Capitalism Run Amok: What went wrong and how to fix it | Marianne Williamson and Richard Wolff

my guest is doctor and professor richard wolff he is professor emeritus of economics at the university of massachusetts amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. he is currently a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs at the new school in in new york city his weekly show economic update with richard dewolfe is syndicated on over 70 radio stations nationwide it's available for broadcast on free speech tv and his latest book is called the sickness is the system when capitalism fails to save us from pandemics or itself richard wolff thank you so much for being with me it's an honor to talk to you thank you marianne it's a pleasure to be here thank you i had mentioned to you before we came on that it must be a little bit amusing for you to find yourself this kind of economics professor pop icon at this point in your life and i remember a time when not that you know it was a pretty elite thing to know who richard wolff was and what richard wolff was saying but i think it's a sign of the times and a good sign of the times that so many people are listening to you it's a good sign because of what you have to say it's unfortunate in the sense that it bespeaks a lot of despair on the part of so many people millions and millions of americans who recognize that the system is rigged in a way that puts them in a permanent um if not underclass certainly economic shackles that um keep them from being able to to actualize their potential both personally and economically the way they might wish and a lot of people are now asking questions and they're looking to people such as yourself for answers so where i want to begin is with american capitalism itself we've been brought up to believe america is a capitalist society and a lot of people are recognizing now that american capitalism certainly as it is now practiced is not working for the majority of americans my first question to you is do you believe that capitalism is so inherently flawed that it is not possible for it to be salvaged or transformed in such a way as to provide the basic necessities for the majority of people well you know it's a wonderful question it goes to the heart of the kinds of issues that are on people's mind i wish i could give you the kind of polish to answer that would come if this was honestly faced in our universities and debated and discussed so that the general graduate of our colleges and universities would be able to engage the importance of the issue you raise but sadly that's not the case and in fact it's our education system that has plenty of the symptoms of what is my answer to your question which is i think and i haven't thought this until relatively recently i think that there is at this point not much of a way out for this system that it has exhausted um its growth potential which was remarkable i mean the history of the united states is a history of economic growth uh that is very impressive that lasted a long time that took its own working class with it at least part of the way the 20th century was in a way the american century we went from our legacy of being a small colony of a great empire to replacing that empire the british one with ourselves and began kind of reversing the role of today i don't mean to be disrespectful but england is more our colony than vice versa and that that's a remarkable uh change and i don't want to shortchange all of that along the way we became a country to which millions of people came for a better life which they were able to realize here these are profound achievements and i don't want in any way to be disrespectful toward them but like everything including every good thing it comes to an end all economic systems did we are not unique in that slavery feudalism ancient village economies uh you you name it they they grew they developed they evolved and then they passed on and they were replaced by human beings who grew up in one system and wanted to make a transition to another one to one that would work better as you put it for the majority of the people and my sense is and i want to be as straightforward as i know how that's where we are we are with a capitalism that has had its heyday uh that heyday ended in my judgment around the 1970s and 80s the last 40 years were propped up as they are to this minute by a mountain of debt we could no longer do what we used to do without debt you know those ancient times when our parents told us save your money put it aside for a rainy day have a fund you can fall back on we don't have funds anymore if you look at the statistics the level of debt uh debt for our homes debt for our cars debt for our daily expenses in the credit card and the most grievous one for me debt for our students instead of celebrating that we have young people wanting to learn and grow we make it enormously difficult for them loading them up with debt they cannot ever repay they can just agonize over on and on you've spoken about that others have um i think we have to face that we are in a state of decline and that's not a disaster that's not a tragedy that is a part of life and we ought to embrace it we ought to say okay what do we do in that circumstance try to make it as comfortable as possible try to begin to think seriously about basic changes so that the system that is passing away is replaced by something that will be better for us so that we don't see it as a as a as an end but as an end of one thing and the beginning of something else and and for me that is as urgent as anything i see around me but the signs if i could just end with this the signs of the decay you really have to be covering your eyes not to see them i mean we are running deficits we've never seen in the history of this country in peacetime the government is spending trillions of dollars ahead of its taxes and still not able to to give jobs to millions of people to give adequate housing uh to rp i mean it is an extreme behavior but not getting the results even that are kind of minimum over the last year just to pick a random one we were so unable to handle our automobile industry that used cars cost 30 on average 31 more this year than they did last year which means that even if you look at the child credit that was just passed that started on the 15th of this month uh it is going to be eaten up by the inflation of the people in other words yeah it becomes that's right the president and all the the people in washington we're going to lick child poverty we're we're not at all and and you know you can't