← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Richard Wolff
Sam.
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One of these days. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our livesjobs, incomes, debts, those of our children and those looming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. I need to begin today's program, which I apologize for, with a few announcements. The first is that you can now hear this program every week on iHeartRadio. That's all one word. Iheartradio.com just go to their website all over the United States, type in Economic Update and presto, you will have our program and an archive of past programs. If you cannot get the program on a local radio station, iheartradio radio.com is an easy alternative. I also want to remind you that if you wish to see this program as a video, as a TV program, just go to Patreon P A T R e o n patreon.com economicupdate Again, it's very simple and you will be able to see the program as a video, as a TV in that way. Finally, we have arranged Democracy at Work has for us to work with a speaker bureau located in California. We're very proud about it. If any of you or any organization you're involved with would like to bring me out for a speaking engagement, please get in touch with the speaking bureau which handles this activity for me and for us. The name of the organization is appropriately speakoutnow.org that's all one word. Speakoutnow.org if you wish to communicate with them, their email address for anything in the way of an inquiry about having me speak is simply infospeakoutnow.org infoeakoutnow.org Finally, I want to invite all of you that either live in the greater New York area or might be visiting on July 12th. That is the resumption of our monthly presentations at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City. And it begins at 7:30, the second Wednesday of every month. So this coming July 12th will be the second Wednesday. So please, if you're in town, consider yourself invited to come and join us at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, very historic church in New York City. July 12, 7:30pm so now we can jump into the economic updates. Well, I want to talk to you to start with about automobiles and cars and car loans in particular, in order to explain something. First, the raw data, which I think you will find very interesting. We had a record this last month June of 2017. The record is for the longest car loan period in the history of the automobile business. In other words, people are borrowing money for longer periods of time to, to buy a car than they ever have before. Precisely 69.3 months. That's a very long time, nearly six years. And it means that for most people they will be paying for a car for a good number of months or even years where the loan they have to pay is larger than what that car is then worth. It's called sometimes upside down indebtedness. Around the car industry, average car buyers were taking out a loan of $31,000 for their car. Why so much? Because what happens is when you buy a car on a long term loan and it comes time to trade it in, you still owe a ton of money in terms of trading it in, more money that you owe than that car is worth for the trade in. So you're building up your indebtedness, which is why it is so high. I mention this not only because it's a wonderful piece of evidence that the recovery we've been hearing about is a mirage. That underneath the glowing statistics about people having jobs, by the way, jobs that are less secure, have fewer benefits and at lower pay, but behind that statistic is a reality such as you're in deeper and deeper debt. To have a car, you have to have a car. Because in most of America there's no other way to solve your problem of getting to and from work, getting your shopping done and all the rest of it. We are in a situation where it's becoming so difficult to pay for a car that that's behind the other final statistics, which is that we have now had six months of declining automobile sales. People simply can't afford to buy cars the way they did. One of the ways they did was by borrowing heavily, which I just explained to you, more money for longer periods of time. Now that becomes unsustainable because they owe too much and they can't do it. So now the car sales collapse. It's interesting that our neighbor to the north, Canada, which doesn't happen, that history of loans is having record year of car sales, just as we are going down and laying off people in the car business because of it. It's not a system that works real well, is it? My next update is very personal. It has to do with airline service. I would put the word service in quotation marks, but I don't think most of you need that. I am responding, as I say, to something personal. A couple of weeks Ago, I returned from Paris, France on a flight on United Airlines. I want everyone to know who it was. And it came from Paris to Newark, New Jersey. I can easily say to you it was the worst flight I have ever had in my life. And I've been on many. It begins on the day that we were supposed to leave Paris at 9:30 in the morning. And we were informed around 7:15 on our way to the airport that the flight would be delayed. At first we were told it would be delayed until 5 in the afternoon. Then sometime later we were told it would be delayed until 6 or 6:30 in the evening. And then a little while later, while we were standing online trying to figure out how United Airlines would get us home, we were told with another text message that the flight had simply been canceled. Now back to the line. The line was immense. It filled up a whole corridor in the airport in Paris. Why? Because even though there were six or seven stations for people to occupy at the United Airlines counter, only two people were there serving us who got therefore the right to stand in line for hours. I won't go through the rest of it. Horrific. We were up for 18 hours that day. Before we got home. We had to stop in Ireland on the way. It was supposed to be a direct flight nonstop at every turn. The lines were long. At every turn. The tempers were short. And the basic reason everyone should be clear is that it saves money for United Airlines to have too few people. I don't even know why the plane was canceled. We were never given the same straight story twice. Partly because people were so hassled who were working there that they couldn't possibly have taken the time to figure this out.
