Is Marx Still Relevant? with Steve Maher

Macro N Cheese

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“But fortunately for us, human nature is precisely the capacity to be creative; to imagine a different way of living together and to bring that into being through our conscious and deliberate actions by working together, by fighting for a different world against the class power that is interested in perpetuating things as they are. And so we can, through acting on the world to transform the world, we also transform ourselves. That's a basic principle of Marxist theory and Marxist politics. By acting on the world to change the world, we simultaneously transform ourselves through the act of struggle, to the act of building collective solidarity, we become different and we also make the world different.”

Steve invited Stephen Maher for this interview to talk about some of the basic lessons of Marxism. While you may not agree with everything you hear in this episode, certain fundamentals of capitalism are beyond refute.

The discussion explores the relationship between capital and the working class, and the concept of class struggle as the key to understanding US history of the past century, especially the postwar period and the development of neoliberalism. To truly make sense of it all we must look at some fundamental truths about capital. It is very fluid and dynamic. Capital is capable of continuously evolving and restructuring. In doing so, our social conditions change as well.

They also discuss the challenges and obstacles in achieving socialism, the history of anti-communist sentiment in the US, the importance of class struggle unionism, and the need for grassroots organizing and building solidarity within the working class.

Stephen Maher is an Assistant Professor of Economics at SUNY Cortland, and co-editor of The Socialist Register. He is the co-author of The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock with Scott Aquanno, and the author of Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power.

@SteveMaher18 on Twitter