← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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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, incomes, debts, our kids, ours. I'm your host, Richard Wolf. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. And I hope that that has prepared me well to offer you these economic updates regarding the world. We all depend on that economic system that surrounds us. I want to begin by talking about a couple of labor struggles, partly because that's a topic that doesn't get the attention that it deserves on the mass media, but also because things are changing in the world of labor. Perhaps things have gone far enough in the inequality that besets our economy, in the injustice that is obvious everywhere in the gap between rich and poor, between corporate power and workers dependency on their jobs. So let me begin with Chicago. At the end of their contract on August 31, hotel workers made a decision. They are members of UNITE Here, a union that represents hotel workers in many parts of the United States. 26 hotels decided to go on strike early in September. They had a number of the conventional issues, but one that was particularly powerful. Turns out that the hotels, in addition to paying poorly, have subjected their workers to to two kinds of suffering that I want to bring to your attention. One, when workers were laid off in slow seasons, they were deprived of their health insurance, making the loss of their job a double burden. In our peculiar society where we apparently imagine that you don't need health insurance when you're laid off compared to when you're not. This seemed galling to the workers and they wanted that changed. And the second thing is they were sick and tired, as so many people are in America these days, about the sexual abuse and harassment that hotel workers are particularly subject to. So a campaign was formulated by UNITE Here called Hands Off Pants On. It tells you something about a society where there has to be a campaign to keep your hands off and your pants on. It followed a survey in which over half of hotel workers indicated that they had been sexually harassed on the job. Seven of the hotels have cut a deal with the union. They won health insurance, and it was very, very important. But the strike continues, and it is something all of you should pay some attention to. Workers are beginning to fight back. Like the women in the MeToo movement. The labor movement is emerging again, and that makes for big changes if it can be sustained and if it gets our support. Parking attendance in Philadelphia are another example. They're struggling to organize within the Service Employees International Union. They want some help in the unbelievable low wages and awful hours that they are Required to live with. They're organizing and it is worth our support and it is worth our keeping track. My next topic is money and politics. We're there often, but we have to talk about it because it is a corrupting factor in our political life that doesn't seem to end. The latest gross example was the primary for governor here in New York State. It pitted an old line Clinton type centrist Democrat, a person long associated with big money contributions, the party that depends on corporations and wealthy people and enjoys it. Andrew Cuomo, quite a long distance from his father, Mario Cuomo. He worked through nearly $40 million in trying to beat back the effort of Cynthia Nixon, a newcomer to politics, to offer a left wing progressive alternative to the same old, same old of Andrew Cuomo. The political issues aside, she had no comparable amount of money. Money has controlled the Democratic Party as it has the Republican for a long time. But despite that, the progressive upsurge has now begun to challenge all of that. And so the money that brought them to power is now being used to keep those folks in power. And nowhere more so than with Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Nixon in New York's primary. Despite all of that, despite the unfairness, despite the corruption that allows money to play this kind of role, Cynthia Nixon, a newcomer, was able to get over a third of the vote, an astonishingly positive achievement given her history versus his money, her politics versus his money, and her appeal to young people and their enthusiasm for a better world versus his money. To stay with the issue of politics and the issue of our economy. There was another election at the same time in New York, this one for the State Senate in New York, where a socialist named Julia Salazar not only won, but defeated a longtime incumbent. And she will become the first socialist in a hundred years to to enter the New York State Senate if she wins in November, as she is expected by everyone to do now. This is interesting. Why? Well, socialists until Bernie have not been able to raise their heads in American politics ever since the Red Scare after World War II, sometimes called McCarthyism, sometimes called the Cold War, and so on. Demonization of everybody left of center became a passion engaged in by both Republicans and Democrats. It meant that everybody trying to make a political point did so without getting near the hot wire of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Well, those days are gone, at least in many parts of the United States. Being a socialist now is not only politically possible, but is in fact a ticket to winning office and winning elections. And Julia Salazar in New York City has just done it again. However, I