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Speaker 1: At the beginning, even liberal economists would say this is impossible. Companies have always been greedy. Why is it that all of a sudden they're able to raise prices more than they would otherwise?

Brooke Gladstone: So is greed to blame for our current inflation woes? From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Meanwhile, some Americans are looking at capitalism and wondering if they've been conned.

Speaker 3: Nobody wants to be a sucker. In a sense, we've been suckered by the market fundamentalism narrative.

Brooke Gladstone: To round out the hour a rereading of The Communist Manifesto.

Speaker 4: If you cannot in good faith engage with the way that the substance and the style are working together, you will never understand what kind of book this is.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. For well over a year, the Federal Reserve has been waging war against inflation. Prices started climbing back in 2021 and quickly broke records in summer 2022.

Speaker 5: Inflation in the United States is again surging to the highest level in 40 years.

Brooke Gladstone: Even though prices have come down since then, everyone, Feds, economists, and pundits were trying to get a handle on what exactly was happening and what would fix it. When data points stuck out, prices were up sure, but profits in some sectors were skyrocketing far past post-COVID predictions.

Speaker 6: Pepsi's prices last quarter were up 17% from a year ago. Profits were up 21%. Chipotle prices last quarter up 13% profits up 26%.

Speaker 5: Chevron is reporting a profit of roughly $36 billion for 2022.

Speaker 6: It's a record high for the company.

Brooke Gladstone: Which gave birth to an idea that quickly moved from the halls of academic research and left-wing think tanks to the political arena.

Speaker 6: This has been a criticism from the left-hand politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, that companies are engaged in what they're dubbing greedflation.

Speaker 1: Everyone is talking about this, whether you call it greedflation, profit-lead inflation, seller's inflation.

Brooke Gladstone: Seller's inflation, that's the preferred term of Isabella Weber, an economist from the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped popularise the idea. She argues that companies like Pepsi have actually contributed to keeping inflation alive by keeping their prices high, even as the cost of production starts to come down. The theory was dismissed as either imprecise or unfounded by some economists and dubbed a conspiracy theory by some in the press but over the course of 2022 and '23, the concept of greedflation has slowly crept into the mainstream.

OTM reporter, Micah Loewinger, spoke to Lydia DePillis, a reporter on the business desk of The New York Times. He asked first, how she defines it.

Lydia DePillis: I think of it as having basically three parts. The first is that companies are raising prices above what their costs would justify. It's not simply a function of they have to pay more for inputs, and therefore they charge more for the final product. It's that they're taking higher margins. The other part is the fact that it's happening in an inflationary environment. The nice thing about an inflationary environment for companies is it becomes very unclear to the consumer why prices are going up.

If they're like, "Oh my God, my snack crackers are 30% more expensive so is my guess sot that must be the reason." Actually what's happening is companies are taking advantage of that opportunity to raise prices more than they would otherwise, which in turn, fuels inflation further, creating a little bit of a spiral or at least slowing what otherwise might be a decline in inflation. The third component is the idea that market consolidation that's happened over the last few decades makes this a little bit easier to pull off if you are someone that has 30% of the market for a given product. Folks have just fewer places to go.

Micah Loewinger: Could you give an example of a company that has benefited from using inflation as a justification for raising prices and that also controls a large portion of its market?

Lydia DePillis: Yes. Take a company like PepsiCo, which has a number of consumer packaged goods, brands, things that you don't even know are owned by them.

Micah Loewinger: We got Lay's, Mountain Dew, Quaker Oats, Fritos, I guess Starbucks Frappuccino drink.

Lydia DePillis: That creates the opportunity to raise prices more than are justified by the price of aluminum that goes into cans or the price of plastic that goes into bottles or the price of corn syrup that goes into all your drinks.

Micah Loewinger: One common rebuttal that I've seen on Fox Business Channel to the notion of greedflation is if corporations can really lift prices at will anytime, why did they wait until this past year? Why didn't they do it--

Lydia DePillis: It's very simple. They couldn't have raised prices at any time. What they required was an opportunity and that came in the form of other shocks that were already increasing prices and made it easier to hide opportunistic price increases within them.

Micah Loewinger: How do we know that this is a deliberate decision on the part of companies?

Lydia DePillis: Let me describe it in terms of how this has wound its way through the commentariat on Twitter and Fox News. At the beginning, even liberal economists would say this is impossible. Companies have always been greedy. Even the competition example, even the fact that companies have gotten more consolidated over the years that hasn't increased dramatically over the past three years. That's fair, but what you can start to look at is profit margins, which had already been high following the tax cuts in 2017. They skyrocketed to record levels in 2021/2022.

