← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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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 coming down the road confronting us, and those, of course, facing our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into the Updates for today, I want to let you know, because we're quite proud of it, that this program that many of you hear on the radio and through the Internet is also available in video form, that is, as a television program or a video of us doing this program. It is regularly broadcast by the MNN Public Access Network here in Manhattan, New York City, and in a number of other places. But most generally, I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that you can see the video version of this program on YouTube by going to the Democracy at Work YouTube channel. And you can also see it. This is something new that we're especially proud of at Patreon P A T R e o n patreon.com economicupdate with economic update being one word. So once again, patreon.com economicupdate these are ways to see and to view the same program in a video format, if you would prefer. So let's turn to the economic updates for this middle part of May 2017. Well, we've just entered into the third week of a hunger strike by Yale University graduate students, and because of the implications and meaning of this strike, it bears some attention. What the graduate students want to do is to unionize. After all, as they explain, they cannot complete their studies to become a PhD recipient in the graduate schools unless they earn money because they have to eat and sleep and do all the other things that people of their age, usually in their twenties of their lives, must do, as we can all understand, in order to earn money, money to be a graduate student, they are basically required to be what's called teaching assistants, that is, to teach classes, typically to undergraduates at Yale University, people whose families pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for these young folks to get a bachelor's degree. It is, of course, an enormously profitable thing for Yale University to not pay a regular professor, who would have to earn a regular professor's salary, and that's in the neighborhood of 75,000 on up to hundreds of thousands. It's much better for Yale's profits not to have to pay a professor to teach the course, but instead to get a graduate student to teach the course because in effect, they pay them a trivially small percentage of what a full professor, a proper professor, a fully trained professor would have to be paid. And that's the beginning and mostly the end of the story. It is of course, very bad for the graduate students. They have to work hard. They are busily at work taking classes or writing their doctoral dissertations, highly stressful work. And here they are being paid little or nothing for doing so. This is a difficult situation and there's no surprise at all that people in that situation working hard resent being paid so poorly that they have trouble making ends meet. There are many graduate students around the country, I don't know whether it applies at Yale, who are eligible for food stamps and other supports, but because they are paid so poorly. So what the Yale graduate students wanted to do was to form a union, Local 33, since other workers at Yale, building and grounds people, kitchen people, clerks, secretaries, have already organized for many years into Locals 34 and 35. At Yale University, the graduate students wanted to be their own unit. They had a election according to the rules of this process in the United States, which they won several weeks ago. But Yale is refusing to sit down and negotiate with them. Yale's lawyers are contesting the outcome because Yale lost and Yale can hire, and has hired very high priced, union busting type law firms to help them along. And of course one can surmise that Yale is hoping that Mr. Trump will sooner or later reconstitute the National Labor Relations Board and that may overturn the rule that allows graduate students at Yale and other places to form unions. In short, Yale University is a very typical employer here in the United States, all its protestations to being the guardian of Western civilization notwithstanding. And they are acting just like any other employer, trying to prevent, to stop, to undercut an effort by its workers to get decent pay and to form a union to do that. I'm particularly interested in this because 40 years ago I was a graduate student at the same Yale University when we were trying for the exact same reasons to do the exact same thing. So, so there's nothing new here that's going on. My hat is off to the graduate students. They are better organized than we were, they are more clear in their interests than we were, and they are more clear allies of the unions than we were. All of which has enabled them to be more effective. Recently, particularly the women among the graduate students have added another demand, that is for an end to the sexual harassment of women graduate students, which was an epidemic when I was a graduate student at Yale and it is remarkable to see that the university has been either unable or unwilling to deal with that problem either in the intervening decades. But there's another reason to be interested in what these graduate students are doing. Because it shows that the kinds of workers you might have imagined could be exempt from the current austerity across the Western capitalist world. The austerity that in Europe and in the United States cuts the services that the government provides people, cuts the jobs that the government provides to people to provide the services to everybody else, that these kinds of downsizing of a declining capitalism, they might not affect university students. They might be exempt. They might not have to suffer. What the Yale strike makes so clear is that the idea that anyone in the working class is more or less educated, higher or lower paid, that anyone will escape this process, is now clearly not the case. That unless the process is stopped, we will all be victims sooner or later. In one way or another, yes. At one end of the income distribution, the people making less than $15 an hour are moving across the United States to try to get a minimum that allows them to live. But much higher paid, much more educated people, like graduate students at Yale University find themselves in the same boat, being ripped off by their employer who thinks he can get away with it at this time in this country's history by not letting them have a union, by not paying them a decent wage and simply enjoying the extra profits that come from having a graduate student to whom you do not give reasonable amounts of money do the teaching instead of a professor. The irony is it's not good for the professors who have less work. That's, after all, what the graduate students are trying to become. It's not good for the families who send