Global Capitalism: Capitalism’s Decline Accelerates [September 2020]

welcome friends to another global capitalism live economic update we bring these to you every other month and of course they're not really live because we can't do that these days normally this would have been at the judson memorial church in new york city which has hosted these every other month presentations for years but we'll have to rely on the internet as so many of us do these days to get the presentation to you but again we're sponsored by three organizations one of which is the judson memorial church on washington square in new york city the second organization is left forum the annual conference of academics and activists on the left currently preparing its 2021 annual conference next spring and the third organization is democracy at work that's the one i work closely with most of the time and that produces and organizes and broadcasts these presentations before jumping into today's major topic which is declining capitalism and the acceleration of its decline a profound topic one that i have taken a long time coming to and that i want to argue for you and with you uh in the bulk of today's presentation but before we get into that i would like to ask you to hear me out about two positive events good news if you like that has happened recently and that has given me a sense of renewed hope about the possibilities to emerge from these dark times in a much better place than we were when we got into so let me begin with these and then turn to the declining system we are living through i begin with the city of paris in france the city of paris these days is remarkable remarkable for having turned the pandemic into an opportunity an opportunity to do things that were considered before but either weren't done or were taking much too long it is therefore a kind of inspiration about what could be and the contrast between paris and the new york where i live could not be starker so let's begin briefly paris is governed by a coalition of the socialist party the mayor is a socialist and hidalgo and the green party so right off the bat we have a remarkable situation and hidalgo has been the mayor of paris for quite a while and here are just some of the things she has been doing some before and some during the pandemic and i will only have time for a few but the point will be obvious here's some of the things that mayor hidalgo in paris has done 50 kilometers of the metro system the subways of paris have been reconstructed so as to become usable bicycle paths what a remarkable idea what a way to use the people of paris and to serve the people of paris in a way particularly suitable to a pandemic whole streets have been converted all over paris to enable restaurants to function restaurants which are a basic part of what paris is and has been for centuries and much more being done for them than for example here in the united states or for sure in new york city she is converting the major boulevard the major super highway is really what it is that goes around paris it's called the boulevard periphery the paris periphery boulevard it is going to become a park a park stressing greenery she's literally going to reduce the whole dependence on the automobile and the truck by converting that into a park and that in turn is part of an even larger project begun some years ago conceptually even before hidalgo but now being carried forward in a serious way which is expanding paris to make it grand by absorbing the suburbs connecting that to the greening of the whole city a massive transformation using people that might otherwise be unemployed to transform a city not just to get through the pandemic which it will help but to reconfigure a city for the long run in a way first and foremost geared to helping the average citizen and not focused on the richest and the most powerful remarkable what you can do if you see pandemic not only as a disaster and not only as an excuse to ratchet up an unjust politics but as a chance to make a difference and to make a change bravo to the socialists and greens doing something very different in paris from what we have in so many other parts of the world and let me not forget to mention that to relieve the city of its burden of traffic pollution and all the other modern ills there is a further achievement i want to congratulate them for just a few days ago all riders below the age of 18 on the paris subway system will now ride for free those over 65 already do the second piece of inspiration which is in a way more inspiring has to do with the last several weeks during which the professional athletes led at first by the national basketball heroes of this country's sports but now spreading to other sports as well an absolutely remarkable development i won't go through the details i'm assuming many of you are familiar with them here is the core a number of our most prestigious professional athletes in a variety of sports have used a traditional weapon of the labor movement the withdrawal of workers work labor to make an important political statement the athletes are concerned about the excess police violence devoted particularly to the african-american community reacting to the murders of several prominent african-american citizens prominent because of the fame they achieved by being the victims of police violence they won't play basketball or other sports they said until this issue which has been an issue in this country for many many many decades is addressed they won't play they will not enable their owners to make money from these sports and we're talking billions of dollars they risk not getting paid themselves as all strikers do why is this important and i cannot overstate it here is a social movement black lives matter justice for african americans here is a social movement getting an enormous assist from the labor movement that's a possibility of working together between social movements and the labor movement who have been very often working alone without each other for much of the last half century it is teaching the labor