Economic Update: The Idea of Revolution

Summary

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff — The Idea of Revolution (May 23, 2016)

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the theme of revolution, both in economic realities and as an organizing concept. The first half features Richard Wolff’s weekly economic analysis, covering recent events including prison labor strikes in Alabama, the continued Greek economic crisis, trade deals like TTIP/TPP, the consequences of free trade and outsourcing, and issues of taxation regarding wealthy educational institutions like Yale. In the second half, Wolff is joined by veteran organizers Joan Berezin and Kip Waldo for a rich discussion on the necessity, practicality, and organizing realities of revolution in the United States today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Economic News & Analysis (00:00–31:40)

• Alabama Prison Strike & Modern Slavery (00:50–08:20)

  • Prisoners in Alabama strike, drawing attention to slave-like conditions that persist due to the 13th Amendment’s exception allowing involuntary servitude as punishment for crime.
  • Wolff highlights the long legacy of post-slavery exploitation targeting African Americans, especially in the South.
    • Quote: “If slavery is bad for the people outside of prison, guess what? It ain’t so great inside either.” (02:45, Richard Wolff)

• Greek Bailout Theater Exposed (08:21–20:42)

  • Greece’s third bailout is really about paying off European banks, not helping Greek society.
  • Wolff describes prior bailouts as political theater: money flowed through the Greek state to French and German banks, bailing out their own financial institutions while pretending to aid Greece.
    • Quote: “You could appear to be helping the Greeks and that would keep your own people from being angry at the second bailout of the rich in their own country.” (14:50, Richard Wolff)
  • Now, with banks stabilized, EU governments balk at providing aid that might actually help Greeks, fueling political tensions and right-wing ascendancy across Europe.

• Trade Deals — TTIP, TPP & Leaked Truths (20:43–24:05)

  • Leaked documents reveal U.S. negotiators’ disregard for labor and environmental standards in trans-Atlantic and Pacific trade pacts, despite public claims.
  • Wolff stresses that the real stakeholders — the working class and environment — are excluded from these negotiations.
    • Quote: “If you’re not there... in all the horse trading, yours is the horse that gets lost.” (23:50, Richard Wolff)

• Free Trade, Outsourcing & Systemic Crisis (24:06–31:10)

  • Decades of relocating American jobs abroad for profit have left social destruction, hollowed cities, increased global emissions, and eroded workers’ purchasing power.
  • Assertions that political promises to ‘bring jobs back’ are empty without system change.
    • Quote: “This is a fundamental systemic problem that needs a change of system if it is to be solved.” (30:45, Richard Wolff)

• Yale University’s Tax Exemption & Urban Inequity (31:10–31:40)

  • Exposes the outdated rationale for Yale’s tax exemption. The city of New Haven, one of America’s poorest, bears heavy tax burdens while wealthy Yale pays none.
    • Quote: “This is called reverse Robin Hood. It’s stealing from the poor in order to give even more to the rich than they already have.” (31:10, Richard Wolff)

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2. The Idea of Revolution: Interview with Joan Berezin & Kip Waldo (31:41–56:08)

• Why Revolution, Not Just Reform? (31:48–36:49)

  • Revolution is posited as a necessity due to capitalism’s systemic exploitation and escalating crises (economic and environmental).
  • Kip Waldo: “We’re not trying to just shorten the whip… what we’re saying is there is a possibility for us to reclaim that.” (32:03, Kip Waldo)
  • Emphasis on the working class’s capacity for self-activity and democratic decision-making.

• Building Revolutionary Consciousness in Practice (37:16–41:56)

  • Joan Berezin recounts organizing welfare recipients in the 1960s — a group dismissed as powerless — who embraced revolutionary ideas after education and discussion.
    • Quote: “Ordinary people, as Howard Zinn used to say, could do extraordinary things and... minds could be changed... more quickly than I could have imagined.” (37:23, Joan Berezin)
  • Modern organizing involves workplace newsletters that connect daily grievances to larger systemic critique, and collective events to revive labor movement traditions.

• Shifts in Public Consciousness Post-2008 (41:57–47:48)

  • Kip Waldo notes missed opportunities but growing awareness since the crisis of 2008, the rise and limits of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and the election of Obama.
    • Quote: “With 2008, the idea that we live within the framework of a system, that there is a system... that it was a system of capitalism, a crisis of capitalism...” (43:42, Kip Waldo)
  • Today, there is a “pregnant moment” where real change feels both possible and necessary.

• Are Conditions Ripe for Revolution? (47:49–52:33)

  • Joan Berezin: Institutional trust is eroded; students no longer see education as a sure path to security; political disillusionment is widespread.
    • Quote: “The first set of conditions are overripe in terms of nothing functions... The second half is the much harder one.” (48:55, Joan Berezin)
  • There is a growing demand for alternatives, as evidenced by unexpected mass support for figures like Sanders and Trump, and grassroots socialist organizing among youth.

