Global Capitalism: China - US’s First Real Competitor in a Century [November 2021]

welcome friends to another global capitalism live economic update every other month we produce these discussions these presentations in the hope that they clarify issues of importance in our daily lives three organizations combine to produce these events one is the judson memorial church off washington square in manhattan which has hosted these until the pandemic required them to become virtual the second organization is the left forum an annual gathering of activists and academics which you can find more about at leftforum.org and finally the direct producer of each of these democracy at work and i'll have more to say about that particular organization in a moment i would like to stress before we begin that these virtual events made available to you cost money and that we need to make them fundraising events as well when we met at the judson memorial church everyone who came kicked in ten dollars the best conceivable way for you to support us is to go to patreon.com and gcleu and there become a monthly sustainer for whatever amount of money you like and can afford that would be the best because it allows us to plan and organize the production and the distribution of these talks it is important otherwise i wouldn't be taking up your and my time to talk to you about this finally for the holiday season coming up uh i'm proud to announce that we have issued a hard cover version of the first book we published understanding marxism but it has a new introduction that i've written uh that covers the last few years and the relevance of marxism to understanding them if i dare say so i think it would make an interesting present for interested people and you can find out more about that at our website democracy at work dot info and finally let me thank the patreon community that already has gathered around these gcleu events for their ongoing support it is invaluable and enormously appreciated today is talk and it's going to take the entirety of my presentation is about china it's a response to your requests that i present an overview not only of china but of this issue of china's place in the world relative to that of the united states so here's the title for today's talk china the first real competitor of the united states in a century and let me explain briefly that title it's a hundred years now that the united states became the dominant power in a world capitalist system world war one changed everything the major other contesters for global power britain germany were defeated and largely set back they could no longer catch up to the united states something like that happened with japan in the second world war and so on the united states has not really had a serious global economic and political competitor the soviet union never came close to being that economically and basically politically either having nuclear weapons is a very important fact but it is not determinant of all else china has it all economic competitiveness political competitiveness and military power including nuclear power the united states has not faced a competitor on this scale for a century and that should be kept in mind as a backdrop a context for everything that i have to say i am neither an advocate nor an enemy of the people's republic of china my presentation today attempts to be balanced in explaining what's going on rather than taking a particular position about what's going on so i'm going to begin with china's achievements and i'm going to begin with a story the world is being changed among other things by the development of very rapid train transport around the world really fast trains new motors new locomotives new power sources new tracks and achieving extraordinary speed which entails extraordinary economies economies of moving people and economies of moving product and this will translate it is already translating into lower prices that can be charged by producers and shippers who can make use of much more rapid train transportation there are a rapidly growing number of rapid trains in the world helping the countries where they're located to become economically stronger and here's the key fact two-thirds of the world's fast trains are located in the people's republic of china the united states basically has none even if you count the train that runs from boston to washington the asla it is faster than our regular trains but a good bit slower than the fast trains i'm talking about and that are exemplified above all else in the people's republic of china the second achievement that is a story but tells a lot is the chinese practice of building entire cities before the people arrive to live and work in them a little mini fact most of the large cities in the world cities of a million or more are located in the people's republic of china that is not only because its population is large but that it has developed in part using those fast trains a network of cities built before the people settle into them so that there's a rational plan for how the city is built a rational set of ways that the city can grow in the future it's all coordinated with the transportation networks roads railroads airplanes and so on it is a remarkable testament to the possibilities the power and the success of the kind of economic planning that china specializes in what's going on here is the next achievement the chinese deserve recognition for they've organized a remarkable economy partly government owned and operated and run enterprises sizable part of their economy and an another part very large of private capitalist enterprises some chinese some foreign and some partnerships between chinese and foreign in other words it's a classic mixed economy but what is interesting perhaps most is that there is an overarching agency which is the government and in turn the partner of the government the chinese communist party who organize and control both parts of their economic system the public and the private what this means we have now learned it means that there's an agency that can coordinate the public and the private resources that the chinese have natural resources capabilities in manufacturing and services and shipping and transportation coordinate these to bring them all to bear on the prioritized objectives of chinese economic and social development i'm going to give you three quick examples of what this ability to mobilize and coordinate public and private resources by an overarching political authority has accomplished in china for the last 25 years the gdp the gross output of goods and services in china has grown on an average of six to nine percent per year the united states over the same period of time saw a gdp growth of 2 to 