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- [00:10]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, debts, incomes, our own and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolf. I want to begin today with a reminder to people to be able to understand the underlying realities of our political situation. The power of socialism in the Western world is much underestimated these days, and I want to talk to you about it in a particular way. On 26 September, in national elections, the SPD in Germany emerged as the number one political party. While it won't be explained to the American people as usual, the S in SPD stands for socialist. That's right. The Socialist Party is now the largest party in Germany. That should not come as a surprise, unless you imagine that socialism is the marginal opposition, unimportant, dying reality portrayed in American mainstream media. Let me give you another example. In Britain, there is something called the Institute for Economic Affairs. It's a right wing by its own statement think tank. And they did a survey, they commissioned a polling company in February and March of this year, 2021, to ask the opinion of 2,000 randomly selected citizens of Great Britain. And these were citizens in the ages of 16 to 34. Ready? Here we go. 67%. Two thirds said they would prefer to live in a socialist economic system. Two thirds higher than that, 78% blamed capitalism for Britain's housing cris. They have a problem in Britain, you know, like we do, that masses of people cannot afford the high prices that real estate has come to require. 75% blame capitalism for climate change. And by the way, in the United States, Harvard University in 2016 and the Gallup poll for several years now indicates that young Americans are moving quite in the same direction as their counterparts in Great Britain. What is going on? Well, some people think, well, there's nothing important. Who cares? And I'd like to remind you all that's what people thought about Britain voting to leave Europe and to vote for Brexit. You don't have to worry about all that. Yeah, you do, and you better. And the Institute for Economic affairs has a solution. The advice given, and I kid you not, is that we, that is the conservatives that they are, must teach that socialism is always and necessarily a dead end, with phrases like it doesn't work or it never has worked, or it never can work. This is remarkable. And you can understand why. Because believing either that it never has or it can't or it won't or it doesn't is a way to cover over the harsh reality that the majority of people in places like Germany, Britain and the United States, particularly the young people who are coming into their role as the runners of society, are more and more interested in socialism. More and more with every passing failed year of capitalism. The United States, in that regard, is the backwater. I want to turn now to Puerto Rico. I like to talk about Puerto Rico because, you know, sometimes the poorest and the most neglected part of a society can teach you some basic truths about it. Puerto Rico's minimum wage is about to be raised from $7.25 and as it is the federal level in this country to $8.50 in January of 2022. This will be the first time that the minimum wage in Puerto Rico has been raised in over 10 years. I'm an economist, so I do the following kind of calculation. Let's assume we're in January of the coming year, and the minimum wage is now $8.50 an hour in Puerto Rico. And let's compare what $8.50 in 2022 can buy with what $7.25 was able to buy 10 years ago, which is when it went into effect. Well, turns out you could buy more goods and services with $7.25 in 2011 than you will be able to afford with $8.50 an hour in 2022. Puerto Rico's minimum wageand you'll see in a minute. What that means is therefore, in real terms of what it can afford for you to buy is worth less next year when it's raised than it was 10 years ago. Treating any society like that is beyond words. But now let's look a little deeper. What's the poverty rate in Puerto Rico? Get ready. 44% of the citizens of that territory of the United States live in the official level of poverty. 44%. Maybe that's what it means to be a colony in the United States of the United States. Maybe there's some ethics or morality to treating people like that. Well, there's one economic fact I want to bring to your attention about it because it says so much. Puerto Rico, as you know, is an island, which means everything that the people of Puerto Rico consume, or nearly everything is produced somewhere else and then shipped. That's the key wordshipped to Puerto Rico. And it comes on a ship. And here's something you may not know. A hundred Years ago, in 1920, the Merchant Marine act was passed by the Congress. Section 27 of that act, which came to be known as the Jones act, has the following. Any ship moving goods from one part of the United States to another must be an American ship. In other words, you can't hire or use for freight shipping from another part of the world. The United States is a small player in the global shipping market. Most of the world's ships are not American. And guess what? It means that if you bring things to Puerto Rico from New York or New Orleans or anywhere, you have to pay much higher freight rates because there are few American shippers. Have you? You