keep promising people it's all going to get better our best days ahead of us and keep delivering the opposite because what you do is you destroy their their sense of of where they are and who they are and they become prey to to scapegoat you know who's to blame for this constant disappointment and we know we we've seen over the last five years the the immigrants the the the chinese the you know the collection the usual immigrants minorities women i mean you can you can collect the people that have been singled out as somehow disturbing because people are right to be disturbed but we don't have a culture that allows them to explore what the real reasons are okay so the the signs of decla of decay and decline are obvious to me and i'm sure to pretty much anybody who is listening to us right now the the distinction to me is between the word end and the word transform so we have the great progressive era at the end of the of the 1800s which was a pushback against the overreach of capitalism then we had fdr and the new deal fdr said i'm not destroying capitalism i'm saving capitalism then the legacy of the new deal that lasted through the 1970s now 1980 is when reagan and reaganomics took the wrecking ball to any righteous ethical center in the midst of american capitalism but what you're saying and this is what i want to investigate further you don't seem what are you seeing because if i hear you correctly you don't think that this extraordinary destructiveness of trickle-down economics through a change in tax laws through universal health care through cancellation of college loan debt through free college you don't believe that this horrible swerve off course can be corrected which is what i would see is the transformation of our capitalist system so what do you what are you seeing for what is necessary now what is if you say one thing has to end what do you see it replaced by or do you think a more radical transformation is possible i believe in transformation my sense is to mix the word end with the word beginning because that's another way for me to say transformation so i am in no way opposed to modern technology i think there are many of the achievements of modern technology i want to hold on to but i don't want to be blind to the disasters of modern technology i want us to somehow conserve what is good for the human race and not hold on to what is destructive of the human race but let me be very precise if i can with your question to answer it this way for me there is a solution there is a way to capture what was good what was achieved by american capitalism without being dragged down as it declines and this has to do with me with a celebration of something that is very american democracy the notion that if you're affected by a decision whatever the decision is you automatically as a human being have a right to participate in making the decision in other words if the system says you must live with the results of a decision okay but then i have to have a say i don't have to be in charge i want to share all of that responsibility with everybody else equally but i don't want to be excluded from these decisions because they affect me i believe in that i think the united states will always be recognized as a society that gave that a lot of life a lot of support a lot of um validity and legitimacy in people's minds but it always did that verbally and symbolically but very rarely really and i'm going to give you the for me the key example it's the enterprise the workplace whether it's an office or a factory or a school or a a store it really doesn't matter where people get together to produce something or to provide a service to the community we call that an enterprise for lack of a better term for me there was something fundamentally amiss in the capitalist way of doing that and i think while it allowed growth and it allowed productivity it has come to the end of its ability to do that and now it's holding us back and here's what i mean in each enterprise a tiny group of people a tiny minority if it's the family business it's whoever the family is if it's a partnership it's whoever the partners of it are if it's a modern corporation which is what most of the business uh is now done in that form it's the board of directors a group of 10 20 individuals they make all the key decisions what to produce how to produce where to produce and what to do with the net product that everybody has contributed to who works in the enterprise but when it comes to making these crucial decisions what do we do with the output what do where do we produce what do we produce what technology do we use the tiny group makes all the decisions and they're not accountable not to the workers who are the vast majority in every enterprise and not to the surrounding communities who have to struggle and fight for even a little bit of a say in what is going on here we see that in the struggle over climate where corporations have been able to do all kinds of things that the community didn't know about didn't understand and now that they do don't know how to fight it don't know how to change it can't get very far are easily hoodwinked or evaded one way or another for me i think we can save capitalism if you like although i prefer a different language go beyond capitalism thank you capitalism for what you achieved you've had your chance you've done your stuff you've done a good job in some areas but it's time to take yourself seriously that when you endorsed democracy rhetorically we now have to bring it home and put it right inside your enterprise and i believe and i think i can show you that if we really believe in democracy if we're going to be honestly willing to do that i think the decisions our businesses will make will be radically different from what we have seen and that is i think our best hope to get beyond the failures of this system holding on to its achievements but saying goodbye to the things that have demonstrated now for quite some time they are obstacles to what we know the people as a whole need so my question has to do with distinction between if there is in your mind between capitalism and trickle-down economics because the paradigm that you just expressed has to do with a change that was significantly promulgated in the 1980s where the basic only responsibility of the ceo and of the of the corporation was its fiduciary responsibility to its stockholders as you said at the expense of the community at the expense of the workers and so forth where we were in the 1970s let's say maybe we could have gone a different direction my question to you is