movement that it can once again become a major political and social force in an alliance with the social movements it is teaching the social movements what it means when the labor movement joins you adds to your moral and political and electoral force the profound power of working people to withhold what this system relies on their labor the possibilities of an alliance not just between sports figures and social movements but between the laboring sports figures and social movements could change this country profoundly in all manner of ways that hadn't been thought possible or reasonable or likely or even imaginable just a few weeks ago is this a product of everything going on the collapse of our system of economics our capitalism the rise of the black lives matter movement and all that it accumulates of american history and the pandemic sure it's a product of all those things but it's a historic re-commencement of the alliance between the labor movement and the other movements for progressive social change and in that alliance if it can build from this momentous beginning lies the possibility for a redirection not only of the united states but because of the position of the united states for the world as a whole and it is very important that all of you share with me watching waiting and clapping at an enormously important new development in the political life of the united states okay let me turn then to our topic for today capitalism's decline accelerates what do i mean we already are well into and have been for decades the decline of capitalism in the west by that i mean capitalism in western europe north america and japan that decline shows up in countless statistics the vast movement of both manufacturing and now increasingly services from those old centers of capitalism to the new ones and by new ones i mean china india brazil south africa and so on the center of capitalism has moved where capitalism in its modern form began britain in the 17th century spreading to the rest of western europe then beyond to north america then to japan and so on and finally now the world system over the recent decades that economic system of capitalism as we know it has left the places where it began what do i mean well the center of capitalism the growth area where it's vibrant where it's ascending where it is expanding that's in asia that's in latin america that's not in north america western europe and japan that's where the jobs particularly in manufacturing but not only are shrinking dying moving relocating and with it is a very quick rise in the standard of living the levels of consumption the real wages of workers in say china compared to the utter stagnation of real wages in western europe north america and japan it's unambiguous it's crystal clear a few weeks ago we learned that the luxury business has moved to china as well huge display in shanghai of the louis vuitton luxury productions empire why china because that's where the growth is and it's not just for cell phones and it's not just for capital goods and consumer goods anymore it's now across the board mr trump's tariffs the trade wars the continuing hostilities of the united states against china sometimes shared by australia britain and others isn't working they started too late and they can do too little and the center of capitalism keeps shifting the decline is setting in in the old centers the new centers have their problems labor problems growth problems that we can recognize because it's what the old centers once had but they don't have it so much anymore they have more the problems of a dying or declining system before i go into the arguments about this decline and why i see it the way i do let me remind everyone of some basic truths of all economic systems they all are born usually out of another system they evolve and change over time and then they die giving birth to the next system slavery porn evolves dies feudalism born evolves dies capitalism born evolves that's right the next phase is the passing away and where before i understood that as something that was coming i now begin to think it's already here so let me tell you why and what that means the failures of this system are mounting any one of them can be explained by this or that but there are too many and they're crowding in on one another i ask you to consider with me the following let's begin with the one that's on everyone's mind the kovit 19 pandemic human society has been at risk from viruses for a very long time its entire history a hundred years ago right after the first world war there was a devastating global viral pandemic seven to eight hundred thousand americans died millions in europe and so on we could go further back the famous black death in the 13th and 14th centuries kind of the end of feudalism or at least the beginning of the end which ought to make you think about a parallel we've had sars and mers and ebola we've had lots of viruses we know all about viruses and the dangers they pose the simplest notion of the protection of public health should have taught every modern society to be prepared and we know how we know from the history we need masks and gloves we need social distancing we need ventilators we need hospitals we need quarantine situations we need all those things and we knew it and we knew that we either had to rely on the capitalists who produce those goods in a capitalist system you know the companies that make the masks and the ventilators and the quarantine houses and the hospitals and the icu units and so on we know would those companies produce them and store them located around the country where population centers were so if and when a virus came we would be prepared and we know the answer as you do capitalists don't do that why it's too risky it's not profitable who's going to produce millions of masks store them in warehouses for an unknown amount of time during which they have to be cleaned monitored preserved checked very expensive for an eventual payout who knows whether people will be able to even afford what that no they're not going to do