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Out.
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They make more money by saving on personnel. We suffer. We, the people for whom the airline is supposed to be providing get ready a service. Well, they didn't. Their profits at our expense. I and the other people flying had our lives disrupted, had our work interrupted, were exhausted physically and mentally by experience of this sort. And it could have been handled a thousand ways more conveniently. But it would have cost United Airlines some money. And they are letting us know. Profit first. You last. Did they learn something, having been exposed earlier for other abuses of their clients? No sign of it when I was traveling. Third item. An important meeting taking place 7th and 8th of July. Some of you will hear this report before the meeting, some after. It's called the meeting of the G20, the 20 richest countries in the world. This is the 12th meeting they've had. They started meeting in the crisis of 2008, when it was crystal clear that the system, economic system of capitalism was, which dominates in every one of those countries, was in deep trouble. So this is the 12th meeting of these 20 richest countries. It is being hosted by Germany. It is taking place July 7th and 8th in Hamburg, Germany, a large city in the north of that country. In addition to the 20 countries, eight other country leaders are invited, and likewise the leaders of nine major international organizations like the World bank, the International Monetary Fund, and several units of the United Nations. In the weeks leading up to this meeting, there have been protests in Hamburg and across Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Why are the people protesting? Because the mass of people, the mass of people have been badly damaged by not only the crisis that capitalism brought in 2008 to the whole world, but by the response orchestrated and organized by the G20 in the years since 2008, which is roughly now coming on to a full decade. The people protesting are angry at the policy that was adopted by the G20, country by country to cope with the crisis.
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That.
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That's what they told us. In order to get out of this crisis. They said we need what came to be called austerity. We needed the government to cut back on the money it spent for social programs, to cut back on the number of people it employed to tighten our belts. And that will get us through the crisis. Well, I'm here to tell you as a professional economist that it was a nice story, but it wasn't true. What the real agenda was, and that has been carried out in every One of those 20 countries was to say, let's double down. Not only is capitalism a system that can bring into crisis the world economy, costing hundreds of millions of people their jobs, sometimes for years on end, but we're a system that is so well organized that we can use the crisis that to our advantage to do something in the name of dealing with the crisis that we've been trying to do for 30 years. And you know what that is? To roll back the gains made in the aftermath of the last capitalist crisis, the Great depression of the 1930s. In the wake of that depression we had here in the United States, the New Deal in Europe, you had the rise of what we call social democracy, a system in which the mass of people said, we are not going to live in a capitalism that crashes our wages, destroys our livelihoods, undoes the family values to which they give empty lip service. No, no. We demand to be taken care of with a national health insurance, with subsidized education, with a welfare program. If you can't provide jobs, you, you capitalists, then the government that you control is going to have to do it, one or the other of you. And that worked in the United States and it worked in Europe as well. And the business community hated it. Hated it because they were taxed in part to pay for it. Hated it because it gave the working class a sense of its own power, what it could achieve if it worked together to do so, capitalism or no capitalism. They didn't like it and they wanted to roll it back to undo the New Deal and European social democracy. They tried over and over again. They weren't able to get very far, not in the United States, as far as they wanted. That's why we have Trump. Not in Europe as far as they wanted. But the crisis, their own crisis gave them the chance in the name of getting us out of the crisis capitalism brought us. The leaders of the United States and Western Europe came upon austerity. And what does austerity mean? Taking back the social services that have been provided to people, cutting them, laying off people who do those services, who provide them to all of us in the fields of education, in the fields of health, in the fields of social welfare, you name it, everywhere the effort, undo them. Not facing the truth of it, that we don't want to pay the taxes. Look at the struggle for example, over the Trump GOP health bill. It's all about not taxing the super rich who would have