3 a year no contest no comparability china is growing three times faster than the united states and has been doing so year in and year out for a quarter century an amazing achievement over the same period of time the real wages that's the money earned by an average chinese worker adjusted for the prices he or she have to pay when they buy things with their wages we call that the real wage in the united states over the last 25 years the real wage has basically stagnated if it's gone up it's gone up by something like half a percent a year which is a statistical empty category over that same period that real wages have been stagnant in the united states they quadrupled in the people's republic of china this again is an unheard of achievement for any country but for a poor country a country as poor as china was until 50 years ago it's an astonishing achievement and their high-tech parody with the united states the fact that the they have their own equivalence of apple and microsoft and google and so on and that a number of them have capabilities we have not yet achieved in the united states as was illustrated by the whole mess around the huawei corporation you can see that their control and mobilization of resources was valuable not only to get their gdp growth the way they did their real wages to grow the way they did but their high-tech power in the global economy is an extraordinary achievement but the list is not done they also over the last 25 40 years moved millions and millions of people from rural agricultural very poor living circumstances into much much better circumstances from agriculture to urban from farming to industry from low-tech to high-tech from minimal education to considerable education this kind of transformation of agricultural people into modern industrial and service oriented working people in europe took centuries in the united states took many decades the achievement of china is not only this transition that has happened before but they have done it in record short amount of time only a society able to mobilize public and private resources the way they have could possibly have achieved this they boasted recently their leadership of having moved 600 million is the number i saw of people out of poverty and into a situation far from wealthy but good bit above poverty and for a country that was as poor as china for as long as people were poor in china this is the re record making record-breaking uh poverty anti-poverty program the world has ever seen when you count where they came from and the number of people involved and what was achieved and now the world has seen yet another example of what can be achieved if you mobilize public and private resources covid china has had seven eight thousand seven to eight thousand deaths from covid the united states has had seven hundred thousand and the population of china is four times larger than that of the united states a much bigger country with much less in the way of accumulated wealth has outperformed the fight against the global pandemic has outperformed the united states on a scale that is hardly imaginable how was that done how could they do that and the answer is not a mystery and it isn't some evil force it's the ability to coordinate everything and i'll come back to that the way they have done more recently they have turned their power of coordination to yet another objective reigning in the power of big multinational corporations they have really done that in a sharp way and then you can see it by seeing what happened to the value of the shares of stock of a number of those very large chinese companies that were told by the government you can't proceed to function the way you have you have to pay the people at the bottom much more than you're paying them now you have to use your profits in ways that are socially useful not ways that enhance the footprint of your company and when that power speaks in china everybody nods and that is a remarkable use of their power of mobilization and coordination and how far that goes is something we'll have to wait to see it's a relatively new exertion of the power at the top and finally they've organized the international development of china's reach the uh belt and road initiative it is being criticized in various quarters as being another kind of imperialism only this time chinese imperialism rather than british and german french belgian dutch american imperialisms well the chinese say it's a different organization with a different purpose we will see it's a little early for either way to reach a judgment but it is a sign of where the chinese are going to focus the extraordinary power this list of achievements illustrates on the other hand i want to make clear that there are very big problems that the chinese economy also faces problems that will require very far-reaching solutions and only time will tell whether those solutions will be found what happens if they are and what happens if they are not here's the first one china built up its extraordinary wealth over the last 40 years by being an export-oriented powerhouse they produced mostly for the world economy they replaced by out competing british french german japanese american corporations so successful were they in replacing those companies in the export markets of the world that those companies in most cases set up shop in china following the old adage if you can beat them join them and they produce now in china an enormous foreign capitalist presence inside the people's republic of china and china is worried it's worried that if something happens to the world economy as it did in 2008 and 9 and as it did again last year and early this year that the markets they depend on to whom they sell all those exports will dry up and with it their ability to employ their people to pay them the wages to produce the goods makes no sense if you cannot sell the goods into the export market upon which china depended so china now has for quite some years been busily trying to develop an internal market they have after all 1.3 1.4 billion people were that to be developed especially along the lines of the fast development that china has shown everywhere else you would have an internal market that wouldn't make the chinese economy so dependent on the rest of the world whose economic well-being the chinese cannot and do not control will they be successful will they build up a domestic market as quickly as they need it to as quickly as their foreign export markets may require them to we don't know yet it's a major problem for them and they work very hard on trying to solve it number two they are a communist party and a government that is controlled by that party therefore they have a problem when there's an enormous