it how do we know that because they didn't they didn't do it well we also know what the answer in capitalism is when the society has to have something but private capitalists driven by profit calculations don't do it we know what the government normally then does the government comes in and does it buys the masks the ventilators the icu units everything from the companies at a good price giving the companies a profit and then the government at public expense warehouses these things around the country where people are make sure they stay in good condition preserves checks monitors cleans repairs replaces in preparation for the catastrophe if or better when it next arrives the government could have done that in all capitalist countries it didn't in most of them the failure of the private sector compounded by the failure of the public sector and of course all involved knew exactly what the issue was and let me tell you why they all know and knew it's because every one of the capitalist countries handles its military in just this way you know it's equally unprofitable for the maker of a missile or a jet fighter plane or a submarine or a gun or a tank or anything else to produce it store it somewhere check it monitor it clean it repair it and then for what for an eventual military activity that may or may not come this month this year next year 10 years from now it's too risky it's not profitable which is why private companies don't do it who sustains the military then answer the government the government goes to the private producers of guns and bullets and trains and planes and all the rest of the military paraphernalia it buys those things from the private capitalists at a price giving them a big fat profit we have a name in the united states for this the military-industrial complex and so the government locates all of the military equipment all around the country and in the case of united states all around the world to be prepared for a military eventuality exactly what you would need to do to prepare for a public health eventuality so the government knew what to do the private sector knew what to do but they didn't do it they are so focused on the maintenance of this capitalist system that they failed to protect not only us but the system itself in their rush for profit for the easiest road to profit it's extraordinary the level of blindness and failure and self-destruction but that's only the first failure i want to have you think about the failure to prepare both private capitalists failure and government controlled by private capitalists and if you're wondering really why didn't the government step in well the answer is the ambivalence of the private capitalist health care system or what we call in the united states the medical industrial complex to show its parallels with the military industrial complex why would the medical profession not want to step in and get the government to buy all of their output at a nice profit why not do what the military have done and the answer in this country and that's one of the reasons why u.s response to the pandemic has been so much poorer than in many many other capitalist countries the problem here has been that the medical industrial complex has wanted to keep the government out of medical care so that four industries could operate a conjoint monopoly the four industries are doctors hospitals drug and device makers and the health insurance companies those four industries together in this country operate a private medical care system its costs are much higher than the medical care systems of most other industrial countries much higher because they've kept the government out because they have demonized the government's tentative entry forced from below by popular demand they've kept it from developing further by demonizing it as socialism they can't bring the government in to do for the medical producers what it does for the military producers because it is terrified that once you bring the government in the questions will be raised again why are we in america paying so much more for medical care that is at best mediocre we live less long than our compatriots of capitalism in europe and japan we're in the hospital more we get sicker more easily we are obese our medical outcomes are poor but we pay more than everybody else so you can't have the government come in because that would threaten the conjoint monopoly that the medical industrial complex operates here in the united states so they couldn't and so we weren't prepared terrible failure terrible failure of the system not just the private but the public as well the private control the public we know that from our politics from the buying of our politicians so this is a conjoint failure capitalism and its government but that failure is nothing compared to the second failure which wasn't to prepare for the virus that was a terrible failure but now to contain it to fight against it we didn't do that here in the united states capitalism hasn't been very good at that to say the least it didn't test everybody in many countries the testing is very poor the united states is one of them vast majority of americans have not been tested as i speak with you and that hobbles the containment because we don't exactly know where the disease is where it's growing where it's shrinking where it's hitting these kinds of people more than we can't say much about this disease because we don't know enough and we don't know enough in part because we're not testing the way we could and we should here in the united states we currently have tens of millions of unemployed people in a rational economic system we would have hired those people as government employees first and foremost to test everybody easy to do easy to train people what in the world is going on even in the united states back in the 1930s the last time we had an economic crash comparable to today's we hired the federal government did millions of people but not now not at all we're hiring a few hundred thousand to conduct a census of our people even as they die in huge numbers there's