Today we continue a series of discussions about the basics of Marxism, a method for understanding and

changing the world used by organizers, activists, scholars, and many of the great revolutionaries

of modern history. Our topic for this week is agriculture under capitalism. Under this system, the most basic necessity of

life, food, is turned into a source of profit dominated by a smaller and smaller number of agribusiness

corporations or monopolies. Environmental destruction and enormous waste are built into the capitalist agriculture system,

while hundreds of millions around the globe go hungry, and while environmental destruction is all around us.

We need a new system. We need a new society. We need to demand that which may have sounded impossible even a few weeks ago, but is not

only realizable, but an imperative necessity. Deepening unemployment, a looming wave of evictions, massive and widening inequality.

There's no denying it. Capitalism is in crisis and capitalism is the crisis.

We are excited to have Professor Richard Wolfe join us for our regular weekly segment where we talk about the biggest stories related to the economy, the state

of the working class, and the crimes of big business. I'm your host, Brian Becker. The Socialist

Program brings you content three days a week thanks to the support of our patrons at patreon.com

forward slash the socialist program. We appreciate all of your support and encourage you to

become a patron today if you enjoy or depend on this show. Richard Wolfe is the co-founder of

the organization Democracy at Work. He's the author of many books. The latest being the sickness

is the system. When capitalism fails to save us from

pandemics or itself, you can check out his work at rd-wulf.com, and that's R-D-W-O-L-F-F.com.

Professor Wolfe, welcome back. Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here.

Professor Wolf, we're talking about Marxist categories,

and so I want to do a little bit of our show today about what Marx and Engels actually had to say

about agriculture, about nature, about the environment. Their ideas were widely misinterpreted, misunderstood, or vulgarized in terms of

their understanding of the relationship between human society and nature. In the last 10 years,

...