With that came payouts to shareholders, which are just an indication that the company has gained windfall profits that they don't have any way to productively invest and they don't have any incentive to pay out in the form of wages to their workers. That is data that is very clear-cut. If you don't believe that though, you believe that it's simply supply and demand. They're just letting the market clear, which is also at play, but you have to consider companies just tell people.

They tell us on their earnings calls, they tell their investors very proudly, that they've managed to say "take price" or increase their margins. Take the car companies, in 2020, all of their factories shut down and it was very difficult to get semiconductors so the supply was artificially constrained. What do we do with the semiconductors that we have? We're going to put them in our most expensive models. They produced almost exclusively trucks, high-end SUVs, and those have higher profit margins on them.

Coming into 2022/2023, the lower-end lower margin models just got cut from their production lines.

Speaker 5: Talk about sticker shock, right now only three new cars on the market three, have the sticker price below 20,000. That comes as car companies discontinue more of their low-priced models.

Speaker 6: That means the average car right now costs more than $48,000.

Lydia DePillis: They came to like the idea of a lower volume, higher profit kind of business, and that has endured.

Micah Loewinger: How do you see greedflation is fitting into a larger political battle over assigning blame?

Lydia DePillis: Inflation has been very illuminating in some ways because there is a fight over explaining what drove it. If you believe that wage is really the problem, and it's workers who are demanding higher salaries and they're quitting all their jobs. Nobody wants to work anymore, they say.

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Lydia DePillis: Then that leads to certain policy prescriptions. We don't want to encourage unions. We want to try to tie people into jobs with non-compete agreements. We want to make sure that employers are able to get workers at an affordable price. Now, if you believe that supply chain bottlenecks were the main driver, then that's an explanation for trying to break those down. This is a big part of industrial policy, the Biden administration has architected its economic policies around saying we need to make sure that there's competition in shipping so that we're not so reliant on these very fragile supply chains.

Now, another explanation for inflation is that we just gave away too much money. There's too much money chasing too few goods and that's why the price of everything has gone up.

Micah Loewinger: You're talking about stimulus, low-interest rates.

Lydia DePillis: Fiscal and monetary stimulus. Stimulus checks, but also really low-interest rates. The truth is that all of these things played a role. Probably wage is the least of those. Wages are generally a trailing indicator.

Micah Loewinger: Because their wages are not keeping up with inflation.

Lydia DePillis: That's right. It can create a wage-price spiral and that's a little bit of what we saw in the last big episode of out-of-control inflation in the 1980s, which is the last time that economists really had to study this at depth. That's been very much burned into their memories. Greedflation comes in when you could say, yes, all of those things are problems but it's all become worse because corporations have more control over pricing. They have more leverage, and that amped up all of these problems.

It's saying that there's something broken about the economy, and there's policy prescriptions to fix it, either fix it or at least compensate for it. You could fix it through antitrust policy, at least somewhat. You could compensate for it by just taxing the money out of that sector.

Micah Loewinger: Like for instance, the windfall profit tax proposals that we heard from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Have these types of policies worked in the past.

Lydia DePillis: They were used in Europe during this period because energy prices were making life really difficult for regular people. I haven't reviewed the literature on what happened there, but generally, the theory is supply is artificially constrained. In that case, Russia was no longer as much of an option and there was no immediate backup for them to turn to. Because usually, the wrap on windfall profit taxes is this, destroys the incentive to produce more of the thing that you need.

That wasn't going to happen anyway in this case, so it might have been the efficient policy. Another way you could go about this is price controls, which obviously have a terrible reputation, but back in the 1940s, price controls and rationing were how we got through World War II. There are those who were saying COVID is really a similar kind of shock. Maybe we just had a more public-spirited attitude back in those days, an idea of national sacrifice. You could only consume so much of a good, but it was also only going to cost so much.

That's how they distributed scarce supplies. Now we distribute scarce supplies by allowing companies to charge as much as they want, which means that those who have the ability to pay are the ones who get the thing.

Micah Loewinger: You first wrote about greedflation a year ago. What's changed in our economy or in our understanding of inflation that reflects the new openness to this idea?

Lydia DePillis: I read this paper by an agricultural academic entitled, higher sales are good, but higher margins are better. Sure, you'd love huge revenues, but if you're only making 2% or 3% on that, then that's not very impressive for your shareholders. I think that has allowed this thesis to gain a little bit more traction because if the story about the run-up was in doubt in prices, the story about the really, really gradual rundown has, I think only added to the evidence.