do you see any country like let's say germany where a certain number of of the workers have to be on the board of directors do you see any of the models in european countries that represent the kind of transformation that you're talking about because some of them would not see this as the i don't i don't think the word necessarily matters but i think it matters for our purposes whether that's really the end of capitalism or the transformation first of all my first question do you see any european countries or any countries in the world that are basically demonstrating the kind of change that you would like to see i think you see in many european countries and i study them very closely partly because my family is french and you know i've been speaking french since i've been a child um and so i have relationships over there that that make me pay attention i think what you see there are bits and pieces of steps in the direction the the europeans you know they are an older culture than we are they they they've been around a long time they've been through a lot i think it gives them a certain it's hard to put my finger on it a certain depth in the way they approach these questions they're willing to take steps they're not quite as scared about where they'll go we're like little kids who won't give up our blankie yeah you kind of know it's still always open yeah you make one step doesn't foreclose all kinds of other options so let me give you some examples of what they've done uh and i know when i explained this to my american audiences you know i was born in the united states i've lived here all my life i've worked here all my life um my audiences are still amazed and it's such common knowledge so i'll take france because it's what i know best in france once you graduate from high school or college and you enter the labor force you are the law specifies that your employer whoever that employer is must give you five weeks of paid vacation every year you are entitled to that you are expected to use that time to spend with your family to recoup yourself you know it's something that as a professor i understand because we have something called sabbaticals some of us still do i used to get those every seventh year the universities where i taught i was entitled to either a semester or a year off and the idea was to you know to recharge my batteries to catch up on the literature and to be a better teacher because of this time off i used to think this is wonderful but i used to wonder why are only teachers getting other people who have every bit the same need the same benefit they could get from it in france it is it is the law you know in germany use another example all tuition and all school fees at this point are zero not only zero for all germans but the germans welcome anybody anyone listening to this program if you're thinking about it you want to go to germany they have a first-rate uh higher education system the equal to any in the world but it don't cost anything why because they have in their mind the sense that an educated person is a blessing to the society in which he or she functions including the economy yes and of course the community should support should welcome should applaud young people ready willing and able to engage a higher education and i see these as steps that come out of the particular cultures of each society they are the ways human beings push towards it and i don't think it's just over you i think we can see it here in the united states too let me give you an example we take it for granted in most american cities that if it's a nice afternoon on saturday or sunday and we have some friends and we would like to take a blanket and throw it on the grass in some lovely town park and have a picnic and be together with people we love we can do that we don't have to ask anyone's permission there's no fee to pay we go in we kind of know that somebody has to cut the grass otherwise we couldn't be doing this and someone has to collect the garbage and someone has to plant those beautiful flowers and all the rent we know that's work that's labor but we don't want it to be the quid pro quo i give you six bucks so i can get 11 minutes over there on that piece of the grass we don't want that we want the freedom we want the community it's kind of nice to see the other people 20 yards away under the tree enjoying them it's part of our pleasure that they're having a good time and laughing and vice versa we want that we make these parks happen we do that just like we did in the 19th century created public education we wanted everybody we kind of understood it and it would be paid for by everybody school taxes all the rest why we decided when it came time for a young person to finish the 12th grade in high school to enter college suddenly we don't run it that way anymore why not what wha what happened here why are you doing this and for me i think if you extend that kind of analytic you can find lots of steps that different communities have taken that show that want to get beyond it i think i see it here in the united states now with young people wanting to explore you know the open-endedness of the internet isn't that sort of for everybody it's sort of in the air we all kind of help develop it we all use it maybe it shouldn't be capitalistically constrained maybe we shouldn't make everything hostage to profit making because you know i'm an economist profits are earned by a very small number of people wages and salaries are what's earned by most people an economy that wants to serve the majority has to put the wages and salaries first not profit as the bottom line you cannot have it both ways if you teach everybody that profit is the key you're serving the people who get the profits you are not serving the people who do the rest and that is how capitalized capitalism has been weaponized basically adam smith actually said that you cannot have free market capitalism outside an ethical context i think a lot of people on both right and left would go yeah there's some truth to that that we have lost an ethical center that that ethical center cannot only be seen within a purview of our private behavior it has to apply to our collective and that humanitarian principles such as those you mentioned of people being able to live with dignity people being able to live with enough time to be with their families etc should be more central to our economic functioning but what is the language exactly if how how can we talk about this in a way you know people hear capitalism and they hear socialism and they they they go nuts how can we have