind of, you know you can see the and there have always been illogical things to capitalism and I don't want to give the impression that I think you know capitalism has been some wonderful servant to humanity. When I say it meets people's needs, it obviously only meets the needs of people who've got money to buy things. If you're starving, you've got no money, capitalism doesn't care that you need food, because no capitalist is interested in the needs of somebody who can't can't enrich them. So I think that logic that you know almost the more efficient you are, the more money you're going to make, and the efficiency means giving people what they want and working out how to produce more stuff more quickly. That kind of made. It had its own internal sense. Even though it had terrible consequences. It had some sense. But now, as I say in that chapter you can see even more than at any point in the past, that whole logic is completely broken down. We throw away 28% of the food we produce and at the same time 9 million people die of hunger every year. We're hitting the level of contradiction has just gone through the roof. We're making loads of stuff that nobody wants. There's a massive financialization of the market. So now if a capitalist wants to enrich themselves, making something that people want is kind of an option, but actually why not just play the stock market? That doesn't. Obviously some of that money then goes to other capitalists who are making things people want. But there's a huge. The financialization of economies has made a huge difference in terms of capitalism's ability to kind of satisfy human needs. It increases inequality.
Steve Paxton:There's also things like one of the examples I use in the book is affiliate marketing. So when you want some product and you go on the google and try and search for it, you'll often get loads of affiliates will be the first results that come in. So they are as opposed to traditional advertising which tried to put when they weren't denying that cigarettes cause lung cancer. Traditional advertising had this function. It brought somebody who made widgets with to the attempt, brought that person to the attention of somebody who wanted to buy widgets. Affiliate marketing actually interrupts that process because somebody but the point of it is just somebody's trying to skim something off the top. So it actually interrupts your attempt to find the person who's making the thing you want to buy, and it doesn't contribute anything at all to anyone except the people that are doing it.
Steve Paxton:It's another example, and there are many of this kind of activity that goes on lots of hours of work, lots of office buildings, lots of pollution caused by people commuting to work and back, and for no benefit whatsoever to anybody. There aren't any more things in the world. There's no one who was hungry. No one who was hungry is getting fed. There aren't any more chairs and tables in the world or anything, and there's an increasing amount of this kind of stuff in the world. And there's also there are things like inbuilt obsolescence and the fact that there are 20 brands of washing powder on the shelves and they're all made by two companies and they're basically all the same. This kind of stuff is just it's illustrative of the fact that capitalism really is. It's got to the point where it's now just chasing its own tail really and feathering its own nest.
C. Derick Varn:So one thing that I think comes out of traditional Marxism that's been dropped by most Marxists, but I think it's kind of in Marxist is this idea of the inevitability of socialism. And while I I'm not an inevitableist I don't think socialism is inevitable, but it does seem to me that the end of capitalism is inevitable. Like you know, we're talking about the beginning of the book which is, you know, a very, you know, break net pace through the history and the stakes of 300 years of capital development, and we've even shortened that to, you know, 20 minutes here. But why do you think? You know, I think a lot of traditional Marxists would have been surprised that capitalism was allowed to get this contradictory and decadent without being replaced by something? Why do you think it has been able to survive?
Steve Paxton:I guess I mean I agree with about the inevitability of socialism. I don't think it's inevitable. I don't think that's inevitable. I think capitalism's, the end of capitalism is inevitable at some point, just on the grounds that nothing lasts forever. And contrary to the beliefs of many capitalists, it's not. Capitalism isn't an end game. We haven't just settled down to how the world is supposed to work. It's a phase, like everything else is, and there'll be something else along at some point, hopefully something better, and maybe that will be socialism. But I don't think socialism is inevitable. And sorry, I've forgotten your other question.
C. Derick Varn:Oh, I was, I was. The other question is why do you think that this form of capitalism, however, has been able to survive and you take to this extent?
Steve Paxton:I guess, because I mean partly because capitalism. Under capitalism, you know, the people who are powerful are fairly efficient at staying there. So you know there's there's a whole kind of system. I think so. I think one one, any system, is going well. I guess what I'm trying to say is any system is going to. The people at the top of any system are going to resist change and try to present the system as just the way, the natural way of the world. So so that happens with any of them.
Steve Paxton:That happened on the feudalism and people sent in ideas like the divine right of kings and the great chain of being. This is just the way it is, guys, and you just have to put up that and people internalize that when that's the, that's the basic background to your existence, then most people just internalize that thing. That's the way it is, and I think capitalism has been very good at doing that. But I think also, capitalism also has, because of this, its capacity to increase productive power and to increase, you know, drivers towards material abundance. Capitalism has fed a lot of people and people although, yeah, I mean it's not fed a lot of people as well but there's a in terms, if you're not taking a judgment on whether we like what capitalism did or not, but on why it's been resilient. One of the reasons why it's been resilient is that it's always been on the right side of providing material not abundance to people, but some kind of material sufficiency to enough people that the opponent that that, that that getting rid of it is a big risk to a lot of people and actually most.
