Who Gets the Surplus? Richard Wolff on What Marxism Actually Measures

The episode opens on a formula Richard Wolff treats like a law of motion. Slaves produce a surplus the master takes; serfs produce a surplus the lord takes; employees produce a surplus the employer takes. "It's very simple," he says. Those arrangements are exploitative class structures because one group produces extra and another group, standing outside production, appropriates and distributes it. The hostility, envy, and resentment that follow are what Marxists bundle under class struggle.

Lex Fridman frames the conversation as an attempt to study Karl Marx rather than to weaponize the words. Marxism, socialism, and communism, he says, are used in American life to attack and to divide much more than to understand, a sensitivity sharpened by his own family history in the Soviet Union, Russia, and Ukraine. Wolff arrives as one of the leading Marxist economists and philosophers working in English. Fridman wants to steel-man the ideas people demonize and to pressure the ones they accept as dogma.

Asked what Marxism is, Wolff starts with the obvious: it is the tradition that takes its founding inspiration from Marx. Marx died in 1883, and in the 140 years since, those ideas have become a major current of thought in every country on earth. That speed and geographic spread, Wolff says, is extraordinary in the history of ideas. Because the texts met different religions, cultures, and economies, they were read differently in different places, so Marxism is, on a first pass, the totality of those encounters.

For the first forty or fifty years, that tradition was almost entirely a critique of capitalism. Marx never wrote a book about communism, and he never really wrote one about socialism either. His comments on both were occasional, fragmentary, and scattered. What he wanted, Wolff insists, was a critical analysis of how capitalism works.

The first crack in that pattern lasted a few weeks in Paris in 1871. After France lost a war to Bismarck's Germany, the government collapsed and the working class of Paris took over the city's economy and daily life. People influenced by Marx were active in the Commune's leadership, and Marx himself was only a train ride away in London. For a short time Marxism had a second quality: besides criticizing capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize a society differently. Implicit hopes had to become a sequence of decisions about what to produce, how to distribute it, and in what order.

The French army regrouped, marched back into Paris, killed a large number of communards, and deported survivors to Pacific islands in the French empire. The really large change, Wolff says, comes in Russia in 1917. Another war wrecked a government's reputation, the tsarist state collapsed, and the army revolted. A small organization, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, split under the pressure into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Lenin, Trotsky, and their allies were in the Bolshevik wing.

Lenin's public position got him arrested and exiled: Russian workers, he said, should not be killing German workers in a war of capitalists dividing the world into colonies. In the United States, Eugene Victor Debs, head of the Socialist Party, made the same argument on his own, with no connection to Lenin that Wolff knows of. Debs was jailed, ran for president from prison, and did remarkably well. Wolff calls him the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, then adds that Debs had much more political courage.

Once Marxists actually seized a state, critique had to become a plan, and much of it was trial and error. Marx had never laid that plan out, and a fifty-year-old text written for another country would not have been a manual anyway. Wolff's framework from there is a tradition with two wings: a continuing critique of capitalism, and a contested set of ideas about what a post-capitalist society should look like. If he had to reduce Marxism to one claim, it is that human society can do better than capitalism and ought to try.

Fridman asks whether Marx would shake his head at twentieth-century implementations. Wolff, noting Marx's sense of humor and his doctoral work on ancient Greek philosophy, guesses he would call some readings inspiring and others horrifying. Ideas, Marx would say, are like children: you influence them, then they go their own way. After 1917 the Soviets occupied a brief perch as the first group that had actually taken power, and their reading became "official Marxism" for thirty or forty years. By the 1960s that canon was already dissolving, but the American Cold War taboo froze it in place, which is why Wolff has spent much of his adult life explaining that the Marxism Americans take as canonical is an old Soviet version.

He walks through Marx's century. Born in 1818 and dead in 1883, Marx spent the first two-thirds of his life assembling a critique, subsidized in part by Engels, whose family were manufacturers, and working in the library as a London exile. In the last third, militant workers and radical intellectuals had accepted that capitalism was a phase to get beyond. They did not then ask what the new system would look like. They asked how to get past a system that seemed to have captured people's minds and daily lives, and the conversation closed on seizing the government.

