[Speaker 1]

All right, Professor Kleiman, you have 15 minutes for your opening statement. You may start when you wish. Okay, thank you, Emmanuel. Hello to Anne, back in New York, and thank you all for coming. As Emmanuel mentioned, I work with Marxist Humanist Initiative, which is an organization rooted in the Marxist humanist philosophy of Raya Dunyavskaya. In her first major book, Marxism and Freedom, which was published in the middle of the Cold War, Dunyavskaya wrote that, quote, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, there is a veritable conspiracy to identify Marxism, a theory of liberation, with its opposite, communism, the theory and practice of enslavement.

This book aims to reestablish Marxism in its original form, which Marx called a thoroughgoing naturalism or humanism. Okay, now I want to talk a bit about Marx's idea of freedom. In his view, quote, freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it. No man fights freedom. He fights at most the freedom of others.

Every kind of freedom has therefore always existed. only at one time as a special privilege, another time as a universal right. I think that's correct. So what we're debating this evening is not whether we want freedom, but freedom for whom. Marx stood for a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. An association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

not because i said so i was quoting him this evening's debate is also about what kinds of freedom we are talking about uh... now libertarians such as uh... t-boy mccann who recently passed away often seek to define freedom as absence of restraints imposed by other people and that i think is an important aspect of freedom But there's also freedom from being dominated by the laws of nature, because we don't understand them and can't cope well with them.

Now, I think there's been a great deal of progress, especially during the last several centuries, in human beings freeing ourselves from domination by nature. And capitalism has also weakened restraints imposed by other people. The problem is that there is yet another important kind of freedom. Freedom from being dominated by economic laws over which we have no control.

In Marxism and Freedom, the same book, Rai Donetskaya quoted a coal miner. Keep in mind that coal mining is life-threatening work. The miner said, quote, I can't word it like Marx, but I know exactly what he means. I lay there this morning, about a quarter to six. I said to myself, you've just got to get up there and go down into the mine, whether you feel like it or not. I just said to myself, now you call that a free man?

Capitalism more or less replaced unfreedom imposed by other people, imposed on the slave by the slave owner, or imposed on the serf by the landlord. It replaced that with unfreedom imposed by the economic laws of capitalism. You don't have to work to get a job. under this particular slave owner or that particular flute feudal lord nobody's holding a gun to your head and you're free to start to death uh...

but if people don't choose to start to death the vast majority of them have to work under the domination of some capitalist if they disobey or don't live up to the bosses expectations or they get laid off in a recession they're free to find yet another master to toil under It's like being transferred from one prison to another, except that the worker, rather than the state, has to pay the transportation costs.

Now this isn't really the fault of any particular individual capitalist or corporation. They're just agents of the system. They're also dominated by its laws. If they continue to employ people who've become expendable in a recession, or people who don't generate enough profit for the company, they're likely going to go out of business. And so the capitalists that remain capitalists are the ones that dutifully obey the economic laws of capitalism.

So what is at fault is the system. Now, it's not as if classical liberals, or perhaps you'd call them libertarians, like Hayek and Mises, didn't understand the capitalist work process or the capitalist labor market. In The Road to Serfdom, by Hayek, there is a rather chilling passage in which he writes that the manager of any plant needs to be given considerable power.

And he approvingly quotes an engineer on the importance of economic spontaneity. Here's the quote from the engineer. There ought to be surrounding the work a comparatively large area of unplanned economic action. There should be a place from which workers can be drawn. And when a worker is fired, he should vanish from the job and from the payroll. In the absence of such a free reservoir, discipline cannot be maintained without corporal punishment, as with slave labor.

In other words, what Hayek and his engineer buddy are telling us is that the role of workers is to obey the discipline imposed from above. And they're saying that the great advantage of a free labor market and a free reservoir of people who will starve if they don't obey, is that this discipline can be imposed on them in an impersonal way.

They don't have to be beaten. We don't have to beat them with our fists. We can let the invisible fist beat them. In his book Human Action, Mises noted that people in a contractual society depend on other people, but he argued that many writers misinterpreted and distorted the state of affairs. Why? Because they concluded that the workers are at the mercy of their employers.

Okay, so we're all geared up to learn from Mises how it misrepresents and distorts things to say that workers are at the mercy of their employers. So what he then writes is, now, it is true that the employer has the right to fire the employee, but... Okay, so now we're finally going to learn what the misrepresentation and the distortion are, right? He continues, but if he, the employer, makes use of this right to fire workers in order to indulge his whims, he hurts his own interests.

It is to his own disadvantage if he discharges a better man in order to hire a less efficient one. The end. Mises then starts talking about shopkeepers and consumers. So what have we learned? What he's told us is that the capitalists who succeed as capitalists only get rid of workers when it is in their interest to get rid of workers. Therefore, the workers are not really at the mercy of their employers.