their children to places like Yale imagining they're going to get the best possible professor. No, they're not. They're going to have graduate students pound off on their students, on their children. Graduate students who are busy working at some completely other activity, namely getting through the program themselves and getting a PhD hassled by the time and energy they have to devote to these other things. It's not good for the students, it's not good for the finished faculty, and it's certainly not good for these graduate students. The difference is the undergraduates haven't protested and the regular faculty haven't protested, but the graduate students, and that's why my hat's off to them, are doing something and in the process pushing back against the general decline in standards of living that is the capitalist program for the working classes across Western Europe, North America and Japan. Staying with the same topic, but approaching it from a different angle, I came across the following news I want to share with you. In July, the federal government, particularly the Department of Treasury, has announced it will raise the interest rates on government loans to students. Before I go into the details, I'd like to ask a rhetorical question. Is making it more expensive for students to borrow to get a college education? Is that part of making America great again, do you think? Well, here's the specifics. Undergraduates will find that the government's interest rate on loans to them for school go from 3.76% to. To 4.45%. That's a hefty increase. For graduate students, it's from 5.3% to 6%. May not sound like much, but you're talking hundreds of dollars extra per year for every year that our students are in debt. And how many students, present or past students, are carrying debt? So, I mean, how many will be affected by this raising of the government's interest rate? You might be shocked to learn 44 million Americans currently carry student debt. The total is over $1.4 trillion. And the average debt carried by a student debtor who borrowed for going to his or her college and university, $32,000 hanging over your head that you have to pay interest on and that you have to pay back. Well, here's a little side point as to who's cheering on the government to raise interest rates. Clearly, the students aren't. Clearly their parents aren't. And clearly those of us who care about the future of the United States and have to wonder out loud, why would a country that knows it has to compete in the world economy be making it more difficult for young people to get an education rather than making it easier? But put all that aside. Here's the people who are cheering the government on, the private lenders, the banks and others who lend to individuals who either can't afford or. Or don't want to pay what the government is charging. Clearly, as the government's interest rates go up, it's good news for the private lenders that compete with the government making these loans. And of course, there's a key difference. Students who borrow from the government enjoy all kinds of protections from being hassled afterwards from the costs of delays in their ability to pay, protections that are not available to them if they borrow from private lenders. So, of course, here is more damage to young people and their families who are thinking of college educations. And again, the larger point I want to drive home is this namely that here is another sign of how a declining capitalism shifts the costs of that decline from those at the top to everyone else. We saw it with what the graduate students at Yale are doing, demanding a decent salary for the hard work they do. But now we see it again in the tens of millions of Americans who will be charged more for their college loans than they used to be. This is a way of shifting the burden from those at the top to everyone else. The fact that it comes at a time when those at the top are getting richer and everybody else isn't only makes the story that much worse. Last week also saw another development that merits some discussion. Two Senators, Bernie Sanders from Vermont and Gillibrand from New York State combine to introduce two bills into the Senate that are interesting and that deserve some discussion. The first bill is called Worker Ownership Readiness and Knowledge, or the word W O r K work as the name of this act they have introduced for consideration by their fellow Senators. The second bill is called the US Employee Ownership Bank Act. To make a long story short, these two bills express the desire of Senators Sanders and Gillibrand from Vermont and New York to support the ability and the incentives for workers to buy the companies in which they work to convert these companies from their classical ownership by shareholders who decide what the board of directors is and what the board of directors will govern the company to do and to change all that and to make the owners not sure shareholders who are outside the company, but to make the owners the workers themselves, the workers become owners Worker owned enterprises. Is this an advance over what we have now? Clearly, from the point of view that this program originates from, from everything that I have been trying to explain and to understand with you over the years, yes, because it's a step in a simple democratic process. Instead of a tiny minority of people, shareholders and boards of directors, making all the decisions that affect every employee and therefore the communities the employees live in, instead of a tiny number of people making unaccountable decisions that affect large numbers, which is a violation of the very concept of democracy, worker ownership at least takes us into this step where the workers also become the owners. And in that sense part of their exclusion from decision making in the workplace is removed. They are less excluded. But having said that, having welcomed these activities, having praised Senators Sanders and Gillibrand for doing this, it is also important to explain that this is just one step. And it is very easy to see and to imagine how this step could unfortunately not be the beginning but also the end of the process of democratization of the workplace. And that would be a tragedy. And why am I concerned? Because we have many decades of experience in the United States with worker ownership. We have the many ESOP operations around the country. Employee stock ownership plan. This is where companies have in fact done what the bill introduced by Senators Sander and Gillibrand seeks to do. That is they have brought their workers into ownership positions by making them shareholders, etc. And what has been the problem in so many, in clearly the majority of these cases, that democratization has stopped there, that workers who become owners still believe that they ought to put the actual running of the enterprise, those key decisions about what to produce, how to produce, where to produce and what to do with the profits, into the