this conversation about the kind of transformation that you mean first of all is it really like capitalism ends here and socialism ends there or is there not a more subtle gradient i mean what would even when you were talking about france and when you were talking about germany wouldn't they still call themselves societies that have capitalist ventures yes they would but here's the big difference in both france and germany huge political parties are socialists and they have been that way for many many decades americans often you know they blanch when i explain that to them and not only have the do they have big socialist parties but those big socialist parties have been in the government and they're in the government now i mean let me give you a simple example right now there's a country that i think all americans have heard of portugal it's not a large country it's a small country right everybody's going there now i mean it's like the new hot thing to live in portugal that's right and you go to lisbon it's a beautiful city and i know that it is so so i say to them do you know anything about portugal and if they've been there they they know that their beautiful wine and lovely countryside and all of that i said do you anything about the government no americans don't really pay attention so i said i said to them let me tell you about the government it was elected back in 2016 it was reelected last year uh very popular it's a coalition of three political parties the largest one is the portuguese socialist party the number two is the portuguese communist party and the number three is the portuguese green party in other words it's a coalition of socialist communists in green for most americans growing up in this country they i mean they look at me as if either i'm crazy and i've made things up and i assure you i have not uh or else they don't know what to do with a sense what does this mean and by the way those parties have been in governments before the world doesn't end when you elect a socialist or a communist or a green it's common practice there are many parts of europe cities where communists are in the of the mayor or or socialists or this or that let me put it another way when a french family is large and it gathers itself together for a picnic or a reunion uncle pierre and aunt louise don't speak to each other because one of them is a socialist and one of them is on the right wing and they and the family has to navigate the complexities but you also can't demonize because you know everybody loves aunt louise's cupcakes and yeah they don't like her politics but they sure love her cupcakes and she's a sweet woman and she helps others in the family when they're sick and the complexity of human life you cannot do the demonization that comes so quickly to the united states to its people so for me i think the way out is to use simple direct clear language forget all the labels i mean if they push you sure but mostly talk about here's how we do it here's how we could do it well for example i explain that we got rid of kings years ago centuries ago and we said we could govern ourselves by a parliament which means when we get together to talk pacquiaole in french parliament it's where you talk and we get together we talk and we argue we debate and we vote is it messy yeah does it make mistakes for sure but we prefer this we feel part of the community we feel respected we don't want to be the subjects of some king far away and an expensive palace we pay for we don't want that we applaud that which i'm glad we do but you know the kings never disappeared they moved inside of our capitalist enterprises that's exactly right we just have a capitalist aristocracy now that's right and we call them ceos or whatever name we want we give them a different name but they are without accountability they dictate they control they buy the politicians you know that they buy the lobbyists you know that they they have look they're smart folks they understand that if they're going to be a minority as wealthy as they are in a society that has universal suffrage how you're in trouble because the majority of people are going to use their suffrage to undo what the economy has done by giving you disproportionate wealth sooner or later with tax laws or whatever they're going to do that so the only way to protect your wealth is to make sure that the political system is so organized that that impulse from below is squashed and you demonize everything that looks like it might bring that i mean i'm amazed where we are in this country right now this is a capitalism that's on life support from the government the federal reserve is literally lending money to corporations directly which it never did before the federal government is running trillion uh three trillion dollar deficits now two years in a row i mean the economy depends on the government more than ever and yet you still have the demonization of the government and i think it's because of the anxiety of the business elite that if the government were really to get involved the way massive people wanted then they can't hold on to their special position and i think they're right they won't be able to but it's my job as i understand it to explain to people that that's the way out they won't want it but no one is wants them to disappear but they have to accept what it means to be in a democracy they have to work to earn their income just like the rest of us there'll be a place for them there'll be a way to use the skills that they've developed no i don't want i don't want the violence and i don't want any of that so i i'm worried about how you're going to avoid that because if we if we don't do something now when we can by the time this explodes it'll be you and i will be watching the horror rush by us well i agree with you and that's why i'm i'm trying to get at what is the language that can be used so but let me let me ask you capitalism in america 50s 60s 70s was it on a track in your mind that that was survivable and sustainable yes and no i think what you're saying and i agree with this part is look we came out of a fantastic depression people have a kind of forgotten from 1929 to 1941 that's a long time 12 years we were in a depressed economic system we had in 1933 a peak unemployment rate of 25 percent uh many times worse than what it is right now every family was touched by unemployment we had desperate poverty we had homelessness and you name it only in much greater uh extent than than what we have now and the government came in in a massive way and fixed this situation and and it did so and this is