to pay a good part of the extension of Medicaid to people with no insurance at all. We're willing to sacrifice 25 million people in America to save taxes to the richest. That's what we're talking about. That's austerity, whether you call it that or not. So the anger at the G20 is not just that they are the countries who embody the capitalism that brought us to crisis. It's even more that they have used it to further an agenda of taking away from the mass of people to enrich a minority. That's why in every one of those countries the gap between rich and poor and has gotten wider. The freedom of corporations to do what they want has been enhanced as the economic livelihoods of the mass of people have been constricted. That's why they have to take six year car loans because they don't have enough income to have a car which they have to have any other way. There's one example of it that I can't forego. Letting you know. Recent research from unicef, the United nations program to deal with the Problem of the children of the world brings it all home. Under the austerity programs of the G20 from 2008 to 2012, reports UNICEF, the number of children living in poverty in these rich countries has increased by 2.6 million. And here's the statistic that jumped out of UNICEF to give you an idea of what austerity has meant. Today, an average of 1 in 5 children in the 41 highest income countries in the world, that's a G20 plus another 21 in 5 live in poverty. What a statement about modern capitalism as to what it has achieved for the people who suffer in and under it. Well, the fourth of July is right behind us. And if you will indulge me, here's a little bit of history about it. Fourth of July makes us think about the origins of the United States. And when I do that, I come back and I see the economics of it. And the man who stands out in my mind was one of the great leaders of the American independence movement, Thomas Jefferson. And he had a very clear idea, an idea he had gotten from the British philosopher John Locke, whom he admired and read and studied. And from Locke, Jefferson got and advocated that the new United States should be a country of self employed people, small farmers, small craftsperson, small merchant. And that these people who didn't employ anybody else, who were their own master, their own self employed persons, could and would together democratically run their communities, whether it be in a New England town hall setting or in any of the other ways that people roughly equal manage their affairs in the communities where they live and work. But there was opposition and Jefferson's vision was never realized. Jefferson's hopes were defeated. Instead we had what Jefferson feared, an economic system that wouldn't have everybody equal, that would produce a poll of very wealthy at one end and a mass of people barely getting by at the other. It's what he feared. That's what came to pass. And that's the capitalism that we have now, where most people have little property and even less power. That's the system, that's capitalism. And there's a history here that needs to be spoken. American capitalism was born and developed in that revolution. Let's remember the Revolution of 1774, 5, 6 and so on. It was a violent revolution, not against this or that law, not against this or that regulation, not even against this or that politician. It was a revolution against the system. The system at that time that we revolted against was colonialism, in particular British colonialism. The US was a colony and was being abusively treated and as colonies usually are, by the imperial power at the top, in that case, Britain. And to exemplify, to illustrate the awfulness of it, there was a kind of clownish king at the time, King George iii, and he epitomized everything that was wrong with having a person like that running a colony 3,000 miles away. So we made a revolution against this system. And here's the Centuries later, the independent capitalist economy has come to much the same situation. It has produced the very capitalism that Thomas Jefferson feared. It has brought people to a level of anger and resentment and bitterness and suffering that makes more and more of them say we face the same problem. It isn't the Republicans or the Democrats or this law or that law or this politician. It's a system this time. It's not imperialism and colonialism this time, it's the capitalist system. And isn't that interesting that as we discover that the capitalist system is the problem, the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, who kind of figured that out a long time ago, finds its way back into relevance on this Fourth of July. The next update has to do with Seattle, sort of, but it goes beyond Seattle. A recent study by a group of economists in Seattle at the University of Washington reignited a very old and, to my mind, rather boring debate. It asked the question, when you raise the minimum wage of workers, that is, you raise the wage of people at the bottom of the economy. Let's remember the federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour, lower than that in any European country, and lower by a