 Και καλώς ήρθω σε αυτήν την νέα εξαγνή της συμφωνίας μεταξύ της Ιαρών Μπρούκ και της Ευρωπαϊκής Υταλίξου, για διάφορες πρόσπιες. Σήμερα είναι η πρώτη εξαγνή και η πρόσπιση είναι ο καπιταλισμί vs. μαρξίσμ. Αλλά δεν είναι ένας από τα εξαγνή που η εξαγνή σου είναι κάποιος που αγαπηθεί προσκλησμό ή δεν αγαπηθεί σαν ανθρώπους και θα αγαπηθεί σαν ανθρώπους στην καταστασία των πόλων. Από την εξαγνή μας βρήκαμε ένα από τα καλύτερα μάρξια που μπορούμε να υπάρξουμε εκεί. Κάποιος είναι σε κατάσταση προσκλησμός και κάποιος είναι σε κατάσταση την εξαγνή της εξαγνής. Και θα δούμε τι η συμφωνία μας βρήκε. Από την ένας πρόσπισης έχουμε Ιαρών Μπρούκ. Ιαρών είναι ο κυρίο της Ευρωπαϊκής Υταλίξου και είναι ο χώρος της Ιαρών Μπρούκ. Οι χώρος του Ιαρών βρήκαμε κάποιος τραγούδιων και υποδέμπτος στο这 οπέλειφι. Οι ίδια beneficial για την εξαγνή της εξαγνής, με我想σή εσύ, και αυτό είναι ο λεπτήρι με του Ιαρών Μπρούκ. Και μετά από την άλλη την άλλη φορά έχουμε Το κατάστασία Δ. Αστλη. Αστλη είναι ο κυρίο της Σουόντας της Σοσθέγδης. Β趣 κομματέτας. Μεσιά της καταστασίας της βρίκες και με αυτή υπήρξει. και έχει δημιουργηθεί ένα αγγή called Semiotics of Happiness. Αυτό είναι ένα αγγή που πιστεύω ότι ο οικογένειο θα ανοιχθεί, γιατί είναι ένα κρίτησμα από αυτή η ιδέα που πιστεύει ότι η αγγή δεν κάνει αγγή. Πριν ξεκινήσαμε ένα μεγάλο ευχαρισμό για το Άνραν-Ενστίτουτ, που είναι σανξινότητας μοραλίας, αλλά και επίσης σε αυτές τις δικασίσεις. Και φυσικά για το Άνραν-Σέντρο-ΚΕ, για την αινότητα, και για όλα τα υπογράφματα που Άνραν-Ενστίτουτ έφυγε σε αυτή η ιδέα. Λοιπόν, ξεκινήσαμε. Η αγγή της δημιουργηθείς είναι, ποιος είναι το σύστημα που είναι εξαιρετικό για την ανθρώπιση του ανθρώπισης και του προγραμμού. Είναι το καπιταλισμ ή αν το καπιταλισμ, σε ένα σπίτι ήταν το σύστημα που έκανε αυτό το προγραμμό, είναι τώρα ένα καπιταλισμό, ένα ομπστακλό που δημιουργηθεί στο σύστημα, και αν δημιουργηθείς, είναι υπογράφει ο άλλος σύστημα, είναι υπογράφει ο άλλος σύστημα να οργανωθεί την οικονομία ή να οργανωθεί τη σωσία που μπορεί να βοηθήσει καλύτερα κοινωνία. Λοιπόν, ξεκινήσαμε με τον Άρων. Ευχαριστώ, Νικός, ευχαριστώ, Άζι. Ευχαριστώ για την οργανωθή σας και ευχαριστώ, Ασκέλη, για να κάνω αυτό, λοιπόν, ευχαριστώ. Είχα πρώτα πρόκληση που πρέπει να μας εξηγήσουμε είναι, εópυγε σημείο, όχι όχι με σημείο, Alors it's great to hear this from a time is coming. But tonight you weren't among us as you were under the stand. What leads to progress? If we're taking as an assumption, we all agree that progress is good. and you know, let's assume, we agree that we're talking about the same thing, when we talk about progress, maybe we'll dig into that later. But let's assume that human well-being, standard of living, quality of life, και κάτι που θέλουμε να δούμε στον κόσμο στην οποία είμαστε, όταν η πραγματική είναι, πού έρχεται αυτό. Γιατί, πραγματικά, δεν ήταν το κόσμο της ανθρώπης, για πολλές φορές της χρόνιας, η ζωή της ζωής, η ζωή του Βουδίου, η ζωή του Βουδίου. Δεν ήταν πραγματικό. Δεν ήταν πραγματικά, πραγματικά, πραγματικά, με λίγες εξεπτώσεις εδώ και τώρα, μεταξύ των πραγματικών πρόσφυγων και εξεπτώσεις, αλλά όλοι η ζωή δεν υπάρχει, η ζωή της ζωής ήταν πραγματικά, για τέτοιο χρόνια, για την ζωή του Βουδίου, δεν ήταν πραγματικά πραγματικά. Λοιπόν, η πρόγραση είναι ποιος πραγματικά είναι. Και θα πω ότι πραγματικά είναι ένας προς της ανθρώπης. mieχρι种Rednerwechsel για supposed its is a consequence of innovation. It is a consequence, a consequence of entrepreneurship. It is a concept of people taking scientific ideas and making the realed in the world. We saw that in the beginning of the industrial of the celebration, αφού που τίχαν προσπαθεί όλοι οι ιδιότητα, φανειάζονται ότι οχ του οικονομικούς ανόλοodziο εστείοκαν,δεν μιώδουν υπήρες έργα, γευναίκες πρόσπροι και χειρότερα, όλοι και και να αφού θα αφήσουν δεν θα Τ collaborated αυτή υπάρχουν βάση τύπος, όχι τρόπος, όλοι και τρόπος, το είχες αλλάκανθαι, μόνο το αυτά που αφήρανται είναι ότι να αφήρανται, να αφήρανται και να παρέχουν και να αφήρανουν, η δύο φοινήκες που κάνουν άνατομα σύζυγουλο, έναν εργασία που έχουμε φέρει και ένα αστήδιο και δύο φορές εργασίας που έχουμε βρήνει... και δύο φορές εργασίας που κάνουν, πάω ένα μέλλον εργασία που δίνει αυτό φορά strawberry, μόνο ένα αρκείο hoped από τον στιγμή Χρόνο... η σύζυγη είναι ο στήδος μας, το επεκειvoorbeeld της σύζυγης. Αλλά η σύζυγη είναι η μόνο διαδικασία, ό ours είναι το μόνο της έγωσης και όσοι θα διαβαίνουν και θα ανοίγουν, Και βρισκόμαστε η δυνατότητα, η λόγωση δεν είναι κάτι από τα δημόνια. Δεν μπορούμε να δούμε για ένα μεγάλο, δεν υπάρχουν μεγάλο στραμύδι. Δεν μπορούμε να θέσουμε για ένα another, δεν υπάρχει κάτι από την δυνατότητα. Είχοι μας πρέπει να κάνουνε την σκοτή. Now, it is true that we benefit from one another. We build on past knowledge, we build on other people's knowledge. But the thinking must be done by the individual in order to progress and indeed the other idea that comes out of the enlightenment that makes all this possible is the idea of individualism, the sanctity of the individual, the importance, the moral importance of the individual's life. As the Declaration of Independence, the American Declaration states, each individual has a moral right to pursue his happiness, his happiness. So the two areas of reason, ability to think, ability to understand the world, and the idea of living for oneself, these are the things that made progress and success possible. And their political manifestation is capitalism. Capitalism is the political manifestation of a human society based on reason and on individualism. The fundamental notion in capitalism is that individuals are free to think and therefore to act on the basis of their thoughts, to innovate and then create based on those innovations. To fail, to suffer the consequence of the failure, to learn from it and to rise up and build again. The idea is that individuals are free, free of the one enemy that reason and individualism have. The enemy of reason is coercion, force, dogma, authority. Somebody telling you you have to think it a particular way. Somebody telling you you have to come to a certain conclusion. Somebody telling you you cannot do that. We don't allow it. We don't like it. Somebody regulating your actions and your thoughts. That's the enemy of reason and ultimately the enemy of individualism and their pursuit of happiness. Somebody telling me what my values must be and if they're not, is free, you know, is able to curse me, not to pursue my values. That's the enemy. Capitalism is the system of individual rights. That is the recognition that as individuals who are free to pursue our rational values and freedom in this context means free of coercion, free of authority, free of force. And indeed, every society that is practiced, that is allowed for this freedom, that is restrained coercion, restrained force, restrained authority, has done well. Not as well as I'd like it to be because no society has ever done this perfectly. There have been a variety of degrees, but always to the degree that a society is free in the sense, to the degree that individuals are left free to use their mind, to pursue their own values, to pursue their own happiness, to pursue their own life. Those societies, individuals telling to be successful, they tend to create material wealth and they tend to create spiritual wealth. Now, what is the alternative? Well, there are a variety of different alternatives and today we're debating one, Marxism. And I'm going to obviously simplify what Marx said because I've only got four minutes, but the core in my view of Marxism and almost all ideas that oppose capitalism is that they undermine both of those two principles that lead to human progress. They undermine the idea of reason, they undercut it, and they undermine and undercut the idea of individualism. Individuals, since reason is a faculty of individual, these two are connected. It is not true that individuals know what's good for them. It is not true that the individual in pursuit of his own self-interest can attain happiness and attain success. It is not true that the individual should be allowed to pursue their own values. No, the individual is not framed by his own mind and his own choices. The individual is framed by