This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question
from our Patreon community. This question comes from Brian Ahn, aka Richard Fox,
and he asks me about a comment by a reporter who referred to the slogan “Abolish Billionaires”
as being Anti-Marxist, and the question is what do I think about that. Well, let me begin with
my usual “there are different ways of interpreting Marxism and what it implies and what it suggests
for political strategy for economic change” and so on. I understand that a rich tradition like
Marxism will naturally, as it spreads around the world, as it has over the last 150 years, produce
a variety of interpretations reflecting the variety of conditions in which Marxism flourishes.
Having said that, I would disagree with such a journalist. I don't think abolished billionaires
carries any implication of Anti-Marxism that I’m aware of. It seems to me that billionaires in a
time like this, when we have a few hundred of them in the United States out of a population of 320
more million, is clearly evidence that there's an inequality of distribution of wealth and income,
that is very much the product of Capitalism and very much against the kind of egalitarianism
that Socialism and Marxism are associated with — not egalitarianism in the sense of everybody the
same, but in the sense of reasonable differences reflecting need and education and productivity,
and so on, but not gaps between some who haven't got enough money to put food on the table
and others who are billionaires. But on the other hand, let's give this journalist
his due. I think what he's probably doing is reacting to Anti-Marxist propaganda and agitation,
one of whose central themes has long been that what Marxists are, and what Socialists are,
are people who quote unquote “want to take away my money that I have earned”
where the effort is to enlist people who really have relatively little
in the notion that they are natural allies for those who have a great deal. In other words,
oppose Socialism, oppose Marxism on the grounds that those people want to take away the money
you've accumulated, by your savings, by your hard work
and so on. No Socialists or Marxists that I'm aware of have any interest in doing that.
Targeting a billionaire is not the same as targeting people who have some money put away
but that they earned it and saved it, etc, by their labor. No Socialist is interested
in removing that, but because of the association between Marxism, by its enemies, and taking away.
The story of abolishing the slogan of abolishing millionaire— billionaires— feeds into that
it feeds the image that Socialists and Marxists want to take away wealth that has been achieved
by people. So it's really important if you're going to go that way and make a slogan like that,
that you go an extra step out of your way to make it clear that billionaires you wish to remove the
wealth of, but not lots of people who have socked away a little bit saved out of their income,
etc etc. You’ve got to make that very clear, just like the critique of business that comes out of
the Marxian tradition makes a distinction between a big Capitalist mega-corporation
and a mom-and-pop business down on Main Street. You make those distinctions in order to build
alliances and to make it clear to people, who could otherwise be sympathetic with you,
that they are not the targets of the social change you're in favor of. So yes, I understand
why you might not want to go near a slogan like that because of its association with taking away,
but if you can make it clear what you’re after: the wealth of the obscenely wealthy, the
billionaires, and remember there are only a few hundred of those in the United States, 0.0001 of
the population, the rest of the population could very easily be enlisted to be critical of those
billionaires, but that won't happen if you don’t separate them from the billionaires, in terms of
what your critical Anti-Capitalist targets exactly are. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.