I'm Bethany McLean and this is making a killing interviews, exploring the headlines you thought you understood, and finding the long term lessons we can all learn from today's business stories. I'm at Bethany mac twelve on Twitter. My guest today has, among other things, a talent for writing catchy titles. Malcolm Harris, who's an editor at The New Inquiry and an admirably outspoken writer, published a recent piece in MIT's Technology Review entitled Canes was wrong, gen Z will have it worse. Malcolm is also the author of Kids These Days, and his forthcoming book is entitled Shit is Fucked Up in Bullshit History Since the end of History. Let's get some generational clarity out of the way for context and disclosure, I am squarely in gen x. Malcolm, as you'll hear in the interview, is deeply gen y. In other words, a millennial. My kids still elementary age are gen z. I have no idea what any future grandchildren would be called or what kind of world they'll be living in. John Maynard Keynes, on the other hand, thought he knew what his grandchildren would be facing. In his popular essay from the early nineteen thirties called economic possibilities for our grandchildren. The founder of macroeconomics wrote about the world a hundred years in the future, which is pretty much now. He imagined that capitalism would be almost over by now, having simply been a means to greater ends. In his books and in his articles, Malcolm seeks to understand where Canes got it wrong and defies the cultural impression of millennials as tantrumy teenagers. Instead, he tries to understand what made millennials the way they are, burned out, waiting later and later to get married or have kids, terrified of debt yet saddled with it, focused on technology inefficiency, but also trying to have a larger purpose in life than work for work's sake. Malcolm writes that a yuk of poll found that support for capitalism among Americans under thirty fell from thirty nine percent to thirty percent between two fifteen and twenty eighteen. That's fourteen percentage points below the average. At the same time, the prime age workforce of twenty thirty was born between nineteen seventy six and two thousand and five. So if Malcolm's right, his answers helped paint a portrait of the economy of the future, and who doesn't want to know more about that. I'm so excited to dig into this today and grateful to Malcolm for coming from Philly to meet me in New York. Hi, Malcolm. So let's start with John Maynard Came's. I think it's a name most people have heard, but you hold different things out of his writing than other people have. What made you gravitate toward him? Well, one of the reasons I picked Cane's to focus this essay around was this prediction about twenty thirty and realizing that the workers he's talking about are all of them are already born, so we could sort of assess this pre foundational prediction in his thought empirically. Now it's about time we can look around and see if that was true or not. And he gets a lot of credit for being empirically right about a lot of things throughout his work. But when you look at this this sort of foundational question of what is capitalism for, he seems like not right. And what was his answer to this foundational question what's capitalism for? It's to relieve us of necessity so that we could focus on our species energy on things that aren't necessary to being alive, like art and music, creativity, knowledge. I'm I'm going to come back to that in terms of what the meaning of life? Maybe, Oh dear, that's a weighty conversation for today. But why do you think he's wrong when you talk about the empirical evidence showing that he didn't get it right? What do you look at since the crisis two thousand and eight, there's been a reassessment about achievements of capitalism, you know, or past the Cold War. We don't have something else to compare it to, so we can sort of look by its own standards how capitalism is doing. And what we're seeing is not the sort of accelerated pace of people's lives increasing in quality. Instead, we've seen wages for most people level off, technology advantages few instead of many. And that's not what was predicted. And why do you think that is what's gone wrong? Was Cans wrong or has something gone wrong to make him wrong? Have there have been policy choices that have made him wrong? What he misunderstood was the system is built on exploitation at its very base, so that over time things are going to get worse. Like that is the nature of capitalism, and that's what marks it predicted years before. So I'm going to come back to that. But there is this great quote by Cans about capitalism that I've always loved, which capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. Does that kind of sum it up to you? Yeah, Well, it's certainly justified a lot of wickedness, right, and that this is the natural state of being. It's only through this wickedness, through this self interest, that we can achieve our collective interest. That's certainly the bill of goods we were sold for a long time, at least as American. You're one of the grandchildren that Caines wrote about. How do you feel about where we are? Not optimistic, especially in the face of ecological crisis. So my parents live in a small town called Cloverdale in northern California, and this year they had to evacuate from their evacuation because of fires. You know, That's that's the level of crisis we're looking at. Is our country's on fire, their whole continents on fire. It does that's who we're looking at and that's going to be an annual phenomenon for a lot of people. Is that a metaphor to you is the ecological state? And the fire a metaphor to you for the state of capitalism? Well, it's it's very literal, definitely, but we can also read it as a metaphor, right. And I got involved in politics through the anti war movement when I was when I was a kid or whatever. We invaded Iraq two thousand and three and there was a group, a coalition called World Can't Wait, and their their logo was a World on Fire, and there said, we can't we can't wait to get rid of the Bush regime. You know, the world, world can't wait. The world's on fire. And now I look at those posters and I've been thinking about them a lot lately because you can see the fires in Australia from space like these are these are literal? Is that what shaped you the anti war movement? Is that what made you start thinking about these broader economic questions? Or were there other forces at work in shaping your worldview? That was my entred into organized politics. I think left wing politics. I came of age under under the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, and it was a very scary time to be alive. And a lot of the things that we're seeing now the consequences of the Trump years, those things were set in place during the Bush years. And so we saw, you know, the Department of Homeland Security being built. We saw this crackdown on domestic protest that's gone on. So, yeah, it was the state of the world to push me here, and it hasn't gotten any better. What made you turn your eyes toward economics instead of continuing to focus on anti war? What made you decide that economics was fundamental to understanding where we were. So I graduated from the University of Maryland in twenty ten, which means I was a sophomore when the financial crisis hit, and at the time I was organizing with a left wing student group to organize against tuition increases on campus because this was a central ide question for students on campus for accessibility of education and a national issue of educational affordability, and when the crisis hit, we were looking for some way to link this to our campaign around tuition increases. So you're saying, what's the relationship between these tuition increases, the huge increases in college educational costs and housing prices, and we didn't really know what the answer was, or if there really was answer. We just sort of figured there had to be at the time. But that yielded this whole research project that me and a friend worked on, and out of that came sort of my first work on student debt, which is where my project started. And so you have maybe I'm going to call it counterintuitive, maybe contrarian, but you've got a view on student debt. Tell us about that. Well, I don't know if it's it's contrarian these days. I mean when I first started writing about it was twenty eleven, which was Preoccupy Wall Street, and I wrote this piece for this journal n plus one about the way that student debt had been set up, in the way it was increasing out of control, and that it wasn't clear that people were going to be able to pay this debt back at the time. Up until then, the assumption had been that all educational debt was good debt, because for every dollar you invest, you're going to get one x back in terms of wages for your better qualified job, you learn to code or whatever, whatever, degrees. You get it's going to rebound to you. All Educational investment was a good idea, And around twenty eleven is when people start looking at the totals, when we're looking closely to a trillion dollars or whatever it was at the time, and say, this doesn't make any sense. This can't possibly be true, especially after wages had tanked during the recession and had not rebounded in the way the people expected. And you're looking at the numbers of the average student os tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and they're just making enough to get by, especially at increased housing costs and transportation costs, and it just wasn't lining up, and people kept paying because there really isn't any alternative at the individual There is not