Richard Wolff on Fighting for Economic Justice and Fair Wages 

From Moyers and Company:

After the war, I think our history is the history of a destruction of the Communist and Socialist parties first and foremost, and of the labor movement shortly thereafter. So that we now have a crisis without the mechanism of pressure from below. And that may look to those on top as an advantage because they don't have that problem.

They don't have a C.I.O. They don't have Socialists and Communists, the way they do in Europe. But I think it's a Pyrrhic victory, because what you're teaching the mass of the American people is that politics, debate, and struggle, is a dead end. And if you think people are just going to sink into resignation, that's wishful thinking. They're going to find other ways to protest against the system like this, because the pressures are building in that direction. I think this is a capitalism that I would say has lost its sense of its social conditions, its social limits. It's killing the mass support without which it cannot survive.

So it is creating tensions and hostilities that will take left wing, right wing, a variety of forms. But it's producing its own undoing and doesn't imagine it because it focuses so much on making more money in a normal way of business that it somehow occludes from itself. It doesn't see the larger social conditions and what its behavior is doing to them.

Watch the entire interview here.  Full transcript here.

Wolff, a Marxist professor of economics, is rapidly becoming one of my go-to guys, and this interview serves as a compelling explanation as to why.  He has a massive alternative critique, rooted in Marx, but very much of the now, of our current economic woes, and talks with Moyers about it for some forty five minutes.  His reasoning makes more sense than any other critique I've read, including Krugman's: after destroying all political resistance, the masters of capital have squeezed workers almost as much as they can be squeezed, so much so that it is actually having adverse effects on the entire economic system.  But the people who run the system simply cannot understand what is happening, almost as though they are on automatic pilot, and continue to do their work as they always have, which is leading the entire nation toward ever greater unrest and instability.  And that's a critique that pretty much matches the facts on the ground as I understand them.

Of course, it's much more complicated than that, which is why you should check out the interview.  It's not only worth it, but it is also the only way to really get a handle on what's going on right now.  The mainstream media is too much inside the bubble to give an accurate representation of our system in crisis.  So go check it out.  You won't be disappointed.

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