the class into which he is born. He is framed by the environment around him, to some extent by the genes that he has. He is either bourgeois and therefore exploiting or polyterian and therefore somebody who's being exploited. And who has no say in that exploitation because he is what he is and he's already a polyterian and he can't change his fate and he can't change his outcome. He can negotiate better terms and therefore he must rebel against the system that oppresses him. And the only way to rebel against the system that oppresses him is to deny the ability of those others, call them bourgeois, call them whatever you want, to pursue their own values, to pursue their own happiness. Indeed, the whole setup is a setup of different groups, different collectives that have divergent interests, that have conflicting interests. Indeed, that ultimately have zero-sum interests, that the one success comes at other people's expense and that the individual ultimately should be striving morally not to achieve their own success, their own happiness, their own flourishing. But that the individual's moral purpose is to serve his class, it's to serve a group defined by the various Marxist groups defined by whatever that group happens to be. It's not to serve himself and that his interaction with other people is an interaction of exploiter or exploited, not as a trader of value for value. The assumption is of a growing pie but a growing pie where some are exploiting others in order to grow it. So I know I'll get some pushback on my description of Marxism. And in the end, just like I said with capitalism, to the extent that it's practiced, to that extent it's successful. If you look at Marxism, to the extent that it's practiced, to that extent it's a failure. The more consistently it's practiced, the more devastating the outcome, take the Soviet Union, Mao's, China and so on, all the Israeli kibbutz. And the less it's practiced, it's still a disaster just on a smaller scale. So socialism in all its forms fail in any variety and to an extreme capitalism, the more it's practiced, the more it's successful. Finally, I want to say just this and I know my time's up. What we have today is not capitalism, what we have today is a mixture, a mixture of capitalism and socialism, a mixture of statism and capitalism, a mixture of markets and heavy, heavy government regulations and redistribution of wealth. The system we have today sucks. It's no good. It's terrible. It's committing suicide. It's not going to lead to the kind of progress and flourishing and success for people in the future. It has to be re-thought. And the question is, do we move towards more freedom, i.e. towards more capitalism? Or do we move towards less freedom, i.e. towards a Marxist socialist vision of capitalism? Thank you. Thank you very much. I've seen, Astley has been dying to Marx explain why you have been wrong, so let's give her that sense. Astley. Right, so some caveats there, you said that I'm one of the best Marxists, I'm not. I'm perhaps one of the most willing. But I have to say that, yeah, I agreed with most of what you said there up until you started describing Marxism. It's not a Marxism that I recognize, but I do see that that's become what, you know, that's what people understand to be Marxism. So you say Marxism everywhere to be tried. What are we trying? What's there to try? What do you imagine Marx was saying? Did he have a blueprint for exactly how we're going to do things? You say this is how things will be organized. This is what we must do. This is how, you know, we will organize production, and this is how we will organize our relationships with each other. Well, to a certain extent, there is a little bit of meandering in some of his work, but there isn't really like people imagine that Marxism is this blueprint or this system that is supposed to, you know, an alternative to capitalism. He spent precious little time offering an alternative to capitalism. Most of his life was spent trying to understand what capitalism is. Because you can, and this is actually one of the criticisms of what existed at the time that Marx was writing, which was utopian socialism and other kinds of sort of romantic anti-capitalists and other elements of socialism and communism that didn't follow from Marxist bent. That was one of his criticisms. He said that they would sit there and try to develop this perfect social organization that most perfectly matched human nature. But there was a waste of time because you can't just imagine. Oh, wouldn't it be great if we could all ride unicorns? Wouldn't it be great if we could all have XYZ? What is possible comes out of what exists now. You can't just create a magical world totally anew. You have to understand what is going on in the world at the moment, how the system is currently structured, where it is going, what opportunities it's opening up. That is what you need to understand. And that's why Marx spent most of his life trying to understand capitalism because he was trying to understand this new world that was being created every day within capitalism. So Marxism is descriptive. It is not prescriptive. By and large, it is an understanding of what capitalism is. And what most people find kind of counterintuitive about Marx is that in many places in his work, he's actually almost giddy about the possibilities of capitalism. The possibilities put forward by capitalism. In some places he heaps praise on the bourgeoisie for accepting the task that history put into their hands by felling feudalism to the ground and creating capitalism. Because capitalism creates a basis of wealth production hitherto unprecedented throughout human history. And it allows us to create a level of abundance with very little human labor. But of course that's not its purpose. It doesn't create abundance in order to relieve us from human labor. It creates abundance through the medium of profit. So we don't reach our human needs directly. We do that through the medium of profit. And now I think what people understand when they hear Marx talking about profit or when I say these sorts of things, it's like, oh, so he thinks we shouldn't do that. Well, yes and no. That the profit as a driver of capitalist production is something that he's saying like, oh well, we shouldn't have profit. Capitalism itself abolishes its own mode of producing profit. So this is what accounts for a lot of the kind of praise that Marx heaps on capitalism at the same time as the criticism, which is really confusing and difficult to grasp for a lot of people who maybe are coming to Marx's work for the first time. So, you know, the most basic example, you can look at the Communist Manifesto, where he says, it has produced wonders that far surpassed the Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals. It has been the first to show what mankind can do. He celebrates capitalism and its productivity. But then he says, but at a certain point, this, the condition of bourgeois wealth creation starts to undermine the process or the ability to produce further wealth. It becomes a fetter on progress. And just as feudalism, once perfectly fine for meeting human needs, was burst asunder by a much more productive system, so too would capitalism eventually be burst asunder by a much more productive system. And so capitalism has this kind of forward push, this incredible dynamism that's produced through competition. So through capitalist competing with each other, they compete to drive down the costs of producing things. And part of the way that they do that is by introducing machinery into the production process. And when they introduce machinery into the production process, they push human labor out, which is actually really good for human beings. Not so great when we're in capitalism, because when you lose your job, you lose your ability to support yourself. But for human in the grand scheme of human progress, it's a wonderful thing that we've conjured forth these enormous means of production, basically like these matter machines that can produce fantastic commodities that our ancestors never could have dreamed of with so little human input. But at the same time, the measuring rod of value within