David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

David Simon, creator of The Wire, near his office in Baltimore. Photograph: Stephen Voss/Redux / eyevine

America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.

There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.

I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.

I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.

We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?

And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.

Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.

After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.

Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.

It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.

It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.

And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.

Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.

The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.

Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.

That we've gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.

Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.

And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.

Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.

I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.

And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.

And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.

From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.

Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other people healthy? It's socialism, motherfucker."

What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.

The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother, that's socialism. You know it is."

And ... you know when you say, OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.

So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.

And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.

That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.

And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?

So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.

We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.

The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.

The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.

Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.

So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.

David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.

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Simon Schama: a man always making history | the Observer profile

Simon Schama, respected academic and popular historian. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

In a speech to an audience in London last week, the historian Simon Schama joked about why he didn't need a microphone. "My father always used to stand at the back of the room and say, 'Louder, Simon, louder.' It explains my whole life."

Loud, passionate, ambitious and above all visible, Schama is the antithesis of the ivory tower academic. He has no truck with secluded contemplation. Instead, he thrives on debate, noise and, most of all, people. When he's not on television – and when is he not on television? – he's giving radio lectures, filing op-ed pieces for various newspapers, writing about food for GQ or promoting his latest historical bestseller.

He is a prolific writer who, for all his love of the crowd, has also served his time in the study and the archives. The author of 16 books that cover territory as diverse as slavery, the French Revolution and a three-part history of Britain, he has somehow managed to make 10 major documentary series for the BBC in the last two decades. By many accounts, his latest, The Story of the Jews, is also his greatest.

A towering achievement that demonstrates Schama's finest qualities to exhilarating effect, it is at once epic yet intimate, intellectually commanding but instantly accessible. It is also tremendously moving, both as a document of suffering and a celebration of struggle.

There is a tendency when considering any historical documentary series to hark back to the glory days of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, as if it were itself the embodiment of civilisation after which the barbarians were let loose. But Schama's five-part series stands by itself without any need to invoke earlier cultural high points. It is not just a bravura piece of television, but an astonishing recapitulation of a 4,000-year story.

In 1989, to coincide with the bicentenary of the French Revolution, Schama published his first big selling book, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. No less an authority than Eric Hobsbawm praised the author for his erudition, describing the book as "exceptionally stylish and eloquent", while also criticising Schama's tendency to focus on particular individuals at the expense of a more systematic approach.

What that book demonstrated above all is that Schama is a natural storyteller. He can do analysis and sift facts, but his greatest strength lies in creating a powerful narrative out of the churning, chaotic drama of historical events. History may be one effing thing after another, to paraphrase Alan Bennett, but for Schama the job of the historian is to unearth the effing storyline that links them together.

As he says in The Story of the Jews: "We are our story." Schama said in the first episode that it was what made him want to be a historian in the first place. His own story is that he was born in the closing stages of the Second World War, on the night before the Allies bombed Dresden. He grew up in Essex and north London and his father, who had held dreams of becoming an actor, was a businessman in the rag trade. Schama once said that his childhood home was a removal van, because his father was always going broke.

But his father passed on an interest in Jewish and British history, taking the young Schama on boat trips along the Thames as he spoke about Disraeli and the characterisation of Jews in English literature. By his own account, the household was a lively and voluble place and the family were known in the neighbourhood for "overdoing it". Schama recalls his mother singing Ethel Merman very loudly at the breakfast table.

"'There's no business like show business' while I was eating my yoghurt and putting my coat on."

Schama was a precocious and talkative child, the kind proud parents liked to see perform. But at the age of six he stopped talking for a period.

"My parents liked to show me off as a little mad talker with an amazing memory. I would have to recite the Latin names of flowers. And I remember deciding to refuse them this. It was a prolonged sulk that went on and on to become a kind of brief childhood madness. I enjoyed the power certainly, but it couldn't last."

No, it couldn't. Schama was born to talk and since that brief word strike, his mind and mouth have been working overtime. He read history at Cambridge and gained a starred first, followed by stints as a history lecturer at Cambridge and Oxford before making his decisive move to America to take up a chair at Harvard.