something crazy about a system that works this way and the social effects i mean they're staggering a recent survey by the restaurant association of new york state indicates that two-thirds of the restaurants in the state of new york are either going to close or likely going to close permanently by the end of this year unless they get massive relief which no one is preparing for them restaurants are an essential part of every community of every market area of every mall of the social life of the united states simply allowed to disappear in huge numbers small and medium businesses are being wiped out in record numbers to be replaced by more chain stores by more big business filling in the destruction of small business in a society that used to pretend it had a special place in its heart for small business the social effects the poor are getting trampled the richest billionaires in the united states have become much richer over the last six months the gap between rich and poor much wider the social consequences of this failure to manage the pandemic is as horrific and will be as horrific as the failure to prepare and then on top of that another failure because not only did you not prepare and not contain this virus let me remind everyone the united states has four and a half percent of the world's population and as i speak with you the united states has 25 of the world's covid cases and roughly the same percentage of kovid deaths one of the richest countries in the world four and a half percent of the people and a quarter of the disaster that's called failure objective failure but along with it almost as if to make matters worse and to give you a sense of why this seems to me beyond this or that failing a decay a decline of a system has been the response americans are treated to a government that either tells you outright that it is prepared when it isn't or tells you outright it is containing the virus when it isn't or it finds someone to blame scapegoating has become a national sport in this country and in other parts of the world immigrants the chinese foreigners in general or if you want to get even more precise students having parties or who else you could imagine blaming it's almost as if the scapegoating is itself a sign that because precisely the system is declining it becomes that much more urgent to invent alternative explanations so you don't even have to get near the argument that this system is declining and yet more evidence arises alongside the failure to manage the virus is also the failure to manage the economic crash now let's be very clear here in the united states we have an agency it's called the national bureau of economic research the nber it is the agency that determines and dates our economic downturns and since we have them so often as capitalisms always do the nber is busy and was working on dating when the crash in the united states began and a few weeks ago it issued its report the crash in the united states began in february and let me be very clear with you that's before the pandemic hit it may be charming it may be comforting to blame the crash of capitalism on the disease on the virus politician after politician is grasping onto that straw as quickly as he or she can to evade the blame for their own complicity in making such a mess of it all but it doesn't work there's no need for the pandemic to result in staggering unemployment in the worst crash of capitalism in american history except maybe we'll see in comparison with 1930s many capitalist countries didn't have massive unemployment that was a u.s specialty doing that crazy thing it shouldn't have been done didn't need to be done we had a good experience with government hiring of people unemployed in the private sector back in the 1930s it could have and should have been brought up to scale right now it wasn't that's another failure of the economic system and the political system so we have an economic crash is that the fault of the disease not at all historians tell us that wherever capitalism has settled it has an economic downturn on average every four to seven years that's true for centuries that's been true all of our lives everything imaginable has been tried by the people who like capitalism to get rid of this profound instability keynes in economics was a whole new branch of how to do economics invented by mr keynes in the depths of the 1930s depression to help get the system out of this ever recurring crash structure every president since franklin roosevelt has presided over a crash because they happen every four to seven years and when that crash happened every president made this promise to the american people and similarly position politicians in other countries have made the same pro promise if you follow these policies these monetary and fiscal policies not only will we get out of the current crash but we will save our children and our children's children from having to go through any more of these awful crashes these every four to seven year events when millions lose their jobs lose their incomes interrupt their educations wreck their families and all the rest every president since roosevelt has made the promise no president has been able to keep the promise to deliver on the promise proof we're in one of the worst crashes ever but you want more proof okay let's do the arithmetic since the beginning of this new century we have had in the united states three capitalist crashes the dot-com crash of early 2000 the subprime mortgage crash of 2008 and now the covet 19 crash in 2020 20 years three crashes yup four to seven years right on time calling them after the triggering device calling each of these recurring capitalist crashes a name associated with whatever the last straw was that brought it on dot-com shares overpriced in markets in 2000 masses of poor and working-class people unable to pay their mortgages in 2008 for the virus now who's fooling whom here you can blame the trigger but it's the system that crashes every four to seven years which was unprepared for this downturn although it should have been