← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to welcome to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our debts, our incomes, those of our children, those looming down the road, and all the conditions that shape the economic parts of our lives that are so central to the lives we lead. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. I want to jump right in rather than making announcements, as I so often do, because some of you have said you want me to do that rather than make announcements. And so to be a nice guy, I'm going to do that. I'm going to start with defense spending. It's something many of you have asked me to talk about that I don't talk about a great deal. And I wanted to mention why a good number of other commentators do. And so I tend to try to focus more on topics and subjects that aren't getting the kind of attention I think they deserve. So obviously, defense spending gets to be deserving of attention, heaven knows. And after I give you the basic numbers today, I think you'll see why. What I decided to focus on was to compare the United States, which is the number one country in the world for spending on the military. The Bloomberg News service, which I use often, has recently compiled the latest numbers for 2016, since all those budgets have been set. So I'm going to give you the amounts of money that are spent by the top 10 countries, that is the countries in the world that spend more on military than the rest of the countries of the world. There are about 185 countries. So these are the top 10. Number one, and here may be a moment of patriotic pride is the United States 2016. Here's the amount of money that the United States officially spends on the military, $622 billion. Try to keep the number in mind, please, as we go down. Number two in the world, People's Republic of China. But being number two means being way down. Unlike the United states, which spends 622 billion, the Chinese spend $191 billion. Number three is the United Kingdom, $53 billion. Number four, India, 51. Number five, Saudi Arabia, 49. Number six, Russia, 49. Let me compare Russia and the United states. Then in 2016, the United States spent $622 billion and the Russians spent 49 billion. When you hear the United States government speak about the dangers of foreign military power, remember these numbers and remember this Summary, the amount the United states spends those $622 billion is significantly more than the total spent by the other nine in the top 10 combined. Let me do that again. The United States spends more money on the military than the nine other countries in the top 10 combined. Spend on the military President Elect Trump has promised to increase spending on the military. We no longer have the adversary in the Soviet Union we once did. We have no adversary spending anything remotely like what we spend. And the plans of the president elect are to spend more. There's an old story in economics that every dollar you spend on the military is one less dollar you have to spend on everything else. Public education, adequate income for people working hard, hospitals, roads, you name it. The dollar for the military is a dollar less for everything else. Guns versus butter is how it's been talked about traditionally. And the United States spends incredibly. There could be no way to sustain this money if it weren't for the fact that over the years this kind of spending has produced entrenched interests that depend on military hardware producers, military software producers, the people who produce the uniforms for the people in uniform, the people who produce all all of the equipment, the people who maintain the bases around the United States and around the world. These are strategically located in many states so that local and regional politicians do not dare question the spending for the military for fear that they will be blamed for a base closing in their area, for a factory shutting down because the orders from the military have been stopped. It helps to explain why it is not at all unusual in annual meetings of the Congress for the military to tell the Congress it needs less money and the Congress refusing to allocate less, because for them it isn't about the military. It's about sustaining their districts, the income those firms earn, the jobs it may provide, and so on. It's an entrenched special interest. That's why President Eisenhower half a century ago warned against becoming too reliant on the military industrial complex. It was a smart warning, but it was not one that was heeded. Let me turn next to an interesting comparison and question. This was brought to my attention by a story in the Washington Post dated December 12th of this year by Matt O'. Brien. It had an arresting title which caught my interest. Here's the Capitalism is Working Better in France than the U.S. that was the title in the Washington Post. So let me tell you what it's actually about. Since 1980, inequality has really blossomed, if that's the right word, all around the capitalist world. Here in the United States but likewise in Europe and indeed basically across the world, inside country after country, and this includes India, China and Brazil and so on, the gap between a shrinking number of very rich people and everybody else has widened considerably. But within that growing inequality, there are vastly different experiences. I'm going to compare, based on this article, the experience in France and the United States and what Matt o' Brien did in a very good piece of journalism, he said, how has the bottom half of the population done in France on the one hand, and in the United States on the other? Well, here are the statistics. Since 1980, the bottom half of the French population have seen their incomes go up by about 32%. And this is taking into account inflation. These are. The real increase in what they earn has gone up by 32%. Here in the United States, it hasn't