right, they come after you in bankruptcy well, and people kept in rolling as well, although the enrollment did level off a little bit around this time when people start drawing these numbers into question, But people keep in enrolling because you have an individual level. If you ask any expert, what's the best thing I can do to increase my wages, they'll still tell you to go to school, and they'll still be right but you look at a collective level, clearly that same dynamic isn't operating. It's not working. So I think you're right. It's not contrarian now to be terrified about the levels of student debt and what that means, and even very hardcore capitalists are worried about what it means in terms of financial crisis. But I think you are contraying and that you've taken that into a broader critique of the educational system at large. Yeah, and that when we look at these jobs that aren't showing up the way they're supposed to, and you still look at young people who are putting in tons of not just money, but also their time and their effort, huge amounts of time and effort to get these educational degrees whatever certifications at a time when there's more competition for them than ever. Where is this value going Who is benefiting from all of this? And there are some people who like to throw up their hands and say, well, no one's really benefiting from this, But that doesn't make any sense to me. And so you can look at the economy and look at who has been benefiting from this acceleration in human capital development and the shift in costs from the state and from corporations. Two workers themselves to train themselves on behalf of companies that are going to hire them later. And you can look at corporate profits which have never been higher. Right, the DAO is at new records every year. It seems like while people seem to be still suffering out there, and it's because that's who's harvesting the profits from this. You know, better trained workers are easier to find than ever before. So we're making ourselves fodder for the system. I shouldn't say we, You the millennials have been making themselves fodder for the system. I mean the equation was supposed to be the better educated you get, the better job you get. And at an individual level that still sort of makes sense. But if you look at a societal level, if a bunch of people educate themselves, they take it upon themselves, they spend the money they invest in themselves to educate themselves, well suddenly they are a lot more educated people and the cost that you need to spend to hire one of them goes down. In the old educational models, that's supposed to mean increased scale of production. Right, They're like, well, there are a lot of cheap, smart workers, we can expand production. That hasn't happened. Instead, we've seen the ruling class just basically grab as much of those profits as they can jack up their own stock prices, and they've been very successful at it. And for you, that shows up in the gap between the stupendous rate of productivity increases and the same time flat wages. Absolutely, and that whole wedge is just increased ruling class share of the economy. That's nuts. Why do you think it is that millennials and all of us have been complicit in that system because it takes all of us being complicit to make it work. Well, it's hard to say what complicity looks like, right, say, like, well, given this, there should be a nationwide rebellion of young people, you know, in all of our major cities. They should just like you know, run into the streets and say, no, we won't do it, We don't want to pay this anymore. This is wrong. And that happened. That happened in twenty eleven, and happened again, you know, during Black Lives Matter years after, of different groups of mostly young people in both cases refusing the status quo, and they called in the army in both cases, and you have to understand that, like they've been called in the army in Hong Kong, right, Like that's a really it's a really aggressive step to take by a state to crack down on their own population, and they did it in city after city in the United States. When you look back Unoccupied, do you think it was a success. It's too soon to tell. I guess I think there are some limited ways in which it was a success. That we put this sort of class language back on the map. Yeah, back on the national radar. I think you don't have the Bernie Sanders campaign the way you do now without Occupy changing the discourse. You also have student debt as an object of discussion in the way that it wasn't before the people recognize that it's out of control, and you have this sort of coalescing of a generational political perspective that I think starts would occupy. On the other hand, it shows the sort of limits of protest as a strategy, which is ultimately what Occupied turned out to be is what kind of national protest, and protest only works until the point they don't want to listen to you anymore, and they've shown the government, and these are democratic mayors and democratic cities who called in their police and used chemical weapons in city centers to clear them. It's an interesting point because I think part of the point you're making is that this question that's going on by millennials of the system actually is a bigger threat to the system than most people realize, and maybe that response to the occupy movement shows what an existential threat it is. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what the next cohorts draw from our experiences or draw from their own experiences, what people like the Sunrise movement or Extinction rebellion, especially the climate protesters in general, draw from those experiences and their own experiences. We'll see tactically what they end up thinking. Coming back to millennial how would you explain to a politician or someone my age what's made millennials the way the way they are? I mean, I think it goes back to the exactly what we've been talking about, which is this break in correlation between productivity and wages, and up until this nineteen seventy nine early eighties, you see these numbers rising together in a way that indicates a sort of shared national prosperity, and that shared national prosperity was the grounds for sort of Keynesian type thought that this is getting better for everyone, sort of along the same line, and for a number of reasons. When you hit nineteen eighty, which is also when this millennial cohort starts being born, those two break and wages stay flat and productivity keeps going up, and that gap between the two of them is an increased rate of exploitation. So you'd argue that it's not so much that millennials have had unrealistic expectations about what the world should be like for them. It's that there's something fundamentally wrong with the world as it's currently structured, so that millennials are right to be dissatisfied. Yeah, well, I think you see that. With me. That's a break between sort of millennial gen z categories is that I was raised in the era of you can be anything you put your mind to, you know, the world is yours, etcetera, etcetera. We were sort of supposed to be this Keynesian generation where we're finally able to be creative. We'll all be able to be creative in our own ways, etcetera. Etcetera. At least that was the bill of goods sold to our parents younger. When I talk to scholars who work on the younger cohort, whatever we want to call it, currently, they don't see that same sort of expectation. There is a lowered level of expectation where they don't expect to win every time. They're not expected to win every time. They're just trying to like cobble together enough good experiences to make them employable. And then that can become a self fulfilling prophecy. Right, if you don't believe in a better future, how do you possibly get a better future? That's fart of it. You've talked about this idea of helicopter parents, and you're actually less critical of helicopter parents than some of us who are older are, And you think there's a reason for it. So explain that when I started writing Kids These Days, when I was working on that book, i'd sort of had a pretty critical view of helicopter parents because I had the stereotype sort of built in my mind of an upper class mostly moms who are putting their thumb on the scale to help their kids who are already pretty advantage within the system. But the more I read research about other classes of parents who are stuck doing the same kind of work, the more I realized that that was a rarefied picture. That most of anything, they are not rich. Most helicopter parents are working class, because most people are working class, and so you have most what we'd call helicopter parents helicopter moms because again, mostly moms, while we're talking about, are just trying to get their kid by, right, They're people trying to create some level of generational progress for their child, which if their child has a learning disability or trouble in school and one way or another they're laned badly, that can be a full time job just trying to keep your kid on track academically to go to a state college or a community college such that they might be able to participate in the twenty first century economy in some way that's not totally stagnant. So you'd see helicopter parenting not as a sign of entitlement, but rather as a sign almost of terror. Yeah, well, just most people aren't entitled, right, it's not the reality of American life, and the stereotypes that we are given of entitled people are mostly written by entitled people. You wrote this in kids. These days, every authority from mom to presidents told millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn't held up its end of the bargain. Do you think there's something wrong just inherently with the notion of human capital. There's definitely something wrong about how we understand the concept of human capital. We think about it. It's something that belongs to you once you've achieved it, right, because it seems like a wage. Right, I got a degree. I earned a degree. The degree belongs to me, but it doesn't belong to me in a way that other commodities do. I can't sell it, right. All I can do is work. And so human capital is how labor appears to capital once it's been hired. Right, human capital or to a state that's trying to compete with another state. So human capital theory emerges in the sixties from these neoliberal ideas of national competition. Can America keep up with the Soviet Union in regard to human capital production? Are we producing enough scientists and engineers so that we don't get wiped out by the USSR? At the time, the answer was no, we weren't. And that's where the Higher Education Act comes from. Right. They're assessing a work force that belongs to either the state or to a company that's trying to think about them in terms of say human resources or whatever. It's workers capacities as interpreted by people who are putting those workers to work. The worker themselves doesn't own your human capital. You can't sell your human capital. All you can do is sell your labor, which is the only commodity you have. And so we get this idea twisted because you think that you can accumulate human capital and that it's something that it's somehow accrues to you. Yeah, that's that's something to belong that belongs to you. But the truth is it just is you, that is who you are. Only other people can put that human capital to work. You're not actually a capitalist, You're just a person. Right. What do you make of the role that we all play in enabling this. I'm coming back to this idea of complicity because you break out these lines between consumers and workers, and yet we who are workers are also consumers. Right, So in other words, yes, we all enable an Amazon, right because we use the service. Maybe you don't, But how do you break out that line between who's a consumer and who's a worker when all we're all some of both. Yeah. Well, that's why I try not to look at consumption as a basis for politics, because that just means being alive on a capitalism right. You have to buy things. You have to buy food, you have to buy shelter, and so when you start talking about people as consumers, you're already just talking about a very limited kind of choice where what you can buy is what's for sale on a market, and you have to buy something, especially when it comes to say food and shelter. That's why I think it's important to look at class as a question of capitalists and workers and the question of do you work for someone else or do other people work for you, and that this is the central division that explains everything that's going on in our economy. You know, we're calling the one percent of the nine nine percent, but that's what we're talking about is people who own assets, people who make money by owning things, and people who make money by working, who's only thing they have to sell is their own labor. Time, the central division that explains everything I like that. It's a big one. It's it's it's definitely everything. There's still other divisions, you know, other class divisions within our society that are all still important. So I don't want to make it sound like there aren't, but that's a key one right there. Right. I guess it strikes me that, if that's right, that millennials are still somewhat complicit in their own fate. In other words, a lot of this is being engineered by millennials. But again, break it down that it's not necessarily millennial versus gen X, it's one percent versus ninety nine percent. Is that perhaps a better way of thinking about it? Right? The generational analysis is important to understand the capital relations. Right, it's through these generational identities that we're sort of starting to understand the relation between capitalists workers. The divisions that constitute society aren't I think, generational divisions. It's not like we need to get the baby boomers. They're all responsible for what's happened. And like you said, there are millennials whose fault this is, right, Mark Zuckerberg's little millennial, Jared Kushner's millennial. They are people who are profiting from this who are millennials. They're underrepresented among people who have profited from what's going on. It's age skewed. So generational analysis points us to a direction where we can start to understand these questions. But no, it's not fundamentally a question of age. We've related to these developments differently depending on how old we are. First of all, do you think it's possible that Canes isn't wrong but we're just getting there more slowly? No, I don't. People have suggested the possibility. He's you know, he put some caveats in people. Some people say it's population growth, which I don't really believe. I don't think. I think population growth is always a distraction when people bring it up. Or wars, which you suggests would be a problem, and there were some definitely some wars in between would push unders wars. But no, you can see that things are getting worse, right, like the questions of climate collapse. We're not on a positive trajectory, right, and to think that as and some people want to look at the world and look at the market and say, well things are getting better. Yeah, yeah, we have this like some climate issues. Think of it sort of like the hole in the ozone layer. They're like, yeah, there's this problem, but we can fix it and things are still going pretty good. There's a really strong contingent for that perspective, Yes, very strong. I might even put myself in all come back to that. But you can't brack it off the whole ecology, right, you can't brack it off the state of the earth. Like then you're the dog with the coffee cups saying things are fine as your house is on fire, like right, things are literally on fire, you know, And that's effect and die off in insect populations that are heating of the ocean. They're just things where the bees are seriously and we haven't begun to understand the impacts, or we're maybe just beginning to understand the impacts and the scale the impacts are and how they're going to affect people. And it's going to be continent wide at a time yea devastation. So to you, the ecology is front center, whereas my generation perhaps has segmented it or we've compartmentalized and said, well, there's this economy and then there's the ecology, and isn't terrible that this is happening to our world? But the economy is separate, whereas you and perhaps millennials see them all as a piece. Yeah, we are the world, right, we are the environment. And it sounds sort of hippy dippy, accept it's really true, except you know your factories are going to burn too. Do you think even if Canes had been right, do you think that is the primary goal? Would that have led to happiness, peace, and prosperity for all if we could just work lass No, because the question of the amount of hours were worked. Right, The idea was that we exist as a society and that we all together want to reduce the amount that we work. But that's not how we're composed. Right. If you view the world in terms of classes, you have a ruling class that wants to get the most out of all their workers, profit as much as they possibly can. And it doesn't matter that Jeff Bezos can't possibly imagine ways that he could spend as much money as he has. No, Right, it's kind of interesting to think about that, because that's just not how they're oriented, right. It's not about working less are having enough. It's just about emploiding as much as you possibly can out of the rest of the world. And then workers, you know, if you're trying to work less, you're trying to retire, right, that's the goal of every worker. That's about work, you know, getting your most you can out of your life. It's a diametrically opposed goal with the goal of the people who are employing you. Except I would challenge that in that the employers the one percent work harder than they ever have either. And maybe that goes to a more fundamental critique of capitalism or the current system in just a broad human context, that it's not working for anybody, but nobody's not working, right, Yeah, at a certain point, work becomes a luxury good for some of these people. I think, does Mark Zuckerberg have to work? Like, of course, not working is a thing he chooses to do because he enjoys it, right, because his work is ultimately just bossing other people around. Well, perhaps I think work is more fun if you get to boss instead of be bossed and you don't actually have to do it. And absolutely well, and I think it's not structurally homologous with what the rest of us do, which is work to get enough money to pay your rent. Do you think that you'd be happy if you didn't work, if you didn't have work, and yeah, absolutely, really totally, really, what would you do with yourself? I mean, because there's an argument that work is the meaning of life, right that without it, without that feeling of productivity or that feeling of contribution, it strips life of its meaning. In other words, if we were headed into a Keynesian world where we didn't have to work, is that what we should be aspiring to. So in a post work world, though, I mean, we still do all sorts of things. The difference is that because we still have to clean up after ourselves, we still have to produce food, we still have to shelter ourselves, we still have