free arrangements free. free. free. free both your videos for your media projects a free video done to our teeth on time. oh i'm sorry to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. with a crisis of capitalism taking over the globe is it time to revisit marxist thinking when it comes to the economy we'll find out tonight's conversations in the great minds of historian robert black earth also as job numbers continue to climb the economy continues to strengthen we're publicans continue to attack the president on wedge issues like birth control that and more tonight's big picture rubble and inside steely take what word do you need to redefine in order to return america to

always society. for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by robin blackburn robin is a historian sociologist and professor at both the new school university in new york and the university of essex in the united kingdom is also the editor of the new left review has written numerous papers and articles on karl marx capitalism and socialism and he's the author of numerous books including age shock how finance is failing us and an unfinished revolution karl marx and abraham lincoln the crisis of capitalism sweeping the globe right now perhaps it's time to revisit the park so to say about economics one of the reasons why i'm pleased to welcome robin from our studios in new york city problem thanks for joining us tonight. thank you great to have you with us your book an unfinished revolution is in part history of the

relationship between karl marx and and abraham lincoln i was blown away to discover there even was one that these guys had any correspondence and you tell us about them. it began with marx's big involvement with the united states. the newspaper the new york tribune he was signed up in about eight hundred fifty two to write articles for the for the tribune by its managing editor charles c. turner and he subsequently wrote about four hundred fifty articles for the tribune a really long article and at a rate of one or even sometimes two a week across a period of nearly a decade so this was a major part of marx's activity and the incomes very useful to him to. subsequently charles turner became an important figure in the entourage of

president lincoln above all during as the civil war got under way in eight hundred sixty one and eight hundred sixty two. been a fierce opponent of slavery he was also a member of a socialist commune. brought from commune prior to becoming managing editor of the tribune and he was a friend of marxism and marx kept in touch with him under the certain point rather later on when lincoln was reelected president inmates in sixty four mark sent an address on behalf of working people in europe to lincoln to congratulate him on that reelection and lincoln replied to that letter so. lincoln i understand was for from reading your book actually was an advocate of free wage

labor marx called that slave labor you want to define those terms and tell us about that difference in opinion and how that might have related to these different worldviews and how that's affected america to this day. well i think both men although they had many many differences both men were very strongly emphatically against slavery and they were also they weren't perfect and he races prime modern standards but they certainly were against the degradation of black people ply their slave system and that's something they felt very deeply and it's what really brought together. especially during the latter stages of the of the u.s. civil war. and. now that both of the men supported free labor wage labor but marx thought this was unfair on the working class

that. the rich capitalists controlled access to production and they exercised a sort of monopoly power over employment and this and made with them to pump a surplus and to get away with paying workers less than they really should have been paying them so there was a big difference between marx and and lincoln on that mark stuart also that there should be a limitation on the working day and he took part in a great campaign to limit the working day to only eight hours and this was not who calls lincoln supported so there was a difference on that point correct me if my memory is wrong i. decade or more ago read much across sandberg's biography of lincoln as a record and he suggested that lincoln was the first president to use the word strike and to support striking workers is that something that. came into this into this marxian perspective and and well let me ask you that there's.

very i think it it's the freedom to join a trade union and to go on strike is something that lincoln did support wasn't a very major part of his. of his work but it was certainly something he did support and was part of that definition of free labor and so that would be another point of coincidence with nantz to tell the truth i think there were other points of coincidence which i'd like to mention i think both both men really had a willingness to support a sort of democratic nationalism. and that's why marx supported north america or of the united states remaining united he also supported the unification of germany and in germany there was the growth of the democratic nationalism in the mid nineteenth

century and they had quite a big influence here in the united states people like lincoln really can be seen as giving expression to it and german thinkers. had quite an influence obviously they had an influence on karl marx it was insult german but german idealist a lawsuit was also influenced abraham lincoln is not not widely known but very world's has an excellent book showing how the the new england transcendental is philosophers people like theodore parker they supplied a lot of the ideas that animated lincoln and for example inspired his sketches were good dress which acas and a number of significant ways. i stress in that book the german americans were hugely important fact of life at this time there was a massive immigration of hundreds of thousands of germans partly anomic migrants

but also refugees from. the revolution of eight hundred forty eight blocks of course of been one of the revolutionaries of eight hundred forty eight and they had quite an influence on the republican party on the struggle against slavery and they also brought a new ideas like both the women or the organization of kindergarden another thing that they did is they established breweries. and produced beer and really this they united radicalism with a rather tolerant attitude towards. the whole and the previous rather british period clinical radicalism which had been anti slavery very very much disapproved of of drink and alcohol and supported temperance and so in a way the german americans they sort of lighten the mixture a bit and and they made the anti slavery cause less forbidding because it was no