capitalist society is human labor. And so by each individual capitalist raising their profit, they undermine the engine of profit, they undermine the source of profit, which is human labor. And so eventually what winds up happening is it becomes less and less, there's less and less incentive to invest. Because in order to enter into production, let's say you want to compete with Google or something like that, you have to go into the production process and meet an enormous kind of capacity. Or if you want to compete with let's say a car manufacturer, you're going to have to buy immense means of production in order to do that. But what you're interested in is a return on your investment. And it's going to take a really, really long time to recoup the cost, because over a long period of time of introducing machines into the production process, you wind up basically the cost of entering is enormous. And so what winds up happening is the avenues for productive investment get smaller and smaller. And why bother investing them? Why take the risk? Not only could you, let's say you buy some shoe factories and you want to compete with Nike. Nike, who's been in business for a really, really long time, has enormous means of production, enormous machines and so on. Why would you buy all of that? And then at the end of the day maybe never recoup the cost. Recouping the cost is going to take a really long time because the rate of profit is very low. But you may never do so because you may simply may not be able to compete. You may not be able to just compete with what Nike is producing. So why take that risk? So it becomes logical then to try and find other avenues for investment that aren't productive. And so what we've seen over the last few decades is investment in enormous bubbles. It makes sense, why would I take the risk to produce something that's actually good for human beings and human progress. I can just give loan money to students and they have to pay it back. It makes sense to do that. And this is one of the things that makes Marxism actually one of the more humanist approaches. Because his understanding of crisis, his understanding of the ultimate undermining of the engine of progress within capitalism doesn't rely on human greed. It doesn't rely on human error. It doesn't rely on people being bad or mean and nasty. It starts with the exact same premises of bourgeois economists, the rational individual. The system in its very proper functioning, even in an ideal sense of functioning just the way that people say that it should, not people making mistakes. That's what leads to crisis. So at a certain point what is a wonderful system that's very productive and produces the basis of a whole new world in which we can create with very little labor actually turns around and starts to, you know, the profit motive starts to weaken and there's less and less incentive to invest. Okay, so I think I went into way more detail than I was expecting there. But in what other way can we think about, so Marxism is an attempt to understand capitalism and what capitalism is creating. That is a basis of wealth and abundance that could provide a future in which I no longer have to sell my freedom to somebody for 40 hours a week. So you mentioned like what is the enemy of freedom, it's coercion, it's not having the right, it's being told what your value should be. Hi, I sell that, I sell my values for 40 hours a week and so do many, many more people and also more hours than that if they can get them. I can't think what I want and increasingly people are actually demanding that even outside of those 40 hours I should embody the values of my employer. It's like creeping out everywhere. And so if you have a world of wealth and abundance that is produced with very little human labor, you can have what capitalists today have. We have a small portion of the population that are able to live the life that actually all human beings can live. We have that capacity, capitalism has produced that capacity where they can work if they want to but they don't have to. All human beings can live like that. We can all work if we want to but we don't have to because automation gets to a point where it takes such little labor. Now within capitalism that's quite bad, it's quite bad for workers because you get thrown out of work and so on, it's quite bad for the overall profit rate. But it is quite good for human progress and that's why Marx is so excited about capitalism in some places in his work. But in what sense can we think about Marxism as a system? Well, it's a system that attempts to understand the movement of history. So it's historical. Marx tries to understand how feudalism, even out of feudalism, emerged capitalism and how some things that existed within that system kind of in many ways carry on into capitalism but in an obscure form. So when you were a feudal serf, you worked some of the time for the feudal lord and you worked some of the time for the capitalist, for the capitalist, for yourself, for your family. So it's obvious, you grow your produce, you see it right in front of you, you cart it over to the feudal lord, it's gone. Within capitalism that is obscured. So we have the wage relation. So you are paid the value of your labor, you are paid the value of your labor power. But the use value of your labor is that you produce more above and beyond what you are paid for. So this actually opened up an enormous realm of freedom for human beings because when you were a serf, you died a serf. When you are born in capitalism, who knows what you can become. But that fundamental kind of exploitation still remains there. We are freer than we have ever been, but we are not fully free because we still have to work a certain amount of time above and beyond what is necessary to replace our wages, to replace our means of life, whatever it takes to get us to come back into the production process the next day. But we also work a certain amount beyond that for someone else. I always say to my students, you work a little bit of time, and by the way, I also teach bourgeois economics, I don't do a one-sided thing. But when I'm teaching Marxism, I always say you work some of the time for yourself, not for yourself, but to replace your wages. And you work some of the time for the capitalist, you work some of the time so that Paris Hilton can go on a yacht. And we can have a situation in which we don't have to do that. And capitalism is creating it, and it's creating the forces of its own destruction. Not inevitably, of course, we can do all sorts of terrible things, we can move into it like neo feudalism, we can have all sorts of dystopian futures, but there is one future of possibility that is created by capitalism. And how do we see that by having human rationality, the capacity for human reason, human freedom, and having a non-negotiable thirst for wealth that we deserve. And when people say, no, you can't have that, you say, no, I see it, capitalism creates it every day and I want it, I want it all. Greed is actually good. Thank you very much, Ashley. So hopefully by now the differences in the panel are clear, so we're going to proceed in the Q&A. Just a reminder to our audience, you can ask questions via Super Chat. For the Super Chat to go through the filter of Razi, it has to be polite and it has to be a question which is respectful to our audience. Again, it takes guts to come and play in a way game and stand up against Yaron. So we have to be polite and we have to be kind. So also another reminder from next Monday, ARC UK is bringing more stuff. So we have next week the premiere of HBTV, which is the Harry Binsvanger TV. So philosopher Harry Binsvanger, who at the moment has the Harry Binsvanger letter. Now he's also going to have a TV, let's say, program in ARC UK. So another reason again to support ARC UK and also just to tell people that. Next week, the discussion of Yaron is going to be with Zubi. You probably know Zubi from Twitter and the topic is tradition, good or bad. So let's go to the first question. I also have a lot of questions here, but I'm going to give priority to Super Chat because we are happy to sell our labor to the Super Chatters as something. So