Capitalism, Mass Anger, And 2024 Elections

• by: Richard D. Wolff

Richard D. Wolff

08-14-2024 ~ In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the British people’s anger, as Labor leader Starmer now says as the anger explodes. Of course, such phrases from such politicians usually mean little or nothing and accomplish less. Such leaders and their parties just keep calculating how best to regain power when they lose it. In that, they are like the U.S. Democrats after Biden’s performance in his debate with Trump and like the U.S. Republicans after Trump’s loss in 2020. In both parties, a small group of top leaders and top donors made all the key decisions and then organized the political theater to ratify those decisions. Even surprises like Harris replacing Biden are temporary departures from resuming politics as usual.

However, unlike Trump, the others missed opportunities to identify with an already organized mass base of angry people. Trump stumbled into that identification by saying loudly and crudely what traditional politicians treated as publicly unspeakable about immigrants, women, NATO, and traditional political taboos. That set the tone for Trump then doubling down by insisting he had won the 2020 election but had been cheated out of it. The mass anger of populations feeling victimized in their workaday lives found a spokesperson loudly claiming parallel victimizations. Trump and base grasped that together they might victimize their victimizers.

Whether or not they can politically exploit voters’ anger, no mainstream leader in the collective West, including Trump, seems actually to “understand” it. They mostly see only as far as what they can plausibly blame on their opponents in the next election. Biden blamed Trump for a “bad” economy in 2020, while Trump reversed the same blame over the last year and will shortly adjust to blaming Harris. Presidential opponents blame the other for the “immigration crisis,” for inadequately protecting U.S. industry from Chinese competition, government budget deficits, and job exports.

No mainstream leader “understands” (or dares to hint or suggest) that mass anger these days might be something more and different from any collection of specific complaints and demands (about guns, abortion, taxes, and wars). Even the demagogues who like to speak about “culture wars” dare not ask why such “wars” are hot now. Angry “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) folks are notably vague and poorly informed as their critics enjoy exposing. Rarely do those critics offer persuasive alternative explanations for MAGA anger (explanations that are neither vague nor poorly informed). Read more

A Note On Noam Chomsky And Climate Collapse

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Noam Chomsky ~ Photo: en.wikipedia.org

08-13-2024 ~ As Noam once said, “if you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.”

In many of his recent writings, Noam Chomsky has warned that humanity has reached a very dangerous point because we are now living in a world of cascading crises. Indeed, when we look around us, we see a global web of crises. Economic inequality is destabilizing democracies and making a mockery of the vision of a decent society; armed conflicts continue to mark human existence; and nuclear weapons and global warming threaten humanity’s survival. Meanwhile, we must feel aghast over the fact that cynicism and irrationality continue to define the mindset of the powers that be. This is precisely the reason why Chomsky has always seen activism as our only hope.

What’s happening in Gaza is an abomination, one that the leaders of this world are watching coldly from a distance. The same can be said about climate collapse, which is as real as the daily slaughtering of scores of innocent women and children in Gaza by Israel’s military. Our global institutions are incapable of doing anything meaningful about these crises. Real power is in the hands of the most powerful nation-states and their leaders have opted to turn a blind eye to both disasters so as not to disrupt business as usual. Profits and geostrategic interests take priority over human lives and the environment. This is as clear as day, and it has always been so since at least the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the nation-state. Read more

Capitalism’s Unequal Distribution Deprives You Of True Freedom

• by: Richard D. Wolff

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-7356013-6-6, eBook: 978-1-7356013-5-9

08-13-2024 ~ As the French economist Thomas Piketty most recently exposed, capitalism, across time and space, has always tended to produce ever-greater economic inequality. Oxfam, a global charity, reported that 2022’s 10 richest men together had six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people on earth. The lack of democracy inside workplaces or enterprises is both a cause and an effect of capitalism’s unequal distribution of income and wealth.

Of course, inequality predates capitalism. Powerful feudal lords across Europe had blended autocracy with unequal distributions of wealth on their manorial estates. In fact, the largest and most powerful among the lords—the one named king—was usually also the richest. Although revolts against monarchy eventually retired most kings and queens (one way or another), similarly rich dictators reemerged inside capitalist enterprises as major shareholders and CEOs. Nowadays, their palaces imitate the grandeur of kings’ castles. The fortunes of kings and top CEOs are similarly extreme and attract the same kind of envy, adulation, and reverence. They also draw the same criticism. Inequalities that marked the economy, politics, and culture of European feudalism reappeared in capitalism despite the intentions of many who revolted against feudalism. The problem: the employer/employee relationship is far less a break from the master/slave and lord/serf relations of production than capitalism’s champions had hoped for, assumed, and promised in order to secure mass support for their revolutions against slavery and feudalism.