longer just associated with temperance. and. the there was also you know music and song and it was quite a powerful cultural contribution coming from these german americans and i don't think historians have paid enough. attention to it and they've also missed the fact that you get five communists who were promoted to the position of general in the union army people like joseph who was a great close friend of karl marx corresponding with him a lot of the time i think maybe part of the reason may have been charles danna marx's friend was actually assistant secretary of state for war by eight hundred sixty three and he would have seen it as being a good idea to promote these german communists because they had experience of

military struggle back in germany in eighteen forty eight and eighteen forty nine and. this connection again it's been overlooked by many of the historians and it's worth paying attention to i remember reading one of grover cleveland's annual addresses state of the union addresses in which he specifically attacked communism that would have been eight hundred eighty s. what happened if i'm quite sure that what happened between eight hundred sixty s. and the eight hundred eighty s. that caused the of the american presidency to shift or and i'm misremembering i know you're remembering very correctly i think the immediate impact of the civil war was to give a big boost to labor and also marx's organization the international workers associate working men's association it had fifty chapters in different parts of the united states and it had thousands of members many of them became

later famous trade union organizers and a lot of this activity led into the great general strike of eight hundred seventy seven it was mainly rail mum workers' strike but it was also supported by other types of work and it was repressed however very viciously hundred strikers lost their life and there was quite a backlash among middle class people against militant labor about point and graver grover cleveland would have been an illustration of this you will so got round about that time the clash in the haymarket in chicago and with. with the shooting of allocates in the other case and then a case throwing a bomb one of the haymarket martyrs and so there was quite a lot of. rather dramatic class struggle in the united states in the eighteen

seventies eighteen eighties and it certainly led some of the. upper class. middle class opinion to be very nervous about militant labor but you gotta remember the american business was led by the so-called robber barons at that time and there were also among the farming people you've got that radical movement not so much influenced by marx but which the the the socialists the marxists the internationalist they did warmly supporters and that was pharma radicalism the grange movement another tact but communism what they call the communism of combined wealth they would very much against the large railroad companies for example which would go and take over the land and would charge high prices to the farmers to transmit their produce to market so there was quite

a lot of intense cost profit in in that whole second half of the nineteenth century here in the united states and you could say some of marx's ideas they definitely fell on fertile soil and you got the founding of the air fell for example you have merican federation of labor now samuel gompers the leader of that. claim to be a very moderate man but i actually he read capital he read marxist great work capital and he certainly learned from it and it helped to inspire his organizing activities and it's only later he became rather moderate robert i'd like to dig a lot deeper into this into the whole concept of marxian economics and the difference between march in thinking in marxist or right after this break more conversations with great minds of robert blackburn writers.

sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else here's you some other part of it and realized everything is ok you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big.

mr. well the amount of our conversations that great minds drop and like for robin is the historians of sociologist and professor at both the new school university of new york and the university of essex in the united kingdom he's also the author of numerous books including age shock how finance is failing us and unfinished revolution karl marx and abraham lincoln let's get back to it robin marxian versus marxist what's the difference in these terms and what really you

know in the modern context what how do these apply today's economy. i think the old c.n.n. is used just as a slightly milder term with marx's being a sharper more demanding term. for those who closely followed marx's ideas in the months since a little more loosely but i think in recent years there's been a renewed interest in marx's analysis of the trade cycle of boom and slump under capitalism and which he traced as being very often the result of over exploitation of the working class leaving them with not enough wages to buy goods and so you get what is called a realisation crisis a crisis of. overproduction with consumption not being strong enough to

absorb all that has been produced and then the. other built on top of that also a financial crisis and i think we've been living through globally something like a marxist classic realisation crisis and it's hot land has been china ironically enough a country with a communist leadership but in that country which has been increasingly trending to capitalism over the last two or three decades workers have not been paid enough they also worry about their old age so they tend to save quite a lot of even the small amount of money that they are paid and this is produced a big imbalance in the whole system of global exchanges especially as china has become by far the world's largest exporter of industrial goods and so one of the things we have to look at is ways to restore demand real demand being hit not of

course only in china but in europe in other parts of the world and also. in the united states and with the forms this take says more and more institutions are indebted governments are indebted corporations but especially now so are indebted and that's why they're more cautious about consumption they're not buying so much and that is making the crisis worse and it's making the stagnation difficult to get out from things are a little better here in the united states because the u.s. government is able to operate using a global currency the dollar so it doesn't have the same constraint as for example the european governments. which of don't have a world currency they have only their own rather troubled currency the euro if you we've we've shown these graphs on the show