needs as a society as well as you know, higher needs as a species. But the difference is the production thereof is not alienated, right, It's you're not doing it for someone else. So it's the difference between like working at McDonald's and cooking dinner for your friends. There's a big difference between that. One is a like rewarding, enriching experience that furthers our connections to each other, and one is subtractive. One you're waiting till the clock is done. You want to go do something else you want to get out of there, you're selling that part of yourself. Would you argue in the end that Marx has it right? Do you see any flaws in his thinking or that Marx had it right? I suppose it's a better way of putting it. Well, I think there are major gaps in his work. But yeah, absolutely, I'm a Marxist. I understand the world as in terms of antagonistic class conflict. And what would you do with the argument that if you look at where Marxism has been employed, whether it's been the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cuba, that that hasn't worked out particularly well. In other words, how do you think about the real world application of the theory? Well, I think there are a number of lessons that we can learn from the experience of state socialism. For the record, Cuba's bees are actually been pretty good shape. So if we're comparing, we're comparing along the lens of the population, the lens of the population, which is not negligible. Dental know their bees are actually really good shape. I did not know that. Yeah, well, and as is there they live longer than we, you know, as long as we do with a lot less healthcare expenditure. So it's not like every part of state socialism has failed in the way that we like to think about it. But that's not where my ideology is. And I think we can learn a lot from those experiments and where they failed. I think masculinism is like a huge, huge lesson we can take from the state socialist experiments that were ostensibly feminist projects and in some way seriously feminist projects. But we're still led by men overwhelmingly to failure. So you think it would be different if it had been led by women, if if feminism are within a feminist approach to socialism. I think it's absolutely crucial moving forward, and as a way to learn from the failures of state socialism. So you see the failures of state socialism more as specific to the ways those let's call them experiments were conducted, rather than necessarily pointing to a fundamental flaw with Marx's way of thinking. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, Well, on the part of Marxism is developing according to our what we learn, right, it's a science, it's not a religion, and so Marxists have been plenty critical of those projects that we're done in Marx's name, and that's interior to Marxism, So it's a criticism is part of the game, right yeah, fair enough? Does something always go wrong with the implementation of a system, though, I mean, could you argue that perhaps capitalism hasn't been implemented is it theoretically was supposed to, But perhaps Marxism could never be implemented as it is theoretically supposed to either. In other words, it's practicality is always the rub. People certainly do argue that all the time. It might be one of the most common arguments, but I think the only the only capitalism we can judge is the one that exists, right It's a real worldwide system that has existed for x hundred years and it has it's rapidly on its way to destroying the entire planet, which is the only thing that we've ever had. So insofar as we can without the planet, we are for sure. So that's an issue, right, Yes, in terms of before like empirically reflecting on the qualities of our system, the fact that it's going to like burn down the ground that we're standing on or flooded, that's a pretty serious issue. And so you can construct in your mind, a different kind of capitalism that doesn't do this. But honestly, even the Canes is a good example, right of a different kind of capitalism that we haven't really seen, that's led by government led investment, social investment, etc. It still calls for this constant growth, which is the real basis of the capitalist system. Is this continual growth and the idea that you could just build and build and build and build, and that that would add up to more, and that you wouldn't have to pay for it in some way in terms of the resources you're drawing, so there wasn't going to be you know, a ying to that yang is really the basis of capitalist thought, and I think that that's wrong. There have been people who have said it's wrong. You know, from the first time they heard the idea, right, we have all sorts of indigenous thinkers who went in encountering this sort of colonialist capitalist accumulation mindset, had said that's nuts, Like you're going to break this whole thing really fast. And so you believe that need to feed the beast is inherent in capitalism and we can't keep feeding the beast? Is that another way to say it. Yeah, Well, here's let's try this. I think abundance is a social relationship. Capitalism believes that abundance is a question of technology and accumulation, that we're going to get enough stuff so that we finally have enough and then we can we can share it. Yeah, And I think abundance is we have enough now. You know that if we shared what we have now, that would be abundance, right, it would be abundance. We had a lot less than we have now and we shared it. Abundance is a question of how we're relating to each other through objects, not this question of accumulation. Do you think humans are ever nice enough to share it willingly? Yeah, I think most people would be very happy to do so. I think we've been we've been set against each other in a system of exploitation for a long time, maybe five thousand years by some accounts, but that's actually not that long in terms of the history of our species. You know, we've got a prehistory is one hundred thousand years or whatever. So maybe this is just a blip. So you think we're innately better than we are, that our real selves are human truth is better than we're acting, not that we're actually acting out the true ugliness of humanity. Yeah. I don't know if there's any anything more innate about us than there is anything innate about panda bears. But I think we're certainly capable of a lot better. If you had to predict how things shake out, if you were to be writing Kames's letter to your grandchildren, what would you say? Oh, jeez, I hope there's still something worth building on at that point. So you've got to be optimistic even to write that letter at this point, And you wouldn't even necessarily be optimist. I am, I think I am. And so I think that you're a cynical optimist. Yeah, well, I'm a realist. I think people often say what I'm saying is cynical because I believe that the system can't fix itself and we got to tear the whole thing down. But I think looking back at the fifties or something and saying, oh, we had things right there, we need to go back to that relationship between capital and labor by strengthening the unions or whatever, I don't think that's optimistic. I think that's delusional. That's fundamentally misunderstands the last sixt seventy god seventy years now of history, and so I don't think I'm being pessimistic. I think I'm trying to be optimistic and realistic about where we go from here, which is that we're still in history. And so if I'm writing a letter to whatever grandchildren, that means that history has kept going in a hundred years from now, we're going to be in something really really different from what we are now. One way or the other. I think that's indisputable, and so I gotta keep hope in my heart that it's going to be the good way and not the bad way, which means that the basic orientation of people toward the planet has changed from one in attitude that's extractive to one that's you know, participatory, imminent, right, you know, you recognize yourself as part of the world. So I think they're going to have a lot more to teach me than I'm going to have to tell them. That's interesting, and perhaps it's deeply optimistic to believe that there is a different way, right, to not feel trapped by history as it's been, and believe that there's a history your future as it could be. Right, Yeah, I think it definitely is, but I still got it, you know, so we're going to call you the terrified optimist. I'm going to work on the right phrase anyway. Thank you so much for coming to talk. It was really interesting. I'm still perhaps two mired in my gen x outlook to agree wholeheartedly with Malcolm. I see where capitalism has gone off the rails, but I still tend to subscribe to Winston Churchill's famous maxim that capitalism is the worst possible economic system, with the exception of everything else that's ever been tried. Perhaps the answer is that I'm just more cynical about human nature than Malcolm. Is. That said, we use the word indisputable a few times in this conversation, and what is indisputable is that whether you think Malcolm's critique is right or wrong, the numbers show that belief in capitalism is indeed faltering, and the ways in which that plays out will determine the world our children and grandchildren live in. And if you're interested in hearing more from Malcolm, please pick up a copy of his new book, Ship is Fucked Up in Bullshit History Since the end of History. Maki a killing is a co production of pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison McClain no relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McClain. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.

