← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
How Deep Fascist Parallels Run
00:30:36
This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff, responding to requests, explores the parallels between what led to the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany after World War I and what has brought the US to Trump and his current policies. Many key basic...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:20]
Richard Wolff
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin by thanking Charlie Fabian and all of you who have sent in materials for Charlie to work up and to help us plan our programs. You can and please do continue to send us what you have. Charlie.info438mail.com and likewise, our recommendation that if you like this program and the economic analyses we present, then there's a companion volume that you will find useful called Understanding Capitalism, which begins with these kinds of segments, but goes into them much more systematically and much more deeply than we have the time to do here. It's available as all of our books are, at our website. Today is going to be a special program. We're not going to have short segments. We're not going to have a guest to interview. Instead, I've prepared a presentation that responds to something many of you have asked me to do, plus something which the literature exploding all around us, articles, books, newspaper stories, videos, obviously show an interest. It has to do with whether the category of fascism applies to what is going on in the United states today. On 14 June, there were demonstrations all over the country. Many of them carried signs opposing fascism in the United States in one form or another. So let us do this in a reasonable, thoughtful way. So I'm going to call today's program. How far does the fascism analogy work? Does it illuminate and to what extent what is going on in the United States today? And I'm going to use a systematic comparison between the most important historical case of fascism, that of Nazi Germany, with what is going on here. And I think that will help us see how far the analogy works. What are the similarities, but what also are the differences? So I'm going to begin with Germany. And the story of fascism in Germany is a story of a working class, the German working class that was lifted up in a spectacular way across the 19th century, all the way up to 1918. Why that year? Because that is the last year of World War I. Before that war began, which is 1914, Germany had gone from being a collection of small little countries, not all one country at all, many small principalities, dukedoms, little kingdoms, divided, hostile, often speaking languages that were similar, but dialectic and, and different in their dialects and so on. The 19th century saw Germany go from a backwater agricultural society to a modern industrial society, to go from many scattered jurisdictions to one unified, powerful German nation, and through it All a rising standard of living and the arrival of a modern, highly skilled, highly industrialized working class. The 19th century was a good century for the rise of Germany. Its most spectacular politician, Otto von Bismarck rose with it. The great unifier fought a whole bunch of wars to bring all of these little countries under one umbrella and to make a powerful modern Germany. In fact, by the second half of the 19th century, Germany and the United States were the two big up and coming economic powerhouses, both of whom in their different ways, challenging the the dominant economic power of that time, the British empire. World War I changed that. The German working class, which had felt itself to be the most educated, the most sophisticated, the most modern, and in many ways they were the German working class who had seen the 20th century as the new century in which they would really rise to their full potential. These were German working class families that had done well enough in the 19th century to have real savings. The Germans were and are very frugal people. They really felt that they were on the cusp of being the great German empire. They had acquired some colonies in Africa and elsewhere by that time. So they were competing globally with countries like England and France, who had been doing it for a longer time. Everything was smashed in World War I. No one had prepared the German working class for the possibility of, let alone the reality that they would fight a war and they would lose. And in those years from when the loss became clear, 1917, 1918. In the years that followed, the German working class suffered what can only be called a trauma. And of course I'm doing this because I'm going to show you that the United States isn't so different. But back to Germany what happened? They lost the war. Part of the punishment of being the loser in the war was that their colonies were taken away from them and given to France or Britain and so on. More than that, they were forced to pay reparations, huge punishment, fines after the war was over that they had to pay four years after the war to the countries that had defeated them, above all Britain and France. Britain and France had borrowed from the United States to fight the war. So they used the reparations Germany gave them to pay back their loans to the United States. So the US Western Europe all lived off of, in large part the Germans who paid reparations in part because that bankrupted Germany. They suffered an inflation, the worst inflation any modern industrialized economy has faced in the last several centuries. During the year 1923, the German currency went from about six or seven to a US dollar to a billion from for a US dollar. Germans took their paycheck in a bag, paper currency in a bag at midday, lunch break, ran home, gave it to someone in their family who would run to the store to spend that money. Because if you didn't spend it right away, by the end of the day it wouldn't be worth anything. Prices were doubling every 45 minutes. Americans have no idea what such a thing can be. But I'm talking about something literally a century ago. This is not ancient history. But what it did was wipe out the savings of the German working class in one year. Gone. You may have saved for 50 years across three generations. And what you had saved was now enough to buy maybe a quarter pound of butter. That was 1923. A few years later, six years later, the Great Depression hit. The collapse of global capitalism. 