You know most people, especially if you get into more privileged strata in society, they just think things are there. You go to the grocery store, of course the shelves are full of things. Or you go to a video games store, of course there are video games there. You go to the mall, of course there are all kinds of stores with all kinds of stuff. But where does all this come from? How many people really think about where this comes from and how all this takes place? People just assume these things are going to be there, because somebody else, somewhere else, is doing all the work to produce all those things. And the question: What is the way in which that gets done, what is the mode of production through which all this takes place?—people don’t think about that or have no real understanding about that. But it’s fundamental, if you think about it.

There was a movie made a while ago—I didn’t see it, unfortunately, although people said it maybe wasn’t that great artistically, but it was making an important point. The title of the movie was A Day Without a Mexican. It was making the point: What if all the Mexicans, who are always slandered—and now there are people like Donald Trump aggressively putting out this slander—what if all those Mexicans stopped working for a day? What would happen? Well, you can expand that and say: What if all the people, all over the world, who produce and distribute all these things that people use every day, stopped working for a day or a week or a month? All of a sudden, people would say, “Hey, what the hell’s going on, the shelves are empty!” So this is something that is basic to society, not only that things get produced but how they get produced. What relations do people enter into in carrying out the production of things? In other words, we’re back to the relations of production, what relations people enter into in producing and distributing and transporting these things. Another way to say that, once again, is what’s the mode of production through which all this is done? That sets the basic terms for everything that happens in society. It isn’t everything that happens in society, but it’s the foundation and sets the basic terms for everything that happens in society. If you think about it, that’s pretty obvious, for the same reason that this movie was made. If people stopped producing those things, everything would grind to a standstill.

And if you try to do something in society that’s basically out of line with the mode of production of the existing system, then either you’re going to fail—or you’re going to have to make a revolution. So, more thinking should go on, more work should go on: Why is this true, that through which mode of production is the most important, the most fundamental question—not the only, but the most important and the most fundamental question—to be posed? When you’re taking up any kind of question in society, any form of oppression, anything that you feel needs to be changed, the most fundamental question is what is the mode of production that’s setting the basis and the ultimate terms and the ultimate limits for what can be changed and how?

As I have said, we’ve got to do the work—and, by the way, I’m not gonna do all the work here. A good part of what I’m doing here is posing questions which we’ll dig into, because we all have to do this work, and it’s no good if we have an attitude that somebody else, somewhere else, will do the work and we’ll just follow along. Everybody has to dig in and work on these things. If we are going to be serious, we all have to do this work. Yes, some of us have been at it longer, have more experience and have developed in certain ways to be able to do this, but we all are capable of doing this and we all have to throw in fully and do it. So, an important part of what I’m going to be doing here is posing questions. And this is a big question: Is it true that through which mode of production will any social question, including the oppression of women, be addressed, is the most fundamental question? And why is that true? I said a little bit about that, but I want to throw it out as a question for people to grapple with.