I'm Bethany McLean and this is making a killing interviews, exploring the headlines you thought you understood, and finding the long term lessons we can all learn from today's business stories. I'm at Bethany mac twelve on Twitter. My guest today has, among other things, a talent for writing catchy titles. Malcolm Harris, who's an editor at The New Inquiry and an admirably outspoken writer, published a recent piece in MIT's Technology Review entitled Canes was wrong, gen Z will have it worse. Malcolm is also the author of Kids These Days, and his forthcoming book is entitled Shit is Fucked Up in Bullshit History Since the end of History. Let's get some generational clarity out of the way for context and disclosure, I am squarely in gen x. Malcolm, as you'll hear in the interview, is deeply gen y. In other words, a millennial. My kids still elementary age are gen z. I have no idea what any future grandchildren would be called or what kind of world they'll be living in. John Maynard Keynes, on the other hand, thought he knew what his grandchildren would be facing. In his popular essay from the early nineteen thirties called economic possibilities for our grandchildren. The founder of macroeconomics wrote about the world a hundred years in the future, which is pretty much now. He imagined that capitalism would be almost over by now, having simply been a means to greater ends. In his books and in his articles, Malcolm seeks to understand where Canes got it wrong and defies the cultural impression of millennials as tantrumy teenagers. Instead, he tries to understand what made millennials the way they are, burned out, waiting later and later to get married or have kids, terrified of debt yet saddled with it, focused on technology inefficiency, but also trying to have a larger purpose in life than work for work's sake. Malcolm writes that a yuk of poll found that support for capitalism among Americans under thirty fell from thirty nine percent to thirty percent between two fifteen and twenty eighteen. That's fourteen percentage points below the average. At the same time, the prime age workforce of twenty thirty was born between nineteen seventy six and two thousand and five. So if Malcolm's right, his answers helped paint a portrait of the economy of the future, and who doesn't want to know more about that. I'm so excited to dig into this today and grateful to Malcolm for coming from Philly to meet me in New York. Hi, Malcolm. So let's start with John Maynard Came's. I think it's a name most people have heard, but you hold different things out of his writing than other people have. What made you gravitate toward him? Well, one of the reasons I picked Cane's to focus this essay around was this prediction about twenty thirty and realizing that the workers he's talking about are all of them are already born, so we could sort of assess this pre foundational prediction in his thought empirically. Now it's about time we can look around and see if that was true or not. And he gets a lot of credit for being empirically right about a lot of things throughout his work. But when you look at this this sort of foundational question of what is capitalism for, he seems like not right. And what was his answer to this foundational question what's capitalism for? It's to relieve us of necessity so that we could focus on our species energy on things that aren't necessary to being alive, like art and music, creativity, knowledge. I'm I'm going to come back to that in terms of what the meaning of life? Maybe, Oh dear, that's a weighty conversation for today. But why do you think he's wrong when you talk about the empirical evidence showing that he didn't get it right? What do you look at since the crisis two thousand and eight, there's been a reassessment about achievements of capitalism, you know, or past the Cold War. We don't have something else to compare it to, so we can sort of look by its own standards how capitalism is doing. And what we're seeing is not the sort of accelerated pace of people's lives increasing in quality. Instead, we've seen wages for most people level off, technology advantages few instead of many. And that's not what was predicted. And why do you think that is what's gone wrong? Was Cans wrong or has something gone wrong to make him wrong? Have there have been policy choices that have made him wrong? What he misunderstood was the system is built on exploitation at its very base, so that over time things are going to get worse. Like that is the nature of capitalism, and that's what marks it predicted years before. So I'm going to come back to that. But there is this great quote by Cans about capitalism that I've always loved, which capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. Does that kind of sum it up to you? Yeah, Well, it's certainly justified a lot of wickedness, right, and that this is the natural state of being. It's only through this wickedness, through this self interest, that we can achieve our collective interest. That's certainly the bill of goods we were sold for a long time, at least as American. You're one of the grandchildren that Caines wrote about. How do you feel about where we are? Not optimistic, especially in the face of ecological crisis. So my parents live in a small town called Cloverdale in northern California, and this year they had to evacuate from their evacuation because of fires. You know, That's that's the level of crisis we're looking at. Is our country's on fire, their whole continents on fire. It does that's who we're looking at and that's going to be an annual phenomenon for a lot of people. Is that a metaphor to you is the ecological state? And the fire a metaphor to you for the state of capitalism? Well, it's it's very literal, definitely, but we can also read it as a metaphor, right. And I got involved in politics through the anti war movement when I was when I was a kid or whatever. We invaded Iraq two thousand and three and there was a group, a coalition called World Can't Wait, and their their logo was a World on Fire, and there said, we can't we can't wait to get rid of the Bush regime. You know, the world, world can't wait. The world's on fire. And now I look at those posters and I've been thinking about them a lot lately because you can see the fires in Australia from space like these are these are literal? Is that what shaped you the anti war movement? Is that what made you start thinking about these broader economic questions? Or were there other forces at work in shaping your worldview? That was my entred into organized politics. I think left wing politics. I came of age under under the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, and it was a very scary time to be alive. And a lot of the things that we're seeing now the consequences of the Trump years, those things were set in place during the Bush years. And so we saw, you know, the Department of Homeland Security being built. We saw this crackdown on domestic protest that's gone on. So, yeah, it was the state of the world to push me here, and it hasn't gotten any better. What made you turn your eyes toward economics instead of continuing to focus on anti war? What made you decide that economics was fundamental to understanding where we were. So I graduated from the University of Maryland in twenty ten, which means I was a sophomore when the financial crisis hit, and at the time I was organizing with a left wing student group to organize against tuition increases on campus because this was a central ide question for students on campus for accessibility of education and a national issue of educational affordability, and when the crisis hit, we were looking for some way to link this to our campaign around tuition increases. So you're saying, what's the relationship between these tuition increases, the huge increases in college educational costs and housing prices, and we didn't really know what the answer was, or if there really was answer. We just sort of figured there had to be at the time. But that yielded this whole research project that me and a friend worked on, and out of that came sort of my first work on student debt, which is where my project started. And so you have maybe I'm going to call it counterintuitive, maybe contrarian, but you've got a view on student debt. Tell us about that. Well, I don't know if it's it's contrarian these days. I mean when I first started writing about it was twenty eleven, which was Preoccupy Wall Street, and I wrote this piece for this journal n plus one about the way that student debt had been set up, in the way it was increasing out of control, and that it wasn't clear that people were going to be able to pay this debt back at the time. Up until then, the assumption had been that all educational debt was good debt, because for every dollar you invest, you're going to get one x back in terms of wages for your better qualified job, you learn to code or whatever, whatever, degrees. You get it's going to rebound to you. All Educational investment was a good idea, And around twenty eleven is when people start looking at the totals, when we're looking closely to a trillion dollars or whatever it was at the time, and say, this doesn't make any sense. This can't possibly be true, especially after wages had tanked during the recession and had not rebounded in the way the people expected. And you're looking at the numbers of the average student os tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and they're just making enough to get by, especially at increased housing costs and transportation costs, and it just wasn't lining up, and people kept paying because there really isn't any alternative at the individual There is not right, they come after you