• Global Examples & (Re)Imagining Socialism (50:48–53:50)

  • France’s mass actions against labor reforms; students and workers collaborating and reviving revolutionary traditions.
  • The term “socialism” itself is being redefined, as formerly leftist parties implement neoliberal policies.
    • Wolff: “You’re revolutionizing what the word socialism means... that’s also usually a sign of big shifts coming.” (52:33, Richard Wolff)

• Is Revolution "on the Agenda" Now? (53:50–55:59)

  • Kip Waldo: Revolution might not be imminent, but creating self-activity, hope, and organizational capacity for change is essential — that in itself is revolutionary.
    • Website plug: speakout-now.org (54:52, Kip Waldo)
  • Joan Berezin shares an inspiring protest sign: “If you’re taking us back to the 19th century, bring back the Paris Commune.” — showing the link between policies and revived revolutionary aspirations.
    • Quote: “Look what’s possible, look at the world we could have if the potential and the creativity of millions of people was unleashed.” (55:30, Joan Berezin)

• Wolff’s Closing Reflection (56:08)

  • Satisfaction at a shift from “just bemoaning the situation” to chronicling collective efforts and organizing.
  • Encourages listeners to get involved, communicate, and utilize resources at democracyatwork.info.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Systemic Exploitation:

  • “We’re not trying to just shorten the whip. We think humans should be able to develop their full potential.” (32:00, Kip Waldo)

• On Effective Organizing:

  • “People’s minds could be changed... more quickly than I could have imagined.” (37:23, Joan Berezin)
  • “The solution... is a workplace newsletter... that ties together everyday problems with systemic critique.” (39:50, Joan Berezin)

• On Social Change:

  • “When fundamental terms like [socialism] are overthrown in what they mean, that's also usually a sign of big shifts coming.” (52:33, Richard Wolff)
  • “We have 10 or 20 years to change the world or not have a planet.” (51:56, Joan Berezin)
  • “If you’re taking us back to the 19th century, bring back the Paris Commune.” (55:06, Joan Berezin, recounting a Paris protest sign)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Alabama Prison Strike: 00:50–08:20
• Greek Bailout Discussion: 08:21–20:42
• TTIP/TPP Leaks: 20:43–24:05
• Offshoring & Systemic Crisis: 24:06–31:10
• Yale Tax Exemption: 31:10–31:40
• Interviews Begin — Revolutionary Organizing: 31:41
• Why Revolution: 31:48–36:49
• Organizing in Practice (Joan): 37:16–41:56
• Is Consciousness Changing?: 41:57–47:48
• Are Conditions Ripe?: 47:49–52:33
• Reimagining the Left & Socialism: 52:33–53:50
• Why Revolution (Summing Up): 53:50–55:59
• Closing remarks: 56:08

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Conclusion

This episode is an expansive, clear-eyed look at why system change, not just incremental reform, is back on the agenda for a growing number of organizers and ordinary people. Wolff and his guests make the case that economic and political crises — in the U.S. and globally — require new forms of solidarity, renewed revolutionary traditions, and, above all, hope grounded in collective self-activity and democratic action. The discussion is both sobering and uplifting: while the obstacles are immense, new generations are awakening to the systemic roots of their struggles, and organizing for the possibility of a radically different future.

Transcript

[A]

Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children, those looming down the road as we know they do. 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 with We have an exciting program for you today and I want to jump right into the Economic Updates and prepare the way for a very important interview that will occupy the second half of the program. I have to begin today by speaking about a strike. Where did it happen? And it's over for the moment, but my guess is it'll be back soon. It was a strike of prisoners in the Alabama prison system. And this needs a word of history, because the ironies and the tragedies here go back a long time. When slavery was finally ended in and by a civil war in the United States. You might have imagined that the condition of slavery was over, but you would have been wrong. Because in the hundred years or almost hundred years afterwards, African Americans from the south particularly found themselves in slave like conditions often. And one of the places where they found themselves in slave like conditions were in the prisons, particularly again in the South. And that had something to do with this remarkable 13th amendment to the United States Constitution. In that amendment, basically slavery is outlawed. And you might have thought, but again, you'd be wrong. You might have thought that the abolition of slavery is a simple one sentence and if you abolish it, you abolish it everywhere, always and hopefully forever. But the 13th Amendment didn't do that. It had a peculiar sentence in there which said we abolish slavery, it is outlawed except in prisons. That's in the amendment. A society abandons slavery, outlaws slavery, denounces slavery, fights a horribly destructive civil war over slavery, but can't quite let go and puts it in prisons. I don't know of any person who ever argued that a person who goes to jail will be better off after he or she finishes their sentence if they were slaves in the institution while they were there. If slavery is bad for the people outside of prison, guess what? It ain't so great inside either. And if you're against it, why in the world would you allow it? And so large numbers of African Americans were incarcerated after the end of slavery and thereby reinserted into a slave system. Alabama was in fact the last state, if I have the history right back in the 1920s, to end convict labor, making people who were in jail work as slave Labor. So the irony is extraordinary that here in the year 2016, in a number of Alabama prisons over the last few weeks, prisoners asserting that they are treated like slave labor and showing pretty good evidence that that's the case once again have to make their plight known. It's extraordinary. It's a comment on the American system, it's a comment on the American economy that it has for so long and now recurringly turned to slave labor at a time of difficulty. I want to turn next to another topic that is once again forcing its way up onto our attention. This has to do with Greece. Yes, again, Greece. What is the issue this time? The Greeks are now trying to get the third bailout promised to them by the Europeans under conditions of extreme economic deprivation. To remind you, average wages in Greece have dropped between a third and 40% over the last five years. There is a 25% unemployment rate in Greece. It's double or more that for young people. In a way that hasn't happened for a century. Young Greeks are leaving their country looking for work. And elsewhere in Europe and the United States, given the unemployment problems of Europe and the United States, you can get an idea of how awful it must be in Greece if people are leaving there to look for jobs here. Well, the first two bailouts, hundreds of billions of dollars given by Europe to Greece turn out, once you look at it closely, not to have been given by Europe to Greece at all. Here's what was the problem. Over the decades before the collapse of 2008, Greece, for reasons good and bad, had borrowed a lot of money as a nation from European banks, particularly French and German banks. And when the global collapse came, hit Greece very hard, it was crystal clear to everybody that the Greeks would have to bail out their own banks, as everybody else did, Americans, French, Germans. But that there was a bigger problem that the French and German banks needed. Not just a bailout because of all the bad loans they made in their own countries, but they needed to be helped because little countries like Greece couldn't pay their debts either. So the Europeans, led by the Germans, quickly mobilized public money in Germany and in Europe to bail out the Greeks. But it wasn't Greeks that got the benefit, because what the Greek government was required to do with the billions given by public authorities in Europe to Greece was to use the money to pay off their debts to the private French and German banks. In effect, what the German government was doing, and it was the leader in all of this, was bailing out its own banks, but appearing not to be doing so. And the Reason for that is simple and political. The Germans had already bailed out many of their corporations, and the mass of German working people were sick of it. Like the working people in most countries were angry at who got the bailout. The very people that brought the crisis then used the government to bail themselves out, but they tolerated it, much as French, American and other workers did. But what would have had to happen in the face of Greece's decimation in this crisis would have been that the German government and the French government would have had to bail out their banks a second time. And that would have been political suicide for the Merkels and the other governments in Europe. So they had a way out. They would participate in a big theater. We're helping the Greeks. Not at all. You're just giving money to the Greek government, which you required them to use to pay off your own banks. You could appear to be helping the Greeks and that would keep your own people from being angry at the second bailout of the rich in their own country. But once that was done, and by the way it is now done, all those debts have basically been paid off. Once that's been done, now the third bailout to Greece isn't needed in the same way. And indeed the theater has changed in Germany and France. We are now not going to help the Greeks anymore as a way of pandering to their own people's rage that they are suffering in the economic downturn since 2008. And it is politically impossible for Merkel or for Hollande to keep appearing to be helping the Greeks. They're now caught on their own. The they can't do it a third time because they haven't helped their own people. And this jarring disconnect between helping foreigners versus your own people is a political impossibility inside the European countries. You can see it most clearly in the extraordinary reversal. First, welcoming the wave of migrants from Syria and the Middle east and Turkey, and then turning on them with hatred and anger as the bitterness of the people inside the European countries who see others being helped by their leaders and they're being screwed by those same leaders in their own country is an intolerable political thing. So suddenly, the Greeks are caught now for the third time. They have already paid off all the money they got before to those banks, got very little from it. Meanwhile, they're suffering 25% unemployment and all the collapse of their society. And now they want a little relief that will actually be used to help the Greeks. And they're told, well, we're not so sure. And it's being stalled. And it's being stalled because the European governments don't know how to come up with a new theater that will make it reasonable to their own people to be helping with billions the Greeks, when they are suffering at home. And right wing political parties have taken this all up in order to position themselves as the ones who say the resources of our country should be for us, since they don't understand and don't want to talk about what actually went on in the first place. It is a further tragedy for Greece. But no one should be fooled into thinking that this is some kind of extraordinary effort by Greece to get even more help than anybody else. They didn't get much help in the first two bailouts. They're only beginning now. And they have paid a heavier price of economic cutbacks and suffering in the last six years than any other European country. And that's what should be kept in mind, lest we be fooled into the theater that what the European governments are trying to portray for their own independent domestic political purposes and simply using the Greeks as a pawn, which has been the basic play since this crisis began. Well, many of you know that the Trans Pacific Partnership and the ttip, the same game being played between the United States and our partners across the Atlantic, got exposed this last week. It was kind of funny. So I want to tell you about it. Speaking on Monday of last week at the Milken Institute, the global conference In Los Angeles, U.S. trade Representative Michael Froman made a familiar argument. The Obama administration is working very hard to reshape globalization to help working people and the environment and so forth. Was wonderful to listen to. The embarrassing thing was on the same day new documents were leaked. We now live in a world where document leaking is becoming part of our normal life. This time they were leaked by Greenpeace in the Netherlands. And there they reveal that US Trade negotiators are working on a trade deal. And the European Union negotiators debating them are angry for two reasons. One, the European Union lists, it doesn't keep secret its positions, its demands. The United States keeps secret its and imposes that on the Europeans. And it turns out from these leaks that the United States has no concern for environment, has no concern for labor standards. None of it. It's just pr. It's straight out lying. And for those of you who follow this, the importance, of course, is not that government officials lie. This is hardly news. What is interesting though is to remember at these negotiations, government officials and corporations are the major players. They are horse trading. They are giving one another whatever they want to get what they want. It favors some corporations over others. It favors some nations over others. It favors some groups of industries over others. But the people who are going to get lost in that horse trading are the people that aren't there. And those are the mass of American working people, the mass of other working people, environmental groups, trade unions. They're not there. And if you're not there, and if you're not part of it, and if you're not recognized, then in all the horse trading, yours is the horse that gets lost. For our next update, I want to talk a little bit about the issue of free trade manufacturing and the jobs that go with it. We have now for many decades as a nation, made a decision, or at least allowed something to happen that is now producing attention in our society. What I mean is we have allowed corporations, when they see fit for their own profit, to move facilities, production facilities, particularly in manufacturing. But not only in manufacturing. Indeed, nowadays it's more services than manufacturing that are doing this, but basically to leave the United States to close their facilities here and move them abroad. The place to which most of them have gone is Asia. But there are other parts of the world as well. Latin America, Eastern Europe, even Africa. Companies get up and leave. They decide it's more profitable to go abroad. It's important for us all to understand what this involves. First, it means that the company is paying much lower wages in some other place than it paid here. It means it's therefore earning more profits. It often means that it can avoid environmental controls in the place to which it is moving, so that it gets a double benefit. It doesn't have to pay the wages it once did, and it doesn't have to clean the air or clean the funnels on their smokestacks or anything else the way they once did. So they're saving money left