a number of times if you if you graph out productivity you know what workers are producing and wages over the last eighty years in the united states what you find is that there was steady growth of the two they followed each other right up until the reagan administration and then from the reagan administration for the last thirty years productivity continue to rise wages went completely flat for working people and that gap was filled in by increasing debt for working people and increasing wealth for those who owned the for the productivity the c.e.o.'s the big corporations and are you suggesting that that is that was the essence of what marx was prophesied in capital. he certainly predicted exactly exactly that sort of development and so it's quite a strong confirmation and it's interesting people like hyman minsky who were influenced by marx were the ones who predicted the speculation and predicted also the eventual collapse also the indian marxist economist nyc who's just been

speaking at columbia university last night here in new york city he was analyzing this realisation crisis which here in the united states also takes the form of the dampening of demand the underpayment of workers and also of considerable threats for example to their pensions and that really is one of the things i was focusing on in my book on a joke i was sharing about how actually the wall street and the private commercial suppliers of pension funds have actually let down the people whom they were meant to be helping and who were they were meant to be assuring a comfortable old age to actually the value of those pensions has dropped very dramatically and actually us the two thirds of us retirees now

find that what stands between them and real poverty in old age is social security which is of course a government sponsored program started off back in the one nine hundred thirty s. at the time of the new deal. i wouldn't say inspired by a car not but certainly karl marx said the solution to these problems is to look for public agencies not through commercial agencies to for example supply social insurance to supply pensions or to supply health insurance and i mean that he wasn't the first charles payne in. one of his books. disagree and just as he suggested what is our modern social security system among other things the minimum wage war on german insurance employer unemployment insurance and student things like that what what can we learn from karl marx right now what what hala see changes what different directions should the united states government

the cameron government the u.k. . be making from his analysis having been proven or disproven in some ways over the over this last century and a half percent. i think what they can certainly take from him is the analysis of the crisis and the steps out of the crisis which would include a huge stimulus to demand it would also include real investment in the technologies of the future and in renewable technologies i think in a way marx went beyond keynes whose analysis of an underconsumption crisis is rather similar to marx's overproduction analysis but marx has more of an emphasis on the need for public entrepreneurial ism for public agencies to begin taking steps and i think that that is almost certainly what is required in the in

the thirty's you've got dramatic developments like the t.v.'s for example massive hydroelectric project which generated income on the mall serve cause massive amounts of electricity and reasonably renewable power and that was a signature program of the new deal ridiculous to say inspired by karl marx but actually it was congress with is thought and of course america marxist did very much support the new deal however those who interpreted marx to mean that a command economy would work well have been disapproved and the soviet economy as we know collapsed but we see other countries like china have actually managed to bring about some sort of dramatic economic development and

we find that forms of public entrepreneurial ism although in battle do still exist in china in china we find that the banks are still publicly and and we find the government carried out a very firm policy of stimulus on a much larger. the scale in the very timid policy here in the united states or in my own country in britain and so one can see that there is a an element of great economic radicalism in the and in other countries like taiwan brazil we find public entrepreneurial ism is an important part of the mix investments in high tech for example in taiwan's science parks or in brazil and then brought up the agricultural research institute in both cases public agencies have helped to produce. to make those countries the main world producer in the

lines of production that they chose and what we've seen it here in the united states to cheering them midst of the crisis general motors went bankrupt and had to be taken over by the state and under public ownership it's been nursed back to health and it's producing this new electronic car the volt. i'm not saying everything's perfect with the policy of that that the u.s. administration there should have been much more and. american workers certainly deserve more efforts made to provide good jobs for them not just second rate jobs in the service sector but also jobs in the high tech sector of a manufacturing and jobs with proper guarantees and with social provision which should be general i think it's very important that the social security for example work that program which has been such a huge success but it should be maintained and expanded and properly funded which

will be a very sensitive issue coming up because the obama administration has paid for its recent stimulus i. cutting right back on the social on the payroll tax which is the contribution to social security that's fine it's help to lower labor costs help to raise employment that's all good. but it's got to make sure that the finances of social security are safe and that probably should mean that they should raise the cap on contributions to social security it stops now at about one hundred thousand dollars income a year and it should be raised to compensate for the fact that it's been cut back at lower levels now these seem like you know quite technical issues but they're not they're very important to the lives of tens of millions of americans and of

hundreds of thousands of millions throughout the world chinese workers deserve a better deal they deserve better wages and they deserve what would be even even more important they deserve good search and security and that would mean made save less and do less to create the problem of low demand very interesting robin thank you so much for being with us this is fast thank you. thank you to seymour has to revisit his conversations with great minds you can go conversations great minds dud . coming up after the break the good jobs numbers mean more endless debate on whether issues like abortion more on that and other topics and tonight's big picture on.

a story that seems so you think you understand it and then. hear see some of the part of it and realized everything you saw. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

clinician free. education free. for charges free arrangement three. free studio type free. old free broadcast live video for your media projects a free. clinic . are you ready to rumble joining me for the friday night big picture conservative commentator and pro-business advocate david solid.