1929. And what had not been destroyed by the war and by the inflation was completely destroyed by the depression which threw millions of Germans out of work. It was too much for any working class to suffer. Everything destroyed. Your savings, your job, your income, your community, your hopes, your future, everything. And that created a desperation which the political leaders of the time were unable to cope with. The right wing couldn't, the left wing couldn't. The conventional parties acted like they couldn't imagine what to do. Or worse, they did things which made everything worse. The mass of the people began to look for more extreme political spokespeople because the conventional, traditional ones sounded so empty headed, so, so lame and so totally inadequate on the left. That meant the rise of the socialist and communist parties of Germany, who in the last election they had 1932 together got half the vote. And Mr. Hitler of the extreme right wing got roughly the other half. The German industrialists looked at this situation. The collapse of their economy, the collapse of their society, the rise of socialists and communists who both declared capitalism to be their enemy. And what had to go. So the business community said, we have to make common cause with this character, this little short fellow with the mustache whom they didn't like, whom they didn't want, whom they had imprisoned earlier, looked down on as odd. But they made a deal because they needed a political force in order to survive. That's what they felt like as capitalists, as employers. So a deal was struck between the employers and Mr. Hitler. And that's how he came to power in January of 1933. Here's my point. The United States, also in the 19th century, developed and delivered to its people an incredible rising standard of living. The difference was they didn't lose World War I. So it continued. And they didn't lose World War II. And indeed after World War II, the American Working class enjoyed a situation that no working class had had before. High and rising standard of living, high and rising wages. The American working class, like the Germans before them, thought that this would never end, thought that this would last forever, thought that they were the special United States, the exception where enterprise would succeed and where wages would rise. And then came 1970. And in the 1970s, all of that came to an end. It wasn't a war the way it had done it to the German working class, but it was something just as bad. Three things happened in the 1970s and 80s that changed everything. A technical revolution, the computer, then the robot, then artificial intelligence, wiping out millions of jobs. And where in the best paid white male industrial workers, the ones who had strong unions, number two, many of those jobs that didn't disappear with automation were relocated to China, to Brazil, to India. Millions of jobs lost to relocation because companies could make more profits producing with lower wage workers over there. So, so they went there. They could make more profits by serving the big markets over there, which were growing faster than the American one by that time. And finally the immigrants who came in desperate because of the changes in their society, looking for jobs, willing to work under poorer conditions and lower wages than Americans had gotten used to. A one, two, three punch. Automation, relocation, immigration. And for white, well paid, male unionized American workers in manufacturing, it was as devastating a trauma as that suffered by the German working class from 1918 to 1929. We've come to the end of the first half. In the second half I'll show you how that parallel shapes our conditions right now. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we Do. Welcome back friends, to the second half of today's economic update. We are discussing the parallels between Germany and its fascism and what the United States is going through now. Before the break, we were up to the parallel trauma of the German working class under its conditions after World War I. And now the American working class under its conditions after World War II. Since 1970s, the three immigrant immigration, relocation of jobs abroad and automation have decimated the jobs of the white male working class. Unionized workers, millions and millions of them lost their jobs, lost their income, lost their self esteem, plunged their communities into economic difficulty because people didn't have the jobs to earn the money to spend it in the local bowling alley or the local dry cleaner or anywhere else. And the problem in the United States was like what happened in Germany. The two political parties were useless. The Republican Party was a cheerleader for the automation and the relocation and the immigration, and so was the Democratic party. They had been captured by the big businesses who wanted to replace workers with machines because it was profitable, who wanted to move jobs out of the country because it was profitable, who wanted to hire low wage immigrants to because it was profitable. And who did all that and who made sure the two political parties whom they funded didn't stand in the way. We cheered on globalization, we cheered on all of the engineers we hyped and to whom we showered praise and money and opportunity. Meanwhile, the conditions of the mass of Americans deteriorated, particularly again the white male unionized manufacturing workers, not only them, but mostly them, and they turned to the two political parties and they got nothing. Meanwhile, after long suffering oppressed groups in the United States, women who were second class citizens economically for sure, black and brown people, ditto, were struggling to have their place in the United States and were making enough noise that the political parties paid some attention to them. Didn't help them a lot, didn't help them very quickly, but helped them a little and with a lot of symbolic. And you know what? That that freaked out the white male unemployed man who began to feel I'm not worth helping, but these other people are. And when that situation arose, there would always be in this country, as elsewhere, demagogues, political hustlers who saw in this emerging tension an opportunity. Tell the working class that your enemy is those black and brown people, the women too, the