Micah Loewinger: Has this round of analysis and this era of the economy, has it changed how you see your job or how you think about our economy?

Lydia DePillis: I always wanted to make sure that I wasn't presuming that the economy works according to clear-cut and dry rules. I took ECON101 in college. I wasn't that good a student. I think it's generally true that folks who don't know much about ECON will say, well, it's ECON101. This is how the world works, supply, demand, boom, you've got your price. ECON was never that simple. Most of the advances in economics have been about how those simple rules are broken under certain circumstances.

My lesson from this is you should always be open to the idea that stuff doesn't work according to black-and-white explanations, and there's a lot of weirdness. Last time might not be how it goes this time.

Micah Loewinger: Lydia, thank you very much.

Lydia DePillis: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Lydia DePillis is a reporter on the business desk at The New York Times.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up one of the most blockbuster PR campaigns in American history. This is On the media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. As Depillis explains it, greedflation is just the latest theory to run a foul of the notion that economies run best under the market's invisible hand, which is to say a system that works by supposedly spurring on individual producers to make what society needs, not necessarily to do good, but to do well. Has the American ideal of an economy left entirely in the thrall of that invisible hand always dominated?

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the co-author with Eric M. Conway of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. This big book traces the evolution of what she calls free market fundamentalism from a theory to America's one true faith. The fact is, planners and politicians have tinkered with the market throughout our history, putting up guardrails usually after we've crashed and then dismantling them, moving fitfully but inexorably to the religious extremism events on Capitol Hill and Fox News today.

When I spoke to her earlier this year, Oreskes said that the intensity of our belief in the myth of the free market as an invisible hand freedom shield, part of the natural order isn't an accident. It's rooted in a century-old masterfully conducted public relations campaign. Its first big challenge child labor. The free market propagandists were for it.

Naomi Oreskes: This is something I think most Americans either never knew or have forgotten how incredibly deadly and dangerous work was. This included children as young as two years old working in textile mills in Massachusetts. If a child began work in a mine or a miller factory at the age of two or five or six, the odds were very great that child would not live to see adulthood. The manufacturers claim that it wasn't really that dangerous, and they argue that child labor laws are denial of freedom, that if the government says children can't work in factories, it's denying the freedom of business leaders and the freedom of parents, particularly fathers to decide what is right for their children.

They begin to construct a story that links economic prerogatives of American big business with American freedom. That's the story that we see being built and told over and over again for the next 100 years.

Brooke Gladstone: The big PR campaign pushing back against government regulation of labor was headed by something called the National Association of Manufacturers. It was a group composed of some of the heads of the largest companies at the time, Sears, General Electric. They got together and created a campaign in support of child labor. Now pull another thread and tell me about Friedrich von Hayek, the influence he had.

Naomi Oreskes: In 1944, a group of American business leaders led by a man named Jasper Crane, who had been an executive at DuPont, and a man named Harold Leno, who was the head of one of America's first libertarian foundations, had the idea to try to promote neoliberal thinking in the United States. Neoliberalism had been born in Austria. It was developed by a group of economists, two of whom were Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.

A group of businessmen who had in the 30s criticized socialism and communism as foreign theories actually imported a genuinely foreign theory behind closed doors, gave money to universities to hire these two men. Von Mises was hired at New York University and Hayek was hired at the University of Chicago.

Brooke Gladstone: Von Hayek wrote a famous book, The Road to Serfdom, that went on to influence Ronald Reagan and then Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan.

Naomi Oreskes: Its essential argument is that capitalism and freedom are indivisible. That if you begin to compromise economic freedom, then it's only a matter of time before you're on a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Now, von Hayek's book was written mainly in response to Soviet-style centralized planning that for government to actually plan the economy, they'd have to control the economy. They'd have to decide how much a particular factory would produce there and how many workers. They would have to control people. Pretty soon you're not just controlling the economy, you're controlling the whole society. They raised some important and interesting questions, but they then begin to use it as an argument for any government action in the marketplace. For example, banning child labor. Now, in fairness, von Hayek, he is not nearly as extreme as his later followers make him out to be. Von Hayek actually says, no, no there is an appropriate role for government. For example, there is a role for government to stop pollution and deforestation.

In the hands of his followers, it becomes a much more black-and-white argument. These same business leaders who get him hired at the University of Chicago, produce a Reader's Digest version of the book in which all the caveats is stripped out. Then they create a cartoon booklet, which is distributed through Look Magazine to millions of households all across the United States with this argument that any government involvement in the marketplace, the next thing we're living under a Soviet-style dictatorship.