The employer/employee relationship that defines capitalism has created staggering inequality by allowing the employer full control over production’s surplus. In the past, inequality provoked references to rich capitalists, variously, as “robber barons” or as “captains of industry” (depending on the public’s feelings about them). Today, they’re referred to as “the rich” or sometimes “the superrich.” Read more

The Conundrums Of Bangladeshi Politics

• by: Vijay Prashad

Bangladesh – Map: en.wikipedia.org

08-12-2024 ~ On Monday, August 5, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina boarded a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J military transport in a hurry and fled to Hindon Air Force base, outside Delhi. Her plane was refueled and reports said that she intended to fly on either to the United Kingdom (her niece, Tulip Siddiq is a minister in the new Labor government), Finland (her nephew Radwan Mujib Siddiq is married to a Finnish national), or the United States (her son Sajeeb Wajed Joy is a dual Bangladesh-US national).
Army Chief Waker uz-Zaman, who only became Army Chief six weeks ago and was her relative by marriage, informed her earlier in the day that he was taking charge of the situation and would create an interim government to hold future elections.

Sheikh Hasina was the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh’s history. She was the prime minister from 1996 to 2001, and then from 2009 to 2024—a total of 20 years. This was a sharp contrast to her father Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated in 1975 after four years in power, or General Ziaur Rahman who was assassinated in 1981 after six years in power. In a scene reminiscent of the end of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule in Sri Lanka, jubilant crowds of thousands crashed the gates of Ganabhaban, the official residence of the prime minister, and jubilantly made off with everything they could find.

Tanzim Wahab, photographer and chief curator of the Bengal Foundation, told me, “When [the masses] storm into the palace and make off with pet swans, elliptical machines, and palatial red sofas, you can feel the level of subaltern class fury that built up against a rapacious regime.” There was widespread celebration across Bangladesh, along with bursts of attacks against buildings identified with the government—private TV channels, and palatial homes of government ministers were a favored target for arson. Several local-level leaders in Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League have already been killed (Mohsin Reza, a local president of the party, was beaten to death in Khulna). Read more

How To Tackle The Climate Crisis And Inequality

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

James K. Boyce – Photo by Matthew Cavanaugh

08-12-2024 ~ Carbon dividends, public investment, and binding carbon-emissions reductions to commensurate reductions of toxic air pollutants from fossil fuels are three policies that narrow inequality rather than widening it.

Our planet is warming up at a record rate. Scientists believe that the climate is warming up as a consequence of the increase in greenhouse gases. Studies have also shown that there is a link between climate change and inequality. Yet, the global economy continues to be overly dependent on fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal—which are by far the largest contributor to global warming. What does all this say about current climate policies and the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050? And how do we address the twin challenges of inequality and climate change?

In the interview that follows, progressive political economist James K. Boyce sheds light on the above questions. James K. Boyce is a senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and recipient of the inaugural Global Inequality Research Award. He is the author, among many other works, of The Case for Carbon Dividends and Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change.

C. J. Polychroniou: Over the past several years, climate records have been repeatedly broken. Last year was the planet’s hottest by a huge margin since global records began in 1850, and 2024 is on course to break that record again. Are climate policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions working, especially when we have wars going on that contribute significantly to climate change? Indeed, with everything going on, which includes increased demand for oil, is it at this point even realistic to expect that we can achieve climate neutrality by 2050?

James K. Boyce: You’re right, it’s getting hotter year by year. This is no surprise: it’s exactly what we can expect until the world reaches climate neutrality (net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases). Some climate policies are working better than others—it is not as if nothing is happening. Renewable energy from solar and wind has become cost-competitive more quickly than most people expected. But we are not on track to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. To do so we would need to phase out the use of oil, natural gas, and coal. Instead, global consumption of all three fossil fuels is at an all-time high.

You are right, too, that wars exacerbate the problem. They distract attention and resources from addressing the climate crisis, and they add to greenhouse gas emissions. In just the first two months of the war in Gaza, for example, carbon emissions (mostly from Israeli warplanes and U.S. weaponry supply flights) exceeded the annual emissions of 20 countries, according to a team of U.K. researchers. Postwar reconstruction, once this latest round of bloodshed ends, is likely to release much more. Read more

The Undemocratic Reality Of Capitalism

• by: Richard D. Wolff

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-7356013-6-6, eBook: 978-1-7356013-5-9

08-10-2024 ~ Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.

When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority—the employees—making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no. Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits. The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers’ decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).

The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely “overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral “democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises. Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.

Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail—government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities—are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to “function in a businesslike manner.” Read more