Steve Paxton:You know many people. People just want a quiet life and if you're kind of getting enough and what is enough is is different to different. It's not a fixed quantity, is it? But if you're kind of getting enough, which many people in the world are kind of getting enough then why would you rock the boat? Why would you change it?
Steve Paxton:Most people aren't hugely politically engaged. Most people in the West who are trying to work towards an end to capitalism are kind of doing it on someone else's behalf. You know we're not. You know I'm not rich, but I'm also not starving and you know my kids are fed and I've got a roof over my head.
Steve Paxton:There are many people in this country and in the US that don't have that, but there are people all over the world that are far worse off and there's a kind of that. You know, the people that are that desperate that they they would really change something don't have the power to do it, and the people that have the power to do it are too busy going to work and worrying about the bills and you know doing things that people do, and capitalism has given people often, you know, just enough to keep them from getting too angry about things. So I think you know that I don't want that to sound defeatist or anything, but I think that one of the reasons why capitalism has been resilient enough to get to this point is that for a lot of its history a lot of its populations have kind of done okay out of it.
C. Derick Varn:That's. That's fair. One thing I would ask now is you know, the majority of the book is actually about the possibilities of capitalism and you you go through a few things. You talk about AI and automation, our large learning models, which is one of the things that I think in a different kind of society definitely a social society would be great under capitalism's kind of dystopic.
C. Derick Varn:Another thing that you talk a lot about is modern monetary theory. You have a whole chapter on your relationship to it and why you're interested in it, but why you wouldn't say that you're you're interested in doing the same thing they would want to do. What is your take on what modern monetary theory is right now? It seems to have had a moment on the left in the last couple years, but the current situation with inflation and whatnot seems to have been used against a lot of the theories around modern monetary theory and I use theories advisedly because I think there's more than one honestly, and I actually don't think a lot of that criticism coming from mainstream economic press is fair or even representing what modern monetary theory really believe. But what do you think is, why would a Marxist or someone like you who's not a Marxist but is like Marx-ish, be interested in MMT, and what are your differences from a lot of MMT theories?
Steve Paxton:So I think I'm interested because it's an interesting way at looking at how capitalist economies work and it's kind of a refreshing way of doing that. I think the criticism of MMT about the inflation that's going on at the moment is kind of bizarre, because one of the things MMT says is inflation doesn't work the way you think it works and we've now got inflation that we shouldn't be having if mainstream economists were right about things. So I think we haven't now got inflation because a huge amount of government spending on investment in healthcare and stuff We've had 10, 15 years of austerity in the UK and we've got inflation at 10%. So it's not spending that's caused inflation. So I think MMT economists are kind of right to push back on the criticism they're getting about current inflation. It's not like they caused it, is it or anything you know, or any policies that they would advocate. But I think yeah. So in general, I think it's interesting because it's an interesting way of looking at capitalist economics.
Steve Paxton:But it's the big difference between me and the MMT is I want to get rid of capitalism. So how, the finer details of how capitalism works are not really my focus. They seem to be kind of they're trying to, they're trying to make capitalism less bad, which is fine. We should, all you know, given that it's here and it's, it's going to be a while before we go somewhere else, let's, let's make capitalism as political as possible while you know, while we're here. But my focus, particularly in the book, is moving on from, you know, going getting beyond capitalism, and so I think MMT is is, although it's interesting, it's, you know, it has a different focus. I don't know if there's there's much more kind of to say about it. But I mean, you know, I'm assuming you don't want me to kind of just explain what it is or anything. I think it's. But yeah, I think I guess, specifically, one of the differences is there is so they have this thing.
Steve Paxton:They have they like the idea that a lot of MMT theorists talk about a jobs guarantee, and I like the idea of a jobs guarantee, but I think of it in a totally different way to the way they think of it and I think the way it needs to be done is totally different. So most MMT theorists will talk if, when they talk about jobs guarantee, they'll use a phrase which is the state should be the employer of last resort, which is kind of sounds to me almost a bit like work fair, isn't it? It's kind of. You know, we're going to replace welfare by giving you a shitty job. You can do that instead. I don't think that's how they mean it, but I think that's that's how governments might use that kind of a jobs guarantee. I've argued in the book that there's a different way of using a jobs guarantee, which is that the state should be the employer of best practice, and I think that's a a.