hands of a board of directors. And so they have searched for people qualified to be boards of directors, have found them to be the people who already are on the boards of directors of other companies. This is very common in, in capitalism. And so they have left the running of the business they technically own in the hands of people who have run them, do run them, and in all likelihood will run them like they were conventional capitalist enterprises making the same sorts of profit driven decisions that capitalist enterprises do. That is why it is so important to understand that when workers become owners, it gives them rights, but rights they have to exercise or else the whole project is stopped, is stumped, is stopped, as it were, in midstream. What workers who become owners can do now, now that they are owners, would be to transform the workplace from a top down hierarchical structure run by a tiny minority. Boards of directors are usually 12 to 15 people in enterprises that can have 100, 1,000 or 100,000 employees. The real question of democracy says no longer will a tiny minority be able to make all of the decisions what, where and how to produce and what to do with the net income. That decision could be and should be democratized. It should be subject to a rule in which every worker has a vote, an equal vote to make those decisions. And no one who isn't a worker does, because you are without rights if you're not a worker, to make the decisions of what a worker owned and operated and directed enterprise would do. Oh sure, a worker co op, which is what we're talking about, would have to work out a reciprocally acceptable relationship with its surrounding communities. Capitalist enterprises had to do that in, in their way too. But of course it would be in a different way because workers themselves would be the citizens in the community and the owner operators of the enterprise when they get together with themselves to figure out how best to manage an economic system that put workers in the driver's seat in the workplace, which we have never seen in the United States before. Worker ownership we have seen worker ownership is a good step, but it is just a step, and it needs to be supplemented by the real serious business of giving working people in their workplace the democratic right to control the decisions that affect their lives. If I can end with a parallel, it's one thing to give everybody the vote in a political election. It's a completely different thing to provide the time and the support so that everybody who votes knows what the issues are, has the time paid time to make politicians come before them and explain and justify what they're doing and what they propose to do. Democracy means the real participation of people. What good is it to give them the vote if everything else in the society blocks them from the kind of participation for which the vote, at least in principle, was intended? The same thing applies to the ownership of shares in an enterprise. Unless we understand where that has to go, the next steps, we will be sorely disappointed by the results. The last economic update we will have time for in today's program has to do with an event that happens every May in the United States, and happened, of course, this May, too, namely Mother's Day this year on the 14th of May, a Sunday. And so it led me to think about Mother's Day. I'm not a mother, but I'm a father, so I have direct experience of a good bit of this, and it's an important issue for me. So here we go. Three reflections on Mother's Day and the economics of Mother's Day that may not have occurred to you. And I want to thank Market Watch, which you can find at market watch, all one word, marketwatch.com, a place that gathers interesting economic statistics, and I found them particularly useful on the Market watch website for March 14th. First, American population growth is now dependent on children born to immigrants. That is, American mothers who were born here in the United States are having fewer and fewer children. The only way the population is growing in the United States is basically because of the decision to have children by immigrants. In other words, the growth in the American population. The future of our working class, which is the future of our economy, has a lot to do with immigrants in ways you might not have thought about. The second statistic I thought was remarkable, released by MarketWatch, was that mothers whose family income exceeds $75,000 a year richer mothers take twice as much paid maternal leave as do mothers who live in families that earn under 30,000 simple English rich people take more maternal leave than poor. You know why? Because. Because they want to. Because they need to. Because their commitment to family values says it's good to take some time off before your baby is born. And it's even more important to be there in the early weeks and months of your baby as part of what it means to have, quote, unquote, family values. And if it is true, as the statistics prove, that the more money you have, the more you take advantage of this important opportunity, the more horrible it is to have to recognize that the United States is the only advanced industrial country that does not have a law mandating paid maternal leave. Every other advanced industrial country has such laws, with anything from six weeks to 40 weeks out of the year being the required maternal leave that employer must give to a mother while paying her every. Interesting. The country that makes more noise about family values than any doesn't support it when it comes to paid family leave. Finally, in 1970, under half of American mothers were in the Labor Force. In 2015, over 70% were. That is a fundamental historic change. It's why the American family didn't suffer a cut in its standard of living as badly as they might have over the last 30 years. It's because a second member of the family went out to work for millions of families. And that wasn't enough either, which is why they all went into debt, which all blew up on US in 2008. This year, as, as we think about Mother's Day, let's be honest, we've made it harder, not easier, for the family to function. Mothers are out of the house many more hours of the day working because they have to, as well as because they want to. They need supports, paid maternal leave and decent, paid, affordable childcare. And this country provides neither to the mass of its people. And. And that is a failing of the capitalist system. We've come to the end of the first half of our program. Please stay with us. Remember to use our websites rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info for more on all of this kind of analysis and for ways to communicate with us. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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What have you done, my little spark? Cursing my name. Cause again I put you out falling apart. Tell yourself you are dreaming only of ones who never dream.