Super Chat from Mario Lin. So the question, if I understand, goes to Ashley, but I also want to take Yaron's take. Are we not free because we have to work? So and I add my caveat. Does the fact that Ashley you said we have to sell our labor. Does this take away our freedom and then what is the definition of freedom for you? Let's start with Ashley and then we go to Yaron. Can we start with Yaron till Ashley takes notes? I can go ahead. Okay, let's start with Ashley then. We're not free because, yeah, because we have to work because we have to sell our labor power, our ability to work to someone. So you can be above and beyond feudalism. You can be way more like under feudalism, you were born a serf, you died a serf. Under capitalism, you can be whatever you want so long as you can convince a capitalist to pay you to be that thing. But in a world where you have let's say full automation where, you know, you're like comrade Alexa, I'd like my meals delivered at 6pm, then you can do whatever you want. And actually capitalism is creating this all the time because as the labor that goes into making something goes down and down, further and further down, the separation between yourself and your product starts to disappear. So you can make music now on a laptop really, really easily and almost anybody can do it. And of course the value of that is quite low but people do it anyway because they really love to do that. And that's that kind of freedom that gets produced within capitalism that also doesn't work within the logic of capitalism. So Yaron, what is freedom? Why is it not or is it impaired by you having to share your labor? And also, does the fact that you can create stuff for free in your laptop and put it out there for free or share it for free, does this undermine the essence of capitalism? What doesn't undermine the essence of capitalism? It comes out of the essence of capitalism. Okay, it comes outside of the essence of capitalism. Okay. So, I mean, where do you start? It surprises me constantly the extent to which people buy into the utopian notion of the Garden of Eden. I mean, this is an incredibly powerful story that has become part of the psyche. That is, there's some kind of ideal out there where managers fall from heaven. You don't have to do anything. You can do whatever you feel like doing to hell with human reason. Who needs that? That's the tree of knowledge. You don't want to eat out of that. And you just consume. You're just a consuming machine. That's not human life. That's not flourishing. That's not happiness. That's not success. That's not anything. Labor is not torture. Labor is how we change the world to fit our needs. We are a being in a particular environment. If we just plop there and rely on our emotions like they do in the Garden of Eden, we will die. That's reality. And therefore we are in a position to change the world to fit our needs to make things better. And we work to do that. Feudalism was an awful way to do that because it was zero sum and there was no progress. And human beings got stuck as was every system before capitalism. So it's not a progression of systems. It's systems that didn't work forever, for 100,000 to 100,000 years. And then we have done something that actually works. The only thing that's ever worked for human beings and that is capitalism, the successful creation. Now, so there's this fixation of machines that will just feed it to me. Who created the machines? Who built them? Now, again, Marx is completely wrong. Laborers don't create almost anything. Labor is simple. Labor is interchangeable. Labor has very little value. That's a reality. Where do machines come from? Machines come from a few particular individuals that have the imagination, the gall, the guts, the energy, the passion. To organize capital and labor in order to make their reality real. In all of the history of the last 250 years, there are very few cases where a bunch of laborers arrived in a particular place and said, okay, let's build something and built it. I mean, maybe you can find one example here and there and some commune in Spain or something, but it doesn't happen. The fact is that progress, innovation, ingenuity, technology, everything involves an individual's mind. Now, Marx is saying to hell with that. That's not of any value. The people who really create the value are those workers down there. No, those workers are basically doing what somebody had the audacity to imagine could be done. That person is not exploiting them. You could argue that they were exploiting him. I won't argue that because I don't believe that. But to the extent that anybody's getting the short part of the stick, somebody like... I was going to use Bill Gates, but Bill Gates is not a good name to use these days given his troubles. But somebody like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates created trillions of dollars of wealth in the world, created as individuals because of their ideas, because of their ability to organize, quote, labor, programmers, managers, laborists to build the machine, supply chains. They created trillions and trillions and trillions of value in the world. Some of that value was captured by labor. They got paid for everything that they produced. They got paid based on the amount that they added to the final product. Bill Gates, I don't know, got paid in a sense, $100 billion. But he created trillions. I mean, he's way underpaid, way underpaid in comparison to the workers. Any one of those workers could have been replaced. Find another Bill Gates, find another Steve Jobs, find another Larry Ellison. That's what's interesting. That's what's unique. And hopefully there'll be a question about investment because the whole view of investment is wrong. And it's not reflective of reality at all. So can I ask the panelists, we have such a good series of super chats. So instead of dialogue, let's try to give answer only to the super chats because they're really, really good. So second super chat comes from Bonnie. And the question is what in essential terms was Marxist view of human nature. And to put this question into some context. So Yaron mentioned that capitalism is the system that is in a way in accordance to human nature that we need reason and freedom in order to survive. And if I've understood well from discussions that I've had with Ashley in the past, we've had this disagreement on whether there is such a thing as human nature and whether you can build a system based on human nature. So Ashley, can you tell us what is Marx's view of human nature and how do you view the topic and whether we can build a political system based on human nature. Excellent question, Bonnie, by the way. Thank you. Okay, so Marx's view of human nature is its ability to create its own nature. So he writes, it is the everlasting nature imposed condition that man must work on the world. And in so doing we work on ourselves. We have different ideas because we create different things in the world. We are the only animals that create the conditions of our own life and in so doing revolutionize the societies in which we live. And that makes us different from animals. So that means that you can't, that's one of the reasons why you can't put forward a kind of blueprint for society. What it's going to be and kind of essential human nature and all these human requirements and so on. Because by creating things in the world, different ways of doing things, we create different ways of flourishing. What I need now to survive is fundamentally different than what people needed a thousand years ago, 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. The ideas that I have in my head are fundamentally different because we have different ways of doing things. So I mentioned feudalism for example. So under feudalism you had a fundamentally different idea of human nature. People thought it is in the nature of the serf to be a serf, it is in the nature of the king to be a king, it is in the nature of the slave to be a slave. They thought that people were just born like that because there was such a rigid kind of concentration of wealth within this class structure. It didn't really change and that's how it was. People