Then they funded a major project at the University of Chicago called The Free Market Project to develop a blueprint for an unregulated or very weakly regulated American capitalism. One of the key components was supporting the work of Milton Friedman. These business executives funded Friedman to give a series of lectures in the United States pushing forward this idea. He turned that set of lectures into a bestselling book, Capitalism, and Freedom. It's made into a television series.

Brooke Gladstone: The National Association of Manufacturers, as you say, sponsored radio shows, most notably, The American Family Robinson, which aired around the country.

Speaker 7: ...was telling me is how you explained to him about taxes and government spending. Our people are hollering for more money to spend and then hollering about heavy taxes at the same time. I know there are a lot of folks who don't seem to realize that all this money has to be taken out of the people's pockets by the government.

Naomi Oreskes: The American Family Robinson was a radio program that was designed to be propaganda.

Brooke Gladstone: That was the word that NAM officials used in their documents to describe the program.

Naomi Oreskes: Correct, designed by NAM to propagandize the values of big business and the threat of the new deal.

Brooke Gladstone: How?

Naomi Oreskes: Through stories in which the government interferes in ways that damage people's businesses, through speeches given by characters about how the American way is to stand on your own two feet, how government involvement threatens the primacy of the nuclear family, distributed free of charge to hundreds of radio stations around the country. It ran for many, many years, would've been heard by millions of Americans.

Brooke Gladstone: There was also a TV show hosted by none other than Ronald Reagan.

Naomi Oreskes: Ronald Reagan is a really important part of the story of how these views which up until the 1950s are decidedly not mainstream, become mainstream. Most Americans know that Ronald Reagan before he was a politician, was an actor. What they don't know is that his acting career was pretty much on the skids in the mid-1950s when he was recruited to be the host of a television program called General Electric Theater, which under Reagan became the third most watched television show in the United States in the late 1950s.

It was a high-quality program with good actors. There's one episode starring Harry Belafonte. They all began and ended with little didactic introductions or conclusions about individualism, standing on your own two feet and not relying on government.

Speaker 8: You expect something from liquor that liquor was never intended to do for you, like helping you cope with the lousy breaks of life. Therefore, it becomes a moral issue, not to take that first drink.

Naomi Oreskes: Hosting General Electric Theater was only half of Reagan's job. The other half was going on the lecture circuit on behalf of GE to promote a very anti-union, anti-government, pro-market ideology. He would give talks in factories, in schools. He would go to the Rotary Club or the Lions Club in the evening and present this set of arguments.

Now, we don't know exactly what happened inside Ronald Reagan's head, but what we do know is that he went into General Electric, a pro-union, New Deal Democrat, and he came out an anti-union, anti-government Republican.

Brooke Gladstone: The National Association of Manufacturers is still going full swing. Right?

Naomi Oreskes: NAM still carries quite a lot of weight in Congress because there still are millions of American workers in manufacturing. They have been a major force lobbying against climate change litigation and trying to block the SEC from having disclosure rules regarding conflict minerals.

Brooke Gladstone: You've suggested that all of this messaging is intended to reduce our options to either capitalism without regulation or repressive communist dictatorships like those of the Soviet Union or China.

Naomi Oreskes: A lot of the propaganda and also the academic work done by the Chicago School presents this as a dichotomy over and over and over again. That's a false dichotomy. There are lots of choices. We do have all kinds of regulations about eight-hour work days and being paid overtime. It's been hard for us to have that conversation about the right choices because we've been so bombarded with this false dichotomy of, laissez-faire economics, unregulated markets, the invisible hand versus we give up all our freedom. Next thing we know we're facing a firing squad.

Brooke Gladstone: Some Western democracies, notably in Europe, seem to have found a middle ground without giving way to soul-sucking authoritarianism.

Naomi Oreskes: They're still fundamentally capitalist market-based systems, but they have stronger social safety nets, stronger protections for workers, stronger protections for the environment, in many cases, stronger protections against dangerous products like endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Yet, these countries are prosperous. They are democratic. Actually, by some measures, they're actually more democratic than the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: How are they more democratic?

Naomi Oreskes: Just look at things like to what extent policies reflect what public opinion polls show the people of that country actually want. We know that here in the United States that many of our national policies don't reflect what a majority of Americans would like to see happen. Of course, we're facing massive efforts at voter suppression here in the United States, various kinds of corruptions formed by the lack of controls on campaign financing. France elections are only allowed to last for a certain number of days.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, part of the myth of the market is that government intervention doesn't work, and you say that you can easily disprove that by considering the economies of individual states today.