can't bring anything into Puerto Rico from anywhere else, so everything's more expensive. That's it. You make more money for the shippers at the price of 44% of the people living in poverty. It is a behavior that makes the whole rest of the world look at the United States every time it talks about fair play, fair trade, belief in the free market. There's no free market in shipping to Puerto Rico, an island that depends on ships. There's only a controlled marketcontrolled. By whom? By the United States Congress. To the benefit of whom? Of the shippers in the United States who get the chance to price above the world market and and rip off the poorest part of the country. It boggles the mind, this gap between the reality I've just laid out and the delusion. No wonder the people of the world become more interested in socialism and the task of the conservatives gets harder. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show, and as always, I want to thank all of you whose support makes this show possible and each week, especially our Patreon community and other regular monthly supporters of democracy at work. If you haven't already, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate or visit democracyatwork.info to learn more about the different ways you can support this show. Stay with us. We're going to have quite a conversation with Dr. Cornel west when we come back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. It is really a personal pleasure. It is a personal privilege and an honor for me to welcome back to our microphones and our cameras, Dr. Cornel West. On one hand, he obviously needs no introduction, not to you or me or to most Americans who have been lucky enough to watch or listen or read what he has done. But in the interests of the few of you who may need it, a reminder of some facts about our guest today. Cornel west is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual, which he has been for a long time. He holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught At Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris in France. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. If our count is correct, his most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at 19th and 20th century African American leaders and. And their visionary legacies. Dr. West is a frequent guest on many radio and TV shows, appears in many films and in spoken word albums. I really might mention to you that when I travel around the country and talk to people, they ask me often how it is possible for one human being to do as much as they see, hear and read Dr. West's work. He has a passionate commitment, as all of you know, to communicate and keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Which he refers to as a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice. Dr. Cornel west, thank you so much for joining us today.
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My dear brother, you know how much of a blessing it is for me to be in conversation with you. It's just a joy to be your bonafide brother for over almost 40, 45 years.
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Yeah, it's amazing how long we've been connected.
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Now, see, I wasn't around when you graduated from Harvard and Stanford and Yale, but when we met in the 70s with Stanley Aronic, with Fred Jameson, Steve Resnick, and of course, when you ran for mayor, we would. Was it 1985?
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Right.
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And the degree to which you've been so consistent with such intellectual integrity and that Marxist analysis and exploitation and asymmetric relation to power at the workplace as the lens through which you view the world. I mean, it's, you know, Paul Sweezey was the great Marxist economist of the middle part of the 20th century. You are the great Marxist economist at the end of the 20th and early part of the 21st century. And that's a great legacy. You think of brother Harry Mac Jolson, right? We spent time in this living room together.
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That's right. That's right. Years ago.
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And so it's a rich, rich legacy that we have to keep alive. We've got to do all that we can to make sure the younger generation has assets, that kind of vision, energy analysis, organizing, mobilizing. But also, since you assist the area, y' all got the deep humanity and humor, man. You know how rare that is among economists.
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Right. And boy, do we need it now. Right? I mean, whoa.
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Oh, these grim days, man.
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Yes, these are grim. All right, let me start with some of the questions we've prepared. You and I have in common many of the things you just listed, but we also have in common this strange place. Harvard University. You have been a teacher? I was an undergraduate. This is an institution that spends a lot of money and works very hard to present itself as the number one institution of higher learning in the United States, or maybe even the world. Let me ask you what you think about that claim, given your direct personal experience.