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Welcome, friends. Welcome back. I should rather say to the second half of Economic Update. I am very pleased in this second half to welcome to the microphones and to our audiences my guest for today, Antonin Plahier. Welcome, Antonin.
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Thanks for inviting me.
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Let me tell you who Antonin is and then we can jump right in. Antonin Plarier has been a member of the new anti capitalist party, npa, as it's known in France, which is a radical left organization that was founded in 2009. And Antonin has been part of that effort since its foundation. He is also an assistant lecturer at the University of Paris Sorbonne, the one in the center of the city and the old center of the French university system. And he's currently at work in his studies on French colonial history. I asked him to join us because, as you know, because we've discussed it, there was a very important election in France for the presidency of that country a few weeks ago. It happens in two stages. Eleven candidates, if I'm correct, in the first round, and then the two top vote getters contested in the second round between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. There was great interest here in the United States. So I thought, let's get someone right from the center of the French activity around the election to give us a different insight. So let me begin by asking Antonin the In the mainstream media, the recent French elections were represented as a big defeat for something we call here populism and a great victory for the establishment or the political center of politics. And it was almost as though the celebration, because that's really what it was in the American mass media, it was a celebration of an election that looked, or was made to look like it was Trump versus Clinton all over again, with the satisfying result for the mass media that Trump lost and Clinton won, in the sense that Trump was like Le Pen and Macron was like Clinton. Do you agree with this take on the French election? How do you see it if you don't?
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Well, in fact, it's not only in the US Media that we have heard this interpretation. In the French mainstream media, it was also the case. And yes, if we have a look just on the election Results, it's true, 66% for Macron and only 33% in favor of Marine Le Pen. But we have to look beyond the election results, and doing so, it appears populism has not been defeated yet in France, at least, if we consider populism as an allegedly critical speech based on a national people who should be opposed to foreigners or foreign capital. If we do so, if we define populism as such, we have to consider the fact that Melanchon, one of the left candidates of rebellious France, can also be considered as a populist and one of his main advisors also recognized and claimed that that her candidate was a populist one. So taking into account this definition, this election has not been a failure for populist idea. This idea that in order to protect us against capitalism, we have to proudly defend our border against immigrant people would say Marine Le Pen, or against German capitalism, would say Jean Luc Menachem. This idea has been repeated over and over during the electoral campaign. And I think that both of these ideas are wrong and are real dead end for the working class.
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Both of them.
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Both of them, yeah, sure. This is the reason why with the new anti capitalist party, which I'm a member, a militant, we had our own candidate, which name was Philippe Putou, and he's a worker, an auto worker, in fact, in an American company, well known here, Ford, the auto industry. And he led a strike a few years ago because his plant was going to close down. So we chose this candidate in order to say against these populist ideas, we. And that's what Philipputo basically said. He said, we workers have more in common, whatever the borders or whatever the citizenships supposed to divide us, than we have in common or we would be supposed to have in common with national capitalist.
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All right, so his argument was, if I understand you, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that the working class of France would be better off in some sense to make common cause with the very immigrants that Marine Le Pen wanted to.
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Exactly, exactly.