unable to contain it although it should have been and therefore we have global collapse this system is declining but i'm still not done here's another sign of decline when you have a catastrophe like the virus and you have a catastrophe like the instability coming back and whacking us once again with a capitalist crash it might be nice if you could avoid having to come to terms with other of your social problems but we don't the system can't do it if i can draw a parallel between a system's troubles and an individual's troubles i think we all know those moments when their a problem arises or maybe even two that are serious but we can attend to them because we've taken care of other things that are part of life that we can put on hold for a moment but what is overwhelming is when we have one or two on top of other problems that we have either neglected or kicked down the road postponed the solution of them and they now come back often made worse by the very latest problems we are not solving at all well and so it is here in the united states which i'm going to be using but again variations of this story apply in western europe in japan and so on here we go the first and the most obvious black lives matter racism systemic racism the subordinate secondary oppressed condition of african americans throughout american history from their arrival as slaves to the present moment that problem has not been solved that problem has been dealt a series of stop gap temporary partial kick them down the road kind of solutions that never lasted commission after commission police atrocity after police it hasn't changed that's why i began today's presentation telling you about the historic and heroic action of the professional athletes in this country demanding that finally something be done protesting when it isn't gathering support to make it happen not shut up by the fact that the failures to control or prepare for the virus and the crash lead politicians to not want to be troubled just now by the unsolved disaster of racial injustice in the united states many of you hear a great deal about this otherwise i would go into it in more detail but the constraints of time being what they are let me push forward because systemic racism is not the only social problem and social explosion happening together with the abject failures around the virus and the abject failures around capitalism's instability here's the next one so fragile is the private capitalist sector of the united states so anxiety ridden is it about its security its safety its ability to reproduce that it has always been a mantra of private capitalism in the united states to avoid competing with the public sector we have systematically blocked government from producing goods and services in competition with private producers that became a taboo and because the private sector was so insecure even before its current failures it needed to keep government hobbled government never has enough revenue government has to go to the capitalists to get more revenue tax them borrow from them always on its knees keep the government hobbled keep the government weak keep the government under invested in and so we have it governments too deeply in debt governments too weak governments hobbled and the ideology that goes with it the crazy fundamentalism that suggests everything is done better by private than by public a kind of hysterical one-sidedness that reveals the anxiety of those who speak it and what has it done it's put our cities our states and even our federal government but particularly our cities and states important levels of government here in the united states in an impossible situation take them right now for example with tens of millions unemployed with a society still in shock from the fundamental changes all around it imposed by the crash imposed by the virus everyone needs more public services to get through this period everyone needs to lean on the public support more because the private sector is so undone and yet in just this moment the cities and towns can't help they can't even provide the poor level of support they provided before why because they depend on taxing and on taxing mostly the mass of people income taxes property taxes sales taxes and with massive unemployment all of those revenues are shrinking just when the government needs to do more the revenue it gets is less is this dysfunctional well that's a polite word it doesn't work so what is happening is that all of the state and local governments that take care of our roads that fund our educational system that maintain our hospitals and countless other public services are reaching a crisis point of their own expected to hit nice and conveniently this november or december right after the next election how convenient what kind of crazy society is already building the next crisis when it hasn't even begun to cope with the crisis of an unprepared four virus and the crisis of an uncontained virus and the crisis of an unprepared for economic capitalist crash and the crisis of having failed to contain or manage it and the crisis of our african-american systemic racism and now the crisis of cities and towns veering towards a budgetary collapse i'm still not done and i have a long list but i'm only going to give you one more before i draw in what i think are the conclusions here eviction the eviction catastrophe here in the united states is at a bit of an earlier stage which allows me to talk about it and to point out how it is building to a level for which words like civil war come to mind as you will see so here's the reality starting with the end of march when the pandemic really takes hold around the world but particularly here in the united states it was earlier a problem in other parts of the world as i think you all know but here in the united states it really hit towards the end of march that means that month already but certainly in all the subsequent months april may june july and august millions of americans did not pay rent if they were tenants in rented apartments hundreds of thousands of commercial