In a captivating article by
Truthout we read - "Nearly 30 years ago, many capitalists were celebrating what political
scientist Francis Fukuyama called the "ultimate victory of the VCR":
where consumerism sank communism. However, they failed to calculate the
effects of this consumerism on the environment. They also failed to
predict how the public would start to tire of a situation in which a
very small percentage of capitalists are reaping all the benefits while
the rest of us are sinking deeper and deeper into debt, poverty and powerlessness".
"Public dissatisfaction with the status quo began to spread in new
directions in 2008, feeding into the global Occupy movement in 2011, and
mass support for Bernie Sanders today. People are enraged; we feel
doped, scammed, cheated".
"An increasing proportion of the population is becoming receptive to
the messages of the professors, activists, clergy, artists and other
community organizers who have long been dismissed as "too radical,"
while the capitalist machine roars on and on. Dr. Richard D. Wolff has
long been warning the US public that the capitalist machine is one of
the biggest scams in history, and now it's finally becoming clear to the
general public".
"I sat down with Professor Wolff -- who recently retired from his post
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and who runs the nonprofit
organization
Democracy at Work -- to find out more about his work".
Question by Creston Davis: Professor Wolff, can you tell us about your
own experiences as an economist who was trained in the elite Ivy League
towers of American academia?
Richard D. Wolff:
"In the 10 years I spent from the
day I entered Harvard to the day I left Yale, in the years in the Ivy
League, I got credentialed to be a professor of economics, which is what
I've done all my adult life. I learned what is now called "mainstream
economics" and essentially, that's all I learned. Because it was the
height of the Cold War when I was studying at university, the way the
elite American institutions handled the problem of the Cold War was by
pretending there was no economics other than "mainstream economics,"
which is a celebration of capitalism".
"Mainstream economics" is divided between two strands: The first and
primary one is the pure celebration of capitalism, which is called
"neoclassical economics" for historical reasons. And the secondary
strain, which admits that capitalism has some problems,
but don't worry, they're easily fixed.
This strain is called Keynesian economics because it explains how, in
the face of the complete collapse in the 1930s, a society can get itself
out of this catastrophe.".
Question: Do you openly claim to be a Marxist?
" I don't shy away from the term "Marxist," but the truth of it is, I
insist on not shying away just as a kind of pushback against the
mind-numbing narrowness of an American academic economic dogma, which
is, to this day, unable and unwilling to confront and to cope with
reality".
Question: Do your colleagues know Marxism?
"My economic colleagues -- many of whom are anti-Marxist or
indifferent to Marxism -- what these two camps share in common is that
they don't know a thing about Marxism. It's not their fault; they are
smart, but it's been the cultural asphyxiation of open-mindedness in
American academic culture that makes them unable to think that way and
which gives me the wonderful opportunity to compare how the different
approaches deal with the problem.
So I know how mainstream economics does it, and I know how Marxian
does it, and can look and see, and pick and choose, and pull these
things together, whereas my colleagues can't do that. I can talk to them
about neoclassical and Keynesianism, but they can't talk to me about
Marxism. It's as if we didn't speak the same language. So it's very
peculiar. Nevertheless my approach to the problems of American
capitalism is starting to gain a larger readership as consciousness
begins to shift ".
Question: What are some trends that we are witnessing as a result of ignoring other ways of seeing the world?
"Back in 2008, with the catastrophic collapse from which most people haven't recovered, it's clear to see that, "Oh my God! We've got a system that's troubled!"
That's why you have a Jeremy Corbyn [as] head of the Labour Party in
England; that is why you have a Bernie Sanders blowing away the
dismissal that he would get 2 to 3 percent of the vote, if that! Despite
the media exclusion of him, more than it's ever justified, he keeps
winning ".
Question: How would you explain this?
" I mean, it's amazing what [Sanders has] been able to do, and it's a sign
... it's the audience that's changed as it has for me. I go all over
the country; I speak in a lot of places and the demand for my talks --
which, five years ago, was virtually nothing -- [now] is very high. It's
a completely different world, for me ... [due to a] change in the
mentality in the American people. Suddenly, I'm in high demand; I do
this weekly radio program broadcast in over 50 stations now across the
United States and it's growing ".
Question: You'll be teaching a seminar, "Capitalism and Socialism in the 20th Century," that focuses on your work in July at The Commons in Brooklyn, New York. What are your objectives in teaching this course?