lot. Okay, let's look. The University of Washington economists said their research showed that when you raise the minimum wage, there will be a loss of jobs, that is unemployment will go up, not a great deal, but that was enough. Liberal economists, horrified by this result, reignited the message they want everyone to believe. Leave. And so they rediscovered some recent research by a group of economics professors at the University of California in Berkeley, which shows the opposite, namely, that when you raise the minimum wage, there is little or no impact on jobs. So back and forth we go, liberals saying you should raise the minimum wage because it doesn't lose some people their jobs, and conservatives saying you shouldn't raise the minimum wage. Or at least if you do, you should be aware you're hurting people at a low wage. And what's the reason for this? Very simple, very basic economics. If you raise the wage, you make work more expensive for the employer. And in a free economy like ours, free capitalism, the employer is free to take the job away. From the worker if he's unwilling to pay them the higher minimum wage. So here we have it. One side in this old debate saying, don't worry, you can raise the minimum wage because the employers won't lay off low income workers. And the conservatives, suddenly demonstrating a concern for poor workers that they never show otherwise, are saying, no, no, no, you mustn't raise the minimum wage because there will be poor workers who, who lose their jobs. Besides the disingenuousness of people basically on both sides, let me remind you again of a little history. About 100 years ago, there was a similar debate. It had to do with child labor. Should it be allowed for capitalists to hire little kids as young as 5 years of age, pay them very little, and take advantage of them because it can pay them so little to get a lot of work done? The conservatives said, yes, that's a great thing, you should allow that because poor families can barely get by and they need to be able to send their children out here. Again, conservatives showing a sudden concern for the poor. The liberals came back and said, no, that's terrible. Child labor shouldn't be allowed and we don't want it. And then they felt awkward because the conservatives said, you're hurting poor families because they need to be able to send their kids out to work. Guess what? The anti child labor folks won. You can't employ people 5 years old anymore in the United States the way you once could and the way thousands of capitalists did. Did capitalism fall apart as the conservatives said? If you do that, did poor families rise up in revolt and demand the return of child labor? Of course not. Child labor was outlawed just as paying human beings $7.25 an hour can and should be outlawed. Now, economists shouldn't be debating as if the employer has the right to say, I either pay you a low wage or I won't pay you any wage at all. We should raise the minimum wage because that's what an economy owes its people. And we should give every adult, healthy person a job because that's also what a decent economy owes people. And if capitalism in America can't do it, that's an argument to change systems. But as long as we don't face that and we have our intelligent economists debating, gee, do we dare raise the minimum wage? Or gee, maybe we shouldn't so that poor people don't lose their jobs, you know what this is like? This is like being accosted in a dark alley by a person who says, I'm going to give you freedom of choice. You can either have me stab you and take your money or hit you over the head with a hammer and take your money. A rational person says, I don't like the choice. He doesn't stand there and say, gee, which one is the better way for me to go? We are being held hostage by capitalism when we are told either accept a miserable low wage or the employer will be free to lay you off and you'll have no wage at all. A system that offers that choice, that has intelligent economists debating back and forth rather than saying, how do we develop an economy that gives people a decent wage and a job, which is what they should be doing. That's a comment on a system that has spun out of control, that is not serving the mass of people not well at all. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update for today. We will be right back after a short interlude. Please stay with us.
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Leonard Cohen
Everybody knows that the days are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed the poor stay poor, the rich get rich that's how it goes Everybody knows Everybody knows that the boat is leaking Everybody knows the captain lad Everybody got this broken feeling like their father or their dog just died Everybody talking to their pockets Everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long stem roll Everybody knows Everybody knows that you love me, baby Everybody knows that you really do Everybody knows that you've been faithful give or take a night or two Everybody knows you've been discreet but there were so many people you just had to meet without your clothes.