in bankruptcy well, and people kept in rolling as well, although the enrollment did level off a little bit around this time when people start drawing these numbers into question, But people keep in enrolling because you have an individual level. If you ask any expert, what's the best thing I can do to increase my wages, they'll still tell you to go to school, and they'll still be right but you look at a collective level, clearly that same dynamic isn't operating. It's not working. So I think you're right. It's not contrarian now to be terrified about the levels of student debt and what that means, and even very hardcore capitalists are worried about what it means in terms of financial crisis. But I think you are contraying and that you've taken that into a broader critique of the educational system at large. Yeah, and that when we look at these jobs that aren't showing up the way they're supposed to, and you still look at young people who are putting in tons of not just money, but also their time and their effort, huge amounts of time and effort to get these educational degrees whatever certifications at a time when there's more competition for them than ever. Where is this value going Who is benefiting from all of this? And there are some people who like to throw up their hands and say, well, no one's really benefiting from this, But that doesn't make any sense to me. And so you can look at the economy and look at who has been benefiting from this acceleration in human capital development and the shift in costs from the state and from corporations. Two workers themselves to train themselves on behalf of companies that are going to hire them later. And you can look at corporate profits which have never been higher. Right, the DAO is at new records every year. It seems like while people seem to be still suffering out there, and it's because that's who's harvesting the profits from this. You know, better trained workers are easier to find than ever before. So we're making ourselves fodder for the system. I shouldn't say we, You the millennials have been making themselves fodder for the system. I mean the equation was supposed to be the better educated you get, the better job you get. And at an individual level that still sort of makes sense. But if you look at a societal level, if a bunch of people educate themselves, they take it upon themselves, they spend the money they invest in themselves to educate themselves, well suddenly they are a lot more educated people and the cost that you need to spend to hire one of them goes down. In the old educational models, that's supposed to mean increased scale of production. Right, They're like, well, there are a lot of cheap, smart workers, we can expand production. That hasn't happened. Instead, we've seen the ruling class just basically grab as much of those profits as they can jack up their own stock prices, and they've been very successful at it. And for you, that shows up in the gap between the stupendous rate of productivity increases and the same time flat wages. Absolutely, and that whole wedge is just increased ruling class share of the economy. That's nuts. Why do you think it is that millennials and all of us have been complicit in that system because it takes all of us being complicit to make it work. Well, it's hard to say what complicity looks like, right, say, like, well, given this, there should be a nationwide rebellion of young people, you know, in all of our major cities. They should just like you know, run into the streets and say, no, we won't do it, We don't want to pay this anymore. This is wrong. And that happened. That happened in twenty eleven, and happened again, you know, during Black Lives Matter years after, of different groups of mostly young people in both cases refusing the status quo, and they called in the army in both cases, and you have to understand that, like they've been called in the army in Hong Kong, right, Like that's a really it's a really aggressive step to take by a state to crack down on their own population, and they did it in city after city in the United States. When you look back Unoccupied, do you think it was a success. It's too soon to tell. I guess I think there are some limited ways in which it was a success. That we put this sort of class language back on the map. Yeah, back on the national radar. I think you don't have the Bernie Sanders campaign the way you do now without Occupy changing the discourse. You also have student debt as an object of discussion in the way that it wasn't before the people recognize that it's out of control, and you have this sort of coalescing of a generational political perspective that I think starts would occupy. On the other hand, it shows the sort of limits of protest as a strategy, which is ultimately what Occupied turned out to be is what kind of national protest, and protest only works until the point they don't want to listen to you anymore, and they've shown the government, and these are democratic mayors and democratic cities who called in their police and used chemical weapons in city centers to clear them. It's an interesting point because I think part of the point you're making is that this question that's going on by millennials of the system actually is a bigger threat to the system than most people realize, and maybe that response to the occupy movement shows what an existential threat it is. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what the next cohorts draw from our experiences or draw from their own experiences, what people like the Sunrise movement or Extinction rebellion, especially the climate protesters in general, draw from those experiences and their own experiences. We'll see tactically what they end up thinking. Coming back to millennial how would you explain to a politician or someone my age what's made millennials the way the way they are? I mean, I think it goes back to the exactly what we've been talking about, which is this break in correlation between productivity and wages, and up until this nineteen seventy nine early eighties, you see these numbers rising together in a way that indicates a sort of shared national prosperity, and that shared national prosperity was the grounds for sort of Keynesian type thought that this is getting better for everyone, sort of along the same line, and for a number of reasons. When you hit nineteen eighty, which is also when this millennial cohort starts being born, those two break and wages stay flat and productivity keeps going up, and that gap between the two of them is an increased rate of exploitation. So you'd argue that it's not so much that millennials have had unrealistic expectations about what the world should be like for them. It's that there's something fundamentally wrong with the world as it's currently structured, so that millennials are right to be dissatisfied. Yeah, well, I think you see that. With me. That's a break between sort of millennial gen z categories is that I was raised in the era of you can be anything you put your mind to, you know, the world is yours, etcetera, etcetera. We were sort of supposed to be this Keynesian generation where we're finally able to be creative. We'll all be able to be creative in our own ways, etcetera. Etcetera. At least that was the bill of goods sold to our parents younger. When I talk to scholars who work on the younger cohort, whatever we want to call it, currently, they don't see that same sort of expectation. There is a lowered level of expectation where they don't expect to win every time. They're not expected to win every time. They're just trying to like cobble together enough good experiences to make them employable. And then that can become a self fulfilling prophecy. Right, if you don't believe in a better future, how do you possibly get a better future? That's fart of it. You've talked about this idea of helicopter parents, and you're actually less critical of helicopter parents than some of us who are older are, And you think there's a reason for it. So explain that when I started writing Kids These Days, when I was working on that book, i'd sort of had a pretty critical view of helicopter parents because I had the stereotype sort of built in my mind of an upper class mostly moms who are putting their thumb on the scale to help their kids who are already pretty advantage within the system. But the more I read research about other classes of parents who are stuck doing the same kind of work, the more I realized that that was a rarefied picture. That most of anything, they are not rich. Most helicopter parents are working class, because most people are working class, and so you have most what we'd call helicopter parents helicopter moms because again, mostly moms, while we're talking about, are just trying to get their kid by, right, They're people trying to create some level of generational progress for their child, which if their child has a learning disability or trouble in school and one way or another they're laned badly, that can be a full time job just trying to keep your kid on track academically to go to a state college or a community college such that they might be able to participate in the twenty first century economy in some way that's not totally stagnant. So you'd see helicopter parenting not as a sign of entitlement, but rather as a sign almost of terror. Yeah, well, just most people aren't entitled, right, it's not the reality of American life, and the stereotypes that we are given of entitled people are mostly written by entitled people. You wrote this in kids. These days, every authority from mom to presidents told millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn't held up its end