Steve Paxton:The reasons for that are much more structural and much more significant, I think, than than what the MMT theorists mean by jobs guarantee. They're really looking at a way of dealing with unemployment under capitalism, and great that's. You know, I'm all for ways of dealing with unemployment under capitalism, but what I'm looking at is ways of trying to drive drive us past capitalism into something else, and I think one of the things, one of the ways that you can do that, is by the state providing really good jobs for anyone that needs a really good job. Obviously, you can't just have a queue of people signing up to be a brain surgeon. That's, that's not going to happen. But when I say a really good job, I mean decent wages and proper holidays and all the kind of benefits maternity leave, paternity leave all the benefits you associate with a reasonable job in a modern economy. So the reason for this is that what it what it does is, it gives us a different way of approaching the problem of exploitation under capitalism.
Steve Paxton:So the traditional kind of Marxist way of looking at this is that workers are exploited because capitalists own all the means of production. So because we don't own any means of production, you have to sell our labor power and we do that on unfavorable terms because we don't really have any choice. We've got to sell our labor power to one person or another. There are people in jobs. There are people getting up at five in the morning to go to clean the toilets in office blocks, for minimum wage. Anyone.
Steve Paxton:If you own some means of production and you could just get by on that, you wouldn't be taking that job. So we you know that's the basis of our exploitation is the need that we have to go and work for somebody and that we enter into employment contracts on unfavorable terms because the alternative is destitution. So if the state is actually so they asked that traditionally, for Marxist is well, sees the means of production then, and then we'll have them and then that that whole kind of way of exploiting people will be out the window. But there's another way you can look at that, and that is you can undermine the exploitative power of the ownership of the means of production by offering people decent jobs. So if you can get I mean, the minimum wage here is not as bad as it is over there it's, I think, once you're 18, it's nine pounds something an hour. But if you had a, if you know, put that up to an actual wage that people can live on. Throw in five or six weeks holiday, which is five and a half is standard here.
C. Derick Varn:One week is standard here. Sorry one week is standard here.
Steve Paxton:It's insane, is it? I think so. 28 days is the legal minimum here, annual holiday, although that might not last forever. Now we're out of the EU. But if you, if you have, if you create a decent job and you say to them look, if you're going to do something, that's plenty of work that needs doing. We've got a social care system in crisis. We've got shortages, star shortages in the NHS. You know, the roads are full of potholes there's. There's tons of stuff that needs doing, all different kind of skill levels and and you know this training that people can be done, people can get to do the things that need doing as well.
Steve Paxton:If the state provides that a decent job for training and opportunities and things and reasonable rewards, then the guy the guy who wants someone to get up before in the morning and go and clean the toilets in his office block is going to need to start offering a bit more money, isn't he? He's not going to be able to, he's not going to find someone and say, well, unlucky mate you're, because your alternative is being on the dole. I can get you to come and work for nine pounds an hour If the state are offering that guy a trained job in the service sector for 12 pounds an hour. He's going to go and take that. So the private sector, you know, as the private sector then has to up its game, it has to improve its offer. It takes some of the expletive capacity out of the ownership of means, of the means of production. It makes owning that office block much less appealing because there's much less profit to be made. And it makes the mean because when you, when you say some of the oil, you can own the means of production if you like, but you've got to compete with a state that's offering people really good jobs, then that suddenly becomes much less attractive because it's much less profitable, because there's much less ex opportunity for exploitation. And this is, you know, this is not something I'm just introduced, this is a policy and start tomorrow. It needs, it would need to start a certain level, probably at the lower end of the jobs market. But there's no reason why that that couldn't be kind of rolled out over a decade or two to the point where actually there's no he really wants to go and work for a private company anymore because working for the state is so much better. And I think what you know part of the An example of something similar to that and that and I think so I first. I think that's a really important thing because that's that's employment is a big deal to people and also that is the basis of, you know, for those of us that, like our marks, that is, employment is the basis of exploitation under capitalism. So it's kind of it's addressing that really structural fundamental point. But you could do a similar thing in health, housing and education as well.
Steve Paxton:So part of that model of the way of going about things comes comes from the introduction of the NHS in the UK. People didn't go and seize hospitals from the private sector. People didn't. You know, there was no. There was no kind of seat storming the winter palace to do that.
Steve Paxton:The state basically just put a load of money in and said there's some really good health care system that you can use for nothing and as a result there wasn't really any private health care in the UK from the end of World War Two until this. I mean there were, I guess. You used to see adverts for bupah and stuff, but nobody really had it. You get, if you had a really good job, you might get a health care with it until maybe the last five or 10 years and now there are loads because they're basically privatizing it and underfunding it and running it down.
Steve Paxton:So now, people, the uptake is much greater, but the the model of the National Health Service basically just undermined the stop private health until the Tories came in and disbandling it.
