Professor Wolff Clearly Explains the Coming ECONOMIC CRISIS

Professor Wolff Clearly Explains the Coming ECONOMIC CRISIS

By Richard Wolff

Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist, well known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis.

Video Posted March 20, 2017

 

Questions about Capitalism

Prof. Wolff gives updates on Caterpillar tax evasion, Obamacare, slave labor for immigrants, Harvard and slavery, billionaires, Puerto Rico, and Greece. Major discussion: questions about capitalism.

 

Capitalism Is the Problem

This article originally appeared at Truthout.org

By Richard Wolff

Over the last century, capitalism has repeatedly revealed its worst tendencies: instability and inequality. Instances of instability include the Great Depression (1929-1941) and the Great Recession since 2008, plus eleven “downturns” in the US between those two global collapses. Each time, millions lost jobs, misery soared, poverty worsened and massive resources were wasted. Leaders promised that their “reforms” would prevent such instability from recurring. Those promises were not kept. Reforms did not work or did not endure. The system was, and remains, the problem.

Inequality likewise proved to be an inherent trend of capitalism. Only occasionally and temporarily did opposition from its victims stop or reverse it. Income and wealth inequalities have worsened in almost every capitalist country since at least the 1970s. Today we have returned to the huge 19th-century-sized gaps between the richest 1 percent and everyone else. Rescuing the “disappearing middle class” has become every aspiring politician’s slogan. Extreme inequality infects all of society as corporations and the rich, to protect their positions, buy the politicians, mass media and other cultural forms that are for sale.

Recent Crises in the History of Capitalism

Capitalism in Western Europe, North America and Japan — its original centers — has boosted profits in four basic ways since the 1970s. First, it computerized and robotized, not to lessen everyone’s work time, but instead to raise profits by reducing payrolls. Second, it exploited low-wage immigrant labor to offset wage increases won by years of labor struggles. Third, it moved production to lower-wage countries such as China, India, Brazil and others. Fourth, it divided and weakened the labor unions, political party groups and other organizations that pursued labor’s interests. As a result, inside nearly every country of the global capitalist system, the rich-poor divide deepened.

The Great Depression provoked economic “reforms,” such as FDR’s New Deal. These included regulations restricting risky bank and other market practices. Reforming governments also established public pensions, unemployment insurance, public employment systems, minimum wages, monetary and fiscal policies, and so on. Advocates believed that such reforms would end the 1930s depression and prevent future depressions. They dismissed critics who diagnosed depressions as systemic and prescribed system change (or “revolution”) as the necessary solution. “Reform versus revolution” was then a hot debate.

In the US, the reformers defeated the revolutionaries as preparation for war — and then war itself — finally ended the Great Depression. As capitalism rebounded after 1945, capitalists increasingly evaded the Depression-era reforms, using their growing wealth to buy the political influence needed to gut many reforms. Later, Reagan led the frontal assault, repackaged as “globalization” and “neoliberalism” to undo the New Deal. When that rollback of reforms culminated in the 2008 crash, it exposed capitalism’s instability and inequality yet again.

The continuing post-2008 economic crisis has reproduced both the kinds of suffering that happened after 1929 and the reform-versus-revolution debates. The difference this time is that we know what happened last time. While the reformers then defeated the revolutionaries, their reforms failed to prevent the continuation of capitalism’s instability and inequality, and their harmful social effects. Reformism today advocates the same (or a slightly varied) set of reforms as last time. It thus represents a refusal to learn from our history. The revolutionary alternative now makes more sense. “Revolutionary,” however, need not evoke romantic notions of storming barricades: Today, revolutionary refers to the recognition that system change, not another reform, is our primary task.

What System Change Requires

What differentiates system change from reforms? Reforms refer to government interventions that still leave employers in the exclusive position to make the basic enterprise decisions: what, how and where to produce and what to do with profits. Reforms include minimum wage laws, redistributive tax structures, and enterprises owned and operated by the government. They range from the mildly Keynesian (the New Deal) to the democratic socialist (what we see in Scandinavian countries) to the state socialist (the model of the USSR and People’s Republic of China). All such reforms retain the core relationship inside enterprises as that of employer-employee, with private or public directors controlling the mass of workers and making the basic enterprise decisions……More Here

Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2017 Hiram's 1555 Blog