Naomi Oreskes: I moved to Massachusetts from California, and I can tell you that I think Massachusetts does have a bit of a nanny state mentality. I have personally been sometimes frustrated by the fact that I can't buy a decent bottle of wine on a Sunday. The reality is that Massachusetts is one of the richest and most successful states in the United States, has extremely high levels of education and relatively low levels of a lot of the social ills that plague other states. Regulation works. Public education works.

High levels of taxes work if you invest them in education and infrastructure, which Massachusetts does.

Brooke Gladstone: The Human Development Index that was developed by the UN as a counterweight to the GDP to try and track how people are faring in terms of health, education, life expectancy, standard of living. Massachusetts ranks number one on that scale, and it's closely followed by Connecticut, Minnesota, and New Jersey. In contrast, the bottom eight tend to be states more hostile to big government, Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

Naomi Oreskes: What these data show is that the states that have high levels of taxation and highly engaged governments, people are doing better. States like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, that are hostile to government and have low levels of taxation, people are doing worse.

Brooke Gladstone: One of my favorite things is the exception that proves the rule in this case, which is Utah.

Naomi Oreskes: Utah is interesting because Utah is a very red state. It has very low levels of taxes, but it's economically successful. It turns out one of the many things that it's doing right is being a large recipient of Federal government funding. A lot of the booming in Utah in the last 20 years was because of the growth of what's called the Silicon Slopes. Salt Lake City was one of the original nodes in DARPANET, which was the federal government precursor to the internet developed by the US military to support military communications.

It was out in front when DARPANET became commercialized as the internet. Because of a major government program, Salt Lake City was way ahead of the curve when the opportunities began to develop the tech industry.

Brooke Gladstone: But there's more. The Salt Lake region, you said also proved attractive to young professionals because of its easy access to great outdoor recreation, particularly its world-class skiing, all of which takes place on federally protected land.

Naomi Oreskes: Some of the best skiing in the world, beautiful hiking, and all of that was developed on federally protected lands. Then, it turns out, because Utah is considered an agricultural state, many residents can get federally subsidized mortgages through the Department of Agriculture. Example, after example, after example, what we see is that so-called small government doesn't yield the prosperity, the economic outcomes, or the health and well-being for people that its advocates promote.

Brooke Gladstone: The 2008 financial crash would be even further proof that government regulation is necessary. Let's return to that spectacularly influential Chicago School. Its jurist and legal scholar Richard Posner changed his free-market notions after that crisis when he saw that self-regulation didn't work, at least in financial markets.

Naomi Oreskes: Posner was one of the leading proponents of the Chicago School of Law and Economics, a big advocate of deregulation, of allowing markets to mostly operate on their own, but after the 2008 crash, he says, "Look, these guardrails were put in place to prevent the economic system from crashing. When we took them away, the system crashed because self-interest doesn't actually work to protect the common good, because what's in the interest of a person as an individual may not be in the interest of society as a whole."

I think what he's written is very courageous, but it's amazing to see how little influence it has had in so many other people who are still sticking to the Chicago story.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, let's talk about the stakes, Naomi, what you call the high cost of a free market. Start with climate change.

Naomi Oreskes: Climate change is one of the clearest examples of market failure that we've seen in our lifetimes. Nick Stern, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, has called climate change the greatest and most wide-ranging market failure in history. Because oil and gas, and coal are legal products, people have used them to do legal things, but in the process of doing that, they have created this giant external cost that accrues to people irrespective of whether they did or didn't use those products.

Now, we're looking at trillions of dollars in damages from climate change, and who going to pay that bill? Well, all of us. People in Bangladesh, people in Pakistan, it's a market failure because the market doesn't account for the true costs of using these products.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about happiness.

Naomi Orskes: What we know and the evidence is very, very clear now is that Americans are actually very unhappy. Money has not bought us happiness. Overall, the happiest people in the world are the ones who live in the European social democracies because those countries have a few key things, good social safety nets, so you don't have to have tremendous anxiety about what will happen to you if you get sick or if you lose your job, better distributions of income.

They don't generate the resentment and frustration that we have here in America and they have healthcare because it's hard to be happy when you're not healthy. They have trust in institutions which is the most interesting of all because if you ask yourself, well, why don't Americans trust our institutions? Well, one of the big reasons is because we've been subject to a century-long propaganda campaign telling us not to trust our most important institution which is government.