and right, and they're willing to pay a certain extra in certain costs. For example, if your market is the United States, but you're producing in the United States, and then you leave the United States and you go to China, you now have to pay the freight of bringing what you've produced in China all the way back to where your market is, and that means freight costs, and those have to be factored in. For those of us interested in ecology, it also means a major worsening of the environment, because where before you produced 100 miles from your market and therefore had to foul the air with a truck for that hundred miles, you now have to foul the air with a steamer going 10,000 miles across the ocean. You're polluting the water, you're polluting the air. It's very important for folks to understand that much of the worsening of the global warming and all of the rest of the ecological damage is a direct result of profit driven decisions on relocating factories out of the United States. Number two, there are results here in the United States. I've talked about them often, I don't want to repeat myself. Cities are abandoned, whether it's Detroit or Cleveland or Camden, New Jersey or any of the others. My hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, all of them are examples of what kind of damage for how many decades can result to a community when it is abandoned by profit seeking corporations that are allowed virtually freely to leave when they want, when it suits them. So you have social dislocation at home, you have environmental contamination globally, and you have what you have a growth in production in foreign places and in the profits of the people in charge of them because their wages are lower. But now follow the logic. If you have lowered the wages of the mass of people who produce goods, then you have lowered the capacity of the mass of people to buy back what you are now so profitably produced producing. Meaning that in the end of the day, the failure to keep wages rising is the failure to maintain the market for the very capitalist enterprises that set this whole process in motion. And it comes back to bite them in the form of no incentive to invest, no incentive to grow, because there's no market for you. American corporations are now listed as having about two and a half trillion dollars of profits on the books that they sit on, that they are not investing. Goldman Sachs this last week advised its clients to get out of stocks. Not just some stocks, stocks. Because oil producing corporations, they said, are in a very bad place that isn't likely to get better for at least the next year. There's no demand out there. But because in large part of the very processes of leaving the United States, leaving Western Europe, leaving Japan, going to places where you can get away with paying much, much less, ends up with a global working class with less purchasing power. There's no way out of this simple arithmetic. Here's the point that all of this leads to in the election in the United States right Now, whether it's Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Sanders, there's a lot of talk about the burdens of free trade and doing something about the destroyed middle class and bringing back the jobs. This is not a serious set of propositions. It may pander to people's Understandable, upset, rage, lack of jobs, jobs that pay much less than they used to, jobs without benefits, jobs without unions, all of that. But what has to be understood is we're Talking about a 50 year transition transformation that we are at best two thirds of the way through, halfway through. It's not over. And unless fundamental changes in the economic system that we live with are made, we're not in a position to do much of it. Those companies are not coming back. They have no incentive to come back. There would have to be fundamental social movements reorganizing the pattern of rewards and punishments that all companies face for us even to begin to imagine it. So a politician who says they're going to do something about it and doesn't specify how exactly are you going to do it, is derelict, is not serious, has to be pushed to confront that this is a systemic problem that requires system change or else nothing is going to change as it hasn't for 40 or 50 years. Even though politicians after politicians who have pandered to voters have talked about bringing back manufacturing or a hundred other ways of claiming that they in some magical way could turn back the clock. This is a fundamental systemic problem that needs a change of system if it is to be solved. Last item that I want to spend time on today is this. The issue of Yale and other universities like it paying taxes. This is an issue that has dominated the city of New Haven as it has dominated the cities in which other rich private universities are located. The law in the United States basically is that if you're an educational institution, you are not required to pay property taxes on the buildings and the contents of those buildings because you are educational, like a church, like a charity, you are exempt from paying taxes. And Yale University in New Haven makes good money by doing this. It avoids paying taxes to New Haven and always has claiming that its property is educational. The problem with the argument is that finally the political muscle has come together around the mayor of New Haven, who is showing in a certain stiffness of her spine, which has surprised many, that she wants Yale to make some payments. My guess is that the crisis of financing in New Haven is so severe that there really is not much choice left about this. So they're demanding that Yale pay taxes and Yale doesn't want to. So in the time I have. Let me briefly go over why this is as outrageous as it is. Yale received an exemption hundreds of years ago when New Haven was still a colony of Great Britain, because local Protestant churches in New in the New Haven area needed ministers and didn't have any. And they couldn't get ministers to come from England. So they wanted to set up a school to train ministers. And the cost of doing that was prohibitive if the school would have to pay taxes. So it was written into the whole arrangement that Yale University would be created to train local ministers and would not have to pay taxes. And that was because it provided a local public service. It made sense for the community to relieve them from taxes because they served the community by providing ministers. For anyone who's not aware of it, Yale long ago changed. It is not primarily an institution that provides ministers to local churches. In fact, it doesn't provide any ministers to local churches in most years, and those years it does. It provides one or two. Meanwhile, it trains thousands of students. So the rationale for giving them a tax exemption long ago disappeared. That's why laws were passed in the 19th century to give them tax exemption, because the rationale for doing that had disappeared. Now they just get it because they do. Education. Yale currently has $25 billion in its endowment. That's its wealth. It is an economic institution three or four times the size of New Haven which hosts it. 17,000 people, more or less, are part of the Yale community. 120,000 are part of the New Haven community. This is a situation in which a very rich taxpayer doesn't pay taxes to the community which hosts it, the community that provides it with police services, fire services, public education, health services, the whole gamut of public services for which the richest citizen doesn't pay. Result. Of the 169 towns in Connecticut, New Haven has ranked number one in the level of poverty. Excuse me, in the level of property taxes it imposes on its people. New Haven is the second poorest city in Connecticut, right after Hartford. It is one of the 10 poorest cities in America. Half of its population is African American, Hispanic in America, and very, very poor. But it pays the highest property taxes in the state of Connecticut because the richest citizen in New Haven pays none. This is called reverse Robin Hood. It's stealing from the poor in order to give even more to the rich than they already have. Yale's arguments quickly. We give to the New Haven community. We bring people here. We put beautiful flowers around our buildings. At this point, my blood begins to boil. Nowhere ever in the history of the United States has anyone ever gotten a tax exemption because they put flowers in their house or because they contribute or because they bring people. Imagine a restaurant in New Haven saying, we don't want to pay taxes because people come to New Haven from out of the community to sit in our restaurant. Very nice, Very nice, but go away. You're crazy. This has nothing to do with your tax obligation that you bring things here. The fact that you make a contribution has to do with the fact that you're a citizen. And we all know it's a byproduct of what you do. Anyway, it has nothing to do with your tax obligations. Look, it's a fundamental fact. Yale wants to save money. Yale is cheap. Yale is a very rich institution. Wants to become richer at the expense of New Haven. As long as the people of New Haven tolerate it, and as long as the people elsewhere in America tolerate it, this absurdity, which is about rich people fattening off the poor even beyond what is normal in this sad country, that's the issue. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Please stay with me. We will be back in a very few minutes. It's like the no looking for me outside Creeping to the door it's like they know now they're coming yeah, now they're coming out from the shadows they're taken to the court because they know better Shut this down They've been watching all my windows. How could they know how could they know what I been thinking but they're right inside my head because they know because they know what I've been hiding they're right under my bed There of control Here they come yeah, here they come out of the shadows to take me to the court because they know better Shut this down They've been watching all my windows. Welcome back to the second half of Economic Update. I am very proud and pleased to welcome to the microphones here today with me two longtime political organizers. One is Joan Berezin, community college history instructor in Berkeley, California for the last 24 years. She grew up in New York City, has been a community organizer and civil rights and anti war activist in Baltimore in the 1960s and over the last four decades has been doing workplace and as we'll discuss revolutionary organizing in Baltimore, Chicago and with Speak out now in the San Francisco Bay Area. She's been active in her teachers union and in organizing fights against budget cuts in education. And my second guest, I have two today, so it's double the fun is Kip Waldo. He has been a community college instructor in Detroit and in the San Francisco area for three decades. He was an anti war activist in the Midwest as a student, a member of the Committee to Free Robert F. Williams and later active in revolutionary workplace organizing in Detroit for the last 10 years, he has worked with Speak out now in the Oakland and broader Bay area of California doing workplace organizing. And that indeed, is what we're going to be talking a bit about today. He was active organizing against the cuts to education around street violence in Oakland and part of the recent campaigns against murders by local police. Okay, folks, I want to get to the. What was I going to say? Sexy question. Urgent question. New question. You talk about your work as revolutionary organizing, and clearly you know that that's both a scary word and a word that differentiates you from some of the other folks who make struggles like you do, but who would rather perhaps refer to themselves as looking for reforms or shying away, as many have, from revolutionary language, revolutionary words, revolutionary goals. So I want you to explain to our audience why you think revolution is the thing that has to be put on the agenda, that has to be dealt with. That is, in a sense, tell us what you mean by it and why you think that's where we ought to be going now. Hip, you want to start?

