This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question from
our Patreon community. This question comes from 'Rob Lubo.' And 'Rob' asks about - having looked
up and Googled the Merriam-Webster dictionary - looking up the word Marxism. And in the way
that dictionary treats it, it includes antonyms, or things that are opposite to Marxism to help
understand what exactly Marxism is. And among the opposites are listed in this order: democracy,
self-governance. In other words. Marxism, for the Merriam-Webster dictionary
(one of the major sources of basic information in our society) is the opposite of democracy
and self-governance. Well, this is crazy. This is so far removed from anything I know,
anything that I have studied in my life and anything I've ever taught that it kind of takes my
breath away. And I want to talk about that because that makes this question especially interesting.
And to begin I'm going to use a historical example. Thousands of years ago
there was a culture in this Greek city of Sparta.
And famously there was a great thinker/ leader of Sparta - a city-state at that time - named
Pericles. And if you study democracy you are often given an early lecture or early part of a textbook
about Athenian democracy as a model. All the citizens of Athens we are told - one person,
one vote - debated the issues of the community and decided by a majority
vote of everybody involved as to what to do - a kind of model of democratic self-governance
that has then lasted through the ages and is known either as Periclean or Athenian democracy.
As countless researchers have pointed out ever since this is a lovely story. It's quite true,
as far as it goes. But it leaves out one salient fact. The majority of people living in Athens at
the time were slaves. They did not participate in Athenian democracy. It was a democracy for those
who owned slaves. It might have included people who were not slaves and didn't own many or any
slaves but it surely excluded a vast part of the population. Which means that if you're going to
talk about democracy you better be careful about who you're including and who you're excluding.
Now let me show you how that applies to capitalism today and why that makes Merriam-Webster
way off base in what it is saying. I think democracy and capitalism has been a combination
that has been very convenient to repeat, a little bit like Athenian democracy. Here's what it means
in practice: individual enterprises are free. They can't be told what to do by the government,
more or less, and they make their own decisions about what they're going to do.
And they treasure that freedom, particularly the employers who own and operate enterprises
in capitalism. And so in their enthusiasm they can refer to their system as democratic. Because
it's about the relationship between them and the government that they helped to establish.
But here's what they leave out, which is like the Athenians left out the slaves. What they leave out
is the vast majority of people, who are not owners and operators of enterprises. They are employees.
They go to work nine to five five days a week or more. And when they enter the workplace and cross
the threshold here's what happens: somebody, a tiny minority of people, the owner, the partners,
the board of directors (if it's a corporation...) a tiny minority - let's call them the employers...
they're the ones who tell the vast majority what to do (you stand over there,
you work with that machine, you work on these raw materials, you work in this way.) And when you're
done producing whatever this company produces your job is to go home. What you help to produce
belongs to me. You have nothing to say about it, you have nothing to do with whatever I decide as
employer gets done with the fruits of your labor. Wow! Where's the democracy there? There
isn't any. The employees have no control over the employer. They don't vote for that person.
No one ever asks them a question about how the enterprise is being run, in the
sense of needing their approval or needing their votes. There are no votes inside an enterprise.
And let's remember inside an enterprise/the workplace is where most adults in our modern
capitalist society spend most of their lives - either getting ready for work or going to work
or spending the eight hours there or recovering with a happy hour afterwards, whatever it is.
Work is the center of your life, one of the most important places you live out your life.
And if democracy is banished from there,
well then, how much is capitalism a democratic system? Only on a very limited basis. Sort of like
Athens long ago. Therefore Marxism can't possibly be understood as being the opposite of democracy.
That really better fits capitalism as the reality we live in. Marxism is a philosophy,
Marxism is a way of thinking critically about capitalism. By the way, pointing out the lack
of democracy in capitalism has been a task Marxism has undertaken from its beginning.
So what is it about this Merriam-Webster? How do we explain what they did? They're a product of the
Cold War. And in the Cold War good guys and bad guys fought it out. Good guys were capitalism,
democracy, apple pie, motherhood and baseball. And socialism, Marxism and communism were evil,
and Stalin, and Russia, and everything bad. This kind of bifurcated system of thinking
does nobody any good. It's basically a way to provoke a war.
It's basically a way to provoke enmity. And it's the last thing on earth we need
in a nation and a country and a world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.
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