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Richard Wolff
Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. For this part of July, and because it's the early part of July, as we do with the first program of each month, I have as my guest Dr. Harriet Fraad. I wanted first of all to spell her name because it's a little unusual and some of you clearly in your emails to us aren't clear about how that's done. First name, H A R R I E T Harriet. And the second name, Fraud. F as in Frank R, double A D. Harriet Fraad. She is a mental health counselor and a hypnotherapist with a practice in New York City. She speaks and writes about the intersection between economics, politics and the psychology of personal life. She publishes widely and her work can be found at Harriet Fraud, all one word. Harrietfraud.com I want to welcome her, as we do each month, to the program.
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Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
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Okay, our topic for today has to do with the relationship between capitalism as an economic system on the one hand, and the problem of addiction. Addiction to alcohol, but addiction to a whole lot of other things, as Dr. Farad will explain. To introduce the topic, let me just point out that capitalism as a system, as we often discuss it on this program, is given to extreme instability. Business cycles bouncing up and down every few years, laying off millions of workers around the world booming up, booming down. It's an unstable system imposed on people's lives. And that the other quality of capitalism that's relevant here is the inequality that it breeds. The polarization between ever fewer people with more, and ever more people with less. This kind of instability and inequality has certainly worsened, if not created all by itself, the problems of addiction. Addiction to alcohol, narcotics, gambling. As Dr. Frad will explain later, of course, capitalism isn't the only cause. But capitalism is a complicated system that not only provokes the need people have for the escape that addiction provides, but it also produces industries profiting off of that, providing the alcohol, providing the narcotics, providing the gambling centers, the. And so on. It even profits off of programs to help people get out of the addictions that this system so systematically fosters. And it is stunning to recognize that these addictions are global, wherever capitalism is. And that capitalism, by its own admission, has been singularly unsuccessful by and large in dealing with this problem, and certainly not in eradicating it. So I want to begin by asking Dr. Frad to tell us what is it about capitalism's instability and inequality that makes an addiction, in some sense, a way people have of coping with the problems.
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One of the worst things that's happened, which has made addiction an epidemic in the United States. The biggest cause of accidental death now is heroin overdose by opioid, which is a human made form of heroin. Or opiates, or opiates, which are a poppy grown. Of course, the opioids are easier to make because they're made with human created substances. But when you have gross inequalities between people, you have huge loneliness. The people at the top, in order to sustain their privilege, have to feel disconnected with the people at the bottom for whom they can't afford compassion or they would wonder, wait a minute, that's not fair. The people at the bottom, particularly in American culture, which is the worst in this aspect, feel, what did I do wrong? If I was smart, maybe I'd be rich. I'm not rich, it must be my fault and there's something wrong with me. And then there are a Million little humiliations of not having enough. Not having enough food. Not having. Which 1 in 5 children experiences food scarcity, otherwise known as hunger. And that I don't have the kind of nice sneakers that other kids do or that I can't afford nice clothes as a person. What is wrong with me? And they start feeling inferior and disconnected and ashamed of themselves because there's a lot of shame attached to poverty. So that isolation breeds addiction at both ends.
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If you're.
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And inequality breeds isolation. I remember a teenager that I dealt with from a very fancy school district telling me how proud she was that she could afford drugs her teachers couldn't even afford, that they were a chosen class, which was really quite amazing. That there's the separation out of people from one another. And connection is the basis of all the 12 step programs. And connection is a basis of mental health. Connection with close people, connection with friends, connection with social organizations, and connection with the wider world. All of those things are hurt.
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And how do those with inequality. How do those aspects of a capitalist economy then lead to an addiction as a way people. Why is addiction or how is addiction a way people cope with the very isolation and inequality you just described in.