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And that even Melanchon, who was very successful in getting 20%, if I remember the first time around, didn't take that step.
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Not so clearly.
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Yeah. Was more like a Bernie Sanders or a Social Democrat or something like that.
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I think so.
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And that.
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And he makes some important concessions on that question.
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But before we get into that, I want to pursue that. But before we get into that, if you put into the camp of populists both Le Pen and Melanchon and perhaps some of the other smaller candidates in the first round, then what percentage of the French electorate would be, quote, unquote, populist by that definition?
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More or less than 45%.
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But close to half.
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Yeah, but it's not the same kind of populism.
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Understood, understood. Very different. And they have strong disagreements. I understand that. But to say that populism was defeated at the same time that you point out that nearly half the people makes the argument that populism was defeated very strange, because it would seem to me as an outsider saying, my goodness, populism was able to get against the mass media, which Denounce both the left and the right. Populism. It was able to get half the French people to vote for. It is a stunning achievement that will shake European politics no matter what pretenses are made that it was quote, unquote, defeated. Anyway, let's go back. There was a great deal of attention in the United States to Marine Le Pen because of the similarities to Donald Trump, to the fact that she came to see Donald Trump in part of her campaign, and so on. You are a French person, you're active in politics. Tell us, what is the appeal of Marine Le Pen to the French workers, to the French population? And based on that, what do you see as the future of the National Front in France?
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Well, I think there is two main reasons for this appeal. The first reason is probably the social situation in France, which is, as you probably know, quite difficult. The 2008 crisis have considerably affected conditions of the working class. 5 millions of people are unemployed, which means approximately 10%. And this is the official unemployment rate. And the real one is probably twice higher than this one. The situation is getting worse because the crisis is deepening. There is plant closures and working class conditions have been under attack with the socialist government in the past five years. So people are upset, they are angry and they are right to be so, because at the same time, the government is giving subventions to big companies, to the banks. Rich people are becoming richer. If I can give you just one example, take Bernard Arnault, which is the first wealthiest person in France?
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Richest person in France?
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Yeah, he is. And the 11th in the world. Last year he owns a fortune of 34 billion of dollars, and this year he earns 7 billion more. Is to say he owns now 41 billion dollars. And which makes an increase an increasing of 20% in a year. No workers in France achieved that the past year. So people see this and they are upset. And I'm upset too, of this situation for sure. But the problem is, it's not enough to be upset. You also have to understand how did we get so far? And from this point of view, governments, for three decades, one after the other, every government have ambiguous or even sometimes really open arguments against immigrant people. That's the way they explain the social situation.
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In other words, the reason workers are experiencing difficulty and a growing gap between rich and poor for three decades has been blamed on immigrants in somehow.
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Somehow, yes. In fact, immigrant people, in a way or another, in the speech of the different governments, have been responsible. Taken as responsible of this situation. Immigrants people should would be supposed to be in this discourse, in this speech, responsible for insecurity, responsible for. For unemployment. They are supposed to be Islamist. You know, this kind of speeches.
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Yes, we've had that in this country. Very similar.
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And the fact is that the National Front is the political party that is saying this the most clearly on the political stage. So thanks to these three decades of social attacks alongside an immigrant, on an anti immigrant speech, you. You get the popularity of the National Front.
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Okay. Do you think this is going to continue? This is going to get worse? Is this scapegoating? We call it the scapegoating of the immigrant. Is this, I mean, the image we get in this country is this is a successful political program in the sense of getting more support and votes for Marine Le Pen and for the National Front. Is that true? And is that likely to continue in your judgment.
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If we pursue. On this question of immigration, I would like to say first that since the beginning of the wars in Libya, the wars in Mali, the wars in Libya over the past few years, in which French governments with American government have for different reasons, major responsibilities. Since the beginning of this war, Mediterranean Sea became increasingly. It was already the case before that. But it's increasingly the place of a human disaster. 5,000 people are dying every year in this place. So this is a catastrophe. And the policy of the European governments towards immigration are directly responsible of this mass murder. Fortunately for us, I have to say that it does exist. Important solidarity movement. So it's not just the National Front, there is also a solidarity movement on these topics. Associations, some unionists and the far left is not isolated on this question. There have been many demonstration on this.
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Issue and these are demonstrations of solidarity with immigrants. Is it because of a disagreement about the role of immigrants in the French economy? Or is it a critique of French government's role in forcing the immigration by creating troubles in Africa and the Middle East? Where does this solidarity come from?
