https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EC1KMfUECw&authuser=0
Essay to support Richard Wolff monthly talk for January, 2021 ~~ Written by dmorista
This is an hour and twenty minute talk by noted Marxist Scholar Richard Wolff. He traditionally presented about an hour and a half lecture / discussion, once a month, at Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church. The Covid-19 situation changed that and now the monthly lecture is presented on-line.
In this discussion Dr. Wolff spends the first 10 minutes or so talking about Advertising and how it affects the price of many items that the Capitalists sell. Then he spends another 15 minutes talking about how the military is deeply embedded in the U.S. political system, despite the various protestations by military leaders that they would not intervene in the U.S. Presidential election of 2020. He also discusses the letter signed by the ten living former Secretaries of Defense (they really should be called the Secretaries of Attack) that extolled the “tradition of civilian control of the military”, and proclaimed that the military would make a grave mistake if it actually intervened in the election.
Wolff spends nearly an hour discussing the socioeconomic background for the “election” of Donald Trump in 2016. This included Trump's usefulness to the Capitalist elites and how that usefulness declined precipitously after the second or third year. He also talked about the “American Drean”, and how that came to an end for most working Americans after about 1970; when the terms of global trade, and the temporary advantages that the U.S. held for 25 years changed dramatically. He addresses the questions of falling or stagnant U.S. real incomes, particularly for American working class men. He takes up the issues of women entering the workforce in large numbers, automation and the elimination of many “good” jobs, and the deindustrialization of the U.S. with large numbers of factories, and entire industries moving to other places. That was most notably to China, but to many other places as well. He chickens out this time and does not discuss the massive immigration into the U.S. since the 1965 Immigration Law changes, the numerous failed colonial wars, coups, death squad campaigns etc. However he has included that issue in previous talks and written articles. It is one of four changes that Wolff pointed out had undermined the American Working Class: 1). Women enter workforce in huge numbers; 2). Many blue-collar jobs and lower level white-collar jobs lost to automation and computerization; 3). Many jobs lost to “runaway plants” that moved to low-wage low-regulation places in the “developing world”; and 4). nearly 60 million legal immigrants and something on the order of 20 million undocumented immigrants make the economic position, particularly of less-well educated Americans increasingly difficult.
He discussed the fact that many White Working Class Americans feel robbed and cheated by these developments (that have been going on for 50 years now, he uses the figure of 40 years but states that the process began in 1970). He mentioned that unless basic structural changes are made in the U.S. socioeconomic system that the far-right will be back with a new Fascist / Authoritarian leader. This is in contrast to what happened during the last crisis of this gravity in the 1930s led to the New Deal in the U.S. and the Nazi takeover in Germany. The U.S. has no organized left to present a coherent analysis and to organize left-led resistance and demands. He states that he thinks the solution is to “democratize the workplace” and end the rule of Private Capitalists. He admits that this is a very dangerous time for American society. He does not look at the events at the Capitol in any great detail, but puts them in the larger context noted above
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