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Of course, many ways. I'll tell you about two big ways. One is it makes you feel good. You feel for a while that everything's okay, even when it's not. When you're a rich kid and you feel isolated from other people and you feel terribly lonely and. And you could afford everything, but you're still not happy, it makes you feel happier to go and get some substance. You get a substance, you feel better for poor people. You also feel better. You feel less inferior, you feel less disconnected. And so that. That connect, you know, repairing the damage to connection is one thing that drugs do. And of course there are different drugs for different deficits. That you feel like cocaine gets you all hyped up, so you feel powerful and not inferior. Every drug has its own particular kind of manifestation. However, it's about comforting you that you're disconnected and alone. It also is very predictable. If you take in a life that's precarious because your job is precarious, you could lose it at any time because your life is precarious. You don't have for the majority the $500 you need in case of an emergency or a person on whom you can count for help in an emergency, that's one out of four Americans has no one to turn to no matter how what the disaster in their personal life. But there you can count on the drug, you can count on that they'll make you feel good. It's something solid in a shaking universe of both economic precarity and shaking and personal shaking, which are very closely related.
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To one another, if I've understood you. Those are very powerful forces.
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Powerful.
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And so we can kind of understand the next place I'd like to talk to you about, which is not just that capitalism as a system has reproduced, fostered this for a long time. But it's even more striking to me that these addictions, while on the one hand they're profitable for capitalism, the alcohol industry, the drug industry, both the legal drugs and the illegal drugs, are places where employers and employees have been making big business for a long time. That at the same time, addiction is very damaging, not just to the addict and to the addict's family, which we know those stories, but to capitalism itself. An addicted worker may not come to work. An addicted worker may not be as productive as he or she could otherwise be if they weren't addicted and suffering all the physical and mental consequences. So I'm struck, and I would like your opinion. How do you account for the fact that capitalism fosters and suffers at the same time from an addiction which it can't seem to cope with?
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Well, there's another first I want to add another damage, which is as drugs get more expensive, people go from prescribed drugs to the same drugs on the market, and they go from heroin to things like fentanyl, made in China, which are 10 times more powerful and more deadly because they need the money. They turn to crime. And so that you also have a huge number of crimes perpetrated because drugs are illegal. And you have a very, very lucrative illegal drug industry which accomplishes its power through physically punishing people who don't go along with it, and also stealing, getting money into people's hands. In a country like Portugal, where drugs were legalized, crime went way down and drug addiction went down 75%. But here you have a huge cost of the society of crime fueled by expensive drugs, because the capitalist system operates as a drug market, not only the legal ones in the psychological pharmaceuticals that are some of the most profitable drugs in the United States, but also the illegal drug industry.
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So that maybe the argument is that it's so profitable to capitalism on the one hand, that even though it undermines profitability elsewhere, the system can't figure out how to solve this problem.
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The system never looks at the social costs. They look at the profits to the top. They don't look at the social costs from Those profits anywhere. That's capitalism.
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Right. But there are some costs to the top. If your worker is less productive.
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Absolutely.
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If your worker has too much absenteeism.
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If you get robbed, if you get robbed.
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So the system profits suffers, but can't work that out because I guess the profit side of that equation dominates. And so we don't get a solution. And yet, and this is the most important part of what I want to ask you about, one kind of program, one type has seemed to work much better than all the others. That is in the sea of a failure to deal with these problems of addiction that have become so widespread. I mean, today's newspapers are full of the latest particular form, the so called opioid epidemic, but we really have an alcohol epidemic and all the rest of it. Tell us about what the one program is that seems to have been more successful and tell us why you think it has been the one that's more successful.
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Well, the most successful programs that are by far the most successful. In every little town in America where there's no other organization, there's an aa, an Alcoholics Anonymous at least. And in larger places, there are many, many programs that are all 12 Steps programs modeled on, modeled on the original one, which was Alcoholics Anonymous. But they're all anonymous programs.
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Could you tell us?
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They're free. And I want to tell you why I think they.
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Now, before you do, tell us about some of the others. So we're all made aware, beside alcohol, okay.