[B]

I'll start with it.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I think if people listen to your show and they put the simple one and one together, they would know that we need a systemic change. And that goes beyond reform. That is that the nature of capitalism. It's based on exploitation of human beings. We find that intolerable. We're not trying to just shorten the whip. We think that human beings should be able to develop their full potential. And when we look around us today, not just in this country, but around the world, we see a real squelching of human beings and of our potential, of what's happening to our children in education, mass incarceration, of increasing numbers of people in the society. And that really calls for a systemic change. There is. People will recoil from the idea of revolution. That's not natural. The people who counsel the people who are really in power today know about revolutions. That's how they came to power. They came to power through revolution. They don't want to see the 99%, as we talk about, come to power over the. I'd say less than 1%. So our idea is that working people, the working class, really has the interest, the ability and the power to replace a system run by a minority, by a system run by the majority. And in fact, it's not just a hope. It's absolutely essential today. It's been essential actually since the capitalism arose, but now with the economic crisis compounded by the environmental crisis, we don't have a choice. They're showing us the end of human civilization as we know it. What we're saying is there is a possibility for us to reclaim that. And so there are two key questions that we bring to the fore when we're talking about revolutionary organizing. That is the self activity of people, the self activity of the working class and democratic decision making. It's not normally how we respond to questions. Growing up the way we have in this society, we're always looking for somebody else to take care of it. So if we live, if we're working in a shop or a workplace where we have a union, we look to the union to take care of it or maybe try to curry favor with a manager of some sort. If there's not a union or if it's election time like we see now, who will save us from the predations of this society? And that's not going to get it. The only thing that has brought about any kind of change, even the reforms that you refer to. And those reforms will lead, if there is an understanding of the way the society operates, finally to a replacing of the system. But if we just limit ourselves to reforms, then we're not going to be able to take that final step. So that's our goal, is to be active in all the struggles that are near us. It's not just in the workplace. Sometimes we're drawn into activities. As you mentioned, both of us have been involved in the fight against the cuts or it's not just cuts, systematic attacks on the quality of education in California, which we see going on everywhere. So when we organize there, our idea is to activate students, to get people to try to understand the kind of questions that are confronting them, the systemic nature of these attacks, to involve their parents, involve people in their communities, to stand up to them. And as a consequence, we were one part of a mass response to those attacks that were taking place in California. We participated at sort of the height of it in organizing a demonstration with some people who were involved in education unions of about 15,000 people. That really was a very different kind of demonstration where people who spoke were the people who did the work. There were no Democratic party politicians, as was the impulse of the people in the unions, to first want to bring on the politicians, the people in the board of Trustees, basically the people who hadn't opened their mouths about these attacks. But there were students, the workers and the teachers, and in some cases K12 parents who spoke about what was needed. And that's our goal, is to activate people to the best of our ability to encourage them to be Active on their own terms. And so our struggles usually go beyond just what's in the workplace. We do have a systematic work in the workplaces that maybe Joan wants to talk about, since I don't want to do all the talking here.