gone up at all. So let me do this again. The bottom half of the population in France is 32% better off. Now, mind you, that's not very good. That's under 1% increase a year. But not very good is still a lot better than nothing at all, which has been the American experience. In other words, capitalism breeding inequality in both France and the United States breeds a lot more of it in the US Than it does in France. Why might that be, is the next question. Since France, like the United States, has been hurt by companies closing down in France and moving production to the lower wage areas of Asia and Africa and Latin America, just like American companies. And French companies have substituted machines for workers, automated, just like American companies have. So they have that in common. So how do you explain that the bottom half did so much better in France than it did in the United States? And the answer is pretty clear and offered by this article, which also goes to a professor at UC Berkeley who's done some work on this named Zucman. And here's basically the answer. The French have a much higher minimum wage than the United States. The French have a much stronger labor union movement than the United States. The French spend much more on public education of the mass of people, poor or not, than the United States does. As a result, Zucman argues, the explanation for why the bottom half has done better is that it has more power in the marketplace. It has more power through its unions. It has more power through the political parties that are responsive to it. And it has more power because it has forced the government to give them the quality of education, the minimum wage, and other legislation that has enabled them to. To do better. The United States doesn't have that lower minimum wage, a virtually collapsing labor movement. Let's remember that in the private sector here in the United states, less than 7% of workers are represented by a union and that the quality of education for the bottom half of our people is very, very poor. We still blame people for not having the requisite skills, but we have an educational institution, but that doesn't provide them power of the working class, articulated through its political arm, its trade union arm makes a difference. That is Mr. Zucman's, Professor Zucman's conclusion. And that makes sense to Matt o' Brien in the Washington Post, and it is something to think about. Third item for today has to do with President Elect Trump's plan. His plan is to reduce the corporate income tax. That's the amount of money the corporations of America have to pay to Uncle Sam as a percentage of their profits. In other words, a company sells its output for revenue, subtracts the costs, labor, materials and all the rest. And the difference between revenue and costs is their profit. And and on that profit, corporations are required to send Uncle Sam 35%. Don't cry just yet because most companies have deductions and exemptions that bring it down to an average more like 20, 22% that they have to pay. President Elect Trump got a lot of support by promising when he's a president that he will reduce it from the 35% official rate down to 20 or 15%. And here's his if we reduce the tax on corporations, well, then they will have less incentive to go abroad the way they have been. And so jobs will not be leaving here. And so Mr. Trump can deliver on his promise to American workers to bring jobs back. That's the plan. It's all very nice as far as it sounds. We don't worry about what it means to the federal government that those billions of dollars it got from the corporations won't be flowing to Washington. We are not going to ask today. We will in future programs. What is going to happen with the federal government when it doesn't have that money? I'm not going to worry about that now. I'm going to worry about something else. Will the rest of the world stand still? Will it simply stand still as the United States changes its tax laws to make companies that were going to leave the United States and go abroad not do it? And maybe, as Mr. Trump suggests, persuade companies already overseas to come back here since they went there to escape taxes here in part? Well, maybe they'll come back. Here's something for those of you who pay attention to President Elect Trump and perhaps even his advisors. Here's something to think it is possible that the rest of the world won't stand still, that they will not stand quietly and have companies located there leave. Companies that were about to come there and improve their economy choose not to come. They're not going to accept it. And let me give you an example of what other countries not only may do, but are already doing. My example will be Israel. New regulations expected to pass by the end of this year, working their way through the Israeli Parliament will cut the corporate tax rate in Israel from as much as 25%, which it can be to some now, down to get ready 6%. In other words, Israel is taking the steps it wants to take to negate the effect of what Mr. Trump proposes to do and they're going to have it in place before he gets to do it, if even he can. In other words, the promised benefits of cutting corporate taxes will indeed flow to the companies. They'll have lower taxes. But when it comes to where they move and when they move, the effect will be nothing because they aren't going to move because the other countries are already taking them. Last part of this lovely story, lovely here is meant ironically, this is a race to the bottom. The United States is cutting its taxes. Israel is cutting its taxes. All the other countries will be cutting their taxes. Governments everywhere will be without the resources to maintain the quality of life for the mass of their people. Corporations everywhere will get less taxation and the rest of us will get screwed. Maybe not the way Mr. Trump would like us to discuss his