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There are three kinds of 12 step programs. The first is a program to help you get off of an addictive substance, narcotics of all sorts, alcohol. Or you may have a food addiction. There are Overeaters Anonymous and Food Addicts Anonymous because you know, the food then is the cheapest that you can get to comfort yourself and the most available. Another is something to help and support you to get over addictive behaviors. So it's not substances, it's behaviors. Behaviors like gambling, addictive spending, sex addictions, and also starving oneself, anorexia, bulimia and so on. The others are getting over emotional addictions like codependency. You have to have people depend on you. And so you surround yourself with people who can't give you anything but constantly take from you and depend on you or the behavior of cluttering every place you have. There's Clutterers Anonymous. There are underachievers that are emotionally constrained over achievers. There are workaholics that are constrained and addicted to constantly keeping busy, working. And then there are 12 steps to get over the damage caused by all of these. By child abuse, by sex abuse, by child sex abuse, by parents who are alcoholics. So there's three kinds. Substances, behaviors and recovery of others from others behavior. And there are. One of the great, great things about the 12 step programs is they're free. Anyone can come. And ironically enough, they are the refuge in the capitalist system. Because they utterly reject capitalist values. They have the 12 steps and the 12 traditions. And they completely reject self gain, greed, money. People who serve in AA have a chance to serve. They are not paid. The people who lead the meetings are not. The only thing you have to pay for is if you send away for literature. So monies are rejected in the traditions. The first one is our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery depends on unity. That the voices of people together are much are the most important. They also have rules. There can be no superheroes. No person can identify him or herself to the press by a last name. Because we don't want superheroes. We want unity among all of us as equals. Now that is opposite of the star culture. In which person who's the head of the corporation speaks and gets a lot of money. Everybody else doesn't have a voice. And that there can be no money and no ego.
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And no person employs another person.
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No person employs another person. No person can take money as a person. Everything is the organization and the unity of the group. And each person's voice is equally important to be heard. And everyone listens and everyone learns. And the healing of unity, the healing of listening, the healing of being part of a group, a unified group that cares is the opposite of capitalism with its competition, with its greed and its hierarchies. And so people look to a 12 step program that costs no money and involves no money, and involves no hierarchy, and involves no greed, and involves no ego to calm the damage that they've suffered.
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So the irony of ironies for me as a critic of capitalism. Is that capitalism produces a serious addiction problem. Throughout its history. Wherever it lands, can't figure out how to solve it. And that the most successful effort so far, more successful than all the others in helping people caught up in these addictions, is a system that, without saying it is embodied the negation of everything. That the capitalist system is no money, nobody employing anybody else, nobody profiting off of the next person or the next person's labor, no egoism of that kind, no inequality built into the organization. It's extraordinary that the salvation of an addiction within a capitalist system. Turns to the negation of capitalism as its Way out.
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That's right. Because capitalism, as Piketty and millions of others have said, breeds inequality. And in 12 step programs, everyone has an equal voice. And when you take responsibility to lead a meeting, it is an opportunity for service. Nobody gets paid. Very important that it leaves the world of money.
- [48:48]
And yet, as so many critics and cynics have not been willing to admit, a program in which nobody gets paid is able to be active in virtually every community of the United States, having people who keep it going, who go to the meetings, who make sure that they happen, who make sure that there's coffee or a cookie or whatever, that people, in fact, in a capitalist society will regularly, for decades, sustain an organization that embodies collectivity, community. It is remarkable.
- [49:24]
It is remarkable. And it is remarkable because people, in their search for comfort and kindness, have to look for an antidote to the capitalist competition and cruelty and humiliation and money system in which they live. And the more societies are unequal, then the more addiction they create. And people look for solace in unity with other people as equals outside the money system.
- [49:59]
It leads me to ask you a question, even though I have another point I want to get at. There are many victims of capitalism who don't turn to addiction, obviously. But if those who are addicted are finding their way out of that problem of capitalism, maybe people who aren't addicted would find a way to live a better life if they changed the society. So it was more like what AA has achieved and what these programs have achieved in the way of a community, of a unity, of a collectivity that nurtures people rather than one in which everybody is out for themselves. In other words, there's a kind of model almost here for what a movement to change society might want to take seriously precisely because of how it has worked as the best program to handle one of capitalism's victims, namely the addiction population.