of the bargain. Do you think there's something wrong just inherently with the notion of human capital. There's definitely something wrong about how we understand the concept of human capital. We think about it. It's something that belongs to you once you've achieved it, right, because it seems like a wage. Right, I got a degree. I earned a degree. The degree belongs to me, but it doesn't belong to me in a way that other commodities do. I can't sell it, right. All I can do is work. And so human capital is how labor appears to capital once it's been hired. Right, human capital or to a state that's trying to compete with another state. So human capital theory emerges in the sixties from these neoliberal ideas of national competition. Can America keep up with the Soviet Union in regard to human capital production? Are we producing enough scientists and engineers so that we don't get wiped out by the USSR? At the time, the answer was no, we weren't. And that's where the Higher Education Act comes from. Right. They're assessing a work force that belongs to either the state or to a company that's trying to think about them in terms of say human resources or whatever. It's workers capacities as interpreted by people who are putting those workers to work. The worker themselves doesn't own your human capital. You can't sell your human capital. All you can do is sell your labor, which is the only commodity you have. And so we get this idea twisted because you think that you can accumulate human capital and that it's something that it's somehow accrues to you. Yeah, that's that's something to belong that belongs to you. But the truth is it just is you, that is who you are. Only other people can put that human capital to work. You're not actually a capitalist, You're just a person. Right. What do you make of the role that we all play in enabling this. I'm coming back to this idea of complicity because you break out these lines between consumers and workers, and yet we who are workers are also consumers. Right, So in other words, yes, we all enable an Amazon, right because we use the service. Maybe you don't, But how do you break out that line between who's a consumer and who's a worker when all we're all some of both. Yeah. Well, that's why I try not to look at consumption as a basis for politics, because that just means being alive on a capitalism right. You have to buy things. You have to buy food, you have to buy shelter, and so when you start talking about people as consumers, you're already just talking about a very limited kind of choice where what you can buy is what's for sale on a market, and you have to buy something, especially when it comes to say food and shelter. That's why I think it's important to look at class as a question of capitalists and workers and the question of do you work for someone else or do other people work for you, and that this is the central division that explains everything that's going on in our economy. You know, we're calling the one percent of the nine nine percent, but that's what we're talking about is people who own assets, people who make money by owning things, and people who make money by working, who's only thing they have to sell is their own labor. Time, the central division that explains everything I like that. It's a big one. It's it's it's definitely everything. There's still other divisions, you know, other class divisions within our society that are all still important. So I don't want to make it sound like there aren't, but that's a key one right there. Right. I guess it strikes me that, if that's right, that millennials are still somewhat complicit in their own fate. In other words, a lot of this is being engineered by millennials. But again, break it down that it's not necessarily millennial versus gen X, it's one percent versus ninety nine percent. Is that perhaps a better way of thinking about it? Right? The generational analysis is important to understand the capital relations. Right, it's through these generational identities that we're sort of starting to understand the relation between capitalists workers. The divisions that constitute society aren't I think, generational divisions. It's not like we need to get the baby boomers. They're all responsible for what's happened. And like you said, there are millennials whose fault this is, right, Mark Zuckerberg's little millennial, Jared Kushner's millennial. They are people who are profiting from this who are millennials. They're underrepresented among people who have profited from what's going on. It's age skewed. So generational analysis points us to a direction where we can start to understand these questions. But no, it's not fundamentally a question of age. We've related to these developments differently depending on how old we are. First of all, do you think it's possible that Canes isn't wrong but we're just getting there more slowly? No, I don't. People have suggested the possibility. He's you know, he put some caveats in people. Some people say it's population growth, which I don't really believe. I don't think. I think population growth is always a distraction when people bring it up. Or wars, which you suggests would be a problem, and there were some definitely some wars in between would push unders wars. But no, you can see that things are getting worse, right, like the questions of climate collapse. We're not on a positive trajectory, right, and to think that as and some people want to look at the world and look at the market and say, well things are getting better. Yeah, yeah, we have this like some climate issues. Think of it sort of like the hole in the ozone layer. They're like, yeah, there's this problem, but we can fix it and things are still going pretty good. There's a really strong contingent for that perspective, Yes, very strong. I might even put myself in all come back to that. But you can't brack it off the whole ecology, right, you can't brack it off the state of the earth. Like then you're the dog with the coffee cups saying things are fine as your house is on fire, like right, things are literally on fire, you know, And that's effect and die off in insect populations that are heating of the ocean. They're just things where the bees are seriously and we haven't begun to understand the impacts, or we're maybe just beginning to understand the impacts and the scale the impacts are and how they're going to affect people. And it's going to be continent wide at a time yea devastation. So to you, the ecology is front center, whereas my generation perhaps has segmented it or we've compartmentalized and said, well, there's this economy and then there's the ecology, and isn't terrible that this is happening to our world? But the economy is separate, whereas you and perhaps millennials see them all as a piece. Yeah, we are the world, right, we are the environment. And it sounds sort of hippy dippy, accept it's really true, except you know your factories are going to burn too. Do you think even if Canes had been right, do you think that is the primary goal? Would that have led to happiness, peace, and prosperity for all if we could just work lass No, because the question of the amount of hours were worked. Right, The idea was that we exist as a society and that we all together want to reduce the amount that we work. But that's not how we're composed. Right. If you view the world in terms of classes, you have a ruling class that wants to get the most out of all their workers, profit as much as they possibly can. And it doesn't matter that Jeff Bezos can't possibly imagine ways that he could spend as much money as he has. No, Right, it's kind of interesting to think about that, because that's just not how they're oriented, right. It's not about working less are having enough. It's just about emploiding as much as you possibly can out of the rest of the world. And then workers, you know, if you're trying to work less, you're trying to retire, right, that's the goal of every worker. That's about work, you know, getting your most you can out of your life. It's a diametrically opposed goal with the goal of the people who are employing you. Except I would challenge that in that the employers the one percent work harder than they ever have either. And maybe that goes to a more fundamental critique of capitalism or the current system in just a broad human context, that it's not working for anybody, but nobody's not working, right, Yeah, at a certain point, work becomes a luxury good for some of these people. I think, does Mark Zuckerberg have to work? Like, of course, not working is a thing he chooses to do because he enjoys it, right, because his work is ultimately just bossing other people around. Well, perhaps I think work is more fun if you get to boss instead of be bossed and you don't actually have to do it. And absolutely well, and I think it's not structurally homologous with what the rest of us do, which is work to get enough money to pay your rent. Do you think that you'd be happy if you didn't work, if you didn't have work, and yeah, absolutely, really totally, really, what would you do with yourself? I mean, because there's an argument that work is the meaning of life, right that without it, without that feeling of productivity or that feeling of contribution, it strips life of its meaning. In other words, if we were headed into a Keynesian world where we didn't have to work, is that what we should be aspiring to. So in a post work world, though, I mean, we still do all sorts of things. The difference is that because we still have to clean up after ourselves, we still have to produce food, we still have to shelter ourselves, we still have needs as a society as well