proposals, but otherwise we're not paying attention. I want to mention the Ikea Corporation. I assume many of you know what that is. It's a Swedish company that is active here in the United States. It produces low cost furniture, often the kind that you buy broken down and then you put it together when you get it at home. Been very successful. It is now all over the United States. Indeed it has a total of 13,000 workers here in the United States. Why am I talking to you about it? Well, I don't have good things to say about corporations all that often. So let me congratulate Ikea. Why? Because over the last week they announced that they are going to put into place a program of paid parental leave for their 13,000 workers. They are going to give them four months of paid parental leave about 18 weeks. Now, this is very unusual. Most American large companies that have employees in the thousands give their workers no paid leave. The majority give none. Those who give don't give much. And those who give give very in a very discriminating way. For example, fathers get less leave than mothers. Adoptive parents get less leave than birth parents. Foster parents get less leave than regular parents. And in an amazing comment on the United States, lower wage workers often get less or no paid leave. Walmart, for example, offers some paid leave to its salaried employees, but none to its hourly wage earning employees. In other words, you're concerned about providing parents at home to newborn children according to how much money their parents earn. While I let that sink in, let's go back to IKEA. I congratulate them. They are offering 18 weeks of paid vacation equally to mothers and fathers. Equally. The birth parents, that is natural parents, and adoptive and foster parents, all equally eligible. So IKEA is pretty good. Until I investigated what IKEA does for the 68. Excuse me, for the many thousands, I don't know the exact number of its employees. In Sweden, the 68 comes out. When I discovered that in Sweden, the IKEA gives its workers 68 weeks of paid parental leave. 18 is a new one for Americans, but we are light years from what the same company does for its other workers in those parts of the world where paid parental leave is considered a right of people. I could stop here. The message is clear. Most American firms offer none. But let me drive it home one more. The United States is the only one of the advanced industrial countries that does not require by law that there be paid parental leave. Leaves it entirely up to the market, to the private sector, to free enterprises. And by leaving it up to them, unlike what the British or the French or the Germans or the Italians or the Irish or the Polish do, by leaving it to the market, the mass of Americans don't get it. Should I stop? No. One more step. Those countries are different from us, not only in providing parental leave so that parents and children can be together without sacrificing the economic well being of the family. But those are society, unlike the United States, that don't make a big thing about their commitment to family values. We do. Lots of words, very little action. Last item for the first half of today's show. There's a lesson in what President Elect Trump has been doing in his effort to pressure American companies not to leave the United States for cheaper, lower wage workers elsewhere. The most famous example since the election has been the case of the Carrier Corporation in Indiana, a producer of air conditioning equipment which had scheduled about 2,100 workers to lose their jobs in Indiana and to have the production moved to Mexico. President Elect intervened. There was lots of photo ops. And when the dust cleared, 800 jobs, according to Carrier and now officially verified, roughly 800 jobs will stay of the 2,100 that were scheduled to go. And even if it's only half, or actually less than half, and even if it's not quite what President elect Trump hyped it up to be, it is nonetheless an intervention by the president to make jobs stay here, at least for a while longer. And there is a lesson here. President elect Trump claims he's going to be doing more of that. He has threatened corporations with quote, unquote consequences if they move production out of the United States. He has done some intervening with the Ford Motor Company. He has done some with other companies. We will see how much of this is political theater and how much of it is real. But as we wait, there's a lesson here. What's the lesson? Well, the first lesson takes the form of a question. The moving of jobs out of the United States on a heightened intensity has been going on for at least 40 years. Why has it taken until now for a president to directly intervene to stop it? We have had Republicans, we have had Democrats as presidents. We have the House and Senate controlled by the one party or the other party in different combinations for these last 40 years. But here is a person doing something, or at least beginning to look like he might do something. It got him a lot of votes. It probably won him the election, the very promise of it, because Republicans and Democrats shared a particular perspective for 40 years. And it's a perspective we can call, for lack of anything else, this funny word, neoliberalism. It was the philosophy that said the government is best, that governs least, the government should stay out of the economy, that the market capitalist system is the best system since sliced bread and should be left alone to do its thing. And we'll all be better off if we let it do its thing. So it was allowed to do its thing. And its thing over the last 40 years was to replace people with computers and robots when they stayed here, and otherwise to move production to where the wages were much, much lower. That's what they did. And it hollowed out the American economy. It made states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and so