A good discussion on how capitalism & capitalists keep exploiting the general public. Of course, politicians are in their pockets, too, which means that these capitalists also control the government, which is supposed to look after the general public in a democracy.
Capitalism is only going to concentrate the wealth in a few hands & make the general public poorer & poorer. After all, there's no limit to the human greed. Greedy capitalists will keep taking money from the public, & keep making it poorer & poorer, without any regard to general living standards to their workers. At the same time, I am not defending the communism because we have seen its problems in Russia & China; far too much inefficiency & control when everything is handed over to the government.
The root cause of world's modern problems with resource depletion, poverty, & mass unemployment is this continual & increasing greed of capitalism. It is an unstoppable train, which will continue on, until & unless, the world put back religion & ethics in its economic system.
This Earth can definitely support a lot more people compared to current population, but it cannot support people when the resources are being depleted to make a few people on the top of the pyramid richer & richer. This world cannot support more people when those rich people keep hoarding cash & splurging on expensive, but useless, items, like buying football clubs, billion-$$$ mansions, whole islands, etc. With religion (any religion for that matter) & ethics, instead of throwing away their money on these useless materialistic things, they could invest in improving people's lives by investing in medicine, food, agriculture, & alleviating poverty.
Essentially, the world has not changed in the past millennia or so. Brutal monarchs, then, used to forcibly take their public's money & spend on themselves. Monarchs of current times are these super-rich elites (the "one-percenters") who keep hoarding money by drip-feeding their workers & spending that money on themselves. Instead of spending the money on charities, it would be better to not cut costs so much that the general public suffers cuts in paycheques & unemployment, in the first place. Those monarchs were the government themselves & current "monarchs" control the government.
The world is only going to get worse & worse, unless & until, people start involving religion & ethics in their daily lives & businesses, instead of a weekly attendance in a place of worship. Religion & ethics will help putting the fear of death & answering to a higher authority in the people's hearts, & let them think hard before brutally cutting down jobs, & costs, to ultimately make themselves even more super richer, & spend money frivolously on completely unnecessary items in their lives.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: I think it's getting clear to a lot of people that capitalism is out of solutions within its own framework. I mean, first of all, in terms of financial reform, there's been nothing serious enough. It's pretty clear there are still enormous financial institutions that are still speculating wildly, and the same stuff that happened in '07 and '08 is likely to happen again. It's kind of a question of when rather than if.
RICHARD WOLFF, PROF. EMERITUS OF ECONOMICS, UMASS AMHERST: That's right.
JAY: The issue of demand in the economy, low wages and such, nothing's changed. And climate change, capitalism, so far, at least, does not consider it a threat to capitalism to have global warming, and they're not really getting serious about it. So, I mean, are you finding that there's this sense of that, that there aren't solutions here anymore?
WOLFF: I think two things are happening. The one that's most important is that as the crisis since 2007 lingers and lingers, this crisis that was not supposed to happen, that was not supposed to cut so deep, continues to do all of that and to last and last and resist government efforts to change it, that people are shifting and beginning to want to look beyond the crisis years since 2007 and ask the question whether maybe we're not in a bigger, longer-term dilemma for capitalism. And I think we are. And if I could sketch it for a moment, think it would help people to see this as a momentary downturn within a longer crisis.
And here's how I would summarize it. For the first 200, 250 years of capitalism, which begins in England, goes to Western Europe, and then to North America and Japan, the capitalist system, it concentrated in those countries, concentrated its factories, its offices, and stores there where it began. And it turned the rest of the world--Asia, Africa, Latin America--into a hinterland to provide the people, to provide the food, to provide the raw materials. And that was how the world was globally organized.
Then in the 1970s something radically changed. With a jet engine, you could get anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. With modern telecommunications and the computer, you could monitor a factory in Shanghai from Cincinnati as easily as you could manage a factory down the street in Cincinnati. And so capitalists--and I want this really to be driven home if I can--capitalists in the 1970s in Western Europe, North America, and Japan have basically said to the United States and Western Europe and Japan, goodbye, we're leaving, we are abandoning you. You are not where the profit is. The profit is in those places we can now go to where we pay a small fraction of those wages, where we can operate with impunity, where the poverty of these societies, itself a product of all of this, makes them desperate to have the jobs that we can provide. It's a perfect scenario. We made a lot of money for 200 years in the West, and now we're leaving.