very important for americans it did so because of pressure from below absolutely i don't want to take anything away from franklin roosevelt he was a great president he was the most popular president in american history re-elected three times no president had ever had that before i don't want to take that away and he taxed corporations and the rich to create social security to create unemployment compensation to create a federal jobs program the government came in and saved the day he's right when he said i'm not here to destroy it i'm here to save it i believe he was right i think he understood what he was doing and i also agree that is what he was doing but here's the historic irony it was the pressure from below we had the greatest union organizing drive in american history the cio in a matter of years they organized millions of americans who had never been in a union before whose parents had never been in the union those people thought they could get through this horrible depression better in a union than not in one which was the basic argument working with them allied with them were two socialist parties and the communist party that were pretty strong in the 1930s this was an amazing movement of the american working class to the left politically pushing mr roosevelt who was a smart politician and understood that they had mass support so he kind of met them halfway no revolution none of that but i will respond by giving you social security unemployment all of that so we came out of the war 1945 that followed the great depression and here's what happened for me this is the core of modern american history the business community was horrified that they had been taxed and by the way let me remind your audience in nine in the 1940s while this country was at war the president of the united states sent a message state of the union message to congress saying i want the top income tax bracket to be 100 if you earn more than 25 000 then which if you adjust it's about 400 000 a year now no minor amount but if you earn more than that the government's going to take it all it's a maximum income and when he sent that message the president of this country no no i'm not talking russia or china or anything like that said to the congress if we're asking young men and women to risk their lives to lose their lives in a war in the in europe and a war in asia i cannot allow you to make huge amounts of money while they're done it's impossible well you know the republicans got all upset in the way you might imagine there was lots of yelling in congress but when the bill was finally agreed and the president signed it people don't know this the top income tax bracket was 94 every dollar over 25 that you earned uncle sam got 94 cents you got to keep six cents well wasn't it yes it lasted it lasted a night under eisenhower who was a republican that's right he kept it it was in the 70s in the 1950s and into the 60s only now is it down in the 30s because of a massive change yeah all of that kind of stuff but we did all those things but at the end of 1945 this is crucial the business class the rich in this country they were they were horrified they weren't just horrified that the left had risen up they were horrified that i'm a president one of them roosevelt came from the same families uh had gone along with this had in fact led it in a in a certain way well here's what they did and this is where you and i come in they went to work and i've got to take my hat off they were very successful they went to work and said this has got to be undone this new deal all of this stuff and we have to destroy this coalition of the unions the socialists the communists had created this movement and they demonized first the communist and the socialists and the unions have been on a 50-year decline in this country they were very successful they defeated the left they dismembered it they destroyed it and it's now slowly and painfully reconstructing itself which i'm glad about but i think we have to face we are who are on the political left which is where i am and and i'm freely say so we have to understand we're in a rebuilding i don't know if we'll do it in time but this country was saved the capitalism we once had was saved by the left doing what it did not alone with roosevelt and all when you killed that left you meant what you did was that the next time capitalism conked which is what we're living through there is no left to save it so it keeps going almost like a crazed animal that doesn't realize how much trouble it's in and keeps we this last week marion you and i watched as did most americans an obscene contest in which jeffrey bezos and and branson are competing as to who can spend more billions of dollars to shoot a rocket with his friends or mean i mean you can't keep doing this without expecting especially in a country like ours that in the 20th century celebrated its big middle class you can't eviscerate that and imagine it isn't going to blow your society apart and trump and white supremacy and and people who don't want to get vaccinated these are understandable desperate activities of people who are distraught yeah because that much despair large groups of desperate people they form a petri dish out of which that kind of collective dysfunction is is almost inevitable they become ideologically vulnerable uh to capture by genuinely psychotic forces and that's what has already happened so that what we're living in right now is almost pre-french revolution i couldn't agree with you more i also think when you're talking about the plans to eviscerate the left i think the assassinations in the 1960s had something to do with that and then of course the apotheosis of all this was the passage of citizens united uh not just trickle-down economics but now and and now one of the things that's also part of that rick is how you see the blm protests the largest protest movement in american history at this point they just ignore protests anyway it's almost like there is no way for people to express um to use democracy to express their displeasure so that it's an economic crisis that is coupled with a crisis within our democracy and you and i agree that this is a very very dangerous very very dangerous brew yeah i think people forget history you know you you don't let people people aren't taught history that's part of the problem yeah people aren't taught history and people aren't taught what's happening in other countries well one of the things that you talk about in your essays has to do with a change in consciousness i want to read to you from uh one of your own essays