on become areas of vast economic decline and misery. And as I say, finally led longstanding working class people used to voting for the Democratic Party to decide. They got very little to lose and maybe a little to gain by giving a shot to this unusual Republican who actually talked at least about their jobs, which had been snatched from them for 40 years. But there's a further lesson here. Mr. Trump is intervening in the capitalist market. He's not going to let it be the market that decides. He's telling the companies what he wants them to do and he's threatening them if they don't do it. What it suggests is that especially if he succeeds at this, corporationsand there's some sign of it already are going to have to accommodate. They're going to have to find other ways to make money, because one way they used to have moving abroad is going to be closed to them. That's all. This means they can still make money other ways. They're working on it already. They understand that sometimes when they push too far, the people rise up and react against them. That's what they just did in this country, like they did it in England by voting for Brexit, we and so on. And when that happens, capitalists, like everybody else realizes, uh oh, the mass of people now have told us no more of this. This is not the first time in the United States. A hundred years ago, capitalists employed children in the United States, millions of them, until the American people said, no more of this. No more little children in sweatshops. Uh, the capitalists yelled and screamed, you can't do that. The market should be left to its own devices. Capitalism is a great system. Nobody cared. And we passed laws saying you can't employ children. End of story. Did capitalism collapse? Not even close. We don't allow corporations to pollute the way we once did. We don't allow them to commit sexual harassment of their employees the way we once did. We require them to pay a minimum wage. They fight every step of the way for all of them. They still fight against them, but they manage to survive them when the political pressure requires them to. That's all Mr. Trump is going to be able to do. Cut off one way for capitalists to function. So they'll have to find others. They've always done that in the past. They'll do it again this time. And for all we know, we will be worse off under the new ways they find to make money than we were under the old one. Because the problem, of course, isn't this or that detail. It's a system that works this way. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic update. Please stay with us. I want to remind you again to make use of our websites, rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info those are the places to go to communicate with us, to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to let us know what you like and don't like, to support us in any way you want, and most importantly, to partner with us to make use of all the materials we post up on those websites to become a partner in reaching as many people as possible. Please stay with us. We'll be right back. Don't ask me what you know is true don't have to tell you I love your precious heart I I was standing, you were there, too World collided and they could never tear us apart. We could live for a thousand years. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for this one of the final weeks of 2016. I'm very pleased to welcome to our microphones today a friend of mine. So let me begin by saying, Kristen, welcome to the program.
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Thank you, Rick.
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So let me tell you all who Kristen is. Kristen Lawlor is an associate professor at of sociology at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx, which is one of the boroughs of New York City. Her first book was called the American Radical Culture and Capitalism. An interesting discussion and part of the reason why I asked Kristen to join us today. That book was published by Routledge publishers in 2011. Currently, in addition to being a professor, she is doing what professors are often required to do, which is write books and publish them. And she is currently at work on a new book called Shanty the Soul of American Syndicalism. So once again, Kristen, thank you for joining me.
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Thank you, Rick.
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In this book that you published back in 2011 on Surfers, or more accurately, the image that surfing had and surfers had in American culture, there were years then when everything was about surfing, when the number one rock music on the pop charts was about surfers, when the films and the television programs were about surfers. And you have a wonderful thesis in your book that this was not some haphazard, random twist of fashion, that this was a very successful image of the surfer because Americans were already then feeling what we now talk about, a sense of America passing them by, of the American system somehow not having a place for them. They were reacting to it by a kind of escapism into a fantasy world of young people on surfboards gliding across the waves, having a wonderful time. And it led me to a question which I thought we might start off with today. If capitalism is becoming harder and harder for masses of people to deal with and all the statistics economically tell us that, might the American people be kind of looking for escapes of all kinds? And might it even be that a wealthy, very wealthy Fabulously wealthy man who flaunts every rule, who's a naughty person in every way. In short, a boyish character given to locker room talk, maybe, you know what I'm saying? Donald Trump, maybe he is an escape for millions of Americans, too. So could we begin by your telling us whether any of that makes sense in view of what you studied about surfers?