want to correct one media misrepresentation. She's the first person to enter the New York Senate as a socialist in a hundred years. And the reason that's important is prior to a hundred years ago, socialists in the New York Senate and indeed in many state legislatures were not at all uncommon. I used to put a quiz to my students. Can you guess? I asked them which state in the United States had the largest number of socialists of elected to the state legislature out of all the 48 states back then? And they can never guess it. So let me give you the benefit in case anyone ever quizzes you, the state was Oklahoma. That's right. Oklahoma was the most socialist state in terms of elected officials of any sort of socialism can and has appealed to the American people in the past, and it looks to be doing that again now. And that's not so much because of the positivity of socialism as it is the clearly grasped negativity of capitalism. Capitalism is a system whose time has come and gone, and that is showing up in in the bizarre politicians that capitalism throws up at us, starting at the top and in the opposition represented by Bernie Sanders and by Julia Salazar. And hence that's an important thing to understand about where our economy is going. My last economic update that I have time for today has to do with an event that happened on September 18th in ten cities across the United States. At McDonald's hamburger restaurant workers marched, and they were marching against sexual harassment on the job. In other words, not just hotel workers being confronted by groping guests, but restaurant workers have the same problem. And they wanted McDonald's to do a great deal more about it than McDonald's has done. McDonald's talks a good bit about the issue, but according to the workers, doesn't do much. And I want to talk about the economics, not the obvious moral, ethical, simply decent human behavior that these workers are demanding that their employer enforce. I want to talk about what it means that women across the board are subjected to sexual harassment and sexual abuse on the job. Here are some of the economic we'll never know how many women quit a job in even if they were capable, skillful, more capable, more skillful perhaps than many of the men. But they couldn't get that job. They couldn't get the promotion. They couldn't show what they could do. They couldn't contribute all they had because they couldn't tolerate the level of sexual harassment and abuse, so they quit. How many women might you guess, didn't even go into whole kinds of jobs where they could have done stunning Work because it was considered to be unsafe, unappetizing, unfriendly to women because of sexual harassment. We now know, of course, that women can do all that work. During World War II, Rosie the Riveter was the image of the women who did all the work that the men used to do and excluded the women from. But the men went to war, and so the women had to step up, which they did, and they did it very well. But we keep the women out. We keep the women down. I remember going to my university classes and noticing that the professor had a different attitude to the women in the class compared to the men. They weren't considered quite as serious because they were going into a man's field. In other words, not only are the women repressed, not only does our economy suffer from not giving women the chance to show what they can do, to make the contribution they're capable of, but we already build that in, in a kind of unspoken discrimination in the very learning process, often in the very admissions process as to who gets into what kind of field in the university, in the selection of courses, in the training programs. We have suffered staggeringly for a long time in giving half of the population a hard deal when it comes to jobs and work and promotion and recognition. And we have lost all that they could have produced. Hats off to the women and the men at the McDonald's restaurant for saying we won't do this anymore. Making that MeToo movement be not only something about the just treatment of women, but also something about giving our society the benefit of the creativity of people whose offer had been rejected by means of sexual harassment. That does it for the first half of today's show. But before I introduce you to our guest, please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Check out our website where you can learn how to work more closely with us. And finally, thanks as always, to our Patreon community for their continued support, which is vital to everything we, we do. Thank you. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I am very, very happy and pleased to welcome to the microphones today two young people who have formed a new organization. The organization is called Black Socialists of America. Over here is Zee, who is a creative based in New York City, but also in Tokyo and the D.C. area. And over here is Sean, who's a socialist lawyer working out of Montgomery, Alabama. Welcome, gentlemen.
- [15:11]
B
Thank you for having us.
- [15:14]
A
Well, let's jump right in. I'm sure my audience, people listening and watching, want to know what Is the Black Socialist of America. When did you get it going? Who's in it? What's its purpose? Tell us about this new organization that takes the word socialist and puts it right in the middle of its name.
- [15:34]
C
We have a socialist sandwich. We got the black on one side and America on the other, and we're just mashing it together. Very delicious, actually.