really did appear as though people were born serf and that was like inside of them, that was their essence. But then capitalism came and blew the whole thing open and suddenly someone could be born a peasant and wind up in New York as a bear and not a bad word to use. A capitalist, something fundamentally different. So then we have fundamentally different ideas in our heads about human nature. We start to have this idea of fundamentally qualities of human beings, that we have a basis of what is it that makes us all human then? What is the essence of human beings? That question starts to pop up and we say well it is the essence of human beings to have reason. And then we have science that comes out of that and so on that you know I have a mind and you have a mind and I can show you the same thing and you're going to see it and you're going to come to the same conclusion as I do. And all of these things come because we revolutionize the way that we do things. And so you can't say oh in order to have human flourishing we need this, this, this, develop this kind of list of things and now let's create this society which hits all of these things. No, you see what's happening in the world and it is changing, it is changing and we can say well there are some things about these changes that I want to hold on to and there are some things that I want to push back against. So there is this enormous pull backward so we have a problem let's say we have a crisis, an economic crisis and there is this backward pull. You know this crisis warns us that there is something going on here, that this system is inherently crisis bound. People who want to say okay that's fine, let's default to the negative side of that, the regressive side. Who needs economic growth? Money doesn't make you happy and then there's the progressive side of that which is well hold on a second, how can we have a crisis? Why can't I eat when the crisis is that we've produced too much and not too much for human need but too much for some asshole to make a profit from. So that reveals to you that this system is not an absolute system for the creation of wealth but has come into conflict with the further production of that wealth and then we hold on to that and say I want to have that progressive side. How can we have maintained the progressive force of capitalism and these enormous means of production and how can we turn them to human ends, to human needs directly rather than indirectly which creates these problems that we have crisis and the backward motion and so on. Just to make sure we don't switch the discussion to the issue of crisis of capital is because I know both of you have, that could be a different episode. So Yaron, issue of human nature, so basically actually says that in a way is it that you're a bit like a central planner that you say the best societies have this and this and this and this. I don't understand the way you phrased the question. But I'll say this, human nature is, I mean Ashley hit on it in the middle there. That is that it's human beings have reason, human beings are the rational animal. I haven't thought I'll hit on this a long time ago. If we paid attention to him 2500 years ago, we wouldn't have had a dark ages. It's a negation of that idea, it's a negation of reason that leads us to dark ages and to dark means. And yes, I'm all for we have different ideas, we have different things. So yes, leave people free to do it. And you know what, if Ashley comes up with the idea that, you know, to each according to his needs from each according to his ability, then great, go found a commune and do that. That's the beauty of capitalism. The beauty of capitalism is you can start a worker's own co-op. You can start any kind of structure you want, free of intervention, free of coercion. You can do that the flip side, right? Any kind of politicization of Marxism involves somebody telling me what I can and cannot do. Somebody telling me what kind of relationship I can have with Nikos and what kind of relationship I can't. He's not allowed to be my employee, even if he wants to. Capitalism is something that when you protect people from coercion authority, you leave them free to use their mind to pursue their own values, emerges from the choices people make. It doesn't. It isn't shaped and constructed and put together. All we do from the top is protect people's freedom and then let people let whatever emerges, emerges. And if it turns out that what emerges, I mean, this would be shocking, but if it turns out what emerges is from each according to his ability to each according to his means, so be it. But I'm willing to put down everything I own as a guarantee that that would not happen. So would I though. So would I. So that's the thing is that what Marx is saying with that line is that he's actually criticizing another socialist group at the time who had put forward that as a slogan, as a demand. He says you can't just put that forward as a demand. You have to have a certain amount of development before you can ever get to that point. And it will never, but it will never just happen. It will never just happen unless we dogmatically hold on to certain values that are indeed produced within capitalism against the forces of capitalism itself. People, let's not interrupt each other because they're. So the next super chat is as if we ordered it. It's exactly on this. It's exactly on this point and it's directed to us. So the question is what's stopping Marxists from starting their own town slash societies and carrying out their ideology. Why does it appear that they need to parasitize a functioning yet imperfect capitalist society. Ashley. Sorry. Sorry. What was the end of that question? Why do we have to perish? So so basically the thing is why why do you have to expect from the capitalist to build the means of production to take them and why don't you build your own society somewhere else? Well, we tried that. And it was, you know, a constant constantly at war and constantly under destruction. One of the problems that faced the USSR was that you couldn't have. You can't just have like a little commune where everybody lives like Smurfs. That's not what that's not the idea. That's not the goal. That's not nobody wants to go back to any kind of past where we imagine that every that our relationships were with each other were fully developed. What we want to do is create a situation where the what capitalism is created by alienating human beings from the products of their labor by separating human beings. So in the past, let's say in the Smurfs, you created something and you consumed it directly. Capitalism separates you from the product of your labor. You don't consume it directly. You make a product. You have no claim to that product. It goes to the capitalist. You get wages and you buy your means of subsistence somewhere else. And so you are separated from the product. But that split allows them to come back together in a higher form through development of technology and so on. So as I mentioned before, you were split from making music or whatever. Maybe that's a bad example. But and then it comes back together in a higher form where you can think it and you can create it in a much more technologically advanced way that was possible before. So it's a whole movement of the entirety of the society. That's what we are trying to understand. And what happened with the USSR was they recognized that they had to have a revolution in many, many different countries. You can't have just like a little, tiny little commune where you all live like Smurfs and live in your own imaginations. It's basically suicide. There had to be some kind of global movement or else you would never be able to move beyond capitalism. You would have to trade with outside countries. Those countries would still be capitalists. Therefore you would maintain the money form. And so all of the contradictions of capitalism would be maintained. And so there one there isn't some wonderful utopia that I have dreamed up in my mind or that Marx dreamed up in his mind that could just be put into place in some little village. It is about the whole movement of society and about trying to take control of that