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Well, I do think that that's a reasonable analysis of some of the appeal of Trump, for sure. There have been wealthy businessmen who have been on the sort of American stage for a long time. And a lot of times you hear them things like, we work ourselves to death, we kill ourselves, you know, and that's. They don't have the same kind of appeal as a Donald Trump who really does have this kind of renegade bad boy kind of thing that I think people want to identify a little bit with. And in the economic way, precisely the things that you've pointed out, his sort of ability, he literally, I mean, at speeches has said that he's going to tell these corporations to fit. You know, I mean, that's a dream. Telling the boss to f off is something that I think people really identify with. He's a vision as incredibly dangerous as he is. I think we need to understand what the appeal is. I just think that this can't be sort of written off. We have to understand the danger. And also, really, we want to get those voters back. We want to get those workers, you know, thinking not, you know, we don't want their rebellion to be only taken up by the right. It has to be able to be tapped into by the left as well. So there's something profoundly irresponsible about him. I mean, everything he's doing is unbelievably irresponsible. You know, he really is somebody who I think can appeal to a lot of these dreams of escape from daily drudgery, power over corporations, stuff like that. I can't help thinking, you know, I grew up going to the Jersey Shore, so I know Atlantic City pretty well, and I've known it. That's not my shore town, but I've known it in its, you know, sort of boom and bust. And I watch the Trumpification of Atlantic City and the way in which Trump, you know, in this incredibly leveraged way, which is exactly what he's going to do coming in. He's made every indication of that. He's not an austerity guy, he's not a fiscally responsible guy in any way. So it was all, you know, debt fueled. It was bound to come crashing down. But there's no question that these giant, you know, palaces, which were so alienating and horrible, you know, when you were inside and outside, you couldn't even, you know, see the ocean because they were. They had giant, like Trump bat signals ruining the. Even the nighttime oceanscape. But either way, you could sort of watch Atlantic City taking people's dreams and sucking them into and sort of out of Atlantic City. I mean, all the money, he leveraged all those casinos and took the money out and then left everybody else, you know, with the bill. So I do think there's something we need to understand about a different way to tap into those kinds of fantasies. But there's no question that that is a big part of Trump's appeal, his ability. Nobody else has said to Boeing, for instance, you know, $4 billion for two airplanes, are you kidding me? You know, I mean, that's. I think that's something. It's a dream of a certain kind of power that appeals to people.
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I'm fascinated by hearing this because the narrow economics that, unfortunately, my profession, economics, is committed to, you know, looking at the statistics always and never asking the larger questions, is trying now to understand, well, people who voted for Trump, their incomes went down and so forth. Yes, that has a role to play, and I do it, too. But I think what you're tapping into with your work is a much richer vein, that as different people have different amounts of difficulty, what they all share is a sadness, almost a tragic sense of what's happening to their lives, what's looking to come for their kids. And they, of course, want to go to a glittery golden palace on the shore where they can bet money and for a little while, be a rich Playboy. And then Mr. Trump comes along, gives press conferences in his golden apartment, so we can all see. It's like. It's almost like a joke. It's like a television program of surfers. You are leading a drudgery life. Well, you could be, at least for a little while, with these lovely young people gliding across the water and having endless fun. And you could be with him, a rich person, a playboy.