Brooke Gladstone: Finally, freedom. In your conclusion, you wonder, did the men and women in this story really believe in liberty?

Naomi Oreskes: America was capitalist in the 19th century and we had slavery. America was capitalist in the 20th century and until 1918, women didn't get to vote. America's capitalist today and millions of people are incarcerated. Freedom is something we fight for. It's something that we protect with our political and civic institutions and the idea that we can somehow protect our freedom by letting business people do whatever the heck they want, it's refuted by the facts of history.

This is why this question comes up about whose freedom were they really trying to protect. Ultimately, the people we studied were trying to protect their own freedom, their own profits but they constructed a myth about the defense of political freedom because they knew that if they said, oh yes, I'm working to protect my profits. There's no reason why any of us would've bought that story. Nobody wants to be a sucker and in a sense, we've been suckered by the market fundamentalism narrative.

Brooke Gladstone: Naomi Oreskes is the co-author with Erik M. Conway of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

Naomi Oreskes: Thank you very much.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Over the course of a century of what Naomi Oreskes exposed to the previous segment as free market propaganda, there have been periodic spasms of resistance efforts of the disaffected to rouse themselves from the fever dream and often the instrument of that arousal is yet another doctrine, another piece of propaganda even older than the one it seeks to displace.

Karl Marx: On college campuses, a communist manifesto is one of the most frequently assigned texts.

Brooke Gladstone: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's slender volume appeared in 1848 for many of those betrayed by the so-called free market in the years since. The pamphlet has offered refuge inspiration and argument. So many arguments still.

Speaker 9: In 2012, the Guardian reported on Marx's growing influence in popularity across Western Europe, noting the continued rise in book sales and the incredibly ironic fact that a bank in Germany issued a credit card with Marx's image.

Brooke Gladstone: Like Hamlet's ghost, the manifesto is both impossible and imperative in its call for action.

Speaker 10: Joe Biden, that's where he is gone. He signed on to Bernie Sander's crazy 110-page Communist Manifesto that will absolutely destroy America, 4 trillion in new taxes, a green new deal.

Brooke Gladstone: China Miéville writes stunning speculative fiction but his latest book, A Specter, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto is a non-fiction rumination on that [unintelligible 00:34:12] to text and its place in the world, and how best to read it today. When I spoke to him earlier this year, he told me that one of the few gripes he has with the book is that its authors are rather too admiring of the bourgeoisie.

China Miéville: It is often a surprise to the newcomer to the manifesto quite how much praise they heap on the bourgeoisie. It became very quickly evident in the revolutions of 1848 that much of the bourgeoisie of Europe was more afraid of the working class than it was of the [unintelligible 00:34:42] regime. Across Europe, the middle class made their peace with these old reactionary powers, and there was a period of immense reaction through the 1850s. If they had written the pamphlet even a year later, I think it would've had a much darker and more pessimistic tone.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk a little more about the text then. It is stirring. It scans. Some of its critics call that a weakness.

China Miéville: The argument is because this is written in such a style that is almost evidence in and of itself that its arguments don't hold up is straightforwardly absurd. One of the things that has frustrated me a lot, one of the main reasons I wrote the book is the lack of curiosity among a lot of its critics about the nature of the manifesto form itself. There is a notorious bit in which the manifesto says the working class has no country. This is often read as saying that the working class movement has to be internationalist which is right and that Marx and Engels grossly underestimate the power of nationalism.

There is an element of truth to that. I think they were too sanguine about how powerful nationalism was but what they are doing in that moment is grabbing the working class by the lapel and shaking them and saying, stop identifying with your countries. You have to be an internationalist. That's the nature of that sentence and if you cannot in good faith engage with the way that the substance and the style are working together and that sometimes a claim in the book is a prophecy or is a plea or is a treaty or is an encouragement.

If you can't seriously engage with that, you will never understand what book this is.

Brooke Gladstone: It is exhortation, prediction, assessment.

China Miéville: Exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's take off the three most prevalent arguments made by critics of the manifesto. The first is something called capitalist realism. The notion that it really can't be any other way.

China Miéville: Exactly. This is a term that was coined by Mark Fisher, a very brilliant cultural critic, and the interesting thing about capitalist realism is that all it requires is to disseminate the idea that nothing can be done. Therefore, even if you think that this is a terrible system, there's no point fighting against it, and this is never been more clearly put than with Margaret Thatcher's notorious and famous phrase that there is no alternative.

Brooke Gladstone: Tina.