as you know, higher needs as a species. But the difference is the production thereof is not alienated, right, It's you're not doing it for someone else. So it's the difference between like working at McDonald's and cooking dinner for your friends. There's a big difference between that. One is a like rewarding, enriching experience that furthers our connections to each other, and one is subtractive. One you're waiting till the clock is done. You want to go do something else you want to get out of there, you're selling that part of yourself. Would you argue in the end that Marx has it right? Do you see any flaws in his thinking or that Marx had it right? I suppose it's a better way of putting it. Well, I think there are major gaps in his work. But yeah, absolutely, I'm a Marxist. I understand the world as in terms of antagonistic class conflict. And what would you do with the argument that if you look at where Marxism has been employed, whether it's been the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cuba, that that hasn't worked out particularly well. In other words, how do you think about the real world application of the theory? Well, I think there are a number of lessons that we can learn from the experience of state socialism. For the record, Cuba's bees are actually been pretty good shape. So if we're comparing, we're comparing along the lens of the population, the lens of the population, which is not negligible. Dental know their bees are actually really good shape. I did not know that. Yeah, well, and as is there they live longer than we, you know, as long as we do with a lot less healthcare expenditure. So it's not like every part of state socialism has failed in the way that we like to think about it. But that's not where my ideology is. And I think we can learn a lot from those experiments and where they failed. I think masculinism is like a huge, huge lesson we can take from the state socialist experiments that were ostensibly feminist projects and in some way seriously feminist projects. But we're still led by men overwhelmingly to failure. So you think it would be different if it had been led by women, if if feminism are within a feminist approach to socialism. I think it's absolutely crucial moving forward, and as a way to learn from the failures of state socialism. So you see the failures of state socialism more as specific to the ways those let's call them experiments were conducted, rather than necessarily pointing to a fundamental flaw with Marx's way of thinking. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, Well, on the part of Marxism is developing according to our what we learn, right, it's a science, it's not a religion, and so Marxists have been plenty critical of those projects that we're done in Marx's name, and that's interior to Marxism, So it's a criticism is part of the game, right yeah, fair enough? Does something always go wrong with the implementation of a system, though, I mean, could you argue that perhaps capitalism hasn't been implemented is it theoretically was supposed to, But perhaps Marxism could never be implemented as it is theoretically supposed to either. In other words, it's practicality is always the rub. People certainly do argue that all the time. It might be one of the most common arguments, but I think the only the only capitalism we can judge is the one that exists, right It's a real worldwide system that has existed for x hundred years and it has it's rapidly on its way to destroying the entire planet, which is the only thing that we've ever had. So insofar as we can without the planet, we are for sure. So that's an issue, right, Yes, in terms of before like empirically reflecting on the qualities of our system, the fact that it's going to like burn down the ground that we're standing on or flooded, that's a pretty serious issue. And so you can construct in your mind, a different kind of capitalism that doesn't do this. But honestly, even the Canes is a good example, right of a different kind of capitalism that we haven't really seen, that's led by government led investment, social investment, etc. It still calls for this constant growth, which is the real basis of the capitalist system. Is this continual growth and the idea that you could just build and build and build and build, and that that would add up to more, and that you wouldn't have to pay for it in some way in terms of the resources you're drawing, so there wasn't going to be you know, a ying to that yang is really the basis of capitalist thought, and I think that that's wrong. There have been people who have said it's wrong. You know, from the first time they heard the idea, right, we have all sorts of indigenous thinkers who went in encountering this sort of colonialist capitalist accumulation mindset, had said that's nuts, Like you're going to break this whole thing really fast. And so you believe that need to feed the beast is inherent in capitalism and we can't keep feeding the beast? Is that another way to say it. Yeah, Well, here's let's try this. I think abundance is a social relationship. Capitalism believes that abundance is a question of technology and accumulation, that we're going to get enough stuff so that we finally have enough and then we can we can share it. Yeah, And I think abundance is we have enough now. You know that if we shared what we have now, that would be abundance, right, it would be abundance. We had a lot less than we have now and we shared it. Abundance is a question of how we're relating to each other through objects, not this question of accumulation. Do you think humans are ever nice enough to share it willingly? Yeah, I think most people would be very happy to do so. I think we've been we've been set against each other in a system of exploitation for a long time, maybe five thousand years by some accounts, but that's actually not that long in terms of the history of our species. You know, we've got a prehistory is one hundred thousand years or whatever. So maybe this is just a blip. So you think we're innately better than we are, that our real selves are human truth is better than we're acting, not that we're actually acting out the true ugliness of humanity. Yeah. I don't know if there's any anything more innate about us than there is anything innate about panda bears. But I think we're certainly capable of a lot better. If you had to predict how things shake out, if you were to be writing Kames's letter to your grandchildren, what would you say? Oh, jeez, I hope there's still something worth building on at that point. So you've got to be optimistic even to write that letter at this point, And you wouldn't even necessarily be optimist. I am, I think I am. And so I think that you're a cynical optimist. Yeah, well, I'm a realist. I think people often say what I'm saying is cynical because I believe that the system can't fix itself and we got to tear the whole thing down. But I think looking back at the fifties or something and saying, oh, we had things right there, we need to go back to that relationship between capital and labor by strengthening the unions or whatever, I don't think that's optimistic. I think that's delusional. That's fundamentally misunderstands the last sixt seventy god seventy years now of history, and so I don't think I'm being pessimistic. I think I'm trying to be optimistic and realistic about where we go from here, which is that we're still in history. And so if I'm writing a letter to whatever grandchildren, that means that history has kept going in a hundred years from now, we're going to be in something really really different from what we are now. One way or the other. I think that's indisputable, and so I gotta keep hope in my heart that it's going to be the good way and not the bad way, which means that the basic orientation of people toward the planet has changed from one in attitude that's extractive to one that's you know, participatory, imminent, right, you know, you recognize yourself as part of the world. So I think they're going to have a lot more to teach me than I'm going to have to tell them. That's interesting, and perhaps it's deeply optimistic to believe that there is a different way, right, to not feel trapped by history as it's been, and believe that there's a history your future as it could be. Right, Yeah, I think it definitely is, but I still got it, you know, so we're going to call you the terrified optimist. I'm going to work on the right phrase anyway. Thank you so much for coming to talk. It was really interesting. I'm still perhaps two mired in my gen x outlook to agree wholeheartedly with Malcolm. I see where capitalism has gone off the rails, but I still tend to subscribe to Winston Churchill's famous maxim that capitalism is the worst possible economic system, with the exception of everything else that's ever been tried. Perhaps the answer is that I'm just more cynical about human nature than Malcolm. Is. That said, we use the word indisputable a few times in this conversation, and what is indisputable is that whether you think Malcolm's critique is right or wrong, the numbers show that belief in capitalism is indeed faltering, and the ways in which that plays out will determine the world our children and grandchildren live in. And if you're interested in hearing more from Malcolm, please pick up a copy of his new book, Ship is Fucked Up in Bullshit History Since the end of History. Maki a killing is a co production of pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison McClain no relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rostkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McClain. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.