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And of course it's a con, of course it's a scam, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. If we could understand that undercurrent of American culture, and if the left and especially the labor movement could really start thinking in terms of. And that's precisely why the image of the surfer is so important to me, because it is this fantasy image of escape and really escape from work. It's an image that taps into what I see as a really latent kind of desire to refuse work and to refuse the unbelievable speed up that has happened, especially in the last 40 years or so. You know, people are working longer and harder since 1973. It's, what, an additional month per year of work for not, you know, for the same and declining wages. At the same time. One sector gets sped up, other sectors become redundant and become surplus populations. And so there's all kinds of terror about policing and incarcerating those populations. I think it can be very dangerous. And one of the things that, you know, it's interesting. It's actually an economic moment that brought me to surfing. I thought I was going to do a labor history for my dissertation, but I was teaching a social theory class and I was teaching Marx on alienation. And, you know, this idea that because we take our activity, the moments of our lives, objectify it into something outside of us and then sell it to someone else, we're alienated from it. Thus, we're alienated from each other, from nature, from. And everything. And at the very same time, I watched a documentary on surfing, and I was watching the surfer move across the wave and thinking, this is precisely the image of the other, of alienation. I showed it to my students and they were like, oh, alienation. Like, they got it because they saw the other to it. But then, you know, when you sort of dial into a certain channel, in a way you dial into a certain frequency, you start to notice something, and then you see it everywhere, and you're like, how did I miss this? So I start seeing that there are surfers everywhere, in movies, in commercials. They're selling deodorant, they're selling cars, they're selling everything. I start looking back at the history of this, and I can see that it is this consistently powerful archetype through American culture since the late 19th century even, but especially the early 20th century. And like the selling of Hawaii and stuff, and that it consistently has meant the same thing, which is largely this countercultural critique of the grind of everyday life.
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A
So an escape for the mass of people's work lives.
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Absolutely, absolutely. But what I was looking at also was the way in which commercial capitalists had deployed this image to foment collective action, collective action of a certain kind. But it's still mass collective action when everybody buys the same thing at the same time. And I do think, you know, Trump didn't have a big political machine behind him or something like that. That's why I was sure he wasn't gonna win. I was like, if Trump wins, I'm gonna have to rethink my whole analysis of, like, power and how this stuff works, because you can't just, you know. But we all were surprised. And anyway, there is something about the ability of these fantasies, the power of these fantasies to mobilize people. Mobilize people. Exactly. And so my point was, why don't we take a page from their playbook a little bit? Especially if we understand. And this is where the syndicalist stuff comes in, the labor politics of worker power and the labor market and stuff like that. What if we started thinking about the refusal of work that is so powerful in popular culture that commercial capitalists are so good at deploying? I mean, I've looked at commercials, all kinds of commercials, and the way in which a critique of work is embodied in the way that commercial capitalists appeal to our kind of deepest desires. What if the labor movement, what if the left did the same thing? And instead of saying, eat your spinach or something, you know, we all have to go to meetings all the time, what if we talked about a much more kind of utopian idea? Because actually, labor movement strategies are far more able to deliver things like freedom and power in everyday life then Trump for sure. I mean, God knows what the hell's going to happen with this guy. It's terrifying, really, in a lot of ways. But I think we really. That's the. Especially the shorter hours movement, the sort of sharing the work in times of unemployment so that you don't have a speed up on one side and mass surplus populations on the other. But a sort of solidaristic refusing of overwork, I think is something that we need to talk seriously about. And it's easier than we think because that's what everybody wants, as far as I can tell.
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A
This is marvelous, Kristen, Really. It gets me excited just to think about it the way I would put it and see whether this works for you. People oppressed by an economic system, they're caught in the mass of Americans going to work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. The grind can either seek an escape that leaves the system untouched. For example, if you're miserable at job, go to happy hour when it's over. If you're miserable on your job, go to the mall and chop yourself to death, which are ways of capitalists making money off the very misery they create. Then your logic says, wait a minute, you could react differently. You could say, if the job is no good, change the job situation. Make the job a joy Instead of a horror, that's an alternative way of coping with jobs that are no good. So, for example, make it shorter hours so more leisure is built in. Make the workplace a cooperative in which everybody participates in organizing the work and running the work so you're not so alienated, you're not a drone who comes and does what he or she does told and then goes home. Transform the workplace physically, aesthetically, every way in order to make it a better experience for you rather than seeking solace in the happy hour or the mall shopping. Is that kind of what you're getting at?
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I think that's a very interesting idea. I'm definitely a little more on thinking about a take this job and shove it kind of an idea.