That focus, Wolff argues, went well beyond Marx. Read *Capital*, the three-volume work of Marx's maturity, and the state is almost absent. Marx mentions it, but he is interested in the factory, the store, and the office, because he located profit in the enterprise, not in the ministries. Late in the nineteenth century, Marxists still agreed that the working class had to take the state, the ultimate guarantor of capitalism when owners call the police or the army. They split on method. Reformists, whose German theorist was Eduard Bernstein, said win elections. Revolutionaries, including Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg on the other side of that German fight, said the system is rigged.

Asked where he leans, Wolff would rather tell the historical story. Over and over, reformists have won, because revolution is frightening. His American example is the 1930s, when the country shifted further left than at any time before or since: more people joined unions in that decade than in any other, and two socialist parties plus a powerful Communist Party worked alongside them. The reformers, mostly union people, won. What they got, paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich, still structures American life: Social Security, unemployment insurance, a federal minimum wage, and a jobs program that hired 15 million people. When listeners say you cannot tax the rich, Wolff says he has to teach Americans their own erased history.

The Russian interpretation, as Wolff reconstructs it, ran like this: the state is crucial, the revolutionaries were right to seize it, and socialism is what happens when the working class holds that power and uses it to leave capitalism. Then, in a pattern he says is not unusual in human history, the means became the end. Lenin, in power only from 1917 until his death in 1923, was crystal clear. In a famous speech Wolff has published on, Lenin said, in effect, let us not fool ourselves: we have captured the state, but we do not have socialism, and we still have to create it.

After Lenin died, Stalin defeated Trotsky, who went into exile in Mexico. By the end of the 1920s the Soviet leadership declared that they *were* socialism. Capturing the state no longer enabled a further transition; the capture itself was the destination. Fridman finds that definitionally confusing. Wolff says it should not be, because the same habit lives in the United States. Ask Americans what socialism is and many will look him in the face and say the post office. Amtrak and the Tennessee Valley Authority fall in the same bin. If a government official runs it, it is socialism; if a private individual runs it, it is capitalism.

There is nothing wrong with that as a way of looking at the world, Wolff says. It just has nothing to do with Marx. Central planning, so often glued to Marxism in American talk, is a Soviet implementation. He does not think you can find a doctrine of central planning in Marx's writing. Marxism is about class, factories, and exploitation. You still have to take the leap of saying what lies beyond capitalism, and Wolff's judgment as a Marxist is that the twentieth-century attempts failed because they did not understand, as well as they could have, what Marx was trying to do.

He offers his own education as evidence of how thoroughly the question was shut down. A professor of economics, he spent ten years and twenty consecutive Ivy League semesters at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and now teaches at the New School in New York. In nineteen of those semesters nobody mentioned Marxism or offered a critique of capitalism. One Stanford professor gave him plenty to read; everyone else was silent. Paul Samuelson's canonical textbook, which trained a generation, put Adam Smith and David Ricardo at the root of a tree of bourgeois economists, then drew one little branch bending back down for Karl Marx. Two paragraphs, then nothing. Wolff's professors, he says, were afraid.

What Marx cared about, Wolff says, is the relationship among people in production: the factory, the office, the store. Something happening there had not been adequately understood or named as an object of transformation. That something is exploitation, defined mathematically. In every community, healthy adults transform nature into useful things, and they always produce more chairs, sweaters, and hamburgers than they themselves consume. Marx wrote *mehr*, "more." Translators rendered it as "surplus," which Wolff thinks was a mistake because surplus sounds discretionary, an extra you might not need. It is just output minus what the producers consume.

Once you see that, you ask who gets the extra, and the answer, Wolff says, is one of the great shapers of any society. The workers themselves could get it. That is as close as Marx comes to a definition of communism: the people who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it. Property, in this language, only ever meant who gets to decide and who is excluded. Exploitation exists when the surplus is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced it. Then he restates the opening formula: slaves and masters, serfs and lords, employees and employers.

He offers a Central Park story. You buy two ice cream cones and hand both to one child; the other howls. You order the first child to share, and a psychologist tells you that you never should have created the wound. All the familiar programs for inequality, Wolff says, are handing the cone back after the fact. The United States, in his lifetime of living and working here, is tearing itself apart over a redistribution of wealth that was badly distributed in the first place. Notice, he adds, that none of this analysis requires a theory of government. Government is secondary to the core question inside the firm.