And I think the emblematic city that kind of shows this is Detroit, a place that was the apogee, the peak of capitalist efficiency in the 1960s, sustaining 2 million people population, today 700,000, a city that has been literally ripped apart and destroyed because three corporations decided, for profit, to leave that place and say goodbye and leave behind the desolation, the unemployment, the collapsed housing, and all the rest of a city and now has to be the largest bankruptcy of any American urban area in our history.
I think the capitalists of the world are saying to Western Europe, North America, and Japan, we were willing to give you higher wages because we were able to reorganize the planet for 200 years. Now our future is in the areas that are cheap for us--the rest of the world--and we're abandoning you.
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... So basically they're saying to the West, we're leaving. Now, of course, if you make it worth our while not to leave by bringing the wages and the costs, well, we might reconsider. But then what they're saying to the American people is, you can have a choice of a slow decline as we leave or a rapid decline to slow our departure. This is an unbelievable proposition to present to Western Europe, Japan, and the United States and I think will shape the basic political struggles in all these places for years to come.
JAY: But it's so self-destructive even for capitalism, because now you've taken a market that was the consumer of last resort for the world and turning people into increasingly low-wage workers. You're going to sell your profits where? The places that are already low-wage workers? I mean, it's really completely--.
WOLFF: You know, it's wonderful, 'cause as you introduced me as a Marxist, Marx was fond of saying that capitalists are caught in a stunning contradiction. Every capitalist tries to lower the wage costs, reduce the workers, substitute a machine, cut the wages, never wanting to face the fact that if all capitalists are trapped in a system where they're systematically reducing the wages, then they won't be able to sell what those wage workers are producing. And if you don't face that, you're caught in the contradiction that what the system makes you do undoes you by the absence of anyone to buy this stuff. And there we are, back to the naked, basic contradiction of a system that doesn't want to face that it has these kinds of internal problems.
JAY: So in terms of long-term decline, why isn't this cyclical? We've seen these things over the last century. Why is this any different?
WOLFF: Well, I think that we have the cyclicals, but the one thing that I find so interesting is that this one has certain unique characteristics. It was really out of the blue in the sense that almost nobody saw this kind of thing coming. Everyone assured us, not just the president and the politicians, but the economists, that it wouldn't last long. That was wrong. That it wouldn't cut deep. That was wrong.
But I think the thing that really strikes me is the kind of utter failure of anyone in this system to cope with this other than the 1 percent. The politicians can't figure out a solution. The bankers can't, as you rightly put it--for example, the banks that were too big to fail without exception are now bigger than they were then. Nobody is solving it. And even the mass of people are like deer caught in the headlights not knowing which way to go. In the '30s, after all, they joined unions, they joined socialist and communist parties, and that made a difference. At this point, there is the behavior of a system that kind of knows that this isn't just a temporary crisis, there's something fundamental shifting. And yet no one quite knows what to do.
JAY: ... I've always been struck that one of the things that Marx and Engels said that I think gets completely underestimated is that socialism isn't just some good idea. It's not a better policy that we could adopt. It's something that actually grows within capitalism. You get these massive enterprises, and they're fabulously well-planned. Like, you take Walmart, you get a toothpaste off of a shelf in Walmart, they know to get another toothpaste thing going somewhere in China. But the individual, as you say, the individual enterprises try to drive down wages, but they also get extremely efficient, and especially with computerization and digitization. Walmart is a planned economy.
But it's, like, the biggest private employer. I mean, Marx's whole point is this is actually--this is the seeds of socialism, except they're privately owned.
WOLFF: That's right. They're privately owned. They're driven by the maximization of profit for a tiny fraction of the population. And then you can't be surprised that the capacity, what they're capable of doing, which is a staggering saving of labor for the community, ends up not saving the labor for the community at all, because the whole point of it is to gather absurd wealth in the tiny number of hands. And Marx's point was this is an irrationality that even the best public relations cannot forever cover over.
And I think we're in a moment where, both in the short-run crisis and this longer-run decline, the irrationalities, the contradictions--. Look, basically capitalism is saying to particularly the American working class, for 200 years, we really exploited you on the job, but we gave you rising standard of living. Compensation of an awful day was that you could go someplace at the end of the day and have something called a happy hour to console you for the unhappy hours prior. Now capitalism is saying to you, we're going to exploit the hell out of you, but we're not giving you a rising standard of living. We're actually giving you a falling one. We're condemning your students to debt they can't handle. We're taking away the benefits. We're taking away all of the job prospects and hopes for the younger generation. We're going to work you on the job more hours than ever, and we're going to give you less for it. Whatever you think about the past, I'm not clear that the American working class will find that an acceptable offer.