activities restaurants department stores every other kind of store didn't pay rent to their landlords and finally people who own their own home that is they have taken out a mortgage loan to buy a home they must make mortgage payments every month those mortgage payments have been not paid various jurisdictions federal and state and even in some cases local have responded to this catastrophe with a kind of stop gap measure that is as i'm going to show you wrong unjust and catastrophic another sign of system failure what most of these folks have gotten both the commercial and the residential have been moratoria you don't have to pay your rent uh and i'm gonna focus on rent because it's the mass of our poorer people it's the key population it's larger than the others the renters don't have to pay under a recent extension they don't have to pay rent until the 31st of december that is the first day of next year okay let's take a look if you read the fine print of the order from the centers for disease control who have the authority here to write the rules a landlord cannot evict a tenant for not paying his or her rent notice the following one this is not a forgiveness this is not a gift this is in effect alone your landlord is loaning you the money by not having you pay the rent until december 31st of 2020 when all that you have not paid will be due into your landlord's hands number two he cannot evict you for not paying your rent but he can evict you for any other infraction does the landlord believe you're damaging the apartment does the landlord believe you're neglecting to maintain the depart the apartment that you can see where this is going and then landlord who can't evict you for one reason may become very interested in some other reason number two the landlord can raise the rent so that the while you're not paying it so that when you owe it all at the end of the year it won't just be all the months you didn't pay added up it'll be the addition of whatever rent increase the landlord chose to impose on you plus you can charge penalties for your lateness and interest for the time that you didn't pay the amount of money people are going to be owed on the 1st of january 2021 will be staggeringly beyond anything anything they can pay at that time given that millions of them are unemployed and that millions more are parts of family where somebody either has the disease or lost their job part of the time all the time you can see so what are we going to have on the 1st of january a time of immense cold weather in most of the populated parts of the united states what are we going to do throw millions of people out of their apartments see a war in the street between the people threatened with eviction and the landlords threatening to evict them let's look at the landlords for a moment they need the money from the tenant to maintain the apartment and the building in which the apartment is located they need to pay back the banks from whom they borrowed the money to build or maintain the building in which the apartments exist that aren't paying rent is there going to be civil war between tenants and landlords residential and commercial you see where this is going this is a system that doesn't work it's a system that pays people too little money to enable them to afford modest housing it has not built public housing for a generations so it relies on the private capitalist housing market and there isn't housing adequate and affordable for people to live in which is why they can't pay their rents where the solution is going to be what warfare in the streets tenants protesting landlords landlords calling the police the system doesn't work it is falling apart and americans more than in other parts of the world are right in the middle of it and they are feeling it they're feeling it in ways that i now want to conclude talking with you about the first one i've already talked to you about absolutely historic action of working people professional athletes paid very well in the united states but they're workers and they have bosses and they produce spectacular profits for their employers the nfl the national football league for example by far the biggest business in all of professional sports rakes in tens of billions of dollars every season and the workers there those professional athletes whose names are household words across the united states have withheld their labor no politician called on them to do it no labor union leader called on them to do it no this is political action from below but even more important it's the working class using for political ends its right and its power to strike for those of you who defend and want capitalism this is a moment for you to be become worried very worried unions have a hard time getting their members to strike even if the objective is an extra wage a better working condition greater security for their job it is usually much harder even to get workers to take real risks with their job security their income their benefits for a political objective here were professional athletes risking huge amounts of money that they earn given that they are so proficient in order to make what more money not at all better working conditions not in the not in the story they wanted to make a political point they wanted the political structure of this country how it treats people how it organizes its police activity to be radically altered to admit it's racist and to take the kinds of structural steps needed to address systemic racism wow the obvious is there every other working person has just been given a lesson let's call it labor activism 101 workers have enormous power and it lies in their ability to withdraw their labor because when they do everything stops the stadium where the basketball game is played is useless the ball is useless the management is useless if and when the workers the actual players the ones who make the game happen who play the game if they withdraw their labor all of the restaurant rest of it stops and what's true for baseball or basketball or football is true for everything