China Miéville: Exactly. We all call it Tina. That is the most pure propagandistic expression. It's absolutely vacuous and empty. Ursula Le Guin, the great writer has a beautiful formulation about capitalism, that its power seems inescapable but then so did the divine right of kings.

Brooke Gladstone: Onto the next argument, human nature. With regard to the manifesto, you quote biologist E.O. Wilson writing, it's a lovely theory, wrong species. In other words, it can't work because human nature is just too base. I've changed my view of human nature from thinking it'll always go low to a belief that it's more plastic. It can be manipulated to dwell with the devils or respond to its better angels.

China Miéville: Conservatives often accuse socialists of having a duey-eyed view of human nature but to have a sense of the potential for a radical reconfiguring of the everyday, you don't need to believe that people dwell with the angels. All you need to believe is that whether people dwell with the angels or the devils depends on an awful lot of complicated circumstances. Capitalism is a system that quite explicitly rewards selfishness. It's hardly a surprise that precisely that dog-eat-dog behavior is very often valorized and very often the way people live in some cases because they have to.

We know that people behave incredibly differently throughout history and throughout different societies.

Brooke Gladstone: How about the last criticism of the manifesto? In one word, Stalin.

China Miéville: It marshals the existence of the Stalinist regimes against communism, both because they were awful and not sustainable. I completely agree but the problem is if you were to only listen to them, you would not know that there have literally for over a hundred years been very serious debates within Marxism, within the left, precisely criticizing those regimes. Not just that these are not desirable and not sustainable but that they are also not in any meaningful way communism.

If you look at Marx and Engle's writing, this is why these regimes cannot be considered legitimate representations of this political program. I want to be very clear about this. I'm not saying you have to agree with that but to simply act as if the mere fact that there were these unpleasant regimes that called themselves communist is therefore evidence that communism is doomed and to have no curiosity about the internal debate. Again, it's just not serious. That idea that Stalinism disapproves communism, rings very hollow if you are someone who has spent a long time reading the communist critiques of Stalinism.

Brooke Gladstone: You quote Marshall Berman, the late great humanist modernist Marxist, who observed that whenever there's trouble anywhere in the world, the book becomes an item. It provides music for their dreams.

China Miéville: This really kicked off after 1871 with the Paris Commune. Then, of course, it exploded again after 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. For the first time, you had this powerful nation identifying with the communist project. That led to interest and also a plethora of cheap additions, the Soviet Union turning it out in various translations. Even in 2008, 2009, when the Great Financial Crush occurred, it was reported, often with a wry amusement in the business press, that sales of The Communist Manifesto had spiked.

I actually find it incredibly poignant and incredibly moving that in this moment in which, for a lot of people, their retirement funds, their life plans have been destroyed, that one of the things that happened in that moment is this yearning sense of, surely there has to be a better way of organizing things than this. I think that ebb and flow of interest is something that we are going to continue to see.

Brooke Gladstone: You also observed that in the aftermath of 2008 and in the rise of social media, you had a very strong right and a much weaker but more vocally unbound left that punched above its weight. The result was the right starts to hallucinate enemies.

China Miéville: Yes, the right has always hallucinated enemies. A friend of mine, the writer Richard Seymour, has called this the era of anti-communism without communism. Yet you still have supposedly mainstream American politicians denouncing Obama and Biden as communist. This is so absurd that you have to understand it as a lazy slogan hearing and as a fever dream. I like to hope that overblown, febrile attack might actually encourage a certain degree of curiosity about what this bogeyman is.

Particularly because, although on a much smaller scale, you have various young leftists, even though their numbers are not particularly big, talking about communism in that online way, which is somewhere between a joke and a provocation. It's very unstable, but as you said, it punches above its weight. When that's happening in the context of a generationally unprecedented up surge of interest in socialism and the left in Britain and in the US, the explosion of membership of the Democratic Socialists of America and Bernie Sanders's campaign, and Corbyn in the UK, there is, I think, a real good faith fascination with these radical traditions.

Brooke Gladstone: You've observed that there's a sense in which every generation reads it anew and that certain things come up quite sharply. What's coming up now?

China Miéville: The planetary crisis. That famous phrase, you have nothing to lose but your chains and we have a world to win. The fact is that the world that we have to win is deeply wounded. Even were capitalism to be done away with tomorrow, how do we salvage and repair a livable world? Even a radical program has, I think, to approach that with a serious sense of humility. Secondly, I think the rise of an iteration of the far right, of terrifying strength and a particular overt sadism, provides a very strong sense of the dangers facing us.