movement and try to direct it toward human ends directly because right now it is indirectly. We don't produce directly for human need. We produce for profit and meet human needs in that way. But if there are needs in the world that can't be met profitably, then those needs will go unmet. If there are problems in the world that we can't deal with profitably, we like climate change for example, then we can't deal with that issue. And the idea is that we have the ability to do all of these things. We have the ability to deal with all sorts of problems, but because we deal with problems indirectly, we can't deal with them. And so the idea is it's trying to understand the whole movement of history and trying to direct it consciously to human ends. It's not an idea of us all living harmoniously with each other. And one thing that I wanted to mention too is that it's also about the freedom of the individual. It's not about living for each other. Right now I live for other people. That's what I do. I live for, I am part of a production process that is very much entwined with other people. I spend whatever it is, I mention it for 40 hours a week or more if they can get me to, to live for someone else. Someone else's needs, someone else's things that they jumped up. I want to live for myself and not having to be involved in wage labour eventually. The abolition of wage labour, which seems to be the natural process of capitalism by removing human beings from the production process, will eventually free us to do that. So it's about the whole movement of history and to free the individual as Oscar Wilds said from that horrible necessity of having to live for other people. Yaron. I mean, this is magic thinking. I mean, this is the negation of reality, integration of reason. Technology just happens. It just appears there. Machines are going to produce all our goods that are just there and I'm going to be able to do whatever they want. It doesn't just appear there. It comes down as a process of countless competitions. You're going to have to get any of this. You're going to have to create values. You're going to have to create values for other people and they're going to be all kinds of ways in which you do that. All kinds of voluntary associations that you're going to create with other people in order to produce values on different scales. And if, and different people produce different sizes of values, different quantity of values, different importance of values, different, you know, both spiritually and materially, this is going to be different. They're going to be able to afford different things. It's not. And this idea that all our needs are going to be produced automatically is absurd because all our needs have to be produced by somebody. Yes, we can build a machine for need one, but need one only creates 500 other needs that then we have to build machines to create them. Somebody has to build those machines. Somebody has to have the idea of how to build those machines. Somebody has to write the music in order for you to make a living off of their music. Somebody has to buy that music. Somebody has to be a value to somebody. That's all capitalism. None of that. None of that is Marxism. All of that depends on private property. Marx explicitly says that communism is the abolition of private property. He's for the abolition of private property and property. Because capitalism abolishes it itself. But it doesn't. That's all complete nonsense. That's not what capitalism is and it's not how capitalism has evolved and it's not what we're seeing. Okay, so where does automation come from? I'm just curious. Where does automation come from in all of this? What's the driver of automation? The driver of automation is profit, but automation doesn't destroy jobs. That's bizarre. There are more jobs on planet Earth today than in any point in human history. And yet there's more automation today on planet Earth than ever before. And I will, again, bet anything that in 50 years with all the robots and everything else, there will be more jobs. There'll be more work in 50 years than there is today in spite of all the robots. So automation only creates more opportunities to create and to build and to make in a variety of collaborative efforts. And I consider cooperation and a business of wage labor, a collaborative cooperative effort. That's only expanding. It's not going to go away. Machines are never going to produce the things that you need. Human beings are always going to have to add something to make those machines happen. They're going to have to fix the machines, program the machines and everything else. That's quote labor. Labor of the mind, not labor. So what we're eradicating is physical labor. That's a beautiful thing. Absolutely. And we're starting to eradicate certain types of mental labor, but that only frees us up to do other kinds of labor. We're always going to be working, always going to be do something productive, but only, only within the context of capitalism. Again, capitalism is a system that says that you do what you want to do and it leaves you alone to do whatever you want to do. If you want to go back and be a subsistence farmer, get a plot of land and you can connect with the products that you sow, you can eat. You can do that under capitalism. Nobody stops you. You're not wage slavery because you can stop being a wage. You can start your own business. You can go and be a farmer. You can do a million different things with you. How would I buy the land to be a farmer, though? Capitalism has provided you even with that. You can get a mortgage. By the way, all those laborers who are today laborers used to be farmers. Labor never existed until capitalism. Capitalists created labor. It's entrepreneurs who created labor. There's no labor without entrepreneurs. They created labor in relation to the capitalists. We have three more to say this. I think it's wrong to whitewash the USSR and pretend that it was somehow engaged. The problem was war. I'm not whitewashing the USSR. I was just mentioning that it has to be. It was doomed. It was forever doomed by the fact that it could not. You have to press everybody because in a small group, a suicide, then they look outside and they see people doing better than them. You have to make everybody miserable in order for people to accept the misery within communism. That is the reality. Yes, it has to be international because it can't be localized because it's a failure local. No matter the size, it's going to be a failure. Can I just clarify one point? It's not that people aren't going to have jobs. It's that the rate of return on investment gets lower over time. There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence. There are finance professors. Believe me, there's no evidence of that. I mean, if you'd invested in Amazon, you wouldn't say that the rate of return on investment is low. Indeed, if there is a rate of investment that's low right now, it's because of a lack of capitalism. That is the reason they return. I mean, it's obvious. Why is there a lack of capitalism? Why is there a desire to move away from these inductive forms of investment? Sorry, if you talk away from capitalism, there's a desire away from capitalism because Marx, like Christianity before it, rejects the fundamental assumptions that make capitalism possible. That is, there's a rejection in our society of reason and individualism. And there's this idea that we can centrally plan an economy. So there's no crisis of capitalism of overproduction. It's never happened. No economist actually thinks that. That is bizarre. And there is no problem of lower-term investment. The problem is that there are not enough of ideas. And the reason there are not enough ideas is because if I have an idea today, I have to get permission to start a company. So I have to get permission to apply the idea. So whole realms of human innovation have been segmented off because of statism, because the state has become the regulator of human ingenuity and human ideas and human innovation. So more... Wait, wait, wait. I wonder why. Sorry, people. Wait, sorry, people. We have three more superstars. They want power. Exactly. See, you have to fall back on something about human beings. You see? So it winds up being... Human beings have bad ideas, needs them to make bad choices, which leads them away from power. So you throw out the human subject. You don't actually believe that people are capable of freedom, because they think it helps. I believe in people are capable of freedom, but I believe they need to be... That's the only way you can explain why things happen. It's always by bad people. Sorry, people are kids. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You have to... You know? Sorry. You want a deterministic history, which is what Marx is. I don't believe in determinism. It's not determinism. There are many different ways that things could go. I didn't say... Definitely going this direction. Marx didn't believe that. I didn't say that we're definitely going to socialism. I actually said that there are many different paths that could actually happen if we don't... Okay, sorry, sorry. I have been... Sorry, sorry. We have three more superstars in three minutes. So we're going to do it battle of ideas style. I'm going to throw all three questions and you pick whichever you want. Okay? So let's respect our superstars and put their questions out there. So question number one. If my life no longer benefits others, ask Fabian. Is it still okay? So basically, if I understand it, this means... Is it okay to live for yourself or does it go against something that Ashley said? Second question. If there were no employer slash capitalist, what do you think people would be doing to survive? Farming, hunting or hunting, gathering? To what era do you want civilization to go back to? Next question. Is it possible that people find meaning and purpose in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning and purpose in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Is it possible that people find meaning in being productive at their work? Είχαμε τρύπωση πολύ στον κόσμο, θα εινάμευω, όπως σε σχέση μας, να συμβουλήσουμε όλα αυτά τα ερώτητα, σε όλα τα μόνος που έχουμε δεύτερος. Λοιπόν, προσπαθήστε να είτε πιο σκοτή και προσπαθήστε να... Προσπαθήστε με εγώ, γιατί όλοι οι ερώτητες είχαμε δεύτερος εδώ. Προσπαθήστε όλοι που θέλεις, αλλά προσπαθήστε να κοβάσετε όλοι. Είναι καλό να κοβάσετε για εσένας, ναι, αυτό είναι το σκόλ. και να δημιουργήσεις τα προπελόσεις που μπορούμε να κάνουνund να βλέπεις το χαρόμα που υποσδές εγωγητής χαρακρόμενασης, για να κοιμηθήσουν το πρόλογείο Allies και τη γνωρίζοντα και τίποτα διότι δεν είναι ο σπίτι γνώρισης από το χαρακρομενικό διότι είναι ένα πρόλογετο, αλλά το γιαδομα θα είναι ναι να γινέ αυτά για εσάς να δημιουργήσουν να εγώμε σε άλλες, όπως είναι το οποίο κάνουμε. Αν υπηρε restω μία Keep the entire Product of our Labour we would be working towards a situation where which is what Capitalism's a capitalist experience right now they can work if they want to but they don't have to. That would be how everyone would live you could work if you want to but you don't have to, so you can be, you can spend, you know a certain part of your day being a machine tender and think up new, new kind of και νέα οδηγή, νέα ασφαλή, και καταστήφη, νέα ασφαλή. Και ποιοί να κάνουν αυτό όλα αυτή την ώρα, όπως βλέπουν, δεν υπάρχει αυτοί διότι είναι αυτοί διότι να γίνουν αυτοί, παρακτώ projet που διότι ώρα, γιατί γίνουν αυτοί, και τώρα να κάνουν είναι να γίνουν αυτοί. Αν μόνο, δεν είναι τίποτα που θέλω νομιουργία. Είμαι πιστεύησης να είτε ότι μπορείς να δοκιμήσεις, αλλά δεν θα έχεις να δοκιμήσεις, Εντάξει, αν θέλεις, μπορείς να είσαι τίποτα. Υπάρχονται δημιουργίες και δημιουργίες. Ναι, πολλές άνθρωποι κάνουν, πρέπει να εγγραφήσουν τους άνθρωποι. Νομίζω ότι αυτό είναι λόγος γιατί εγγραφίες και μουσικούς, γιατί they get to do something that is fully creative and they really enjoy it. ίσως οι άνθρωποι βάζουν να είναι like human traffic and that kind of thing. Αλλά πρέπει να εγγραφήσουν τους άνθρωποι, because at least we imagine that they are doing something that they love, whereas most people are not really able to do that. Εάν δεν υπάρχει τίποτα, δεν υπάρχει τίποτα. Δεν είμαστε προσφασίδες από τη θερρατική αγγραφία. Υπάρχουμε τίποτα δημιουργίες και τίποτα, που δημιουργούν την αγγραφία και δημιουργήσουν τους άνθρωποι. Υπάρχονται δημιουργίες και δημιουργίες, but generally you have to work and most people, if you didn't have that coercion, you'd be doing something pretty different with your life. Θα εγγραφήσω τι είναι η δημιουργία της αγγραφίας, but if I don't work I'm gonna die. Ευ 듯 έχουμε τη δημιουργία, which is a natural state of man if they don't work, you die.útρα красивο αυτό tabii εκεί, no because I can't even speak about capitalism if you look at it... you can add, for example, the grapes of wrath. These people, when they got thrown off their land, they kept looking at the land saying, Look, there are orange trees over there. Why can't I just eat the oranges? And they were like... Somebody planted those. Somebody put in labor into those houseplants Δεν έτυχουν πραγματα. Μετά από τα ποιομένα, δεν υπάρχει αρχτές πο mythology κομμάτις. Αυτή η μηχανή εξαιρεία που μιλος πρέπει να φύγει. και διολογικά πράγματα και ψήματα που συμβαίνουν. Είναι πιο εξαιρ tér ηλίσταση των ζωήων ανθρώπων. Μερείον ήταν επίσης συμβαίνει 150 χρόνων, αλλά μόνο όταν πρόσφυρες πρέπει να μην θέσης να γναίσει αυτή αυτή η πίσία, να λυτεμούν, να σηκωθείς και όταν διόμενοει μια πτυπική αρτητισμία. Δεν είναι η ανθρώπη υπολούν. Η αρτητισμία μας ομίζει να υπο ακούνες. Αλλά για να αναγνωρίζω κάτι, Μαρκς ευκεισίου έφαναν μικρότητα ορίστασης που ανιμετωξύμουν για να ζουν για τους ευρωποίες. Εάν εσείς κομμάτισται, read a powerful essay that he wrote, My favorite piece that the Marx wrote, it's on the Jewish question, Where he lamborassed the Jews for what? For living for themselves? For pursuing their own war being? For pursuing their own monetary war being, which he considered evil and horrific and his accusation against the Christians, γιατί they were coming too much in pursuit of their own well-being. So no, there's nothing in Marx other than his ultimate utopia, where everybody lives for themselves because everything is available labor-free. There's nothing in Marx that suggests that you should live for yourself. Indeed, he recognized the fact that in the transition to this ultimate utopia, many people would have to be killed, many people would have to be eliminated, read his letters with angles, where they talk about different people in different classes and what needs to happen to those classes. In those letters, I bet that's literally the only thing that people like you read. He says those people are going to kill each other. In the transition too. And so liberal said the exact same thing about Nazis and communists, that they're just going to kill each other and we should step back. Not a nice position to have, but that's something. No, it was the inevitable, the inevitability of history was going to be that in order to achieve the utopia, certain people had to die. Because in the name of the politicians. He literally says that these two warring groups were going to kill each other off and then he says good riddance. Yeah, I mean, okay. Yeah, and then you like, I don't know. He says more than that and there's more than one matter. But look, if this associate violence for Marxism is wrong, Marxism necessitates violence because it doesn't recognize the rights of the individual to live free based on his own values, based on his own choices. It forces the individual to live under a certain context. The abolition of private property is about abolition, not the phasing out of private property. The abolition, which means the taking away of private property, the taking away of people's hard work, of taking away the people's innovations, of the creation of people's minds. It necessitates violence. Marxism necessitates coercion and violence. And the idea that it is coercive, that the coercion involves, I have to work, is ridiculous because the state of nature in which man lives is that he has to work in order to survive. He has to work in order to survive. But he has to, within a particular context, the ability to work directly for yourself was taken away historically. Nobody took it away. There are