else in a capitalist system without the workers the raw materials the tools and equipment and the employer can't do anything the workers can play the game without the employers but not the other way around think about it everyone is thinking about it those baseball players those football players those basketball players they have gotten everyone's attention the effort of the republican party and to some extent the democratic party to focus attention anywhere else but on the system dying were one up upstaged by this action of workers withholding their labor to make a political point the ramifications of this will be a major shaper of whatever happens both in the united states and beyond in the years ahead the second thing these failures and this declining capitalism are making clear is that the major political institutions associated with capitalism in its ascendancy and again i'm using the united states the republican party the democratic party and the labor organized labor unions all of those institutions are showing unmistakable signs that they are dying to i noticed that television viewership of both the republican and the democratic presidential conventions was lower this time than in the past four presidential election cycles the american people aren't interested they see these political parties as largely irrelevant to their lives their needs their wants their immediate futures the labor movement's silence its lack of activism is nothing short of stupefy are there cases are there examples where labor unions are active yes of course but the movement as a whole suffering the worst unemployment since the 1930s where is it where are the street demonstrations throughout the 1930s that part of new york city where i live near where i live called union square there were demonstrations of working people carrying signs every day for years everyone was confronted by labor unions organized labor unions marching with signs demanding that society take care of its majority namely the working class there are no such demonstrations now the labor movement doesn't call them the labor movement doesn't seem to be what concerned about the worst unemployment in the century since the great depression and it it boggles the mind union membership is lower now on a trajectory of decline that is 50 years old every year fewer and fewer people as a percentage of the labor force are in the labor movement to organize unions of course they're weak but they're also increasingly irrelevant those professional athletes they did this on their own they consulted their union i assume their union has played some role i assume but the initiative the courage came from them and that too is a model of something that can and will happen in this country more and more as the power that the working class always had become something they're aware of and can use and now can see how useful it can be the black lives matter movement is much stronger because labor was withheld by professional athletes the labor movement even if it doesn't get it yet is much stronger because it now has one through the action of those professional athletes the approval the affection and the gratitude of a social movement they made much stronger by giving it the power to withhold labor and therefore profits from big capitalists the potential again for social movements and labor movements to reconnect to reunify and to utilize their power to change society that has all been an effect in part of decline the last measure of decline is perhaps the way to end this but it'll be scary and this has to do with fascism and this is a difficult topic because of recent history particularly the fascist regimes of hitler's germany mussolini's italy and likewise the governments in spain and japan all of which deserve and most of which took the name fascist what does fascism mean and there's much confusion so perhaps i can help here a bit fascism is a kind of merger of the private capitalist system with the government now private capitalists are always interested in influencing the government shaping the government controlling the government that's why they pay lobbyists so an army of them works in washington or albany or uh sacramento or wherever else capitalists want to control the government it's why they give so much money to candidates and parties but to influence and control is different from to merge fascism is that next step when capitalism has become so problematized so difficult so dangerously close to collapse so much a declining system or a threatened system it is desperate and it merges with the government it wants the government to be a partner it literally takes government officials into the board of directors and demands that the government take corporate executives into the inner sanctum of government decision making they want to fascism is that merger using the government to enforce the capitalist system when if you left the capitalist system to itself it would fall apart it is an act of a capitalism that's desperate in germany's case it was desperate because socialists and communists were picking up half the votes in germany in the early 1930s and this was the business community's response let's give the government to the fascists let them destroy the communists which is what they did they were threatened today it's different the business community in this country is not threatened by socialists and communists it's the opposite that's not the problem the problem for capitalism in the united states today and increasingly elsewhere is capitalism itself its own internal dysfunction it's accumulated unsolved problems it's failure to prepare its inability to overcome the contradictions inside itself so that it can survive but whatever the problem the merger with the government is the fascist solution now you can sometimes see it when the government takes troops and puts down a strike there we go the government using its strength to enforce something but there are subtle ways that fascism happens and those are the most important to see today i want you to pay attention to that point