Prof. Richard Wolff
ZG: As you mentioned, capitalism was very context dependent. It wasn’t the inevitable course of history—it’s a system that came about. Could you briefly talk about, other than the dogma surrounding this economic system, what exactly is corrosive about it? And what are you trying to move us towards?
RW: Here are the three basic problems of capitalism. Number one, it produces and reproduces fundamental inequality. First of all, inequality of income and wealth, and secondarily, the inequality of politics and culture that follow from the inequality of income and wealth...
The second problem of capitalism is instability. The capitalist system is fundamentally unstable. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is an agency in this country that keeps track of the business cycle, so called, tells us that capitalism, wherever it has settled, has an economic downturn every four to seven years, on average. Downturn has synonyms: recession, depression, crash crisis, I could go on. But the reason there are so many words is because it is so constantly with us...
And the third problem of capitalism is its fundamental injustice. It punishes the people it damages. It celebrates and exalts the people who are the most effective at gathering the wealth into their own hands. Americans who cannot name the people who govern them all know who Elon Musk is, or who Jeffrey Bezos is, and on and on and on and on ...
Every system, slavery, feudalism, village, egalitarianism, whatever you want to call them, has provoked people who love that system and people who don’t...
It is the odd and, in my judgment, terrible failure of the United States that for the last 75 years, it has prided itself on a systematic ignorance about the Marxian criticism of capitalism...
Perhaps the most important philosophical understanding I could hope to convey to you, is that socialism, and Marxism, and
communism are products of capitalism. They are capitalism’s other side. They are the shadow.
ZG: Let’s get a bit more into that Socialist Alternative that you’re talking about. Right now we have seen a lot of unionization happening across the country. You have the Writers Guild, you have the UAW, and even here at Harvard, the undergraduate workers have their first authorization election tomorrow to form the Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union. As someone that is very strong and supportive of this Marxist alternative, do you see the people doing this work as having reformist intentions, simply trying to create better material conditions? Or is it a revolutionary impulse?
“Perhaps the most important philosophical understanding I could hope to convey to you, is that socialism, and Marxism, and communism are products of capitalism. They are capitalism’s other side. They are the shadow”
RW: The answer has to be, and always has been, both of those things are going on, and they’re going on simultaneously. And that’s how it has always been. So this is not a critique of that, or, or a disappointment in that. That is how these things evolve...
You’ll learn more about what’s going on in the United States economy today by understanding the Great Depression than anything else I can think of. In that you saw a collapse of capitalism...
You had the reformist reaction. In that case, led by the trade unions, above all the United Mine Workers who formed something called the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But you also had two socialist and one communist party, all very strong. We’re talking tens, or even hundreds of thousands of members in the United States. And among them, there were both reformers, but also revolutionaries. Because remember, 1933 is only a few years after the Soviet revolution in Russia, so everybody had in their minds, oh, one could go a good bit further.
The unions wanted better working conditions, they wanted better wages. The revolutionaries wanted to overthrow capitalism. Well, they confronted the leaders of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt and the industrial elite...
And he said to them, I will give you more in the way of reform than you asked for. But the price is, you got to get rid of that revolutionary objective. That’s the deal. And the unions, and the socialists, and the communists accepted the deal. Some of them were unhappy to accept the deal, but they accepted it...
And the next 70 years, my lifetime, and yours, has been a process of taking back from the American working class most of the reforms that were gotten and won in the 1930s. The irony of the struggle between reformers and revolutionaries is this. We’ve been down the reformist road. I just gave you a description. We know what it can do, which is impressive. But we also know what it can lose, which is equally impressive. The irony is the only way to secure the reformist gains is by means of a revolution.