Then comes the line that organizes the whole interview. If you make a revolution and all you do is "remove the private exploiter and substitute a government official" without changing the relationship, you can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you are missing the point. The point was not who the exploiter is, but exploitation as such. You have to change the workplace so there is not one group that makes all the decisions and takes the surplus from another group that produced it. Otherwise the project goes crooked: it cannot even see the objective it missed.

Fridman presses the human-nature objection. Leave people in a room and hierarchy appears: the clever, the charismatic, the muscular start to lead, and leadership starts to look like employment. Communism is nice in theory, the argument goes, and fails in practice because of how humans are. Wolff's first reply is historical. Every society rules out some behaviors as socially disruptive, and every economic system that has ever existed has included defenders who called it the only arrangement consistent with human nature. He has seen the claim in tribal studies, in anthropological reports, and in the literature of slavery.

Fridman tries another defense: the capitalist takes risk, aggregating an organization that may fail. Wolff refuses the monopoly on risk. He took a risk getting in a cab to the studio. The worker who moved a family from Michigan to Pennsylvania, bought a house on a mortgage, and pulled teenagers from a school takes an enormous risk that the job will still exist next year. The capitalist has a cushion; the worker often does not. In Wolff's experience of businesses, workers are not taught to demand a separate payment for that risk, and the country's low-wage sectors are being transformed from below by people whose complaint is not abstract: the work pays poorly and it is killing them.

He puts numbers on the supposed link between hardship and pay. The median wage of a child-care worker in the United States, as they speak, is $11.22 an hour. A car-park attendant makes several dollars an hour more for watching vehicles. By any measure of social importance, he says, minding toddlers at the key moment of mental formation should not pay less than guarding a sedan. Gender, in his account, explains a lot of the gap. The notion that wages equal "marginal product" he treats as a mathematical fantasy: you cannot pull one worker out of a process, hold the rest of the world still, and read the drop in output as that person's contribution. Hegel's line is that you cannot step in the same river twice.

Economics as a discipline, he adds, is born with capitalism; Aristotle and Plato never called their discussions of exchange economics. Both lived as market relations were creeping into ancient Greece, and both denounced markets for wrecking social cohesion. Plato wanted no markets. Aristotle thought it was too late, so the job was to regulate them. Wolff then describes a market as a machine for allocating shortage: when demand exceeds supply, the price rises until the poor drop out. A rich household can buy scarce milk for a cat while a poor one has none for five children. That, he says, is why Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions have such trouble with usury and with letting money decide who eats.

Fridman puts the familiar rising-tide case: much of the twentieth century's longer lives and easier days is attributed to capitalist invention and competition. Wolff reaches for Hegel. Everything that exists exists in contradiction; you will not understand a thing unless you look for the bad side of the good and the good side of the bad. Marx celebrated capitalism's technological dynamism, having lived through breakthroughs in textiles, mining, and chemistry. He does not then hand capitalism the credit for mass living standards. Capitalists, with few exceptions, have fought every effort to improve the lives of the majority. Their job is to minimize labor costs: replace workers with machines, move production from the expensive United States to cheaper China, bring in desperate immigrants who will work for less.

Every measure that helped American workers, Wolff says, had to be fought for over decades, from the beginning to now, against capitalist opposition. The federal minimum wage, first passed in the mid-1930s, was blocked at the start. The last time it was raised was 2009, to $7.25 an hour, "which you cannot live on." In the twelve or thirteen years since, prices rose every year, including 8.5 percent in the most recent year they discuss, while the floor never moved, in a period of stock-market boom and widening inequality. The nerve of a defender who then wants credit for gains workers had to wrest from the system, he says, takes his breath away.

He goes further. Long ago, capitalism could have overcome hunger and disease far beyond what it has done, and it did not. That, for Wolff, is the worst moral condemnation imaginable: you could, and you didn't. The mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is not built into the system. He then gives the arithmetic example he wants listeners to remember. A capitalist lays out $100 for tools, equipment, and materials and $100 for workers, sells the output for $220, replaces the used-up inputs, pays the next shift, and keeps $20 as profit.