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I think the first reaction is probably a kind of humanitarian reactions towards this disaster. But this is also disagreement on the policies and on these speeches that we were talking about.
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Okay, let me push you one last time about this. Is this growing? Are the French people's upsets about their situation making them more open to blaming immigrants? In other words, is this sense of a problem getting worse, correct? Or would you disagree? What's your sense from your own experience?
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I would say that it depends on the social and political situation. I mean, for example, a few years ago we have had this great experience of a big undocumented workers strike, 6,000 undocumented workers went on strike in order to claim equality rights, equality of their rights with the rest of the working class in France. And, and this is a strong demand that can convince people that immigrant people and French working class should. And have one working class that should work together and that could claim for the same rights.
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Do you think French born, native French workers understand that, agree with that? In other words, is there a. Is there a sense that solidarity with immigrants is a strategy?
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This movement met some solidarity around this strike. It was not an isolated one. And I think that is through this social movement that we can change people's mind and we can convince them that both of them are common interest to fight against capitalism.
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Okay.
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And if we do not do this, for sure these feelings of anti immigrants would grow.
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So you're saying it could grow, but it will depend on struggles to push a different agenda out of the suffering of French people.
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Yes, exactly.
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Another feature of the French election, which we found very interesting looking from the United States, was the hostility that seemed widespread to the European Union, to the notion that somehow France was not doing well in the European Union and would do better if it were out of it. That was clear from Marine Le Pen and the National Front. But you could see many other politicians making noises like that. And it's clear that Manuel Macron in his very first few days, is also trying to project an image of focusing on France being somewhat critical of the European Union. What is that about? Why is the European Union a target for criticism in France now? What's that about?
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I would say that governments, either they are French government, British government, whatever, governments don't want to take the responsibility when they are adopting an unpopular law and they lead a policy intending to promote higher flexibility, for example, that is to say, higher exploitation of the working class. And they say, I'm not responsible of this policy, I lead it because the European Union is compelling me to do so. But what is the European Union? European Union is basically just a meeting of national governments. And the French government alongside the German government, play a great role in the European Union. And they decide all together the policies that they want to lead together. Just to give you an interesting example, last year concerning the whistleblower, there have been a law, it was during whistleblowers as well. Whistleblower, yes. Just after the Panama paper last year, the European Parliament has adopted a law called business secrecy in order to avoid this kind of scandal to happen again in the future. And it's interesting to notice, to note that every single French representative in the European Parliament voted in favor of this law, except a few, one from the Green Party, but every other one have voted in favor of this law. So who is responsible of this policy of the European Union? Is this European Union as such, or is it the French representative among other representatives?
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So let me make sure I understand and our audience understand this is kind of a political theater. In other words, the national government, in your case France, pushes through an unpopular law and then acts as though it had to do that under the pressure of the European Union, because that way they are not held responsible. So they get the law they want and they pretend they're not to blame for it, even though they are also the controlling forces in the European Union. So this is a kind of a theatrical way to push their program through. But the side effect of it then, if I understand you, is to make the European Union immensely unpopular because the governments have blamed it for everything they wanted to avoid responsibility for. And so the people, and this could be applicable to England too. So the people vote against the European Union because they've been told that's where the problem is. But then they're left with the national government, which was behind it all along, and therefore they've wasted their time.
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Exactly. That's what I wanted to say. And you can bet that if there is any convictions in the few coming months on future whistleblowers, you can bet that the very same one who have voted in favor of this law would accuse the EU that it's responsible of this situation.
- [48:58]
A
Okay, all right, let's go back. And for those people who will follow these things, it was remarkable that someone like Jean Luc Melanchon did as well as he did, because it did suggest that there was a basis for a left wing election success that the mainstream media had said wasn't there. And you have to remember that this comes out of the American experience where in the initial months of Bernie Sanders effort, he was dismissed as someone who would get 1 or 2% of the vote. He wouldn't make any difference, and he ended up surprising everybody. So tell us, what is this Melanchon phenomena? Where does it come from and where does it go?
- [49:45]
C
I think that the mention phenomenon, we can mainly explain it with the collapse of the Socialist Party, who were leading the government in the past five years. And the Socialist Party have chosen in the past five years to serve with real loyalty, the interest of the bourgeoisie, the interest of. Of a capitalist system, and doing so, politically speaking, they have almost committed suicide.
- [50:17]
A
Political suicide.