- [50:59]
Yes, I wrote a list. I wrote an article, 12 Steps to a Revolution, talking about how by using the 12 steps in a political way, so that in AA and all the other 12 steps, you have to take a serious moral inventory of yourself and be honest. Well, as Americans, we also have to take a serious moral inventory. Look at how our country is built on the genocide of Native Americans, how we've had slavery, how we also have wonderful liberation tendencies. Even though the Constitution only gave the right to vote of 6% of the population, it still had some checks and balances of which we can be proud and so on. That there are. For every step, there's an equivalent in a secular organization that you can look up to that. You can connect on. And the unity is most important. And although in the 12 steps they talk about God all the time, the God they refer to can be any God you want. The bottom line is the life loving spirit of the child that gets crushed adjusting to a cruel society in their family and in the outside world.
- [52:13]
Let me in conclusion, because we're running out of time, let me ask you about one particular aspect of the 12 steps that has always struck me. The argument is made that there should not be discussion of the larger society and how it has caused or contributed to whatever your addiction happens to be. And the argument is that's copping out on your own personal responsibility. How you, your life, your family, your choices contributed to the addiction. Yet everything you have said seems to me to argue that the larger society is indeed a major player. How do you react to this insistence of the 12 steps to exclude the social causes of addiction as a cop out on your personal responsibility?
- [53:08]
Well, I react in two ways. One is that it's expedient because the 12 step programs get free services all over the place. Churches, community centers and so on. If they were interrogating the capitalist systems, profiteering, they probably would get many fewer donations places, help of all sorts. But I do feel that there needs to be a 13th step. What are the social conditions and social forces that have led to the addiction? So you'd have to look at the alcohol lobby for alcoholism. You'd have to look at psychopharmacies and ads that this tranquilizer and that upper will make you feel better. You have to look for the behavioral addictions at the insistence that you work harder and harder and harder and harder on speedup. You'd have to look at the hierarchical nature in which, let's say the surgeon who's sitting on the shoulders of the nurse who hands the implements, the people who clean the hospital, the orderlies that wheel the patients around, but somehow he's the king and makes a million dollars a year whereas they're at minimum wage. You'd have to look at the hierarchies and say, no, we're all in it together. Each one of us does his or her part to make something work for us. And that's an anti capitalist notion. That's a communal notion, that's a co op notion of how to run a hospital. For example, in one example, would you.
- [54:47]
Say, for example, that just as the 12 step program says, you shouldn't cop out on your own responsibility because that's part of the story. It Is you could answer, if I'm hearing you, that you agree with that, but you agree that it's equally another kind of cop out not to face the social causes, the economic contributions to your problem. You shouldn't cop out on the part you yourself play, but you also shouldn't cop out on the part that the society plays in all of this. Because a solution then would require not only changing yourself, but changing this society.
- [55:30]
Absolutely right. That's why it would be the 13th step that you would look at. How have I colluded with these capitalist values and why did I have to. What is our economic system that pushes me to this? And you'd have to look at psychopharma, for example, with its relentless advertising of drugs direct to people, which is not allowed in any other country in the world. You'd have to look at the alcohol lobby and how it pushes college students to have beer runs where you run and then you stop at a beer station and down beers or pushes it at fraternity parties. You'd have to look at so much of the addictive quality of our society and say, no, we want relaxation, we want unity, we want kindness with one another.
- [56:28]
As usual, I want not only to thank you for coming, but I want to invite the audience. If this program is interesting, if this kind of a dialogue is something you would like to see, let us know. Go to our two websites, rdwolf, with two f's. Com and democracy at work, all one word, democracyatwork.info those two websites give you all the means to communicate with us, to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that partners with us. If you're particularly interested in the way Dr. Fraad and I interact, I should mention that we will be speaking in Montreal at the American Sociological association annual meetings on August 11 in the Self and Society seminar that is part of those ASA meetings. Thank you very much for being with us and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Gonna be my time, my time babe they ain't gonna get change change, change, change, change, change Thing going to change. Sam.