private capitalist sector to their economy they have the second largest number of billionaires after the united states in the world and they're growing their billionaire class faster than that in the united states these are very powerful very large companies that wield all of the power that goes with mega corporations everywhere in the world the chinese government being a government of communists at least ideologically opposed to capitalism critics of capitalism suspicious of capitalism have a problem in having invited and enabled an immense private capitalist sector that can and already has bumped heads with the communist party and the government how that plays out is a big problem for the future of china and one for which a solution is not yet clear yet another problem not only do they have a big private capitalist sector they have a big private excuse me foreign capitalist sector in other words a big part of the private capitalism inside china are enterprises effectively owned and controlled by british french german american and so on corporate entities and they have even more bases to be upset with to be confrontational with to evade the controls of the communist party perhaps bring in their own national governments to lean on the chinese government etc etc and finally there is the reality of civil liberties the chinese are a coordinated top-down political system the very success they've had in mobilizing resources has as its other side a rejection a skepticism a hostility towards the kinds of civil liberties that are enjoyed in other parts of the world that's a problem in terms of your consciousness of your people in terms of where desires for change may go and there's a question of whether or not you can long postpone the development of labor unions that are independent social movements that are independent that may have relationships with the communist party of china but are separate from them how all of this is going to be managed is a major issue and a major problem for china it has its achievements it has its problems i want to turn next to the competition with the united states because that is for my audience and for much of the world that is watching and waiting as you will see an absolutely crucial question of the day but before i do that i want to take a moment to explain to you that there's a considerable team that produces this event that produces our weekly radio and television show economic update the videos that we release almost every day and the rest of the work the book publishing and so on that comprises the activities of the organization democracy at work i myself am a volunteer i am not paid by this organization and i have no intention of becoming paid i've been a professor all my life i'm in a position to do this as an extension of what i did as a teacher with the biggest difference being the enormous gratification which i readily admit that comes from being able to talk to so many of you to play a role in shaping the conversations we all have about the society we all live in and that many of us want to change i'm proud of what we do but i know that it costs money i know that many of the folks working on our team live by what they earn as part of the team that produces these events we are making a difference it's gratifying beyond anything i can tell you and i want you to please consider being a partner with us in changing the conversation and perhaps the very direction of our society and you can do that in many ways but one of them is to be a supporter a sustainer of what we do and what you watching us or listening to us know that we do in an ongoing way that has now continued for over a decade so i ask you please to consider particularly being a regular sustaining supporter with whatever it is you can afford the flow of money coming to us from people like you is absolutely crucial to extending the reach we now have achieved over 10 years and that is exploding in terms of the number of people listening to us watching us and following us so if you can please know your partnership would be enormously appreciated all right to turn then to the competition between the united states and china i want to talk first about the interdependence between the united states and china because it is at least as important as anything else we're going to be saying about the competition let's begin with the enormous flow of chinese-made goods and services into the united states they have become a staple part of the consumer goods that americans buy in fact the explosive growth of china is closely linked to the explosive gross growth of the walmart corporation and not just walmart but i like to tell the story you know china was able to produce all these things that we buy clothing appliances in the very near future automobiles and so on but they weren't able to distribute them they had mastered the technology they had mastered the manufacture they had mastered the transport but in order to sell to the american people you have to have a system of distribution stores warehouses the comfort and knowledge of people that they can go to this particular store and buy these goods china would have taken decades to do that but they didn't have to they had a partner yeah walmart there is no walmart without the people's republic of china even though it is also true that the growth of the people's republic of china is likewise dependent on walmart having made the decision to be the distribution network one of the most important for the chinese production of goods walmart profited by doing this and china profited by doing this and in the process not only did china and walmart become interdependent but so did the level of consumption of the american working class and middle class were the flow of inexpensive chinese consumer goods into the united states to be seriously stopped or disrupted the substitute goods that americans would find no longer chinese because it was stopped would be much more expensive in other words if you think we have an upsurge of strikes and labor actions today and we do they're nothing compared to what would be activating and irritating the american working class were the chinese flow of inexpensive consumer goods to be stopped the chinese don't want that because it's very profitable for them walmart doesn't want it for the same reason but every capitalist in the united states in a way doesn't want it because if it were to happen the pressure from your workers mr and mrs capitalist for higher wages to pay for the higher price of consumer goods would be very serious as a problem so there's a lot of interdependence between the united states whose very wage level is dependent on the export of chinese goods then china has become a very important outlet for