Steve Paxton:It stopped private health care from being a thing for in Britain for more than about 2% of the population. State education stops private education being a thing for 97% or 93% of the population. These are things that they're not saying that there are no faults with the NHS or with state education. But this is the kind of thing if the state can provide and it doesn't always have to be a centralized state it could be like much more local, it could be cooperatives, it could be kind of local trust. There are loads of different models of kind of ownership. But if there is public provision of really important things like health, housing, education and employment, then we're starting to move quite a long way away from the kind of the capitalist free market. And the really important one is the employment one, because that's the one that starts to address the exploitation that happens because people under capitalism don't own any means of production.
C. Derick Varn:This will give us a means to pivot to the middle of the book. Ironically, since I jumped to the end.
C. Derick Varn:But one of the things I think that this does bring up and I just wanted to bring this example to kind of prove your point in the United States the government is actually the largest employer If you consider all sectors of government and state governments.
C. Derick Varn:We are way more fractured on that than you are and anywhere in Europe, I think, maybe other than Switzerland, but we saw an increase of low-level wages, specifically low-level wages, in the beginning of the end all of that for listeners who can't see me or is in quotation marks of the pandemic. And the reason why was that the federal government said that its minimum pay was going to be $15 an hour of benefits for full-time workers and that did kind of set a minimum wage here. Even though there's been no movement legislatively in the United States and at the federal government to set a minimum wage, it's just now you have such a large employer, aka the federal government, raising their minimum pay, which actually did mean that most jobs have now come within $1 or $2 in it even in places with massively different purchasing power, because, the United States being so big, there's huge differences in how far a dollar goes depending on where you live.
C. Derick Varn:Thank you, I say all that because it does kind of prove the point that you're making and it does kind of prove an MMT point. But I also agree with you. At least when I read Warren Mosler's proposal I'm like, well, the government as employer of last resort, at what you're suggesting. The ideal Thing was and this was years ago, but it's like it is that barely at a living wage. So that's, that's not really gonna help people that much. That still seems conductive to capital, not to, yeah, power.
Steve Paxton:I think that's interesting what you say about the federal rate. Well, I didn't realize that they'd. They've done that, that's so if they all they have to do now is I make say there's a job there for everybody and and the private sector's really got a updates game into yeah.
C. Derick Varn:However, our central bank seems to be actually trying to do the opposite. So there is a move there, there is an explicit move by Jerome Powell to create unemployment, and they're actually having a hard time doing it because we've had such a population, a working population drop. I mean, we've had a lot of excess deaths, more than a lot of parts of Europe, but we've also had Just a lot of people leave and, for whatever reason, been unable to work, and the last here and and that also gets to another point in the United States, even though we have probably the shittiest you know welfare system in the developed world, you're still usually not gonna starve if you don't work as long as somebody around you is working. Yeah, they're not saying it never happens. There's, there's a lot of. You know. We have way too much hunger for a country this rich, but it is, you know. It does kind of fit your point there. It's not like we've had like mass famine.
C. Derick Varn:Yes, yeah with large parts of the population leaving the word.
Steve Paxton:I mean, starving is pretty extreme, isn't it? You know there's there, there are people you know the work or staff thing is. Well, you know there are people in the UK, the use of food banks as is, has gone up massively in the last 10 years, and particularly over the last two or three years, and you know that's not great. That's, that's people living on charity, which is which is just shows the breakdown of the welfare system. Yeah, I'm not trying to give the impression that you know, life on the doll is really great and comfortable and you know it's fine. I'm just saying that lit actually literally starving, as in that would. That would be the pure mode of capitalism is that there would be no welfare state and you would actually just starve to death as many people do in the world, like nine million a year.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, yeah, your book makes that point. And yeah, we've had a massive increase in use of food banks and whatnot to like, like the food we have food bank day and Since, but the pandemic, and it's not really stopped since. Then You'll see like a line of cars around the block to go get it. So so it's, it's. It's not ideal Don't want to which should be celebrating a capitalism In this capacity at all, but you are right that in developed world there's still pretty where for you to starve to death. Yeah, so I guess this brings me, though, to your whole point in the senator book about emerging capitalist ideologies and the kind of dualities or contradictions in both, that what we might call the left wing under capital and the right wing under capital. So so what is the left wing and a capitalist society? And and why? You know, some people try to talk about left wings and pre capital societies and I'm like I don't know that that makes sense. But right.