- [50:18]
C
Yeah, yeah, sure.
- [50:19]
A
Well, the polling results for Francois Hollande were Unbelievable. I mean, literally, one had the impression that one had gone in a very short time from a Socialist party that had won the presidency and the majority in both the Senate and the national assembly to a party that nobody wanted to talk about or see or vote for. It's an amazing self destruction.
- [50:41]
C
Yeah, it's true.
- [50:43]
A
And you think Melanchon represents what in relationship to that?
- [50:47]
C
Melanchon has benefited from the collapse of the Socialist Party because former voters of the Socialist Party turned their vote in favor of Melanchon system, Melanchon organization. And I think that lead us to another question. Is this collapse of the Socialist Party, what does it mean? And what could be the alternative to the Socialist Party in the left is Melanchon? In other words, could be an alternative to the Socialist Party or could be an alternative for socialist policy? I would say that I don't think so. And mainly for two reasons. The first reason is that Melanchon for sure is on the left side of French politics. So his program includes social measures that would benefit to the working class if they would be adopted. And that's a good point. But we can also observe that while he was getting closer to the second round of the of the presidential election, he started giving up key points of his program on social question, on immigrant question. An example he was defending in 2012, last presidential election, freedom of movement. And he gave up this demand in his program. He was defending raising of minimum wage, but he finally specified that it will be only €1,350amonth, while the unions and the far left consider that €1,800amonth would be a minimum to live with dignity. So I don't think it is this kind of legitimate or good potential alternative. The second reason why is not Melanchon basically was saying, vote for me and the social reforms will follow. Many of his supporters are aware that even the most timid social reforms require social struggles. But if you want to prepare people or working class to this perspective, you have to say it. And that is the reason why working class needs its own candidate for this kind of elections with a new anti capitalist party, as I said before, we decided to have our own candidate, Philippe Putou. And as an autoworker, you know, workers can identify to him, can identify to his policy what he basically say, basically say was we here to defend the vital demands of the working class, raise wages, no more firings. And for this we need to organize, we need to build our own organization, we need to build our own party, and we finally need to run ourselves. This society if we want it to be better. The good news for us is that this kind of candidate, we are not the only one in the world to have this policy, to have our workers on the stage in order to defend this kind of policy, revolutionary policy, we have developed, for example, here in the US Strong relationships with an organization called Revolutionary Workers Group. And everywhere we are trying to develop this kind of policy. Because if we want one day the world to be better, we have to start here and now.
- [54:35]
A
All right, thank you very much, Antonin.
- [54:38]
C
Thank you.
- [54:38]
A
This is Antonine Clarier from France. And I hope my audience enjoyed as much as I did your accent as well as what you had to tell us.
- [54:47]
C
Thank you.
- [54:48]
A
In conclusion, folks, for today, let me remind you that programs like this are the work of a group. We call ourselves Democracy at Work. And you can find out more about it by going to our websites. Democracy at work. All one word. Democracyatwork.info or rdwolff with two Fs.com those websites are maintained by us, updated every single day. They provide you with ways of following us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and now also patreon.com all of these places are places where you can either listen or watch this program. The websites also provide you with means to communicate to us what you would like to see more of, less of what you like, what you don't like. The websites also provide you with ways of communicating to us. If you'd like me to come and give a talk in your area, which I like to do and I do several times a year as I travel around, there are also ways for you to partner with us. We are always looking for more stations to carry this program. We are always looking for people who will make use of what we do. And that's what we mean by partnership. And in that spirit, I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that is also a partner for us in the sense of distributing and sharing what we do with many, many others. The United States is clearly, if you read the headlines, as we all do, entering a period of enormous stress and turmoil. We see it at the surface of our political life every day. But below the surface, it is also going on. There is a vast economic reorganization of the United States. It's in trouble. It is facing the twin challenges of an out of control automation that is removing jobs in face. In place of giving work to people, it gives work to robots and to computers. And at the same time, it takes jobs away from people who've spent lifetimes working at them, who. Who have decent salaries and moves them abroad to where wages are very low. This is a society that does not know how to cope with its own problems, in which the rich get richer and shift the costs of this problem, of these problems, onto those below them with every chance they get. That's why graduate students at Yale are striking. That's why we have the social conflicts building that threaten the future of this country. We will be attending to all of this closely in the weeks and months ahead. Thank you very much for being with us, and I look forward to talking with you again next week. Sam.