u.s investment most of our large mega corporations corporations many of you think of as quintessentially american and the same applies for japanese or british or german corporations are now heavily dependent on the enormous investments hundreds of billions of dollars into china into production facilities in china they don't want to lose the value of those investments they don't want them to become unprofitable and they know that the power of the chinese government and of the chinese communist party to take steps in that direction is already proven and demonstrated so there's an interdependence china wants the benefits of the technology of the connections that it brings for them to invite as they have done foreign capitalists to invest in china but the very fact that foreign capitalists have creates the interdependence between them and i want to stress it because comparable interdependencies didn't exist between the united states and the soviet union and that had a great deal to do with the so-called cold war and with the whole history of post-world war ii global economic events the interdependence i'm describing between the u.s and china did not exist between the united states and the soviet union but i'm not done the interdependence goes further the exports of goods from the united states to china is relatively small compared to the reverse in other words we buy more chinese goods than chinese buy american goods and the result is that the flow of dollars leaving the united states to pay for the goods that come from china is much greater than the amount of dollars the chinese need to buy the goods they buy from america the net flow accumulates dollars in chinese hands without going into the details here's what ends up happening to a lot of those excess dollars the dollars flowing to china that they don't need to buy goods from america they lend that money to the united states government very important that you all understand this that is a choice the chinese have made it is a reserve of wealth they can count on they hope if and when they need it say if a pandemic strikes or say if war breaks out or say and fill in the blank so they've done that and now let's watch the interdependence they have sent over in excess of a trillion of these dollars more than a trillion that's an enormous source of money given to the american government by china to be used by the american government pretty much as it wishes say for example fighting wars in other parts of the world whoa so the american government's ability to print money to raise money in the deficit to cover spending more than they raised from americans part of the reason the government can spend more than it raises from us is that the chinese lend it to the u.s government there's an interdependence on the other hand the chinese now own the debt of the united states they are either the number one or the number two it goes back and forth between china and japan creditor of the united states were they to demand repayment of the debt owed to them the value of the dollar the value of interest rates in the united states would go god knows where we have the classic relationship of debtor and creditor a relationship of interdependence if ever there was one the united states is the largest debtor country in the world and china is one of the greatest creditor countries in the world each for their own mostly domestic reasons but the interdependence is very real and limits what both governments can do and here's a relatively small point but one that i know you'll want to think about when the chinese use those excess dollars to buy u.s treasury bonds that is to lend the money to uncle sam the loan of course carries an interest rate like all such loans do which means that the united states government has to pay interest to the people's republic of china for the trillion dollar debt trillion plus that the us owes to the holders of these government securities in china well that's 30 40 50 billion dollars a year that uncle sam collects in taxes from you and me and sends over to the people's republic of china which it is free to use say for example to build up their military which you and i are paying for in this interdependent system finally the chinese have become important investors here in the united states buying companies becoming partners with american companies becoming important players in various markets here in the united states and american companies looking to sell are eager for the chinese to become buyers because maybe then they can get a better price for whatever it is they're selling in the market these are interdependencies american companies line up they don't want a war with china trade war tariff war none of it they want the chinese to continue to do what has been so profitable in so many different ways to both public and private institutions here in the united states after interdependence is competition yes the united states and china have some competition both company countries are looking around the world to secure sources of energy oil gas and so on and sometimes they clash the chinese want to get their hands on the energy they need to bring into china the united states wants to be secure in the event that energy sources here not only may not be there but maybe too expensive and that then becomes a competitive problem if it costs more to get energy here as compared to the countries with which we compete so if you put all that together there's also expo uh competition for export markets the united states would like to sell goods produced here but they can't because the chinese got there first or can undersell them so there's a tension there and that's a competition and that is ongoing and that will probably become more intense and likewise there's a competition about the latest technology since we really have a competitor in china and they can do the high-tech work there's a competition about who has the latest version again the struggle with huawei was precisely over the fact that huawei was ahead of u.s competitors in a number of ways that was scary to contemplate that will not stop that is continuing and now we come to the cold war this uh reason a recent um collection of irritants of one kind or another calling your leaders bad names putting the american navy into the south china sea developing an intense concern for the uyghur minority a muslim minority inside china and so on let's take a look at what that is to finish this discussion of the competition first there's a scapegoating of china for internal domestic politics mr trump was able to distract attention from things he did that he didn't want attention on by blustering one tariff war one trade war against china after another it was kind of histrionic it