in in sicknesses the system or system yeah sickness is the system you put america's billionaires have gotten nearly half a trillion dollars richer over the course of this unfolding crisis jeff bezos added 34 4.6 billion dollars in wealth mark zuckerberg added 25 billion there is no excuse for that it is unethical immoral and unnecessary it is nothing short of perverse and obscene that the richest man in the united states mr bezos should have become much richer while a hundred and sixty thousand people die and millions more are still being infected you're talking about covert there and then the next sentence is it is a critical time for a shift in social consciousness and i couldn't agree with you more it's a shift in consciousness that is going to ultimately create the breakthrough so if you could just tell me uh what is okay the shift in consciousness tell me if i've got this right so the shift in consciousness begins with the realization that the way american capitalism performs now is inherently detrimental to the good of the vast majority of americans okay that's number one is that correct absolutely yes okay that that that its core pillars have outlived their usefulness yep that there are some positive aspects of it that we want to retrieve and take forward yes correct and now if you could just name to me what are the pillars of the system that you see replacing what we have now because i think the more of us have those in our minds the more we can start to articulate the political as well as the economic consciousness that is the answer um to a sustainable future well i want the workers to be in the position of running and owning their own enterprise and i want them to be co-respective with their communities where what the what is decided in the enterprise affects the community where the enterprise is located or where the workers live then that community as a residential democracy has veto power and vice versa where the community does something that affects the in other words i want a cold if you like a co-determination because we have the beginnings of democracy in the residential communities where we live we vote for the mayor we vote for the city council we we kind of have that i want us also to vote in the workplace and then the decisions made in either one have to be okayed by the other one then we have at the base of society the kind of democracy that i care about and on your question about socialism i'm a critic of the socialism of the of the previous century because i think it got sidetracked into this notion that the government is going to be called in and fix everything i don't maybe because i'm an american that's not my idea i don't want the government to do it i think there's a role for government and the government has to solve collective problems i believe in that but i want a government controlled from below most americans agree with this and one of the ways you do that is you give workers the industry that it's working people together who are giving the taxes that keep the system going either as members of the collective enterprise where they work or as individuals in their residences paying taxes but you've anchored you've anchored things where the people are so a couple of questions and this one might sound very naive who originally invests the money where does the money to start this enterprise come from if not people who feel that they have investment potential well there's lots of ways of doing this and and here i'm not telling you what might be i'm telling you what already is because there are many parts of the world where these kinds of collective or cooperative enterprises already exist so here are some of the ways they get the money to start up in fact let me start with the proposal of the british labour party uh under corbyn and not now but uh while he was in charge they had an official policy which they said would be their first act if they won an election and they became the next british government and you know the labor party has been the british government many times over the last century anyway if they got elected here's what they do they pass a law and here's what it would say any enterprise can continue the way it is now as a capitalist hierarchical enterprise but if any enterprise wants to either close down or sell itself to another enterprise or leave the country or go public issue shares and all of that it must before it can do any of those things give its own workers the right of first refusal to buy the company and run it as a worker co-op and so when this was made clear the the clever journalists said yeah well where are the workers going to get the money at which point uh john o'donnell who was his his his chancellor shadow chancellor the ex-checker smiled at the press and said we're gonna lend it to him in other words the government uses and here's the rationale the government uses a portion of its taxes to make available at low interest or in some favorable way the money to enable what to enable a cooperative sector of the economy to be created and the purpose he said i thought was very smart we want the british people because we're talking about britain we want the british people to know in their neighborhood that side-by-side with capitalist enterprises there are these worker co-op enterprises you can shop from one you can shop from the other you can get a job in one you and then we'll know and families will talk to each other i'm in this kind of enterprise you're in that one and over time then we put it to a vote and let the people decide what kind that this should be a democratic decision it should never have been otherwise and we're going to do this as our way of preparing the ground for an open debate and a decision democratically made one person one vote whether we want an economy that's 50 50 90 10 or whatever and that can be periodically reviewed and revisited here's another way let me give you another example two other examples in germany which has a bunch of co-ops you know who supported it the church in this case the protestant churches all in many parts of germany the protestant churches interpreted the bible their religious book as implying that a cooperative enterprise was somehow more consistent in their interpretation with christian theory or christian uh religion and so they provided money when people wanted to set these things up uh they didn't attack other kinds but this is what they did and here's the last example in 1985 a law was passed in the italian parliament it's called the marcora law marcora was the name of the italian legislator who pushed it