Steve Paxton:So I mean I guess, so I make the point in the book about the left and I think Obviously the idea is that I'm going to talk about Predate, the French Revolution. But the labels left and right, as most people know, come from the immediate aftermath of French Revolution and the seating positions in the National Assembly. And the point I want to make about that is when you usually, when you talk to people about Left and right, if you said, if you ask people what, what left and right means to them I mean they are contested terms We've all got a general kind of a thing that we think we you know, it's like you know when you see it. But when somebody asks you what it is, then it trips people up a bit. But broadly speaking, people will come out and and list a few things, a few policies that are left wing and of or attitudes that are left wing, and a few policies or attitudes that are right wing. But another way of looking at that is to look at the original the, the where the terms originated, and the terms originated with French Revolution, with the revolution, is being the left wing, but obviously that was a capitalist revolution, so those people were pro-capitalist and the right wing were the people that who were kind of opposing this new visit, this new change to capitalism from feudalism. And, if you think so, now the left are obviously Either anti-capitalist to the extent they want to get rid of it, like I do, or they are Anti-capitalist to the extent they want to mitigate the worst of it. But, broadly speaking, the left are, you know, do oppose capitalism. So, but given that the left really started off being in favor of capitalism and are now against capitalism, there's no.
Steve Paxton:If you, if you take that kind of historical context into account, you can't really say that term applies to a set of policies or or an approach to how the world should be. What you can do, though, is you can look at it as being a direction of travel. Be. You know that being left wing is to be Progressive, not in that the, the way it's often used, in that kind of socially liberal sense, but as in looking for progress, trying to, you know, supporting the idea that we should move away from Hierarchy and Superstition towards equality and rationality, and that's the kind of the left project is to drag us from feudalism to capitalism and then to something better, and, you know, capitalism, for all its ills, was an improvement on on feudalism. It was improvement in that it created more stuff, so fewer people went hungry although loads of people still do and it also had some ideological progress in front of over feudalism. It replaced things like the great chain of being and the divine right of kings with things like the declaration of rights, of the rights of man and the citizen and the Declaration of Independence, which say that all, all men are created equal, or people are created equal, and that kind of sets the tone for capitalist Ideology. Who you know these guys are trying to justify, getting rid of a system of social hierarchy. So part of their thing is look, we're all equal, that you know there is some way in which one person is as good as another person and the fact that you're a Jew or something shouldn't come into, they shouldn't interfere with that, and you know that that kind of gets that. That that is a drive towards equality and it is a drive towards equality of political participation and equality before the law. And I, so I then. So I kind of have that as being the left, as being this direction of travel Towards progress from feudalism through capitalism into into socialism. But also there is, as you alluded to, that.
Steve Paxton:I think there's a, there's a duality on the left which is between there's the kind of the liberal identity politics left, and then there's the socialist left, and the liberal left Spends its time calling out capitalism for failing to meet those promises of all people being equal, the civil rights movement, the suffragettes, that kind of thing, but also now, with, you know, our kind of current equivalents of those things. And you know, and there's still a gender pay gap there. There's still, you know, disparity in the prison population of most countries in terms of the racial makeup compared to the racial makeup of the whole population. These things, do you know, are being called out by kind of the liberal left, and they are. What they're doing, is they're saying to capitalism you, you, you said that this was your ideology, that we're all created equal and you should all be treated equally, and but I think then, and then there's a socialist left where, yeah, we want all of those, oh, we're completely agree with all of that stuff.
Steve Paxton:But also, even when you've done all of that, even when the prison population exactly mirrors the Non-prison population, even when there's no gender pay gap, even, you know, even when the kind of the hierarchy of Income inequality is completely kind of gender neutral and race neutral and everything else. There's still a Hierarchy of income inequality. So we need to address that and we need to and, more importantly, we need to address wealth inequality and ownership of the means of production inequality. So there's although, yes, socialists agree with with everything that the liberal left to saying when they are calling out their hypocrisy of really existing capitalism, we're also saying you still got to go a lot further than that and you've got to sort out some things which can't be sorted out under capitalism. There are things which are not. There is no way you can't mitigate the concentration of the ownership of the means of production under capitalism. It's not going to work because getting rid of that is Getting rid of capitalism and that's what many of us want to do.
C. Derick Varn:What do you think is a duality of the right? Like? That's like one of the things I've had a lot harder time defining I used to consider myself a conservative 20 years ago but, like, is figuring out what the right consistent, like what unifies the right wing of society, of capitalist politics? Particularly now in the United States we have, you know, a growing movement of national conservatism which is basically for the, you know, from the European perspective, a kind of red Toryism, but we've never had that before. Really that's not that much part of our tradition, unless you go like pre-civil war. And so what do you think is the contradiction there?
Steve Paxton:So I think, I mean, I think it's less of a contradiction, I guess, and partly that maybe it just looks like that because the right are always better at living with their differences than the left are. They, you know, have whatever their differences are, they'll band together to fire us a lot. But I think that duality is, and I think as well this is. You know, this is not a clear-cut division between individuals. These are kind of thought processes and attitudes and tendencies that often exist within the same people and, as with the duality on the left that I've just talked about, often that tension within a person, that's not one group of people over here and another over there shouting at them. We're all kind of a bit of a mix of those things to some extent, and I think that's true on the right as well, and I think so, while the tendency of the left is to move forward, the tendency of the right is to basically resist change, to try and stay where they are. But that includes people. So I think there is a tendency.