plenty of people who subsist as farm around the world. There is a process of primitive accumulation. Plenty of people. Have you never heard of indigenous people around the world? Your ability to live off of the land was taken away. Literally, people were taken off that land. Most people left the land because there was so much... 99% of people left the land because there was so much more opportunity elsewhere. But because capitalism created opportunities for people to live a much better life than the really awful life of indigenous people. So the people, for instance, who were taken, who were caribou hunters, taken as that own dire fisherman. Sorry, we have more superstars. You know what that would be? I mean, all people were indigenous people once, and people have chosen to give up the poverty of subsistence living in order to advance. You're just making things up. It's just literally not what happened. Anyway, by the way, I don't think there's any disagreement that Yaron would not approve of people being kicked off their land with violence or someone taking their land. So I think this disagreement is not very substantial. Okay, two more superstars. Actually, three more superstars, and then we're done. We had an hour. We can't go indefinitely, guys. Okay, three more minutes. We finished at 10 past, solid end at 10 past, and please don't interrupt each other. So the state blocks ingenuity, so we have not seen the amazing results if government got out of the way. Super chat from Gullwings. Ashley, for the people that will be sitting on there, who will feed them? Will others be forced to provide for them? And the emphasis here is forced to provide for them. And last super chat. Marks also mocked Mark Steerner for his quote egoism. Let me comment here. Mark Steerner's egoism is to be mocked. So he's really bad. Don't confuse Steerner's egoism with Ron's egoism. Okay, so basically there's one question there. What if the people who sit on their couches, does someone have to be forced to feed them? What if they don't want to feed them? No, so the idea is that that will never happen until the productive forces are developed and advanced enough. It's not like you'd be like, okay, now we're at a point where everyone just sits on their asses. And by the way, there are loads of people in the world who sit on their asses right now. They can work if they want to, but they don't have to, and lots of people don't. And who feeds them? I do. I do when I work. I work a certain amount of time for myself and a certain amount of time above and beyond what I'm paid in wages. If I weren't the case, if I cost more than I make for the employer, I would be fired. So that's what I do. I already work for people who don't work. They can work, but they don't have to. And so that would never happen until we get to a point where the productive level... I'm sure that we're at that point right now if we had sorted out some way of organizing production without the law of value. And we have never sorted that out. We do not have an alternative. There is no alternative to capitalism. I will agree with that. Everything that we tried, every time we tried to overcome capitalism, we failed. But that's the thing, is that Marxism isn't like, oh, well, let's just go do this other thing, that it's an alternative. I think this is why people are sometimes very confused by me. I can sing the praises of capitalism, because I don't think that I need to tell people capitalism is this terrible system in order to overcome it. What terrifies me is that capitalism is going through an extraordinarily destructive phase. It is destroying the basis of its own wealth creation. And there is nothing to replace it. To restore the profit rate, we can do all sorts of things. We have a very destructive crisis right now. People go out of business and you can buy them up, you know, cheaply and so on. But you can also have war. You can like flatten two continents and build them again. That's really... That restores the profit rate. That's what scares me, that there is nothing to replace it. Okay. Thank you, Ashley. Last word to Yaron. We went over time. This shouldn't happen again, but the discussion was too interesting. Yaron, your final word. Thank you. I'll just say, you know, a big disagreement here is the labor theory of value. I think workers get as much, if not more, than what they should get. And certainly they get as much as what the alternatives provide for them. I think that business owners, middle managers, all the people that Marx likes to condemn as properly paid, at least in a capitalist society, granted, we don't live in one right now. But generally entrepreneurs underpaid, not overpaid, if anything. The idea that Steve Jobs made too much money or Bill Gates made too much money is absurd, given how much they contributed to labor. How much? Because they created labor. There was no labor without them. And yes, I agree with this with Ashley. I too am worried what we're heading. We're heading towards some kind of feudalism, a state-controlled, so-called state-controlled capitalism, which is not capitalism, but another form of socialism, whether it's fascism or socialism, or how you want to define a feudalism, or how do you want to define it. We're heading in that direction. There's no question. We're heading in that direction because of people not understanding what capitalism is and the virtue and beauty of it. And because capitalism is constantly being undermined in our political system. And I think the reason for that is is because we the capitalists have not done a good enough job defending it and explaining it. And that the anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-egoism philosophies out there are so deeply rooted in our society that it's hard to unroot them. But that is our job. Our job is to unroot those and get rid of those ideas so that we could have capitalism. And capitalism doesn't get replaced. It is the system that exists forever and under which we all flourish and under which we all achieve some kind of utopian or perfect existence one day. Okay, let me wait. They're trying to explain. Can I just agree with Einrand on something? That people are actually observing something real happening in the world. They didn't just conjure up these ideas out of nowhere and be like, oh geez, you know, why don't we like go back? Why don't we... They're seeing something happening in the world and they're trying to explain it. And they're trying to explain it in a context where there is no alternative. We can't go forward. Let's go back. They, I agree with you. They are the enemy. But they are... These ideas don't just come out of nowhere. They exist in a context. People are actually trying to explain something in the world. I agree with you. There are lots of problems in the world today and people are trying to explain them. But that doesn't make the explanations correct. Most of the explanation, 90% of the explanation, are wrong, are corrupted. And they're corrupted by very, very fundamental ideas that are part of... What are they trying to explain? They're trying to explain the progressive stagnation of capitalism and the fact that it has a powerful, backward, that the world just doesn't seem to be happening. That the historical rate of profit is tending to zero. Sorry, people. You're talking over each other. So let me finish on a positive note. So I'm very thankful overall in my life to both Ashley and Yaron, because for people who know me, know that me hanging out with Ashley many years ago was the turning point for me being a boring, misanthropist, new leftist. So that was the starting of my journey. And then that journey, you know, when I came across Yaron, it led me where I am today. Don't blame me for that. Oh, your fault, Ashley. So I'm very proud. I'm very happy with today's discussion. I hope that people enjoyed it. So many thanks for the superchatters. Thanks to Raj for organizing it. Thanks to the Andron Institute for supporting it. Thanks to Ashley for showing up and facing Yaron in this discussion. And I hope people got some value out of it and got some food for thought. Many thanks to both. Many thanks to our viewers. All the best. Bye-bye. Thanks, guys.