through and here's what this law does if you be by the way still in the books it was fought by the industry the capitalists but they weren't successful it's still the law in italy um if you become unemployed you have two choices you might call choice number one the kind of american idea you declare you're unemployed you prove that you are and you go what they call it on the dole you you get a check every week that's sort of the way we do it here but you have an option b if you can get at least nine other italian unemployed workers to join with you the government gives you this option we will give you your full unemployment compensation that you're eligible for every week for a year or however you are we'll give it to you as a lump sum right now and we'll do the same for the other nine on the following condition you use it as startup capital for a worker co-op that's one of the reasons italy has more worker coops than most other european countries if you go to the area around bologna in the north of italy the emilia romagna area it's called that's an economy where forty percent of the enterprise four zero so just shy a half a worker co-ops it's been that way for decades it's if anybody wants a laboratory of how a sector like that could work there it is and it's very successful so let me ask you a question do you call yourself a democratic socialist you know like you i think i i'm so upset by the horrific associations that go with a lot of these words that i shy away you know if you push me sure yeah i'm part of socialism it's a consciousness it's your point earlier it it's a way of thinking about the world even people who would never uh take the label socialist when you ask them questions will give an answer which we in america say oh that's a social issue and if you say that to the person they look at you no i'm not a it's it's muddy you got to do a little bit of of sorting things out to make them understandable uh to an american uh context 30 years ago when i would talk people would look at me as if it weren't safe to stay in my environment too long you know was guilt by association now i'm on the radio on the television as you said very nicely you were saying that it's a different world and it's not me well i think it's not me it's this country that has changed well there's been so much obfuscation it there are so many people who consider themselves conservatives who consider themselves right wing who if you actually ask them where they are on particular issues are actually a little bit to the left of center so these labels do not help i have two more questions for you and you've been so generous with your time and i'm so grateful first of all elizabeth warren and her proposals about reforming capitalism where do you see that she represents for me absolutely the illustration of what you were saying she made a decision it seems to me that she's not going to have anything to do with that word socialism she's not so she repeats periodically as i'm not his own i'm a capitalist in order to make it possible to continue the conversation with her her potential constituents uh she wants to talk about a whole lot of things which just between you and me are classically things socialists talk about but by insisting she's not she's carved out a space in the consciousness to move it along and you know i don't do that but i respect it that yeah there needs to be a lot of us there needs to be people like her there need to be people like me i'm i'm ready because yeah i get it age you know i'm ready to say you know you want to call me a marxist did i learn from marx you bet and if that's a freaky thing well listen to me long enough and maybe you'll discover that it's not me that is scary because of the marks but it's marks it becomes less scary because you understand what i'm saying and it isn't all that freaky and it isn't all that bizarre and you don't have to live in that world that manichaean world of the the the good guys over here and the bad guys over there and all you don't need that that's a hindrance to getting us further also if people actually read marx they they have a very different view than this than this idea of you know marx what about india walton do you have any ideas about feelings about india walton running and winning is the mayor of buffalo as a socialist candidate it's terribly important i i i couldn't tell you how happy i was to read that and i don't know her and i don't even know what her exact pro i don't follow buffalo uh details so but it it it's wonderful it means that a perfectly typical let's call it i mean i know it's unique in certain ways but a typical sizable american city not new york not california but not new york city but but in another corner really part of the midwest and traditionally that the people there weren't turned away by that label didn't run for cover when they when her opponent said they listened to her they thought about it and they voted for her and i think this isn't you know i don't want to be sound i don't want to be condescending but there's a kind of maturity developing in the american electorate that i think we should all applaud this is these are people especially among the young yes they're not going to be told do this do that good they want to see they want to hear they're not stupid they're not falling all over themselves in some fadism they're looking they know that this system isn't working for them and if you're a college kid these days or you've been to college you're laboring under levels of debt and constraint that that should never be put on anyone certainly not a young person starting out who is giving himself or herself to the education process they know it's not working and they want alter that's why the polls all show literally as you get younger the number of people critical of capitalism and interested in socialism you know keeps going up and i think that's that's not a mystery that that's a pretty clear situation and of course yes i'm overjoyed uh we'll see what she does and i'll follow it now but it's a breakthrough in consciousness that's the debt i feel the bernie i mean whatever your agreements are disagreement the man opened it up oh no disagreements with me no absolutely and for that we all are in his debt he he did it when no one thought it was doable and i think he even would have been elected in 2016. yeah i think so let me ask you one yeah i agree with that uh one last question biden has fdr's picture over the mantle place and the oval office a lot of talk about the new fdr i find it tragic i see that picture i've seen it i've thought about it it struck