Schama was a friend of his critic Hobsbawm and is also friendly with the late historian's daughter, Julia, for whom he speaks at her Names Not Numbers talking heads events.

"He's very gregarious, warm and intense," she says. "He feels things very deeply. He doesn't pull his punches. He thinks life is important. But he's thoroughly egalitarian – he wants to chat with anyone who comes into his orbit. I think he should be cloned. The world would be a better place."

By the mid-90s, Schama was art critic for the New Yorker, had a chair at Columbia University and had written and presented two series on art for the BBC. Since then, he's balanced his post in New York, from which he took a sabbatical to make The Story of the Jews, with making films in Britain, trailing an ever-growing army of fans in his wake.

With popularity, however, comes envy, particularly in academic circles, and Schama has not escaped the accusation that he has "dumbed down". It's a charge that he vehemently rejects.

To his accusers, he says he wants to say: "'Try it, Buster. See how unbelievably demanding it is.' Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers. I am completely unrepentant. One should not feel shifty."

With his robust opinions and emphatic delivery, Schama isn't shifty, but he isn't necessarily easy to place. A liberal, he isn't a historian of the left or right. He's not divisive like, say, his fellow TV historian, Niall Ferguson. As one observer puts it: "The liberal left like to think that he belongs to them and the liberal right think that he's one of theirs." This uncertainty was highlighted when he took up an advisory role to Michael Gove, as the education secretary set about reforming the teaching of history in schools. Schama was in agreement with Gove that history had lost its binding thread and become a series of unrelated greatest hits – the Tudors, the Nazis etc.

In 2010, he said that the way that the subject was taught threatened to cut "the cord of our national memory", explaining that "chronology is very important".

His fear, he wrote, was that unless children could be won over to history, "their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of the eternal now".

Never one to remain in her own cage, Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist, suggested Schama's role was "an insult to history teachers" and dismissed the man himself as "not only glitzy, but also cheap".

But earlier this year, after Gove published his draft curriculum, Schama delighted his audience at the Hay festival by deriding the proposals. "It's 1066 and All That – without the jokes," he quipped.

Aside from history, Schama's great passions are food, art and conversation. By his own admission, he has a magpie mind that has led him to write on subjects far divorced from his specialities. "There are one or two things I know I can't write about," he has said."DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor."

With The Story of the Jews, however, he is solidly on home turf. It's the story he's been working on and towards since he started out in academia. In an exam when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had to select between three essay titles. "I chose 'The Manor' and wrote not on feudalism but on how I remembered my Uncle Harry describing Golders Green as his manor."

He set up a Jewish reading group when he lectured at Cambridge, then lectured on Jewish history at Oxford. In the 1970s, he embarked on extensive research with the intention of writing a Jewish history, but daunted by the scale of the task, he eventually gave up. It's to the credit of BBC's Adam Kemp that four years ago he was able to persuade Schama to return to the story that has haunted the historian his whole life.

"It was not just that Jewish history was inexplicable without everyone else's history," Shama recently wrote. "It was that the history of the world was inexplicable without Jewish history." Never has this point been more persuasively argued than in Schama's spellbinding The Story of the Jews.

Born 13 February 1945 in London. His parents were Jews with both Ashkenazi and Sephardic roots.

Best of times The publication of Citizens in 1989, which made Schama's name and won him the NCR Book award.

His twin achievements at the BBC. First, the 15-part A History of Britain to tie in with the millennium celebrations and this year's The Story of the Jews, expected by many to be his greatest yet.

Worst of times It's been a story of unbroken success, but Schama has been repeatedly criticised for his Zionism, most recently coming under attack from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for making a "moral" case for Israel.

What he says "You wouldn't know it but I'm good at... singing. I have a lounge-lizard repertoire. I do a croaky Tom Waits, but need to drink and smoke more to get it right."

What they say "This book shows Schama at his best… a labour of love, as full of memorable incident as a Bellow novel and wittier than a Woody Allen movie." Journalist Daniel Johnson on The Story of the Jews, the book.

"Simon Schama is the most personable… of telly historians… he is bigger on screen than off… his voice… speaks as if to the sound of violins."

Television critic AA Gill.

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