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Well, you know, I think anytime we talk about Harvard, you really have to go back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James. They used to talk about the true Harvard as the those individuals who go through that ruling class formation site and decide to actually embark on genuine quest for truth and beauty and goodness and even the holy, if you're religious. And so James called them the undisciplineals. The ones that can't be disciplined. The ones who raise Socratic questions, who critique not just themselves with structures of domination, forms of dogma, keep track of the forms of death, social death, of slavery, civic death, of Jim Crow and so forth. But that's James call that the true Harvard. Then you've got Harvard the social club. You got Harvard the site of making connections. You got Harvard the site of trying to gain access to power, status, prestige, spectacle, image. Now, in the last 50 years, you know better than anybody else the commodification of universities, the bureaucratization. They're top heavy in terms of administration, in terms of making big money. Students are an afterthought because for the most part it's about research for the professors on the way to becoming big money. Could be they in the administration or in other ways. So you've got commodification, you got bureaucratization, then you've got research rewarded over teaching. So when you were there, what from 59 to 63, I mean, you had magnificent thinkers there. Even though it was deeply anti Jewish and anti black and anti woman. The Jewish quotas probably had not been fully lifted for the undergraduates and so forth. Black folk, very few, probably chocolate folk in your classes and what have you, no women at all. Radcliffe was still kicking in. I arrived at Harvard 1970. You leave 63. I arrived seven years later. And women are just being admitted. There were six black folk who admitted the year before my class. We admitted 90. That was because of the rebellion in the streets of black people responding to Martin Luther King Jr. Getting shot. The same Martin Luther King Jr. You and sister Harriet brought to Yale back in the 60s, right? But when Martin got shot, lo and behold, even these ruling class formation sites, oh my God, we don't have enough black folk. And of course. And so you get discourses of diversity and inclusion, same kind of stuff then as you have now. Capitalist structure still in place, imperial policy still in place, white supremacy is hit, but not white supremacy tied to predatory capitalist practices. That's white supremacy tied to the imperial and militaristic practices. And so very much Harvard has been the beacon of claims about diversity, claims about inclusion, claims about embracing and yet so tied to the military industrial complex, so tied to big money, donors, benefactors, and more and more willing actually to acknowledge that it is in its dominant form, not a major counterweight to the commodification of our society, the bureaucratization of our society and the ways in which disciplinary divisions of knowledge, highly specialized, don't allow students to give what you provide in your show, which is a synoptic analysis, an overarching view of what the forest looks like and not just polishing the little pieces of nuts in the corner for tenure and not acknowledging the interrelations and the interdependence of the economy, nation, state, civic association, psychic life, spiritual life. All of that being under the aegis of a larger capitalist civilization. Hard to get that at Harvard, brother, if not impossible.
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Yeah. And the only thing I would add is for me it was impossible. I remember, you know, at the time, I'm 8, 18, 19 years old, raising my hand in classes because I was just beginning to kind of figure out, asking questions which were leading questions. I wanted to understand the critique of capitalism as a system. And my professors, the thing that I took away when I asked the question whether the professor was good at what his or her job was, I'm saying her, there were very few hers at that time, his job. He was scared. He was afraid. His eyes were saying to me, don't go there. His eyes were saying to me, don't go there and don't take me with you. I can't go there. I either don't know the answer, which is embarrassing, or I do and it's too scary for my career future. Don't go. Please don't go there. And you know, I'm not a nasty person. Someone pleads with me to do something, you know, unless it's self destructive, I do it. So I kept quiet. I learned on my own, you know, and it's been that way all the way through the time. I brought Martin Luther King to the campus at Yale and to the city of New Haven. I was called in by a Nobel Prize winning economics professor at Yale who was my teacher. I was called in a week later and he gave me which he thought he was doing me a favor. He gave me advice. He said, if you continue to do this kind of public political work, I will not be able to write letters of recommendation for you. He was letting me know that if I wanted to make it in the Ivy League as a professor, he could make the difference, but he couldn't do it for me if I was in that kind. And by the way, this was not a conservative. This was not a right winger. This man was on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Kennedy administration. So you know where he stood politically. All right, let me.
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You could feel the shadows of McCarthy.
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Absolutely.
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The impact of HUAC and at the same time, the call. Because your vocation to intellectual truth telling, your vocation to the plight of working people, your vocation to the sensitivity of the suffering of oppressed people here and around the world. I bet you you got the only dissertation written in the Economics department in the country tied to colonial struggles in Africa.
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That's right.
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Was it in Kenya?
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Kenya, yep. I wrote my doctoral. Good for you, Cornell. You're blowing me away. It's embarrassing. Thank you. Yes, I went to East Africa. I actually studied and learned Swahili. I took a semester and it changed my life. That time I only spent three or four months in Kenya and Tanganyika, which later became Tanzania for me, and I wrote the book. I wrote my dissertation about British colonialism in Kenya, and it changed my life. What I saw, the reality of what colonialism was on the ground was a lesson that no way could I ever become a supporter of a system that could do that to those people. I mean, just you could not spend the months traveling and talking to people and have that outcome. But I want.
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Henry James said to Robert Louis Stevenson, he says, no theory is kind to us. That cheats us of seeing.
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That's right.