"The 20th century was one comprised of a cataclysmic struggle between
two opposing ideologies: capitalism and socialism.... Toward the end of
the century, around 1989-1990, one of these two ideologies, socialism
collapses. The Soviet Union implodes, Eastern Europe follows in its
wake, and in China some basic changes begin to manifest in terms of
direction and orientation. China's shifts were made so that it could
become popular and competitive in the new world order, which is
globalized, unabated capitalism. Capitalism won, end of story".
"What that period and what this history shows us is that whatever else
one has to say, something about the 20th century experiment with
socialism, particularly in Russia and China, wasn't sufficient to
sustain itself. They fell apart not by being overwhelmed by a military
defeat ... rather, at the end of the day, there's something inherent in
that form of socialism that didn't work. And so, starting in 1989, this
implosion led to a series of deep questions and criticisms inside the
world of socialism to explain what happened".
"Questions such as
"What did we do wrong?" "What can we do
differently?" "What was valuable in what socialism achieved despite its
collapse?" "What was repugnant or didn't work in socialism?" And
these sets of questions have produced, in the period between 1990 and
2016, a horizon of self-criticisms coupled with new directions for
socialism in the 21st century".
"Yes, in the wake of capitalism's defeat many philosophers -- and we're talking even atheist Marxists -- started turning to the deep stories of religion in Judaism, Christianity and other religions including paganism in the early 1990s. They did this both as a way to preserve narrative in the wake of capitalist anti-intellectualism, and also as a way to create new forms of resistance to nihilistic capitalism. In the latter, the robust indeterminate meaning of existence was reduced to how much you owned materially. It was as if, in the face of socialism's defeat, capitalism's answer to the question of meaning for all human existence was found in the appallingly simple question: "How much money do you have?"
"This is why my course will be examining not only the history of
socialism and capitalism in the 20th century but also how those
ideologies no longer work and are shifting dramatically. It's imperative
to know history and the history of economics to understand our options
for creating a better future".
"This can be seen in two ways: First, for those people who paid
attention to socialism, they observed things in terms less of a failure
and more of an emergent dynamic shifting in light of these
self-criticisms, new priorities and directions. Number two, capitalism
also discovered to its own surprise that the great "victory" of
1989-1990 of capitalism itself turned out to be of short duration. By
2008, capitalism that had claimed itself to be the "great victorious
system" collapsed and cannot find a way to recover as a whole. Of
course, the corporate side of capitalism recovered via the taxpayers
bailing Wall Street out".
"Among the meaningful signs of change are [that the] Greek government is
now run by socialists, the Portuguese government is now run by an
alliance of communists and socialists, and the [UK] Labour Party is now
being run by Jeremy Corbyn, and to everyone's surprise, Bernie Sanders
is even more wildly successful under the banner of "democratic
socialist" who may win 50 percent of the vote within the Democratic
primary largely owing to the independent voters who are able to vote in
Democratic open primary elections. And no one believed this was possible
in the United States, including Sanders himself ".
Question: In Spain you have Podemos' recent victories too.
"Podemos is having gains and the traditional socialist parties no longer
have the traction they once had. In France and in Germany, the
democratic socialist parties are all falling apart. So you see classic
socialism fading rapidly, and the same is true of capitalism.
Capitalism, with its inherent injustices, is speeding into a stone wall,
and everyone's staring at the wall but doesn't know what to do, like
the proverbial deer caught in the headlights"
.
"So it's clear to many that both capitalism and traditional socialism are
in deep trouble and are changing, and if you look at capitalism, it's
extreme inequality and extreme instability with the crash of 2008 and
all that happened and the prognoses that 2016-2017 are going to be down
years again indicates that we are at a nodal historical point.... This
new century's struggle will be between a changed capitalism and a very
changed socialism with likely very different outcomes".
Note EU-Digest: See also the full bio of Professor Richard David Wolff in Wikipedia
I
n the context of the above interview of Dr. Richard David Wolff it is probably also interesting to note that it indirectly also highlights the reasons for the emergence and election of Donald Trump as the President of the USA. One could probably define the Trump emergence as a right-wing attempt to capitalize on what appears to be a populist uprising around the world.
As the Chinese saying goes: ""we are living in interesting times".
EU-Digest
Read more: Richard Wolff on the Changing Tides of Capitalism and Socialism