This is just like saying that a successful totalitarian state only executes dissidents when it is in the state's interest to execute the dissidents. Therefore, the dissidents are not really at the mercy of the state. Make sense of that if you can. I can't. Now, it's true that the labor market transaction between a company and a worker is a voluntary transaction in a certain very peculiar sense of voluntary.

You know, nobody's holding a gun to the worker's head in the market. And there's a concept in economics, the concept of a Pareto improvement. And it's often used to claim that any voluntary transaction between two parties is good for society. Since it's a voluntary transaction, it obviously makes both parties, the company and the worker, better off in their own estimation.

And no third party is hurt. So on the basis of individualistic, libertarian ethics, it seems that... that one can say that the voluntary transaction is unambiguously good for society. at least that's the story now to his credit professor beland doesn't believe the story at all he's aware that the starting point just before the transaction matters a lot for instance if you have to sell your house for five thousand dollars almost nothing or else starve you're better off after you sell your house than if you were just a moment before you sold the house but given a different starting point a starting point where you had enough to eat without having to sell your house, you might be better off not selling the house.

And this second situation is clearly better for you than the first one. And so Professor Beilin has written, quote, if we take the Pareto criterion without thinking about it and apply it on an empirical situation akin to the ones we find in the developing world, then it appears rather outrageous. There's nothing natural or equal or just about the starting point, which means the Pareto criterion only cements this situation.

But radical change may be more just. I think that's exactly correct. What was some hand motion? The key point here is that a voluntary transaction only cements, reinforces, and perpetuates the starting point. If the starting point just before the transaction is bad, then the end point just after the transaction is almost as bad.

Garbage in, garbage out. So when we look at the transaction between a company and a worker, we can't really talk about good or bad. in abstraction from the starting point. So let's consider that. What is the starting point that makes the great majority of the population have to choose between either starvation or working under the domination of one or another capitalist?

And is there any other possible starting point? Even more pertinent, was there in fact at one time a different starting point? And was it better for working people? Thank you. The starting point of capitalist-dominated production is what Marx, following Adam Smith, called previous accumulation. It's now generally called primitive accumulation of capital, but there was nothing primitive about it.

It started about in the year 1500 in Britain. Now before that point, the working people were no longer serfs. The large majority of them in Britain were free peasants. They engaged in subsistence farming. They farmed for themselves and their families. And in practice, if not exactly in the written law, the land they farmed belonged to them.

And even as late as the 1690s, there were more of these free independent peasants than there were capitalist farmers in Britain. But by about 1750, they had all disappeared. what happened to them A large part of the answer is that the landlords decided to capitalize on the rising price of wool by driving the peasants off the land and turning the land into sheep farms.

Somewhat later, peasants who had farmed land that had been owned by the Catholic Church were also evicted. There were other events. The upshot is that people who had been free peasants, who worked for themselves, were forcibly driven from the land. But that by itself wasn't enough to turn them into employees of capitalists. What they first did generally is they became beggars or vagabonds, you know, wanderers or robbers.

So then harsh laws were imposed, not only against robbery, but also against begging and wandering. And there were punishments, which included whipping, imprisonment, slavery. and the slaves who ran away or rebelled could be put to death. So forcible expropriation, taking away of property, violence, and repression by the state are what created a new starting point, the capitalist starting point, in which the great majority of the population has to choose between starvation and working under the domination of one or another capitalist.

Two minutes left. Okay, and so given this new starting point that they did not voluntarily choose, working people began to voluntarily work under the domination of capitalists. And these voluntary labor market transactions only cement this situation. reinforce and perpetuate this new and much less free starting point. A genuinely free society requires that we undo, reverse, this expropriation, this taking away of property.

We need to return to individual property in the sense that the direct producers, the people who actually do the work, have ownership and control over the land, buildings, tools, raw materials and so forth that they need to make a living. So if you're for reestablishing individual property in this sense, reversing this forcible expropriation, you and Marx are on exactly the same side.

This is exactly what he envisioned in the culminating chapter of his book Capital. I'm going to quote, the expropriators are expropriated. Capitalist private property is the first negation of individual property. private property as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets with the inexorability of a law of nature its own negation.

The negation of the negation. This does not reestablish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property. That's the goal. based on the acquisition of the capitalist error, that is, on cooperation and the possession in common of the land of the means of production. Direct quote from Marx. Now let me just say finally, it is conceivable that when individual property is returned to the great masses of people, some of them may want to work under the domination of others in return for a wage.

I think that's bizarre, but it is just barely conceivable. So, if you are an absolutist about transactions, freedom of expression, of the world.