was mostly theater it changed very little it certainly didn't hurt china one-tenth what mr trump tried to claim but it was good domestic politics it made it appear that our problems in america had some foreign cause that we could punish or block or in one or another of these sorts of childish maneuvers the scapegoating of china is a good bit of what this cold war talk is about then there is the fact that it does hurt china to be militarily threatened to be castigated it takes time and energy and wealth to rebut those charges to spend more on getting your message in your out because the united states which has much more developed reach around the world can demonize you as it sees fit so it has a marginal impact that irritates more than anything else the chinese from everything i can see then there's also the fact that the united states empire is not growing just like its economy isn't growing compared to china china is now a presence everywhere in the world it is cutting economic deals with every country that will do that with them which is most countries in the world overwhelming majority of them and they're out maneuvering the united states and it is leading many to see the united states empire as in a long period of decline how far it will go how long it will last nobody knows but the decline is pretty clear and the chinese are growing so there's a kind of natural tendency for the united states to blame the chinese and so you get saber-rattling hoping maybe that puffing yourself up as a threat for example over the uyghur minority or over the hong kong developments or over the taiwan status these are ways to press the buttons as they say in beijing but it's not clear that there's more than so far theatrics political public relations theatrics and so it is the defense treaty signed between australia united kingdom and the u.s to confront china again another one of these saber rattlings and here's a another point the united states seems to be concerned to mobilize its allies to confront china now that the united states seems to have decided that china is the big enemy which is said openly they want to mobilize other countries and so there's all kinds of maneuvers to to have alliances geared against china and the one between the united kingdom australia and the us was the major one in recent times that puts europe by the way in a remarkable difficult situation because whether you like it or not or admit it or not europe is now in an altogether new place after the end of world war ii it was crystal clear the europeans were not going to go with the soviet union they were going to go with the united states and the united states and the soviet union were the big competitors and europe was the ally that western europe of course the ally of the united states everything is muddy now the europeans depend on trade with china more than the united states does and they depend on investments from china more than the united states does and the united states especially under trump but even under biden is less willing to do for europe what it once was willing to do the united kingdom is clear they are in the american camp and the russians are increasingly making it clear they're in the chinese camp but for the rest of europe in the middle between england on one end and russia on the other it's an open question and europe is a very important economic player in the world economy a divided one yes and weaker because of that yes but an enormous player nonetheless and where those countries go together or separately in the confrontations between the united states and china will have a major impact on how that competition works out last point i want to make there is a fundamentally different strategy emerging on the part of china versus the united states in their struggle given their interdependence and given their competition for the united states it can't really compete very well economically or even now politically the failure of the tariff wars of trump the trade war of trump or the kind of verbal maneuvers of biden are clear evidence that the power political and economic isn't there what the united states does have is a predominance of military power would it dare use it who knows but it wouldn't be the first time that an empire losing its political and military clout resorts to what clout it has left that doesn't usually end real well for anybody and it may not this time either the chinese seem to have decided on a different response they're not going to count on military partly because i don't think they want to or maybe they cannot catch up with the dominance the u.s military still has maybe they can't afford it so they're trying something else they are trying to compete around the world by developing a different kind of society that's the meaning of the recent decisions at the very top of chinese society to decrease i'll use a careful word inequality to lift the poorest up and to tax the richest to do so and to force behavior of corporations public and private that enhances equality instead of inequality it is very stark to compare the efforts to go in that direction with the united states where the level of inequality of wealth and income has gotten steadily worse over the last 25 years including the four years of trump and including the first year of biden there seems no end to the growing inequality here contrasted with the chinese apparent strategy of confronting the united states not militarily but with a quality of the society that may win more hearts and minds than a military approach could hope to do we will be seeing about that in the months and years ahead let me conclude by answering the question you send to me most often what is china is it capitalism is it socialism is it something else how do we understand what this society is given everything we've just gone through in the way of the interrelationships and the competition and the interdependence and the cold war holding these two things together the chinese refer to what they have as socialism with chinese characteristics okay let's look what does that mean well socialism is a very big word and it's a very large tent that has lots of things inside it for example western european countries scandinavia is often mentioned but this is true in germany and france and in large ways in italy and spain as well socialists there in or out of the government and i should mention to you today that socialists are very much part of governments in europe the largest party in germany in the recent elections the socialist party the government of portugal is a coalition of the portuguese socialist party the portuguese communist party and the portuguese green party and on and on and on socially and very big in europe and what does it