ones getting ahead. They're taking your job. Why would the Republicans and the Democrats, one loudly, one softly, say such things? They would say them because neither of them has the courage to attack the businesses whose profit maximizing strategy lies behind all of this. Businesses chose to go to China. No one held a gun to their face. Businesses chose to get rid of jobs for technology. No one held a gun to their head. Businesses looked for opportunities to rip off immigrants by paying them less. But it worked. The demagogues arose in Germany. The demagogue was Adolf Hitler. He told the German people, you got two enemies, the Jews and foreigners. Mr. Trump arose and told us immigrants and foreigners very similar. He turned the upset, the genuine suffering of white male manufacturing workers against women, blacks and browns. Easy with American history. Hitler found it easy to turn Germans against foreigners and Jews too, because that existed for a long time. Antisemitism in Germany as elsewhere in Europe. Notice the similarities. Eventually, the hostility that was initially a way of moving ahead politically. This antipathy to Jews got so hysterical on the part of these people like Hitler that that he literally exterminated millions of people in ovens. Mr. Trump isn't there yet, but he has empowered the equivalent of storm troopers. That's what they were called in Germany, the ICE folks, the people who treat immigrants in an unbelievably callous way. Faces covered, no ideas, acting as if they have the authority to bully, to hurt, to export, to deport without due process of any kind. That's what Hitler's SS did, too. That's what the Gestapo did, too. You're caught up in your own ideological craziness, as I have tried to argue here and as many others have. The problems of the American economy have very little to do with immigration. They're too few, they're too poor. They couldn't possibly explain the difficulties of white male manufacturing workers in this country any more than Jews had much to do with the crisis of Germany's workers working class. It takes an extraordinarily, how shall I say, a person with a very ambiguous relationship with the truth to start babbling, to get people's misery, to turn them against other people and make them miserable, too. We're not at it. We're not yet fascistic. But we have made many of the steps that go in that direction because we have many of the qualities of a difficult economy pushing us that way. And no leaders, no Democrat and no Republican able or willing to stand up and say what I've been saying. Nothing I'm saying here is secret. Everything is available in the history books. That's where I learned it, too. So what are the differences? Here we go. In Germany, the fascists had a real problem, namely the communists and the socialists. Half the country was communist and socialists. And they fought not just at the ballot box, but in the streets, too. So things had to go way further to shut that society down. Here in the United States, Mr. Trump doesn't face a well organized left. The irony of this country is that the left, while it is large in terms of the number of people, think about how many came out on June 14th in 1500 cities and towns across America. Oh, it's there, but it's not well organized. It doesn't have powerful political parties of its own. It doesn't mobilize to win elections. It doesn't mobilize to get out into the street, except once in a while when things push it far enough, like on June 14th. And why is that? Why was the left well organized in Germany and poorly organized here? Because after World War II, after the Great New Deal, the business community and the right wing in America went to work to destroy the organizations of the American left. 1. Communist, 2. Socialist Party and the CIO. The Congress of Industrial Organizationsthe greatest labor union drive in American history. We never had anything like that before. We've never had one since all those organizations were destroyed after 1945. They're people arrested. They're people hounded out of the country. They're people hounded out of their jobs. You called yourself a communist or a socialist, you could kiss your job goodbye. And worse. The CIO represented nearly a third of the American working class. Today, it represents a tenth. Everything has been done to break those organizations down. And so we are defenseless against Mr. Trump, aren't we? He doesn't have to yet deploy full fascism. So we don't have it yet. But if you want to see its beginnings, notice that the ICE people seem entitled to have masks, so you can't identify them, to deny you their names when you ask for them to behave in a way we permit no other police to behave. We have a special police. That's what Hitler did, too. We're not there yet, but the conditions that brought us to this place are very similar. In the end, Mr. Hitler went so far in exterminating Jews to produce a horror around the world that came back to undo Mr. Hitler. Likewise, his hatred of foreigners led him to believe that the German army could walk across Poland and Russia and Czechoslovakia and all those other places. And he tried, and he was defeated. War and extermination of state scapegoat. Does it sound similar? Are we trying to exterminate our immigrant population? Are we moving in that direction? Have Mr. Trump's spectacular inability to end the war in Ukraine, which he promised to do to end the war of the Jewish leaders of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza that hasn't come to an end that's gotten worse Mr. Trump spoke of endless wars writhed that too was a feature of Mr. Hitler that brought him down turned out the extermination of a scapegoat and the attack on foreigners is very fascistic leads in fascistic directions but it also points to that which in the end ends fascism in 1945 Mr. Hitler vanished either by suicide or in some other way we'll never know but the German experience with fascism was over from 1933 to to 194512 years could have been very different has been very different ever since will the United States stay on the road it has been on to have yet more similarities to fascism not yet but the analogy takes on more relevance with each passing month thank you for your attention I hope you found this historical parallel type of analysis interesting thoughtful for you to think about and as always I look forward to speaking with you again next week.