Steve Paxton:On the one hand, there are many on the right, particularly in Britain, but I guess in the US as well, who kind of regret the passing of feudalism, and there are people like Jacob Rees-Mogg who kind of would openly like to go back to just this owning serfs, you know, and a lot of this is tied up with kind of the nobility, the aristocracy, who still own huge amounts of the land and the productive resources in this country, and the monarchy as well, and we just had, obviously, the queen died so we've had a herphune or a coronation and this kind of thing and lots of people have found the monarchy was kind of fading in its popularity but it's lots of people have revived how much they like the monarchy and the whole idea of the institution. I don't know how long that will last, but I think there is definitely an element to right-wing British thought and many people you know it's not necessarily right-wing here to be sort of vaguely supportive of the monarchy. It's kind of very middle of the road.
C. Derick Varn:It would be extremely right-wing here.
Steve Paxton:Yeah, it's kind of weird because it's that one thing, isn't it? Because most things I think we're. You know what's middle of the road in Britain is mainly further to the left of what's middle of the road in America, but in the monarchy it's yeah, because of the history as well, but it's kind of yeah, you're a bit odd if you're not a little bit of a monarchist. I would say, here, people see it. It's kind of it's a statement. If you're anti-monarchist, it's a statement that you make and other people think, you know you're making a big fuss about something. That's. That's kind of the consensus, I think.
Steve Paxton:But I think that there is, you know, among the right and people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, that there is this, you know, and Roger Scrooton is kind of this ilk, I think People that kind of just they want tradition and they want, they like that, that kind of traditional hierarchy, and they might not come out and say it, but they kind of do regret the passing of feudalism. On the other hand, there's the kind of the Thatcherai 80s money guys. They're just all about, and they're the kind of the Nozick people and the Hayek people and they're just all about free markets make loads of money. You know, if you work hard you'll make, you'll be fine. And having that kind of hard-nosed economic, libertarian ideal.
Steve Paxton:And I think most right-wing people in Britain have a bit of both of those, even though they're quite contradictory. Because you can't have a free market and libertarianism if you've got an aristocracy. And you know the ultimate expression of that free market thing is meritocracy, isn't it, if you only get what you deserve. But none of them are supporting a abolishing inheritance. So you know they're not. Although they like the sound of it, they don't like the sound of it enough to ever. They mainly send their kids to private schools, you know. So they don't let the kids anywhere near a level playing field. They don't actually want meritocracy and economic kind of. They don't want a free market because they like the privileges they get from not having a free market. So there's these two contradictory ideologies kind of going on side by side inside most right-wing people, I think, and that's the kind of duality of the right.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I would agree with that. In the United States it tends to be nationalism and kind of a Christian-esque now. I mean it used to be a lot more explicitly Christian, now it's not much though, but, like I would say, early bourgeois traditionalism, like you know that they would like to have the church of the 17th century back, but no one's really no one, except for, like, nick Land and Curtis Jarvin are actually asking for an establishment of American monarchy, a service or anything like that.
Steve Paxton:Right, but it's interesting you say about Christianity actually, because that I think so what we have from the kind of the feudal past and the monarchy you guys have, kind of the Christian values, is that that's the kind of the symbol that traditionalism all revolves around.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah and maybe white supremacy, maybe white supremacy, but even there, increasingly the right is moving away from that explicitly into like something like vaguely European. But we're gonna include lots of Latinos again, even though we didn't used to and stuff like that and norms and you know. But yeah, christianity to a great degree serves the same thing, as you know, as the aristocracy does, but it is still different in some, like no one. We don't have a traditional aristocratic class, we have like a, we have like a hot bourgeoisie that's old enough that they can kind of be considered an analogous to an aristocratic class, but it's not really the same thing.
Steve Paxton:Yeah, I mean, I guess it's. The similarity is that they have, you know, there's there are elite universities that their kids go to and schools that their kids go to, and there's a huge kind of cultural amount of cultural stuff that they do, which which is designed specifically to separate them from everybody else.
C. Derick Varn:But that's for American liberals. On the quote left here too we have a liberal elite.
Steve Paxton:That's the same thing, yeah, but I think, yeah, I mean the difference, I guess, between them and the aristocracy here is the aristocracy here still own half the country, right, you know? Whereas whereas in the States, those people that you talk about, they own a lot of productive resources, but not the actual, not necessarily that kind of amount of land, and if they own it is because they bought it, not because they were given it by George III or something.
