oh and some are going 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 robin black birth also as job numbers continue to climb and the economy continues to strengthen the republicans continue to attack the president on a wedge issues like birth control that and more tonight big picture rubble and inside steely take well words you need to redefine in order to return america to

always society. puts writes conversations of 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 marx had to say about economics one of the reasons why i'm pleased to welcome robin blackburn from our studios in new york city robin thanks for joining us tonight. thank you great to have you with us your book an unfinished revolution izzy 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 in correspondence can you tell us about that. it began with knox'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. managing editor charles c. downer and he subsequently wrote about four hundred fifty articles for the tribune really long articles and the rates 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 income was 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. charles payne 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 this certain point rather than later on when lincoln was reelected president in one thousand nine hundred sixty four mark center an address on behalf of working people in europe to lincoln to congratulate him on the re-election and lincoln replied to that letter so if every and lincoln i understand was from 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 a fact that america to this day. well i think both men although they have many many differences both men were very strongly emphatically against slavery and they were also they weren't perfect anti-racist by modern standards but they certainly were against the degradation of black people by the slave system and that's something they felt very deeply and that's what really brought them together. especially during the latter stages of the of the u.s. civil war. and. now the birth of the men supported free labor wage labor about marx thought this was unfair on the working class but the rich capitalists controlled access to production and they exercised

the sort of monopoly power over employment and this enabled 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 i'm 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 a cause that 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 and he suggested that lincoln was the first president to use the word strike and to support straightening workers is that something that we came into this into this marxian perspective and. let me ask you there.

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 it was part of that definition of free labor and so that would be another point of coincidence with martz 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 not 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'd 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 himself german but german idealist philosophers also influenced abraham lincoln not not widely known but gary wills has an excellent book showing how the the new new england transcendental is philosophers people like theodore parker they supplied a lot of the ideas that animated blinken for example inspired his gettysburg address which acas park 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 marks of course has 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. alcohol and the previous rather british period calico radicalism which had been anti slavery very very much disapproved of drink and alcohol and supported temperance and so in a way the german americans sort of lightened the mixture a bit and and they made the anti slavery cause less forbidding good cause it was no

longer just associated with temperance. and. the there was also you know music and song i mean it was quite a powerful cultural contribution coming from these german americans and i don't think historians are 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 crown marks corresponding with him a lot of the time i think maybe part of the reason may have been that child stana 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 in one nine hundred forty nine and the. the fact the this connection again it's been overlooked by many of the historians i think it's worth paying attention to i remember reading one of grover cleveland's annual addresses of state of the union addresses in which he specifically attacked communism that would have any eighteen aids what happened if i'm quite sure of that what happened between need hundred sixty s. in the eighteen eighties that caused. 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 is 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 woman workers strike but it was also supported by other types of work and it was repressed however very viciously one 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 hay market in chicago and with. with the shooting of an a case than the case another case throwing a bar none of the haymarket martyrs so there was quite a lot of. rather dramatic class struggle in the united states in the eighteen

seventies a hundred eighty is and it certainly led some of the. upper class. middle class opinion to be very nervous about militant labor but you've got to 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 a 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 former radicalism the grange movement another type of 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 translate their produce to market so there was quite

a lot of intense conflict 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 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 rather i'd like to dig a lot deeper into verse into the whole concept of marxian economics and the difference between marx in thinking in marxist to right after this break more conversations with great minds rather than wiper predators.

sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else here's some other part of it and realized everything is ok. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

mr. go back to our conversations the great minds of the out of whack for robin is a historian so 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 finances failing us and an unfinished revolution karl marx and abraham lincoln let's go back to it robin marxian versus marxist what's the difference in these terms and what really you

know in a modern context what how do these apply to today's economy. i think c.n.n. is used just as a slightly milder term with marxists being a sharper more demanding term. for those who closely followed marx's i idea is an amount 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 sun pundit 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 say 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 you get it 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. 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 as become quite 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 really

a 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 one the forms this take says more and more institutions are indebted governments are indebted corporations but especially house are indebted and that's why they're more cautious about consumption and 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 constraints 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 shown these graphs on the show

a number of times if you if you graph out productivity and 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 own to the for the proteas c.e.o.'s and big corporations and are you suggesting that that is that was the essence of what marx was prophesied in. 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 martz were the ones who predicted the speculation and predicted also the eventual collapse also the indian marxist economists private part 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 they were meant to be assuring a comfortable old age to actually the value of those pensions has dropped very dramatically and actually us 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 karl marx but certainly karl marx said the solution to these problems is to look for public agencies not to commercial agencies to for example supply social insurance to supply pensions or to supply health insurance when i mean he wasn't prefer sir thomas paine in. one of his books. as an agrarian justice he suggested what is our modern social security system among other things the minimum wage. on insurance and unemployment insurance excluding 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 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 the land 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 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. . for example passive 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 there and of course america marxist did very much support the new deal. 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 we find the government carried out a very firm policy of stimulus on the martial art. this 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 and in other countries like taiwan brazil we find public entrepreneurial ism is an important part of the mix investment in high tech for example in taiwan's science parts or in brazil in embryo 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 jaring them midst of the crisis general motors went bankrupt and had to be taken over by the state and it under public ownership it's been back to health and it's producing this new electronic car the volt. i'm not saying everything's perfect with the policy of. the us administration there should have been much more . american workers certainly deserved more efforts made to provide good jobs for them not just second rate jobs in the service sector and also jobs in the high tech sector and in 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 that that program which has been such a huge success that 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 by. 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 but it's all good. 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 very very important to the lives of tens of millions of americans and of

hundreds or 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 social 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 to conversations great minds dot com . coming up after the break the good jobs numbers mean more endless debate on whether issues like abortion more on that and other topics in tonight's big picture.

you know sometimes you see a story. is it you understand it and then. some other part of it and realize that everything is. local to the big picture.

mr. are you ready to rumble joining me for the friday night big picture rabble conservative commentator and pro-business advocate david solid progressive can commentator sam sax and mike ritz associate editor and columnist at reason magazine and reason and thank you all for being here with this new job numbers out today two hundred twenty seven thousand jobs created last month this is the twenty fourth consecutive nonstop month private sector job creation third straight month of over two hundred thousand a month this isn't.