A new machine arrives that yields the same output with half the workers. The employer fires half the staff, keeps everything else the same, and pockets the $50 no longer paid in wages. That extra is why the machine gets bought; the dismissed workers go home to mortgages and school fees. The alternative path, Wolff says, was available the whole time: keep every worker, pay them the same as before for half a day's work, and turn the technological gain into a half-day of freedom. Same output, same revenue, same profit; the majority is helped instead of discarded. Business schools, where he has taught, train managers to choose the profit-maximizing fork every time, and there is no democratic mechanism for mixing the two.

The alternative he wants in the foreground is old. The employees together appropriate their own surplus and decide democratically what to do with it, including whether to buy a machine and whether to take the savings as leisure, as new technology, or as new products. Late in life Marx read extensively in anthropology because he kept finding communities, including in the United States, that already organized production this way. In a country that almost universally endorses democracy, Wolff finds a stunning contradiction: there is a place democracy has never been allowed to enter. In the workplace a tiny group of people, unaccountable to the rest, whether an individual, a family, a partnership, or a corporate board, controls a vast mass of employees who neither elect them nor can remove them.

Fridman offers two familiar constraints: elected governments can regulate wages and hours, and workers can leave a bad boss for a better one, which in theory disciplines employers. Wolff grants whatever accountability those channels give, then reaches for Hegel again. Competition destroys itself. The point of competing is to beat the other firm on quality or price; customers migrate, the loser fires workers, the winner hires them and buys the used equipment. Monopoly, or more exactly oligopoly, is the product of competition, not its opposite. Every small capitalist trying to build market share is, in the impolite version, trying to become one of a handful of firms that dominate.

Fridman invokes the American dream: a broke person with a strong idea can take on Ford and GM, as Tesla did, and even become the richest person in the world. Wolff says that is like winning a lottery. Fridman objects that a lottery is pure luck, while a founder works brutally with a good idea. Wolff replies that the odds are better in the lottery. How many Teslas, he asks, do you actually notice? When a few firms jack up prices and haul in wild profits, capitalism does incentivize entry, a twist Marx would have enjoyed. That does not, in Wolff's view, cancel the one pattern common across industries: many become few.

Fridman wonders whether this picture oversimplifies by deleting basic decency: plenty of executives would not press a button that erased rivals at the cost of mass suffering. Wolff recasts the process as selection. People who cannot stand treating others that way often leave; the ones who reach the top have had to do things along the way that filter for hardness. If you do not make profit go up, you are toast. He notes that average CEO pay is now about 300 times average worker pay, and packages are still being jacked up because that is the universe those executives inhabit, after COVID, a second-worst economic crash, inflation, and talk of recession. You cannot keep imposing quiet suffering on a working class, he warns, without anger finding an outlet. In the 1920s that pattern in Germany produced Hitler.

He adds a rationality test aimed at the automobile. Forty-nine thousand people were killed in U.S. car accidents in the year whose figures had just been released; cars are the country's single largest pollutant and a vast energy sink. A well-maintained, frequent system of buses, trains, streetcars, and vans has been known for decades. Wolff once estimated a reconfiguration of public transit in major metropolitan areas at $30 billion, less than was then being sent to Ukraine, a figure Fridman doubts is still enough and Wolff dates to a few years earlier. If the climate crisis is about fossil fuels and cars, mass transit is the solution, and the country is doing nothing to make it happen. Electric cars, in his view, replace one individual car with another.

Is he worried that bringing Marxist ideas to life would trample individual freedom? No. For him Marxism is a way to enhance the freedom of the mass of people whose liberty capitalism eroded. Marx loved the French Revolution, liberalism's great triad, and the American contribution of democracy; his critique was that capitalism promised those things and never delivered. The con pulled on Americans, Wolff says, works like this: what threatens you is the government. In 2008 large numbers of people lost homes and jobs, and they blamed the state. If I were a capitalist, Wolff says, I would love this. I kick workers out of their houses and they get angry at the government; I fire them and they get angry at the senator; I laugh all the way to the bank.

Fridman asks which is worse, government or company, given two parties that look alike, a bureaucracy accountable only on the surface, and firms that can at least go bankrupt. Wolff calls them twins, literally the same people. The greatest practitioners of central planning, he says, are corporations. General Motors, Ford, and IBM buy up suppliers and customers because they hate the uncertainty of the market they pay professors to praise. Once they are big, they plan production inside the firm. American universities, in his experience as student and professor, proudly model their bureaucracies on business. Corporations want things from government; government knows that pleasing corporations is how it keeps its jobs.