C. Derick Varn:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, there's yes. No one owns, no one can command those kinds of rents in that way. Some of the largest landholders in the United States are churches the. Lds churches, like in the top 10, for example, right, but even that they're not really commanding. Well, the LDS actually are, but a lot of them are not actually really commanding like a lot of rents with that.
C. Derick Varn:So it is fundamentally different and I think, like, when people always compare, like the leftness and the rightness of, like the America and and like Europe, I'm always like well, I think the mainstream is more right wing here. I think you're absolutely right about that. That's true, for that's really true for the United States, it's slightly true of Canada compared to Europe, probably true of Mexico as well, but our right is not as right wing in so much that it does not have nearly as far back a tradition to pull from. No one's going to be like advocating a return to feudalism, and people who do are considered weirdos.
Steve Paxton:Yeah Well, I think people would be considered weirdos if they actually came out and said it here. But that doesn't mean I don't suspect that they that's what they really would like, but nobody's actually coming out and saying let's go back to feudalism.
C. Derick Varn:Right, but now also very few people like let's get rid of the lords.
Steve Paxton:Yeah, yeah, we've got the House of Lords totally unelected hereditary people sitting there. They've got seat in the legislature because their ancestor at some point was given it by a monarch, maybe 500 years ago. Yes, and people think you're mad if you're not mad, perhaps, but people think you're radical if you suggest that's maybe not the way to run a legislature.
C. Derick Varn:So I guess it kind of gets over the kind of mixed nature of the two ideologies and the two ideological clusters I shouldn't call them. They're not that coherent and their tensions and I think one of the things that you're right about is that the right it either doesn't see like either isn't as contradictory, or you know, I kind of take the Daniel bear Bell stands up from the 50s that they are that contradictory. They just don't care why, whereas it does for some reason bother the left that we have these internal contradictions that we can't seem to reconcile. Whether or not we believe that we could have a more fair, like Rawlsian Capitalism are whether or not we have to do something fundamentally different, and that doesn't even get into the varieties of fundamentally different. What would that would mean that you know, that.
C. Derick Varn:That's a. That's a fair point. I'm gonna jump to the to the end of the book, on the section I hinted at earlier and this be my last kind of question topic. There is a chapter in your book where you talk about AI and automation and that contributing to the end of capitalism. Since this book was written but not since it came out We've seen massive innovations and Large learning models, and I mean in large language model learning. As far as machine learning goes, I don't tend to call that artificial intelligence, but it's probably the closest thing We've ever actually had to it. How does that? How does that affect your analysis of what's gonna happen in capitalism? Because you know, I think, I Think it's going to, I think the technology could be good but under capitalist circumstances is gonna be a you should only and be largely used to Reduce decent paying jobs. So when do you see this going?
Steve Paxton:So I think, I mean, I think there's there's more than one aspect to the whole AI situation. So there is, there are legitimate worries about how people who control social media empires are going to use AI and how how it's gonna be in the kind of the information sphere, so that, so there's that aspect to it. But I think, if, if we're talking about the effect on employment and jobs, I think, yes, you're right. Under capitalism, as every kind of automation has always done, it's, it's used really badly, because what happens is if you, if you invent a machine that's going to do someone's job, then they end up without a job, and under capitalism, that means they end up without any money. So you know and that, and that's a problem.
Steve Paxton:But I think you know, if we take, if we, if we look in abstract at the ability of AI to do things that people currently do for employment, then this is, this is a good thing, you know, abstractly out of If, for a moment, we look at it outside of capitalism, abstractly, this is a good thing and we should be welcoming the invention of anything that means there's less work to do. That means now all the work that we really need doing that isn't getting done. We can start, we, you know we can concentrate more manpower on that, but we, I think the the other aspect of it is Is that because obviously it doesn't exist completely, you know, in abstract of its situation. So so that's.
Steve Paxton:That's something, I think, that just shows us how, how, what a desperate state we're in with capitalism is that we've got, we're gonna get this stuff. That's gonna mean there's Less crappy work to do and we're worried about that, so. So that's kind of showing us that we should be moving on from capitalism. But I think one of the other things I try to bring out in the book is that if Predictions are correct that AI is going to displace a lot more people than from employment, than previous waves of automation, then I and people higher at the income level scale as well, and people with, with more Qualifications and that kind of thing, then I think that might have an effect on how people different people view Different potential policies that that that we could suggest so, for example. So one of the things is when I said earlier about what is capitalism, it is a system where most people are proletarians and that means you're a wage worker. Basically, you don't own any means of production, so you have to go out and work. When you think, when you look at the class structure like that, which is not the class structure, when we talk about Middle-class people, the PMC or whatever, we're making much finer differentiations. Proletarian is a huge group, it's basically almost everybody. Even if you're on a huge wage, even if you're on three times the median average wage and you're an architect or something, you're still a proletarian. If you don't own any means of production, you're still. You know, you are a proletarian.
