B (14:55)

Rick thanks for having me.

A (14:56)

Let me tell you all about who Rick McIntyre is. He's a professor of economics and chair of the Economics Department at the University of Rhode Island. He's also there the co director of the URI in Cuba Program program. He has lectured at many universities in the United States and abroad, including the University of Rennes in France. He also there held the Chair of the Americas position. He is the author of the book Are Workers Rights Human Rights and also co editor of Knowledge, Class and Marxism Without Guarantees. He's also the author of many articles and all kinds of poetry published material. What I want to do with Rick MacIntyre, whom I've known for many, many years, is to have a different kind of conversation from what we normally have. Normally we focus on a particular topic where the guest is a specialist or an expert. What we're going to do this time is a little different. I want to draw Rick out on a question about the basic, broad conditions of American capitalism as we speak. To have two people who study that material talking with one another about whether really big changes are underway or are coming down the pike in this system that we all depend on and that we all live in. So let me begin with one way of many ways to get in it. Do you think that the Trump administration, now that we've had whatever it is, two and a half years of it, is making a basic change in American capitalism, or is it more of the same? How would you assess both the condition of capitalism under Trump and what the meaning of the whole Trump phenomena is?

B (16:45)

Well, I tend to think of Trump more as a symptom than a cause. Of course, the longer he's in office, the more of a cause he becomes. But I think he's partly a symptom of the dysfunctionality of American capitalism over the last three decades. A capitalism that did very well for a lot of people, but also did very poorly for a lot of people. And in large swaths of the country, in the upper Midwest, in the industrialized areas, people have, have lost track of the meaning of life, that the suicide rate is at all time highs. And Trump appealed to people in these so called social capital deserts. He put together a coalition of a lot of different groups. But that, I think is a sign that the dysfunctionality of American capitalism has reached a new level. So I think in that sense, Trump as a symptom is a sign that something really different has happened.

A (17:37)

Would you say that the balance between, using your metaphor from the beginning of those for whom capitalism works and those for whom it doesn't, that balance has shifted so that the number for whom it's good is shrinking and the number.

B (17:51)

For whom, well, we know what the numbers say, but let's not de emphasize too much how successful this form of capitalism has been. The amount of surplus, the amount of profit that's flown to the big merchants, to the big bankers, to the big tech companies on the west coast is truly astounding. The wealth that has been piled up is unprecedented. Nowhere else in the world do we have anything like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the big Amazon, the big tech companies. I mean, America won that race, but in the middle of it, we won it partly because wages were prevented from rising here, and these companies have taken advantage of incredibly low wages abroad, so that all the surplus has flown to them. People tend to emphasize globalization and trade, and that's what Trump wants us to pay attention to. But the big story really in the United States has been de unionization, the complete collapse of working class institutions that, if nothing else, were able to defend working people against this kind of thing. At least through the 1980s. With that gone, it's been open season.

A (19:01)

Tell us then, a little bit about the labor movement. Where do you think it is? Are there stirrings of a new militancy emerging? Is it more that we should expect of the 50 year decline that they have suffered? Well, what do you see, especially if you give it that kind of importance, as you just did?

B (19:19)

Well, the private sector unionization rate is now 6.4%. So how much lower can you go? There's really only one direction to go in. There's some signs with work being done in immigrant communities with people earning very low wages. The fight for 15 alliances between community activists and labor groups. Now some signs of alliances between folks concentrating on ecology and labor movement people. There's some signs of a broadening of the movement, but there's not a lot of movement yet. So every time there's a few green shoots, people say, well, the labor movement is coming back, but I think we have to be careful. And we need a broader movement that's going to confront capital in all its forms. I mean, one of the things about Trump that I resisted thinking about for a long time because it's too simple, but it makes sense. Trump is a landlord. He sees the world as a landlord. He represents the landlord class, the people whose wealth is tied up in the land and minerals. And that's, you know, the landlord class is the class that most folks face every day in their lives because they have to rent apartments from those people. So I think we need a different kind of movement that's going to confront capital in all of its forms. Financial, industrial, merchant, and landlord. The labor movement can do some of that, but it needs allies. And maybe being in a tough position will encourage the labor movement to find more allies.

A (20:56)

A number of people have begun to edge towards the notion that capitalism, or at least American capitalism, is in some broad sense, in decline. In other words, of course, there's the high techs in California and so on roaring ahead. But decline always had elements within it of upward movement. It's never all one direction. But if you look around at the suicide rate, the opioid catastrophe, the inequality that seems on a perpetual rush to get worse, you begin to get a sense of a system that is falling apart, that can't survive. And it may be that the center has moved. Instead of being in North America and Western Europe and Japan, it's moved over to China and India and Brazil and those. How do you feel about the very phrase capitalism in decline? Is that meaningful?