He disagrees that firms feel pain more honestly than agencies. A New York-area company he knew well was built by two brothers; the dynamo took care of a sibling who, Wolff says, could not tie his shoes without help, and made him a vice president with a huge salary and a skyscraper office a few blocks from the studio. Relatives filled the org chart. Executives made mistake after mistake, blamed somebody else, and if they finally left were replaced by another person who did the same thing. They talked about it at family events. The difference that matters to Wolff is not more government versus less. It is more or less of a democratic workplace. If everyone in an enterprise had a vote, he says, they would never give two or three people a hundred million dollars while others cannot send a child to college.

Fridman asks the hardest question in the room: why did Stalinism lead to so much bloodshed, and did Marxist ideas catalyze that state? Wolff does not think so. He spent ten years with another economist writing a book, from a Marxist position, on the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and he points listeners there for the evidence. The biggest impact of Marxism on the USSR, he suggests, was what the rest of the world did in response. World War I finished off a tsarist regime already shaken by 1905 and by defeat to Japan. It was in some ways fortuitous that the small group able to seize that collapse happened to be Marxists; Kerensky's earlier government had tried and failed. The rest of the world, watching a critical movement take power in a large country, freaked out.

The United States, in Wolff's telling, went berserk: Palmer Raids, the Sacco and Vanzetti trials, a repression of the left unlike anything before. Four countries, the United States, Britain, France, and Japan, invaded, including 10,000 American troops, to try to crush the revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, a critic of Lenin and a leftist, was hunted down in Berlin and killed. Isolation and encirclement are not the whole story of the bloodshed, but they are a large part of the psychology. Stalin's later invention, socialism in one country, had no support at first, because socialism had been internationalist. Revolutions tried in Berlin, Munich, Budapest, and Seattle all failed. He was left, as the French say, *tout seul*.

The second blow was economic. Russia was poor and had depended on heavy French and German investment; that capital was cut off. Wolff sees a replay in contemporary sanctions, with the difference that today's Russia has China, a fact he thinks Washington has not yet absorbed. The third, deeper current is historical inertia. If you allocate power unequally and undemocratically for a very long time, across religion, kingship, and feudal lordship, it sticks. You can make a political or even an economic revolution in 1917 and discover that those habits have a life of their own. Stalin is figured as the originator of his situation. Wolff says he was not. He never had that kind of power. He was the product. The Cuban people, in a parallel, made Fidel Castro into a figure the baseball-playing lawyer had not been.

Fridman asks how far Marx's ideas created the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Wolff's answer is almost none. Marxism gave Hitler a stepping stone to power and nothing else; Hitler neither knew nor cared about the doctrine. The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German one, founded around 1870 while Marx was alive, and by century's end the second party in Germany. From about 1906, anyone who wanted a hearing in the German working class had to use the word socialist. Other parties did what Hitler did: they put the word in the name and then made clear they had nothing to do with Marxism, hence National, *Nazi* from the German *National*. They fought Communists in the street. The first people Hitler jailed were Communists, then Socialists, because in the two 1932 elections those parties together took 50 percent of the vote. His pitch to German manufacturers was a deal: you are too few, you need a mass base, and I am the one who can smash the left. Only people who do not know that history, Wolff says, pick up on the word in the party name.

Wolff then draws a line he wants kept clean. The socialist movement predates Marx, was always larger than Marx, and went on after his death. Marxism is a systematic, heavily economic critique of capitalism; that analysis is its strength. Socialism is a bigger tent in which Marxism figures, a broad conviction that we can do better than capitalism, the way earlier generations thought they could do better than slavery and feudalism. Capitalism, in this telling, was progress over both, and progress has not stopped. Many socialists are not even that interested in economics; they are there because of climate. Anarchists, from Bakunin and Kropotkin to Sorel, come closest to Marx's impact inside the tent, and they rhyme with socialism in their suspicion of concentrated power. Lenin even wrote positively about the withering away of the state. Russian socialists had been hunted by the government; they had no love for it.

On Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Wolff's crucial point is generational. Sanders, roughly Wolff's age, came up through Cold War America, a Manichaean taboo running from about 1945 to the present. Wolff would raise a hand at Harvard, Stanford, or Yale with a question about Marxism, which he was studying on his own, and see fear on teachers' faces, including the good ones. They did not want to say they did not know, or to look interested, because that was not good for a career. Later they told him to come to office hours. In economics the great debate is still neoclassical versus Keynesian, two camps that hate each other and can agree on keeping people like Wolff out. The result is that postwar developments in Marxism are unknown even to average American intellectuals. He has had to explain that Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist, and that Antonio Gramsci was not merely a literary critic but head of the Italian Communist Party for most of his adult life.

What the country is in, he thinks, is a slow awakening of socialism from Cold War hibernation, faster than he ever expected to live to see. Sanders had always been a socialist; the momentous decision was to run for president in 2016 from tiny Vermont and not to run away from the word. Wolff asked a high Democratic official what they thought and was told one percent of the vote. The official was wrong, and Wolff admits he thought one percent was probably right too. In honest moments, Sanders will tell you that democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s: tax the rich much more, provide much more support for the working class. When asked for examples he mentions Denmark. That is the softest socialism, and it is where a country coming out of hibernation starts. Already there are people who want to go further. Ocasio-Cortez voted to support money for Ukraine; large parts of the socialist movement did not.

He zooms out with a historian's analogy. The shift from European feudalism to capitalism took centuries, in fits and starts, until conditions were ready for a general switch. The Paris Commune lasted weeks; Russia lasted seventy years. These are early experiments, and a serious tradition learns what to copy and what never to do again. On Twitter, cultural Marxism is mostly a leftover swear word slapped onto race, gender, and bathrooms. There is a real cultural Marxism, and it is different: Lukács, Gramsci, the British intellectual Stuart Hall, and Walter Benjamin of the Frankfurt School, analyzing how capitalism shapes culture and how culture becomes a condition for capitalism to survive. Wolff notes that MIT Press published Louis Althusser in English, and also his own textbook, *Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian*. An intelligent country, he says, could have taught that tradition. Fear taught the insult instead.

Fridman asks whether decades of being a Marxist in Cold War America ever put Wolff in dark places of self-doubt. The question, Wolff says, is reasonable, and the honest truth is no, though he does not know how anomalous that is. If his wife were in the room she would say he has been tremendously lucky, which is true, and luck is never the only explanation. Denied classroom instruction, he had to learn the tradition on his own, which changed the motive: not notes for an exam, but something slightly risqué and oppositional. He always found a professor who would talk outside class, students to read with, and kind people who gave him time. The fancy schools also gave him a pedigree he can wave in a tight spot, like garlic with the devil. Americans, he says, are very deferential to that kind of prestige.

He puts the psychology differently. Capitalism struck him early as not that great a system, and nothing since has changed his mind; development kept supplying evidence. What has changed is the last ten years, more than anything else they have discussed. Until then he did a public interview or conference talk once every two or three months, like many academics. Now he does two, three, four interviews a day. There is a hunger. At the end of some talks he leans into the microphone, smiles, and says he is having the time of his life, and that is the truth. He is used to seminars of eight or nine, undergraduate rooms of thirty, the occasional lecture of a few hundred. An audience in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube is new.

His advice to students is to go for it. The conditions are infinitely better than when he had to do it, and he could do it. He has never regretted becoming a teacher, and he has never regretted being a critic of this society. The gratitude people express for help seeing what is going on is, he says, unbelievably encouraging. Many of them already thought the emperor had no clothes; they needed a fact, a piece of logic, a vocabulary. He remembers that feeling from his own teachers, and now he receives it. He is walking proof that systematically criticizing a society and sharing the critique can make a very good life.

He is not afraid of death, though he thinks about it. Death is hard for the people left; he worries more about his wife. He married at twenty-three, the same woman still. Love has played an enormous role because his parents were political refugees who met as refugees, interrupted their lives, changed continents and languages, and rebuilt. His father was a lawyer; his mother had to leave university to run for her life. As the first child he felt the pressure, never meant as harm, to achieve what had been shut off to them. His wife is a psychotherapist, and looking back he thinks he married the education his survival-obsessed immigrant household never gave him. Asked the meaning of life, he quotes Marx: life is struggle. Building a relationship with a child or a spouse is struggle; so is understanding a complicated argument and simplifying it so a student or an audience can share the pleasure. Fridman closes with the line on Marx's grave: the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.