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B
Well, Black Socialists of America started really as a social media platforms. I started a Twitter page, Facebook page, Instagram back in December of last year. And I was just sort of curating what people call the black radical tradition, but more specifically, you know, black American socialism, which goes all the way back to the late 1800s. So I really started by taking pictures, clips, articles, and sort of outlining that tradition, you know, from all the way back then to today. And through that, social media following started to develop. And then through that, a network started to develop amongst black American leftists. And through that network is how I connected with Sean. And it took us a while, but we got on a call and we had a conversation about what this platform could be. The catalyst actually was seeing the response that Cornel west got from putting out his critique of Ta Nehisi Coates and seeing sort of the response that he got from what people call the black liberal elite. And it was actually in that moment where, you know, I did my research, I said, are there any organizations for black socialists, you know, black American leftists, anti capitalists? And there weren't really any sort of tied to this tradition that we're, you know, representing today. So, you know, instantly I said, that has to change. There needs to be a collective voice, not just sort of individuals, you know, whether it be journalists or academics, you know, speaking up, speaking out, but a group voice, collective voice.
- [17:36]
A
Let me push you a little bit. You know, socialism means many things. It's been around at least 150 years, been interpreted in a variety of ways. What do you mean by what does the socialism part of your name mean to you?
- [17:53]
C
Yeah, so I mean, a lot of people have written a lot about how there have been various amounts of various different kinds of socialisms across the time and space. And, you know, it's a good question, especially now that it's kind of become a buzzword. So people are doing with it whatever they want to. I think for us specifically, what we're looking at is this sort of artificial separation between labor and ownership and kind of bridging the gap between the two of them. Like, we conceive of a socialism where workers democracy is the standard economic mode where the people who are actually laboring in for the purpose of producing wealth are taking ownership of the things that they're doing, that they are directing their labor, that they are reaping the benefits of that labor, and they're doing so in a manner that is cooperative rather than competitive. That's chiefly what we kind of want to put across, absent the. The aspect of government intervention, absent the aspect of sort of the bureaucratization of everything. We want to reunify labor and ownership.
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B
Yeah. And have it be democratic. Democratic control in the workplace, and then people democratically deciding how. What's happening with the surplus value.
- [19:10]
A
Okay, why now?
- [19:17]
C
Why not now?
- [19:19]
A
That's always been a good answer. Why not now? But is there something particular about this moment historically, that you may not even have been conscious of, but that now that you think back on it makes this the time?
- [19:33]
B
Well, I'm 25. You're 26.
- [19:35]
C
Yes.
- [19:37]
B
You know, I think for a lot of millennials, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign was sort of like, it gave us a lot of us a boost of hope. And some of us sort of delved further into the words, the concepts that he was mentioning, democratic socialism. And I definitely think I was. I'm one of those people. You know, I dug a little bit further into the theory and the history behind it, and even above all of that, try to see, not just dealing with these ideas in the abstract, but if we want to reach a socialist society, how do we get to that end?
- [20:21]
A
Right.
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B
And I think there's been a lack of really tangible, concrete economic policies being put forth by socialist organizations and activists in general, and really a cohesive sort of movement, you know, based around some sort of strategy. And that's actually something I wanted to mention before, when we were talking about when BSA first started, you know, initially we thought, you know, we can have a platform, you know, to educate and to let black leftists speak, let the world know that there are black leftists in America. But I think we realize that we have an opportunity to do more than that. We have an opportunity to create tools that sort of lend themselves to autonomous action. And also, you know, we can work with other people to pull together the resources we need to start building democratic enterprises and institutions that can allow us to actually challenge capitalist relations from where we are.
- [21:31]
A
All right, let me push you again.
- [21:32]
B
Yeah.
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A
Kind of two questions. I'm going to give them to you at the same time, because they're related. What exactly are you planning to do as BSA and closely related? Why didn't you get involved with one or another of the existing organizations and do it that way. There must have been in your mind not only the particular things you're going to do, which I want to hear from you, but also why you think you need to do it independently, at least for the time being. And then I'm going to ask you whether you'll be working with other organizations. But, but that comes later. So first, what exactly are you going to do and why? Set up your own organization to do it.
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C
And we actually ought to answer those simultaneously because they're linked, actually.
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A
Yes.