I think they are, in fact, inevitable of a system predicated on profit over need, built on the bones of a system of patriarchy and white supremacy and so on. If you see this new sadistic hard right as an inevitable feature of capitalism, then the stakes of moving beyond capitalism become ever more urgent.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote at the end of your introduction that a specter hams your text, a hunch that, in fact, the manifesto now looms more than ever. I'd suggest the enforced isolation of the recent lockdowns that enabled us to look through our computer screens at the world and to think more in terms of systems. You make a very persuasive case that the totality of capitalism, it's not just an economic system, but one with its own philosophy, principles, worldview, culture, everything, is very hard to dislodge.

I don't think it's seen now through a glass quite so darkly.

China Miéville: I think you're right and I hope you're right. One of the things that is interesting as capitalism enters this doddering and dangerous phase is that it has spent so long saying that there is no alternative and so on, that when it is forced to do things that it said for decades it couldn't do, like this enormous influx of public funds into furlough schemes during the pandemic, having said it couldn't possibly do that, it starts to make people think, "If it's not true that that couldn't be done, what else couldn't be done?"

American business for decades said universal health care is impossible. It's not a question of whether or not we want it. It cannot be set up. If that demand becomes loud enough that people at the top start to feel that continuing to deny it will put their position in jeopardy, you can absolutely bet your bottom dollar they will grudgingly allow a universal health care system. The point is, all these things that they say are impossible are not impossible. What they are is not desired by capital.

Brooke Gladstone: Capitalism, as you note, is enormously adaptable.

China Miéville: It is incredibly adaptable.

Brooke Gladstone: Something not anticipated by Marx and Engels.

China Miéville: No, indeed. This is one of the things that I think they got wrong. They underestimated the extent to which it can accommodate certain reforms as a way to continue. The manifesto and the tradition have to be read today with a much sharper sense of how adaptable capitalism is. Now, I do think that that flexibility is diminishing as it becomes more and more shaky, and these moments of outright sadistic hard right are symptoms of that shakiness.

Brooke Gladstone: People of goodwill are frightened by violence and by hate, which can spread so quickly out of control. These aren't intellectual arguments against revolution, but visceral ones. In your book, you build up to a discussion of the utility, the necessity even of hate.

China Miéville: I had a debate with a friend. She basically said to me that she always felt uncomfortable when I talked about hating capitalism. I understand that. All I can say is I look at the cruelty and the waste and the violence and the sadism, who would I be, ethically, not to hate this system? If that hatred is one of the things that can help us to be motivated to overthrow this system of iniquity, surely that is hate in the service of love.

Brooke Gladstone: Overthrow how?

China Miéville: People think that they are fundamentally opposed to the use of force in any situation, but actually very, very few people are. Do we really think that the fighting of slaves on the slave ship or the activists in the Warsaw Ghetto was not justified? The question then becomes, if you think like me that this is a world built on oppression, exploitation, racism, homophobia, sexism, then it becomes an ethical urgency to see its end.

One of the reasons that I think it's so important to build socialism as a mass movement is that the more people who simply say, "We deserve better than this," the less likely any coercion or force becomes necessary. I'm not interested in 100 people with guns saying, "Right, we now have socialism." There's no point at all. I am interested in the mass of people simply turning around and saying, "We will no longer be treated like this by this system." Overthrow, for me, is the point at which the majority of people simply say, "No more."

Brooke Gladstone: That could happen by the system adapting itself to the point where it is no longer that system.

China Miéville: I'm not interested in reforms of trying to make capitalism a little bit better. Don't get me wrong, I'll take them if they come along because I'm not indifferent to life being better for people along the way. Any reform within the context of a system that is fundamentally about prioritizing profit over human need will always be embattled and endangered. You say, overthrow how, change how. The point is, I don't have a blueprint.

People do sometimes imply if you can't lay out a point by point planned alternative, somehow your demand for change is illegitimate. I think that's just complete nonsense. You look throughout history, whole social situations have been overthrown and changed because a critical mass of people could no longer live with the world the way it was.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me, what did you want to accomplish with this book?

China Miéville: I want this book to be an introduction to the manifesto for the curious reader to actually find out what this notorious document is all about. I want to talk to the critics of the manifesto and to say, "By all means, let's actually have a serious debate." One of the starting points for that is you're going to have to acknowledge that most of the stuff you say about this text is embarrassingly weak. If you want to be taken seriously, bring your A game instead of this D game you've been bringing for decades.

Brooke Gladstone: China, thank you very much.

China Miéville: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: China Miéville is the author of A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto.

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Brooke Gladstone: On the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Suzanne Gaber with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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