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A
Tell us about that.
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The way in which, you know, you talk about automation, for instance, and in the labor movement frequently and just in popular discourse, we can think about automation as a scourge in some ways because it puts people out of work. But I do think, I mean, there certainly was a time in, you know, left thinking and intellectual history where people really talked about the possibilities of automation in terms of human freedom from work, freedom from the workplace. Because I do think, you know, I have a job that is a pleasure to do. I love my students, I like my job, I like my colleagues. It's a good. Academia is a good place to be in a lot of ways. So I'm not against good workplaces, but I think that's rare. And I think that most workplaces are inherently alienated in a way because you're not free when you're there. I think that freedom really is the ability to constitute time on your own terms, you know, and to have a certain spontaneity in what you're going to do in any given day. And I also think in terms of the, you know, sort of proto fascist and violent and right wing nationalist, really terrorist that I am very afraid of in terms of Donald Trump. You know, people are really at their best and kindest, I think. And it's not just about kindness. It's about sort of solidarity and being cool with one another when they're on vacation, for instance, rather than when they're in the workplace and when they're sort of under a kind of, you know, grinding sort of everyday life. And so I think that there are in terms of working less people working less and thus making more, because I do think there's a supply and demand curve in terms of labor power, selling labor power as a class, the less you provide to the market relative to the demand, you know, the more power you have to make other kinds of demands about the way that automation goes about ecological kinds of stuff, but also the higher your wages go.
- [47:38]
A
You know, for me, my interest in the worker co op was always in part that a worker co op, when workers themselves make the decision, they bring in new technology in order to reap from it free time. The capitalist brings in technology to make more profit. The worker isn't freed of time. That's not the interest of the capitalist making the life of the worker better. So of course the capitalist brings in the technology, fires the workers he doesn't need anymore, leaving them to God knows what misery in order to make more profit out of it. But a worker co op would bring in the technology, in part at least to relieve workers of X hours of the day in order. And you know, the irony is that all technology is always brought in with great promises of labor savings, but those are never realized. We have more technology than ever and we're working our rear ends off. So the advocacy of the worker co op was designed in a sense, anyway. Let me. Can I tease out of you or draw out of you some examples, some way of thinking about fantasies, images, whether they're surfers that would be positive in this sense, that somehow would be something that a labor movement or a social change movement could put forward as a counterweight to the kind of fantasy that surfer and so forth represents?
- [49:10]
B
Well, I think I notice these things, especially in terms of surfers. So there is, you know, a couple years ago there was a big to do about the food stamp surfer, A kid that was called the food stamp Surfer. And he was highlighted on numerous Fox News features and got interviewed, grilled by Sean Hannity after a couple of these things. It was very intense. And he was a guy who, he was sort of playing for the camera a little bit, but he was on food stamps. He was a surfer. He didn't want to work. He just wanted to hang out with his friends and surf. And he was very serious about his rock and roll band. This is what was most important to him. And when he got his food stamps, he would go to the store and buy the most expensive thing. And so he bought lobster with his food stamps and he would have a party for all his friends. And so this actually made its way into the debate over food stamps in the Congress. And people were actually saying, you can't be like Jason, the food stamp surfer. And the Democrats were saying, of course, most people on food stamps work hard. He's not indicative of you know, he's not characteristic of what most food stamp. And nobody was saying, hey, sounds like people might want to, you know, work less, surf more and eat better food or something like that, you know. And I really felt like in that sense I also look at the sort of Mediterranean fantasy, the way that that plays out. I've been interested in Greece and the Greek islands and some of the fantasies around Mediterranean leisure and long lunches with your family and all that kind of stuff. And what I notice is that the, those fantasies are usually used to bust apart the solidarity that we actually need, for instance. But that there's another possibility. The Mediterranean fantasy in American culture. People love this, but no one is saying, guess what? This is what's under attack in the Eurozone. This is precisely what Euro austerity is meant to speed up. Because people don't necessarily say that that fantasy is channeled into resentment against the work shirker, whether it's the food stamp surfer or the Greek island, you know, leisurely person or whatever, which of course that's also exaggerated, but