[A]

Joan, let me ask you to comment on what Kip said, but also push you a little bit. Give us a sense of how you see the people you've been working with respond when you articulate a revolutionary approach, this critique of reforms as insufficient that Kip just did. What kind of reaction are you getting?

[C]

I mean, I think a lot. For me, that sort of guided what I've done is really the experience I had in the civil rights movement where it was really obvious to me that ordinary people, as Howardson used to say, could do extraordinary things and that people's minds could be changed on all kinds of issues much more quickly than I think initially I could have imagined. And I'll give you one small concrete example and then talk more about what we're doing with Speak Out. I organized welfare recipients, who are probably the most spit upon and looked down upon group of women you could possibly have found with very, very difficult lives. And we organized a welfare rights group. And at one point, this was in California. This was in Baltimore.

[A]

In Baltimore.

[B]

Good.

[C]

Thank the Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein's famous movie on the 1905 Russian Revolution was playing. And I decided to take a group of welfare mothers to see it. And everybody thought I was nuts, that there would be no way that they could understand it. Well, it was a fantastic experience for them. We had a long discussion afterwards about what had happened and how it had happened. And they proposed to make point 11 of their ten point program revolution. So that's just one very small example. We have been trying for 10 years to build an organization and network of revolutionary activists, primarily in healthcare and transit, which is where we have members of our group, in addition to the ones in the community college that Kip talked about. Obviously, in this situation today, as you've described with everything in your program, people know that there's a crisis. People know that they're being screwed. People know that they're being oppressed. People know that they're being exploited. But the idea of class consciousness has really been missing for decades. Certainly, you know, and you experienced it in a great way yourself with Occupy. At least the idea of the 99%, if not the idea that there are social classes and the working class has particular interests, at least that idea that the majority has interests that go against the 1% and that there is a ruling class, you know, that existed in a period where people are relatively passive, even though they're angry and disillusioned. The solution we've found to try to activate people inside the workplaces is a workplace newsletter. It comes out every two weeks. On one side is an editorial that deals with exactly the kind of issues you deal with in Economic Update. And on the other side are echoes of the experiences that people have in the workplace. The lousy food in the cafeteria, the fact that people are short staffed in the emergency room, or whatever other problems are going on. And because the workers know those problems very well, they're quite able to judge if we're accurate on what we say about the workplace. Maybe they ought to consider what we say on the front side about police brutality, about Trump, about the problems of global warming. So that's one way we've found to tie things together. The newsletters are certainly clearly, to the workers, revolutionary newsletters that. That's the politics of speak out. Now, there are workers who write articles, who participate in editing the newsletters, who give money to help support it. We do a collection at the workplaces twice a year where people publicly give money. So it's in front of their supervisors and in front of other workers, they take the newsletters inside the plant. And this has been a way to reintroduce revolutionary ideas back into the workplace. And of course, it's easy to write about things. It's a different thing to fight to change them. But the same people are often organized together along the lines of what Kip was saying, where they organize to fight themselves, to try to do something about the problems that they face. Three or four times a year, we also organize much larger events. We organize a picnic, which you've come to, which has about 120 people. We have political displays, we have a political speech. And again, workers who come to that, who help to organize it, know that they're coming to a revolutionary socialist event, and they're bringing their friends and they're bringing their family and. And it's a chance to really reintroduce, I would say, the traditions of the workers movement that we certainly saw on a huge scale. If we looked at the social democracy at the end of the 1800s or the 1900s, where the working class and its culture was something that people really engaged in. We have a May Day event every year where we teach people the International the Working Class Hymn of the Workers Struggle that goes back decades. At first it's a little awkward, but then people really get into it. And it's a way for people to feel really proud that they have traditions and that they have a past that shows the working class has been able to do things. And therefore, you know, we have reason to believe that there's a chance to do something in the future.