and again there are many examples i'm just going to focus on one capitalism today is on life support in the united states and the life support machine is the united states government it maintains capitalism american capitalism is dependent and again just a few examples corporations in america are more indebted now than they have ever been in the history of the united states much of that debt and more every day is being provided by the government of the united states the federal reserve has been buying government bonds here's what happens a company approaches a bank for a the bank says i'm not going to loan you any more money because i've already loaned you money and the economy don't look so good i'm not do no problem says the company the fed will take care of you here's how it works the bank gives the company the loan it wants 50 million bucks the company writes out of iou we call that a corporate bond a promise of the corporation to pay back that money at a certain date and pay annual interest between now and then and what does the bank do with this piece of paper literally within minutes it sells that piece of paper to the federal government of the united states which hands money over to the bank thereby replacing in the bank's hands the money that they lent to you so the bank has no risk at all you've gotten your money and who is holding the bag the federal government so that's how corporations are surviving okay how bad is it fully 20 of american corporations are now so deep in debt that they are what we call zombie corporations this is a corporation that is technically bankrupt that is it doesn't make enough profit to pay off the interest on its debts well how does it survive by borrowing enough extra money to pay off the interest on its previous debts but of course at the end of this year it'll have even bigger interest costs than it had before this is a zombie becoming more zombified over time how is it possible for a zombie to borrow money i just told you the federal reserve will take care of it okay at the same time the federal reserve is buying other kinds of securities that are made up of the debts of all kinds of real estate operations the debts of students the debts of car buyers the debts of credit card debt people people in debt with their credit card in other words lying behind the ostensible private sector is the government it makes an absolute joke of libertarian ideas of conservative or what we used to call conservative economics that wants us to understand the private sector is what we need and rely on and the government is an unwanted inefficient intruder that shouldn't be there the economy of the united states today is the opposite all that holds it up all that holds it together is the government the last step who buys what american companies produce well the mass of the people and how do the mayors of the people get the money partly they get it now directly from the government that's those extra six hundred dollar checks for the unemployed that's the unemployed compensation that twenty thirty million people now take home it's the credit cards that the mass of people still have running up those debts because in the end it's the federal government that buys those debts when they are securitized bundled together into the securities that the federal reserve is buying with the fresh new money it prints consumer worker employer they're all on the dole but much more money is involved in keeping them going than was ever paid to poor people on welfare so this is welfare built large and by no one so much as ready conservative republican politicians if it weren't so tragic you should be laughing at the horrible irony of it all let me conclude with a thought there are well-intentioned people who look at this wholesale disaster and come up with interesting plausible ideas of how you could maybe fix it if just you do this or that if you stop letting the fed be the solution which it isn't to these problems and allow the government to come in perhaps allowing public employment of people uh for a green new deal let's say or something like there are people who think you can solve this problem they mean well and if you do some of the things they propose it will help no question but i believe we are beyond that and that we have to say to ourselves and make it part of our conversation are we better off fighting heroically against the establishment to make the little changes that will make things better but leave the system intact or are we better advised now to recognize that this system is the problem that the real sickness of our time isn't covet 19 it's capitalism it is declining it is dying and the real question we need to face is whether we will permit it to take us down with it this is richard wolff thanking you for your attention and i hope you will forgive me if i remind you that since we cannot do this live and cannot raise the money we normally do 10 bucks a person that i ask you to consider being a supporter subscribing to our youtube channel youtube democracy at work which doesn't cost anything but also making a donation of whatever you can afford to help defray the costs of producing these presentations filming them processing them and delivering them to you thank you in advance and i look forward to speaking with you again second wednesday of november a program we're planning now which will be happening roughly a week after the american presidential election and it will analyze what the results were if we know them then and what they mean for the world ahead

Channel: Democracy At Work

Views: 116,612

Rating: 4.9049602 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Wolff, democracy, work, labor, economy, economics, inequality, justice, capitalism, capital, socialism, wealth, income, wages, poverty, yt:cc=on, COVID-19, pandemic, virus, epidemic, contamination, exploitation, scapegoating, racism, systemic racism, housing, fascism, EU

Id: X6vrc1mPsNo

Length: 78min 4sec (4684 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020

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