mean there well it means private enterprise private capitalist enterprises with employers and employees stock markets all of that but with an enormous level of regulation and interference by the government to make the economy work what they think is better that's why the europeans mandate that in almost every european country if you get a job you must be given four to five weeks of paid vacation every year why you have a health insurance from birth to death whether you're working or not while the colleges are increasingly low cost or free seven european countries the tuition and fees are zero to go to college including germany and so on so there's all kinds of social interferences minimum wages controls are whether companies can leave without paying all kinds of costs of the workers that are displaced phenomena that most americans can't even imagine that's what they call socialism in europe private capitalist enterprises but governed by a powerful socialist commitment then you have the soviet union which is in a case quite different there the decision was made again for many local reasons that the government would not just regulate and interfere but that the government would take over the ownership and operation of enterprises which at least in industry was the soviet norm china is neither the european socialism nor the soviet uh communism or the soviet socialism soviets always call what they did socialism the china is somewhere in the middle like the europeans it is a mixture of a big private capitalist enterprise sector and a government owned and operated so it's like scandinavia in that it's mixed it's a little like russia because there is a segment and an important one where the government owns and operates the enterprise but it's not like russia because a huge sector is private which russia didn't have so it sits somewhere you could you might say between the soviet model of socialism and the european scandinavian model of socialism and we might leave it at that but there's another approach and i want to end with that you could look at capitalism and socialism not in terms of the role of the government that has been the discussion in the 20th century that does not mean it has to be the discussion in the 21st century the discussion now in this century i think is going to be different it's going to look at capitalism and socialism in terms of a different way of organizing production simply put in capitalism a small number of people the owner the board of directors in the corporation run the show they tell the mass of people employees what to do how to do where to do and then to go home and what those employees produce belongs to that little group at the top it's not a democratic system it's a very autocratic system because the folks at the top who make the decisions are not accountable to the people they employ who have no vote over these decisions whatsoever and the alternative could be a socialism understood as the democratization of the enterprise of rearranging the enterprise so it is democratic so there isn't a small group making decisions all decisions are made collectively and democratically for all the usual reasons of advocacy of democracy only now it's advocacy of democracy inside the workplace and not just in politics if you use that lens then european scandinavia or china or russia none of them made the transition from capitalism to socialism none of them reorganized the factories the offices and the stores into democratically owned and operated worker co-ops they didn't do that they thought about it there were some debates at various times about it but they didn't do it or at least they didn't do it yet and that leads me to my closing comment a year or two before he died early in the 1920s the leader of the soviet revolution lenin commented on what they had achieved between 1917 when the revolution happened and when he was giving this talk which i believe was 1920-21 he referred to what the soviet union had achieved excuse me with the phrase state capitalism and he was very proud of it we made a revolution the state is now controlled by a political party of the working class by which he meant the communist party in russia the workers control the state and the state has taken from the private capitalists the industry so we have a capitalism run by the state it's state capitalism why did he still call it capitalism the only answer i can make to that question is because they hadn't transformed the inside of the enterprise they had transformed who owned it they had transformed who ran it but they didn't transform how it was run how the mass of people would become the owners and operators of the economy that lenin said was the next stage of the revolution which history tells us they didn't achieve so the question for china is really the same one you have developed a mixture of state capitalism the sector where the state owns and runs and a state regulated private capitalism so you have a mixture of state and private capitalism but lenin's question stands will you are you in the process do you have plans for the transformation of this kind of still capitalist economic system to something fundamentally different and that fundamental means the radical democratic reorganization of the factory the office and the store that question is as pertinent to china today as it was to the soviet revolutions and revolutionaries after their revolution but to conclude china is a fundamental game changer not only the great competitor for the first time in u.s history and for the first time in a century but also raising the most fundamental questions about economic organization about capitalism itself and about the next system that replaces capitalism in the way that capitalism replace the foregoing feudalism slaveries village economies and so on you are all right to be writing to me about china it is the issue as much or more than any of the other basic issues and it should never be forgotten as the context within which both the chinese are going to figure out solutions to their problems and the americans to theirs and the rest of the world affected by those decisions as they find their own way thank you all for your attention i hope that these comments and explanations of what the chinese revolution really means these days will be useful to all of you thank you

Channel: Democracy At Work

Views: 141,197

Keywords: Richard Wolff, democracy, work, labor, economy, economics, inequality, justice, capitalism, capital, socialism, wealth, income, wages, poverty, yt:cc=on, China, US, foreign policy, inflation, prices, supply, demand, supply chains, loans, lending, finance, cold war

Id: 6q5VsEew0ZM

Length: 58min 26sec (3506 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021