[A]

Let me push both of you. You've been doing this for a long time. In both your descriptions that we began with, it's clear you've been at this for decades. Big question, is it changing? Is your ability to reach people changing? Has it changed, particularly over the last period, say since 2008, when capitalism really took a dive, as everybody knows? How would you assess the openness to or the responsiveness of the people you're trying to reach with, what you're trying to reach them about?

[B]

Well, I think we have to contextualize it. Having been in Detroit from the early 70s up until 89 or 90, watching a city that was incredibly vibrant, where there would be traffic jams on the weekends at 12 o' clock in the morning, where people were moving around the city to the ghost town that exists today. People there were well aware of something that was going on. The unions really had control over people's aspirations. People were told, okay, you can get this plant's closing, but you can move from here to here to here. And those kind of hopes, I think, have been really dashed, not just by what happened in Detroit, but what we've seen happen across this country with the crisis of 2008, the housing crisis, which many people would view as a housing crisis, but what we know is a much deeper economic crisis that followed by the hope that was sort of reflected in the election of Obama, which was not insignificant to have an African American president elected. But then the consequence was nothing really changed the idea. So what people, I think the difference is at that point with 2008, the idea that we live within the framework of a system, that there is a system and there is actually a name to it, that it was a system of capitalism, a crisis of capitalism that produced this enormous turmoil. Then we have Occupy that actually started to sort of pinpoint the functioning, the 99% versus the 1%. This is how the society is organized in the array. And again, not much of an activity in the working class around any of these things. But nonetheless, we see that then the response in Ferguson, a town that many of us had never heard of. Turns out I knew a guy who grew up there, but he had never talked about Ferguson. He always talked about St. Louis. So we see this small town Rise up and just say, we're not going to have any more of these killings like the murder of Mike Brown, followed by Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and so on and so forth. That led to, we could say, many people would say today Black Lives Matter sort of concretized that notion. So in that way, the idea that we might be able to do something, that we could respond, I think is probably the thing that has begun to change. I think people have known about the problems for a long time. They've felt it, they've lived it. The sort of the well repeated adage, now that the lives of every generation are going to be worse than that of their parents is not very inspiring for the parents nor their children. And now we have Bernie Sanders come and say we need a political revolution and we need socialism, even though that's not exactly what we, you know, his definition isn't what we would be saying. But those ideas, those notions are more current and I think there is really fertile ground. What I've seen through the period that I've been active is missed opportunity after missed opportunity when people were ready to do something and there wasn't a way forward and they were captured by people who would just say, well, we can just take a little step at this point. We're not for people running into the flames, but we think there is really that we're living a pregnant moment at this point where we're about to see something really break loose. Now, whether it's something positive or negative, I think really depends on what we do. Not these too little, but all your listeners, what we, the collective we do.

[A]

Joan, I wanted to ask you. There's an old way of posing this question which says a revolution happens when two things are present. The condition of the status quo, the way society has been working, is really broken down and having a very hard time. It's not clear what will happen, but it is in rough shape. That's one condition. And the other condition is people in their heads have to have it in their mind that there is something they can do, that they are going to take some time and energy with other people to do it, that you can have people ready to go, but if the conditions aren't right, they can't. Or you can have the conditions ready to go, but people aren't ready in their heads. Where would you put us now in the United States on both those criteria in terms of whether talking about revolution is a reasonable thing for us to be doing?

[C]

Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head and just One little thing to add in terms of what Kip was saying about a change in consciousness, it's been really interesting. Two things I would say at the community college where I've been in the 90s, and it's primarily working class students, you know, who are there in the 90s, people really believed getting an AA, getting a bachelor's was going to lead to a job, was going to lead to buying a house, was going to lead to a future. Almost nobody believes that. I would say today among your students, among our students, they really, really. Because they look, you know, they look at their friends who went through UC Berkeley who are working as baristas. You know, it's hardly an inspiration to have student debt, you know, to end up serving coffee or beer. I would say there's tremendous cynicism. I mean, in terms of the conditions being ripe. Look at the polls, look at the approval rate for Congress, look at the approval rate for unions, for the Catholic Church, you know, all the institutions. I think people have really lost faith. But that brings us to the other half. I would say the first set of conditions are overripe in terms of nothing functions, not to mention the rampant destruction of capitalism. If we look at wars, if we look at global warming, if we look at health care, we look, you know, anything. We point to the whole first half of your program every week. And I think ordinary people are quite aware of that. The second half is the much harder one. And as Kip was saying at the end, you know, I think we see two roads, you know, if we look at what's going on with the refugees that you mentioned, you know, earlier, if you look at the right wing in France, where we just were recently around Le Pen, or you look at the right wing groups in Germany, all over Europe, the anti refugee movements, and really the most rampant sort of proto fascist for the future kind of movements that we haven't seen have that level of authenticity and acceptability, you know, in decades. And we look at Trump, I think the other thing we see is clearly two years ago, everybody would have believed it was going to be Clinton against Bush. Nobody, I think, would have imagined Trump or Sanders. I think it's a real reflection that people are against the establishment. So what to do and what are people ready to. At my college, for example, for the first time this year, the students organized a Students for Socialism club. I had no idea what that was going to be like. First meeting had 30 students. I went to it. I was really interested. I asked, why are you here? And going around the room Every single One of those 30 students said, in one way or another, the system isn't working. We have to find something better. We have no future. We're worried about global warming, you know, drugs, alcohol, student debt. So I think it showed a real shift that I wouldn't have imagined happening at the college 10 years ago. I would say certainly in the workplaces also. People are watching what's going on. We just came back from a trip to France, you know, where people have been mobilized now for three months practically. I think they're in there. 13th day of action today.

