When I arrived to the United States in 2011 my friend told me he had been at the Occupy Wallstreet demonstrations the previous week, I thought he was crazy.

“We’re new to this Country dude, why would you go there and risk your Visa like that?” - Me

“I care about this sort of stuff dude, it’s important that we stand up for what’s right” - Him

Deep down I knew that he was right, but I was too scared of The Empire to do anything like that, instead for the next few years I put my head down, worked 9-6 in New York City, paid a tonne on Money on rent, and booze, and other things, and dealt with the crushing knowledge that I was making $100,000 a year, and someone was making a $1,000,000 or more off of my back.

Rewind 3 years earlier, and I was back in Australia, I had finally stopped working for other people and I was fully funded by my own software development firm. It was actually really hard, I worked ridiculous hours (easily 12 hours a day, easily), I brought in the $70,000 a year, but it cost me a lot of my time.

The economy of scale wasn’t there, compared to the pre-built software or the established firms, it was going to take me another 10 years to get myself to a point where everyone else was working all day and I just made money off the company.

Yeah that was my goal, make money off of other people working.

I wanted to be a rent seeker, I wanted to steel from the people I forced to labor under me.

And I was determined to succeed on that path, because that’s what succes looks like in a Capitalist economy.

So let’s talk about Capitalism a bit, this system where a few (1%, 5%, sometimes 10%) of people own the businesses that employ the labor to produce what society needs. A system which inevitably leads to concentration of wealth and power for the very reasons I discussed above, that’s the point of capitalism, to gain more capital.

Well this fact of Capitalism, will be its very downfall, and Dr Richard Wolff is here on Empire Files to explain why.

The difference between Marxism and other things, is that it wants to go to the root, it is radical in that sense. It wants to see these problems Homelessness, Inequality, an economy that bounces around, a society that concentrates political power.

These recurring problems of Capitalism, Maxism says are built into the system. If you want to solve that, you can’t do that within the framework on the system, you have to face the fact that the system itself is the problem.

Which is why Marxists tend to be people who abide by the idea we can and should do better than Capitalism. We should reorganize society because that would be a better way of solving those problems.

Dialectical Materialism is the name for a point of view that says that if you want to understand the world you have to look at how ideas shape the material, but the other way too, but the two interact.

When it came to explain the problems of Capitalism, he never suggested it was the ideas, it’s the real way that people get their food, make their clothes, and live in the system.

Internal contradictions, problems it’s constantly dealing with, for a while it finds solution (Slavery, Oil, Credit), and then it eventually fails

When and where will we get to a point of internal contradiction where it begins to tremble, makes it vulnerable, and at that point if revolutionaries can see and understand what’s going on they can intervene to move to the next system. Just like rebels overthrew slavery, feudalism.