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That cheats us of seeing. And what you're able. When you said, okay, I'm going to keep track of colonial practice, I'm going to keep track of imperial domination. What is this relation to the core capitalist centers as they themselves exploit workers, as they themselves degrade women and black folk and indigenous people, gays and lesbians don't even stay in contact with the humanity of many of so many of the Catholic brothers and sisters, Italian and Poles, as they make their way into Protestant America, let alone Jewish brothers and sisters. God Almighty. So that as an economist, man, you are in a very, very unique space and zone, but you choose to be in there. That's what I like. That's your calling. That's your Vocation, you choose to stay there and you're still there now. And almost what? Eight decades, brother. Almost eight decades. It's unbelievable.
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All right, all right, tell me, how do you, and I wanna be real blunt here. The United States has 4 1/2% of the world's population and it accounts for 20% of the world's deaths from COVID China is a society four times larger population and it has 1% of the number of deaths from COVID that the United States has many more people, many fewer deaths. This is a statistic which I find so stunning, so powerful. But I wonder how do you make sense of a country as rich as the United States, as highly developed as the United States, unable compared with a much poorer country such as China, to either be prepared for or to cope with a public threat literally to the life of the people here. And I say this having learned that this last week we surpassed the number of dead Americans from the so called Spanish flu a hundred years ago. How do you see this?
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I mean, I love the way you put it in terms of the public threat because when you have a public life that is so dejected based and degraded and devalued that when there's a public threat you're unable to provide an effective public response. So that levels of civic deterioration, the levels of public disintegration, and we could talk about it in terms of public health, public education, public transportation, public conversation, all of those have been so degraded, given our highly commodified world and culture, that when you have life and death issues so immediate. We already have life and death issues prior to the pandemic, of course, with poverty and so forth. But when one becomes so immediate, it's clear that America is a colossal failure in terms of having a high quality public life and therefore public response to public problems. China has a public and civic life that is quite intense now. It's authoritarian. It's got authoritarian Communist Party, it's got its own predatory capitalist tendencies under the aegis of the Communist Party. That's bureaucratic and authoritarian, but they're able to mobilize and galvanize a public response. Now America likes to deny is diminished and deteriorated public life and talk about its liberties. Well, we got personal liberties. We want to do what we want. Well, freedom is not licentiousness. Freedom is not doing anything as one likes in one's individualistic and hedonistic egocentric orientation. That's not freedom at all, but that's how debased our understanding of freedom is. With a debased public life. I mean John Dewey talked about this in 1927 when the public and its problems as a democratic socialist he said, look, we have a public problem of depression, the economic depression. What will be our public response? And if it were not for the organizing of workers, if it were not for the organizing of black folk, to A. Philip Randolph and others, the response to that public crisis would have been so much worse. In the end the name remain one of just saving capitalism rather than transforming workplace and moving toward the kind of democracy at work that you've been to involved with such eloquence. So that it's a very sad commentary on just how spiritually decayed and morally decrepit our society actually is as an American experiment. It's a very, very sad affair. Not sad enough for us to give up on fighting. We gotta fight no matter what. But we have to tell the grim truths even as we fight, right?
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Speaking of grim truths. And we're running out of time, of course. Can I get your reaction to that photograph of the white border patrol cowboys on horses rounding up the fleeing Haitians desperate to get here? How did. I mean that photograph is around the world. How did it hit you?
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Well, I mean as you know, going back 1791-1804 with the great Haitian Revolution, the end of name was is to present images of a great and dignified people, a Haitian people in a very degraded way. People don't want to come to terms with the ways in which the Haitian people's history has been such a challenge to the mainstream American ways of being in the world. The ways in which they not simply transformed themselves generated impacts on slave insurrection. Unbelievable slave insurrection. Just a few years later, New Orleans and on to Denmark Vesey. The Haitians spirit and energy is irrepressible. So when I saw those images I said oh, once again. Here an ex French colony has been paying reparations to France decade after decade after decade, poverty devastating them, hurricanes coming at them. Look at their dignity, look at their determination, look at their fight. So in that sense I expect it. I'm never surprised by white supremacist dogma, by capitalist degradation of human beings. Patriarchal subject. I'm never surprised. I just don't allow any kind of despair to get in the way of fighting and resisting those kinds of attempts to degrade any slice of humanity no matter where they are.
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My brother Cornell, we've run out of time. You are a wonderful guest. Thank you again Dr. Cornel west and to my audience. Thank you for joining me. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.