I don't. So I think it can be dangerous also if it's not re channeled. And the thing is, when you see these fantasies being used to gin up resentment against workers and to divide and conquer workers from each other to get to, you know, sort of get us away from the solidarity, you know, that we really need to feel, what you see is that nobody would resent a non worker if they loved work. Right. It's almost like you can flip it very quickly. And even when Hannity interviewed this food stamp surfer, he let himself go. He was saying, I work, I work, I've done all these jobs. You think I wanted to work that hard? You think I wouldn't want to? And then he kind of stopped, but caught himself. Yes, but resentment against the way that these fantasies get deployed in the sense of resentment against the poor and dividing and conquering the working against the unwaged sections of the working class, which is, you know, a very serious problem I think is an index of how much people are available to non work anti work imaginaries. And I really do think that mobilizing that has real labor market effects in terms of this supply and demand of labor power. And you know, I really feel like we have got to fight on the front of the labor market and this issue of supply and demand. And I think the cultural politics of that are key. Absolutely. Capital is fighting us on labor market stuff every minute. We've just seen a tightening labor market, we've just seen you know, there are all these articles in the Wall Street Journal. 95 million people who aren't even looking for work anymore. Where are they? What are they doing? And they say, I think they just took their food stamps after the recession. And Obama did expand that because it was really necessary at the time. And they're not coming back to work. Right. The quit rate in manufacturing is up. Even though even with all this talk about scarcity of manufacturing jobs, people are quitting these jobs in ways that are really shocking the economists, as I'm sure you know. So what happens yesterday? Boom. Tighten the money supply right away. So they are fighting us on this every minute. They don't like a tightening labor market. They don't like the sort of audacity of workers to just quit a manufacturing job. You're supposed to think a manufacturing job is the greatest thing you could possibly have. So they're fighting us on this. I think we need to understand the potential for worker power that comes from a restriction of the supply, a collective restriction of the supply of labor to the market. And I think the cultural politics of that, in the same way the cultural politics of work, work, work from the boss are informed by Protestant work ethic, you know, Max Weber, E.P. thompson, all these guys make that very clear. Our intervention, our move towards worker power needs to be informed by a much more countercultural sensibility about freedom and the refusal of work.
- [54:43]
A
So, in fact, if I understand you, we could imagine a revived labor movement, let's call it saying something like working with your union to be a strong counterweight to the boss. Is your best shot to be freed of the drudgery of work. Absolutely. We will get the workday reduced. We will get the pay increased. We will make sure technology enhances our lives and not just their profits. In other words, you become the better able to deliver what the fantasy can't really.
- [55:20]
B
Absolutely. But only if. And this is where it really is a cultural question. Only if the union movement abandons its fetish of jobs rather than freedom. Right. And I think that's, you know, been a real problem, this idea that we need jobs, we need jobs. And there are ways in which that's important because the more jobs there are, the labor market tightens, stuff like that. But I also think that's been a real problem with the labor movement in terms of its ability to inspire people. That's why I got interested in these. You know, they're really the first slackers. The first people who were called slackers were the wobblies of 100 years ago.
- [56:00]
A
Who said I won't work?
- [56:02]
B
Totally. Yeah, they called them that. The I won't works.
- [56:06]
A
Well, here's a final comment, and this has been very fascinating, and I feel terribly vindicated that this approach from sociology and cultural study is exactly the enrichment of economics that a proper definition of economics would have. What's interesting to me is that yes, yesterday or earlier this last week, Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve raised the interest rates. But there was also a Release on Thursday 15th December by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicating that between October and November, real wages in the United states fell by 0.4%. That's an enormous drop in one month and suggests that, yes, this system has been providing jobs, but at a lower rate of pay, jobs that are without benefits, without security. The focus on jobs is not going to solve the misery of the American working class, not even close. Thank you very much, Kristin Waller.
- [57:08]
B
It's been a pleasure.
- [57:09]
A
It has been very much so, and I think we have much to think about as a result. I want to thank you all for joining me. As always, I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. Do check them out. They've been a good partner to us. Make use of our websites to be a good partner with US as well. Rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info and I look forward to talking with you again next week. It is. Sam.