B (22:01)

Well, I think in one way, in an ideological way, it's very meaningful. In other words, the fact that most people, the average of people under 35, prefer socialism to capitalism. Now, it's not clear people know what they mean when they say that, but just the fact that they would say that is amazing. The politicians in the Democratic Party who have to now say, oh, no, I'm a capitalist, of course they're not capitalists. But the notion that they need to say that means that there is an ideological crisis. There's no question about it. And amongst young people, I think the idea that capitalism failed is just common sense. I mean, they've Grown up with 2008, they've grown up with student debt, they've grown up with deindustrialization. So this is just a fact on the ground. The question now is, where do you go? And that's why some of the social movements that have so far been more electoral than economic, but nonetheless create some hope. I mean, the idea that you can say I'm a democratic socialist and get 14 million votes for president in 2016 is darn impressive. So on the ideological front, I think there's no question that things have changed. On the more purely economic front, capitalism has always progressed by destroying what exists. Right, we know that. And so you have a country in which you have both Detroit and San Francisco at the same time, a place that's almost too successful and it can't live with that success. And another place that's too became a complete disaster. That again, the only way to go is up. So I would be a little careful about saying capitalism writ large is in decline. The other thing that happened as a result of the 2008 crisis is the Fed acted to bail out the whole world. So now the dollar is more firmly in place as the currency of choice than it has ever been. So when we talk about unevenness, sometimes that's a little bit vague. It sounds like you don't really want to say what you mean. But I think that American capitalism is in decline on the one hand, but extraordinarily successful on the other in different sectors in different regions.

A (24:28)

But if that was always true, then if that balance shifts too much, then you have the conditions for real change to happen.

B (24:37)

I think we have the conditions for real change because of what's happening with young people and who have grown up in a different world than we. I went to public universities. I paid nothing for my college education. I came out with a little bit of debt. That's a very different situation now. People who have been through a crisis that was every bit as bad as 1929, if the government hadn't taken extraordinary steps under both Republicans and Democrats. So the only way the system was bailed out was by the state. The notion that I don't have to convince students anymore that capitalism doesn't really work. I mean, there's a few. There are libertarians, they read things. But ironically, the students who don't read much, they have the common sense to know that this system doesn't really work. They don't know what would work. They're willing to give socialism a try, even if they don't know what it means. So I think we're in a moment where there's a generational shift and there's a lot of opportunity amongst youth.

A (25:39)

If you wanted. I know this is an impossible question, but if you wanted to give advice to young people that are searching in just the way you've described, what would be a direction where you might imagine a labor movement, a larger social movement might coalesce around a program that people alienated from capitalism might find attractive, what would you say?

B (26:05)

Well, since that will never happen, I can answer freely. I think one thing that sometimes gets underplayed is the notion that we have to have power in the workplace, that we have to have a voice in the workplace. We used to have a simple solution on the left, which we would say, well, we nationalize property, we nationalize the means of production. That didn't work out that well. That's a long story which we can tell another day, perhaps, but we don't want to say that story anymore. So the idea of working for a voice at work, which you have been spending a lot of time on, very important, I think. But also, wouldn't it be nice if we had a political democracy as well? We have the framework of a political democracy, but we don't have a real political democracy. And especially at the local level, where real estate interests tend to be extraordinarily dominant, it's great that Bernie is running for president. It's great that some of these other people are running for president. That's not going to change what happens in the neighborhoods and the communities. So to have stronger voice in politics is something that. And I know young people that are working on this. It's very important. And then young people are going to have to live with the results of climate change. And we know that the reason why climate change is resisted as a reality is that the solutions all involve the state and the expansion of the state in some ways. And since that's evil, we can't believe that climate change must be real. So if those three different movements could coalesce around economic democracy, political democracy and ecology, then we would have something. And I think the potential is there today.

A (27:56)

I sure hope you're right. Rick, thank you very much. I'm going to bring you back and we're going to continue this conversation as we watch the uneven development unfold.

B (28:07)

I'd like to do that.

A (28:09)

Thank you all for watching. And I hope that the very raising of these questions, not so much the answers that we're beginning to try to formulate, but the question about a system, recognizing that we have a system, we live under a system, and it has its own motion, its own ways of being, is something we ought to talk about, think about, and, and intervene in shaping as much as we can. I hope that kind of a conversation is of interest to you. If it is, let us know. And in any case, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.