me as it obviously has struck and struck you uh i'm taken and i guess i'm a little touched that he wants that yeah that he chose that picture that there's something there somewhere in that in his heart senator from corporate delaware somewhere he knows yeah uh maybe it has something to do with his his roman catholic uh beliefs i i don't know and his agenda is having gone through so much yeah there's something noble that he put the picture there but i have to temper it because i i have to be honest with you he isn't roosevelt he isn't doing anything like you know roosevelt's signature decisions were fundamentally changing this system to say to the american workers if you're 65 years of age or older and you've given a lifetime of working in this community we call america whether you're a mother at home raising children whether you're a worker in a factory or someone in an office you're entitled to a retirement you're entitled to stop to take it easy to not put the stresses of a you know of work and so forth and we're going to create a pension system for you and we're going to do it and we're going to do it in a reasonable way and we're going to help you and that's going to make you feel better about your future it's going to enable you not to be a burden on your own children which is the last thing you want it's a that's a powerful intervention so was unemployment insurance so was the first minimum wage so was the federal jobs program that created those national parks in the west that we visit with great enjoyment to this day he did really big mr biden isn't doing that he isn't doing that and roosevelt had an ally uh and mr biden doesn't but it's partly his own fault mr roosevelt had the ally of the unions the socialists and the communists who were out there every day beating the bushes leading the little march down the center of town giving people things to think about that meant when they went into the factory and it came time to vote for the union or not they voted for the union not because of the arguments the union made but because of what uncle harry who was a socialist said last week at the dinner table when the family got together or what they saw in the street or what the school teacher brought to their attention the democrats got rid of all those lefties after world war ii and now they are suffering because they don't have an ally they just don't they're all out there by themselves even the labor movement which was once a key thing has been allowed with their with their complicity to die away so for me yeah mr biden can't be a roosevelt it's nice that he has the picture it's tragic that he doesn't see why the picture isn't enough yeah most americans don't realize that social security came from the socialist party absolutely and i also think in terms of what you're saying about the unions i think it's interesting how especially among young people when you look at what's happening at frito la today when you look at what's happening at amazon unions are sort of hot and happening again now in terms of a lot of younger people who are rediscovering what all of this means well professor richard wolff you are you know sometimes all the time actually it takes particular voices who articulate things that people can understand and it is such an important piece it's such an important part of moving things forward and your popularity today is to me i told you before i thought it was kind of amusing that you're this pop icon given the things you talk about but it's important it's more than amusing it's important and i thank you and for those of us who have been listening to you really for a long time it's delightful to to see how many people are hearing and how an important part you are of the deeper conversation and i agree with you it is a maturing of the american mind at least among some some segments and i also agree with you that there's tragedy ahead if we don't have these conversations and if we don't create the political will around these changes i thank you very much for what you're doing for the society and i'm so honored that you came to talk to me thank you so much you're very welcome and let me also uh and not just as a return kindness you brought a whole another dimension to that presidential race i said so to you before we went on the air i meant it um and you've stayed with it afterwards even though you're not part of that race anymore i had to recuperate i'm sure from it uh but you've kept your voice going and that's what we need none of us knows which of our voices touch which people in what way the best thing we need is lots of voices each in their own way moving to be able to say here's what's wrong every other breakthrough whether we overcame slavery or monarchy or all the other things it took people to say you know we can do better than this we can do better than this there's no reason to look at capitalism with anything else we can do better let's see how we might do it let's listen to the people thinking about it and then we'll we'll find a way forward and we won't go down with the system which would be the ultimate tragedy so you do that i feel that you and i are in you know we do it differently but we're partners in that larger project and i'm grateful that you're there i'm so grateful as well oh my very very best to you thank you very very much you're very welcome

Channel: Marianne Williamson

Views: 256,603

Rating: 4.7349834 out of 5

Keywords: Marianne Williamson, Marianne Williamson (author), A Course In Miracles, ACIM, Consciousness, Love, Happiness, Spirituality, Humanity, Our Deepest Fear, A Return to Love

Id: IiEmfXECD9k

Length: 61min 32sec (3692 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/kkent2007]

She got a bad rap because she believes some crazy shit. No crazier than most religious people, but outside of the "norm"

[u/PheonixMoment]

I listened to some of her speeches and interviews, she was incredibly based

[u/Ispira202]

She’s not a politician, we don’t know how far left Bernie is because he has to hide his power level

I would also never trust a crystal aunt, but that’s just me

[u/ben512k]

I’d vote for her

[u/Neoinsomniac]

I don't remember her much outside of having really weird spiritual beliefs (Those of which I don't even remember what they were)
I'm Canadian, it didn't really effect me, but I imagine that same image may have screwed with a lot of voters

Though, I'm sure if she runs again, this interview will probably be used against her...

[u/Setitov]

We all slept on Orb Mother. 🔮

[u/Greedy-Mushroom5237]

She was generally everything people thought tulsi was.