Steve Paxton:And there were lots of debates that I talk about in the book, lots of debates in the second Half of the 20th century about the stratification of the working class. Basically because as we as the kind of the white collar sector, expanded, lots of people who would, whose parents are blue collar workers, got white collar jobs. And, as you know, we had free education through university education, people got degrees and and got graduate jobs. And there was this idea that this kind of Working class where everybody worked in a factory, everybody was blue collar, everybody was in a union, everybody got paid wages, had stratified and splintered and there was no class solidarity there anymore because everybody's interests were different and one but one thing you can Suggest is that, okay, so the interests of somebody who's a supermarket cashier and somebody who's a fairly senior architect or something Don't really coincide, but the things that stop them from coinciding are their employment the guy who's getting 150 grand a year or something 150 grand a year or something his interests are not the same as somebody on 20 grand a year, because he's getting 150 grand a year and he's got a nice car and he doesn't worry about the electric bill coming and he can afford to put food on the table and that kind of thing. But that's all tied to the fact that of his employment. When somebody invents ai to do his architecture for him and he's now His employment becomes precarious. Then suddenly His interests are going to be much closer to those interests of people at the lower end of the wage scale whose Employment as and financial situation has always been precarious.
Steve Paxton:So what that means is, if you approach someone kind of the idea of a jobs guarantee, well, to somebody who's in secure, well-paid employment, that just sees like what mean paying more taxes for people who don't go to work. I'm not interested in that and I'm talking about kind of looking at people as that kind of self-interesting economic actor in the you know this is. It's I'm skimming a lot here but but in this kind of ideal, typical case, that is, that is the, a predictable response from somebody in secure, well-paid Employment. I'm not really interested in the jobs guarantee because it's just going to cost me more taxes. But if that person in five years time is looking at ai replacing all these colleagues jobs, I'm thinking actually I could be out of the job in a year or two and then you start talking to him about a jobs guarantee or ubi or something like that, then he's going to be more kind of okay, I can, I can see, I can see where that might help me there, so I might support that policy.
Steve Paxton:So I'm kind of, you know, painting people as wholly self-interested and it's much more complicated than that. But, um, I can just kind of trying to be brief but the the idea is that when employment becomes precarious for a much bigger group of people, including people that we have traditionally thought of as being splinted away from the working class and and having that own set of interests that aren't the same as the interests of people at the lower end of the income scale, when their employment becomes precarious and you realize that all their perks are tied to their employment and actually maybe that could Point to that, could that could lead to More of a bit more solidarity and solidifying of the interests of of a bigger number of people.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I think that that that's fair. I think it's it, it I agree with you. You can't, you know, assume homo economicus. But also, roughly speaking, homo economicus is predictive of large groups of people. It's, you know, can't predict individuals, um. So I think we will see, I think we've already kind of begun to see that in in some ways, with uh, more and more college educated people being considered, broadly speaking, uh, left wing, not just in a cultural sense, which has always been kind of true, but in a economic sense, which has not been true. I mean, I remember when I was First in college, I think every third person was like I'm socially liberal but I'm economically conservative, and I was like, okay, sure, um, and I don't hear that nearly as much to right.
Steve Paxton:I mean that's just I'm socially liberal but economically conservative just means I Used to leave me alone when I'm having a joint but I don't want to pay any taxes.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, that is what it means. Um, uh, I come to the awkward part of a very of a left-wing podcast, where I have to ask people what they want to plug, because we still live in a capitalist society and whether we like it or not. So, um, do you have anything you need to plug other than the two books we talked about today?
Steve Paxton:Um, I don't actually know, just the two books we talked about today. Um, uh, I don't have one to hold up and show the camera. I don't know if you've got one handy there.
C. Derick Varn:This is unfortunately. Uh, my copies are e-copies, you've got the angle. Yeah, I hold on, I might, I might my kindle's big enough that maybe you can see the cover. Um, all right, and here we go. There it is yes.
Steve Paxton:I designed the covers of both of them as well, actually. So, um, I didn't like the ones that zero came up with, so I did my own. So, yeah, so how capitalism ends and um unlearning marks. I don't think I've got any other podcast booked here at the moment that I can tell you to watch, but, um, yeah, have a look at the books and um, I'm on twitter steve underscore. Underscore paxton Um, follow me on twitter if you like Um by the books. Um, if you like them, good, if you don't, I'm not giving you money back.
C. Derick Varn:I enjoyed them and, clearly for disclosure, I helped publish one of the two of them.
Steve Paxton:So Um, actually to be fair, if I did give people their money back, if I gave them my share of what they've, just they probably wouldn't need. I'll just keep it fair enough. Thank you so much for coming on, cheers.