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C
So there's a. I always call it a problem of creativity in the left as it exists right now. So many of them, first of all, they either don't take class seriously or they don't take race seriously. It's one or the other. They don't really attack them both as being essentially the same issue. But the other problem is that their solutions to the problem are largely, we need the government to pay for universal basic income or something like that. Or it's just we need to expropriate the wealth of the capitalist class and then somehow a socialist state will spontaneously emerge. So neither of those solutions are satisfactory. One is impractical and the other one is just going to leave to a bloated welfare state, which is not what we want. So we saw a lot of room there to kind of give a novel strategy, something that is, first of all grassroots and also is more dedicated towards building a socialist society from the ground up rather than simply distributing wealth in a way that's broader, requires more servility to the state or to the capitalist class or however you want to do it. And also that's very rare, race conscious that draws from this very rich tradition of black American socialism.
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B
Self determination, yes. Like Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition. I think that's another element. We're very divided right now. We're divided. People are divided all across the world, but especially in America right now. And instead of ignoring these divisions, I think we need to be working through, working through the divisions and then bringing everybody together, you know, to a multi ethnic, multiracial plane of action. And up until now, there really hasn't been, I feel like an effort, I mean, really since, you know, Fred Hampton's assassination, to do that in a, in a concrete way. So, you know, with Democratic Socialists of America, every day we have, you know, you know, black Americans who are part of that organization venting to us about not being heard, not being listened to. You know, again, this class reductionist, I Mean, this is what's plagued the American left for, you know, decades now. So we thought, why don't we come in together and address the issues that are disproportionately impacting us poor and working class black Americans and link this to an internationalist struggle.
- [24:49]
A
I'm struck by that because it seems to me that America's changing. For the last 40, 50 years, leftists have been very narrow. They've chosen ecology or nuclear war or race even, or sexism, but been very anxious not to get near the socialism, not to question capitalism because it was hard enough to do what they were doing on that particular issue. You're not doing that. You're going right at the beginning and saying no, it's the whole economic system that we tell us a little bit about how you're going to make that your politics. Because that's the trick in a way. If we could bring together the particular single issue groups to merge around a shared platform form of economic, but also racial and cultural transformation. I mean the sky's the limit as to what you could do.
- [25:46]
C
Yeah, that's a scar, I think of the 1960s, you know, the 1920s radical judiciary. If you had an anti war organization, you could pretty much assume correctly that it was also a socialist organization. Right now in the 60s you had sort of this atomization of the left. You know, people were focusing more on the not necessarily socialists, but they were part of the anti war movement. So we're focusing on the environment and we've kind of not moved away from that sort of model of organizing because I think for a couple of reasons, some people, we want a broader sort of base so people that are not necessarily socialists can participate. But the result of that has been, you know, virtual inaction. You have these large activist networks that aren't really doing anything, so.
- [26:28]
B
Or what they're doing is more short term, kind of exactly right. This survival pending revolution, it's more just on the survival side not actually getting us to revolutionary.
- [26:38]
A
You can see it at the end of the Vietnam War activity, the anti Vietnam War movement kind of petered out. It didn't have the staying power, even though the majority of people in it no doubt knew that more social change was needed beyond the end of hostilities in Vietnam and were driven by that.
- [26:59]
B
Yeah, I think another, another element to it is, you know, a part of our, the strategy we're advocating for deals with the concept of dual power, right and centered. Within that is the worker self directed enterprise. And I think one thing that can't get lost and You've spoken about, you know, this moment where the co op, you know, the concept sort of becomes mainstream and what could happen in that moment when there's a cooperative movement. I think when and if that time comes, we need to make sure we have the infrastructure in place to make sure that there's ait's explicitly political. Right. Like, we're not just, you know, it's not going to be a mess. We're pushing for democracy all across the world, all across the board. Because if we don't do that, you know, we're falling into a lot of the mistakes that have, you know, been made in the past. And a lot of these co ops can be co opted by capitalism, by capital. Co op. Co opted. Exactly. Nice little pun there.
- [28:01]
C
So, three pronged strategy. First, educate people on the ideals of socialism. Second, set up alternative economic and political institutions. Third, weaken the capitalist state. We do that. Socialism.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Hold that thought. I want to thank all of you for being part of this conversation. And I want to remind you that if you want to follow us or observe the continuation of this conversation which we're about to do, please check us out@patreon.com economicupdate where this conversation with these representatives of Black Socialists of America will continue. Thank you again for watching and I will be speaking with you again next week.