[A]

We've been reporting here about the fight against the labor law. Favors the employer quite dramatically.

[C]

Exactly. But we've seen student activists in the high schools and the universities that haven't been active for 10 years since the fight against the education reform in 2006. We've seen workers organizing general assemblies and coming to student demonstrations. We've seen the NUIT debut, the Stand up at Night, which is like the French version of Occupy.

[A]

And.

[C]

And what's been interesting is it's not just in Paris, it's all over France, even in small towns. And there's really been an inter discussion between the students and the workers about what they want and people really starting to talk about the idea of a new society. The biggest lack, as Kip was saying, and I think it's the question for today, is where are the revolutionary activists to make the linkage, to take the disillusionment that people have and turn it into hope and into organization and into the realization. I mean, I think, you know, I was an optimist in the 60s. I thought I was going to live under socialism and I would never have to worry about a pension or buying a house or any of those questions. I really did. I grew up as a red diaper baby, so I had lots of illusions in what existed in the world. But today, with global warming, you know, with the scary potentials of nuclear war, we have no choice. You know, we have 10 or 20 years to change the world or not have a planet. And I think that really has a different impact on younger people. But they have to have hope. They have to be organized. They have to be connected on a world scale. And if we can bring what's going on in France the way that you do, if we can bring the experiences that show that it is possible to fight in many different ways and they can be linked together, then we have the chance to fulfill the second half of your equation.

[A]

Right. I'm stimulated by what you say also. There's another sign of revolution. When you remember that in France it's a socialist president and a socialist party that is trying to impose on workers and students who were the people that voted them in, that they must now succumb to a new set of labor rules that favor the employer, that you're revolutionizing what the word socialism means. You're taking an entire generation of militants and activists and telling them they have to come up either with a new term or with a radical, different notion of socialism in order to square how the world works for them. When fundamental terms like that are overthrown in what they mean, that's also usually a sign of big shifts coming. So I think you see it starkly in the self destruction of the Greek Socialist Party. Now the self destruction of the French Socialist Party. It's extraordinary to see. Look, we don't have much time, so I would like to ask each of you, can we go back and have you say, in as condensed a way as you can, why is revolution on the agenda now?

[B]

Well, I don't know if revolution is on the agenda now, but the idea of evolution is good. So I'd say just for a little plug, if people went to speakoutnow.org, you could look at some of the things that we write on a regular basis to go to the workplaces. We don't go into workplaces calling for revolution. For us, it's really a common sense, it's the natural solution for the problems that ordinary working people face. So the challenge we face is to get people organized, get people self activated, get people involved in their own lives and really stimulate that kind of idea of hope that we are capable of solving the problems that we confront. That is revolutionary. And with the goal of building a new society, which means bringing that revolutionary heritage back, learning from the mistakes of the past, I don't think we'll. Hopefully we won't repeat the same mistakes.

[A]

Give us again the website so people who are interested can pursue it.

[B]

So it's speakout-now.org One more time. Speakout-org now speakout-now.org Sorry, Joan.

[C]

So one of the wonderful signs in one of the early demonstrations in Paris that really caught my imagination, it was a high school student who had a sign against the law being promulgated by the Socialist Party that said, if you're taking us back to the 19th century, bring back the Paris Commune. And I thought it was like the perfect way to say, you know, what we're trying to say. And I think today we have no choice but we can't always argue on the negative. And I think you're someone who especially personifies that. Look what's possible, look at the world we could have if the potential and the creativity of millions of people was unleashed. And even when we do our small festivals or our revolutionary university, when people can see what can be accomplished in a very short period of time, they can really start to imagine if the world was like that every single day. And I think, you know, that's really where the hope lies.

[A]

Kip Waldo, Joan Berezin, thank you very much for being with us. I wish we could do this more often and perhaps we will find a way to do it.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

I wanted to make a final comment quickly. When I first began this program back In March of 2011, it was mostly about analyzing the economic situation, explaining why the crisis happened. Over the last five years that we've been doing it, the focus has shifted. I still analyze the economics as people ask me to do, but more and more I'm in the very happy position of talking about people who are doing something about it and not just bemoaning the situation. And that's an enormous satisfaction to me too. And if I had some small part to play in helping make that transition, so much the better. Thank you all for listening. Please again become partners of ours on our two websites, rdwolff with two Fs and democracyatwork.info both of them allow you to communicate to us, to communicate with us about what you're doing, about how you might partner with us, make use of all the materials we put on both websites. And finally, I want to thank, as always, truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, a long term partner with us. And we treasure that partnership as we do with all of you. I look forward to talking with you again next week. But after a while gonna be my time, my time babe they ain't gonna change. Thing gonna change Y. Sam. Ram.