← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Late Stage Capitalism and Technical Change
00:30:45
On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the censoring of U.S. government reports on hunger, changes in U.S. agriculture amid capitalism's decline, the special place of white, male, Christian union members in...
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- [00:20]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. A few quick announcements before we jump into today's program. The first one is that our every other month presentation, Global Capitalism, will take place next on the 12th of November in the evening at the Women Building up headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. Please think about coming if you might be in the New York area at that time. And you can find out all the details by going to our website, democracyatwork.info globalcap, and that'll give you the information you need. Secondly, I want to direct you all to our substack. We now have a very rapidly growing substack program with all kinds of material that we add every single day. Please take a look. I think you'll find it very interesting material for your own consumption. You go to democracyatwork.substack.com to get at that. And finally, a word of thanks to you all. Many of you have been letting us know about the fake videos. Videos that look like me, sound like me, might even be the words taken from my presentations and my interviews, which I do several every day. But this is now a serious problem, not just for us, but for others. There's a whole industry in making up fake videos. Many of you have noticed the words don't sound like me, the voice is chopped up, the likeness has obviously been composted in some way out of other materials. If you want to be sure that you get the genuine material, there's three places to our website, democracyatwork.in fox, our YouTube democracy at work channel, and then Democracy at Work social media. Those are our products. We put the material on there. Nobody else can or does. And it's a way to be sure because there's an awful lot of fakery. And do please keep letting us know we're working with Google to try to get the problem solved. Okay, today's program is going to be talking about a range of topics, but then in the second half we're going to have a remarkable interview with a UCLA professor, Ramesh Srinivasan, who is going to be talking about high tech and what it is doing to our modern capitalist economy. He's quite a visionary. Very interesting. Host of the Utopias podcast. So stay tuned. That will be on our second half. Let me jump right into the first half. I want to talk about the group of employees in the federal government recently put on leave. They head of what's called the ers Department Economic Research within the US Department of Agriculture, and they were fired, put on leave by the Trump administration. One of the things they were responsible for is the Household Food Security Report, been issued annually here in the United States for 30 years. There either is none this year or there will be none this year, or it will be late. It used to be the product of a team of economists and researchers trying to be as transparent as possible about the condition of food insecurity or security. And by the way, food insecurity, that's a term invented by bureaucrats because it's less frightening than the term hungry, which is what it means. Why did the administration shut down this office? Well, the clue was the phrase it's got a lot of liberal fodder. That's a quote. Wow. It's also costly and we don't need it to be made. Here's what's going on, in case you hadn't noticed it, in your domain of the government wants to get rid of anything that sounds to them, whoever they are, as being insufficiently cheerleading for the United States. They don't want critical reports. It has nothing to do with whether criticism is merited, nothing to do with what the truth of the matter might be. You say something nice or we're going to fire you. We are living in a society that is moving in that direction. And since I'm on the Department of Agriculture, let me continue and tell you something about agriculture here in the United States. Our agricultural system is challenged these days in a way it never has been for at least the last century. We are no longer the breadbasket of parts of the world where we once were. Some of you have been reading about the terrible problems our soybean farmers are having, soybeans being a major product in the United States on our farms, and China being one of the great consumers of, of the soybean product. Well, the Russians didn't buy any this year. They have others to buy it from, others who are not shaking their sabers at China, not denouncing China, not applying tariffs to China, not applying sanctions to China. You get the picture. I want to talk particularly about Brazil, which is now the largest provider of soybeans to China. But I want to go beyond it. Russia is providing grain and fertilizer all over the world. They are a major producer. Russia long ago solved its problem of insufficient food grains, wheat, corn, and so forth. They are now a major exporter. They produce not just enough for their own people, but become a major export product for them. Grains and fertilizer out of Their abundant petroleum, which is what you use to make fertilizer. China is the big importer in the world of soybeans, of grains, of cotton, from Russia by train, from Brazil by ship. The United States is losing its export markets for its food. It's producing a crisis this year. Mr. Trump has been pressured into providing a gift of 10 to 20 billion dollars to American farmers who are going to go out of business if they don't get some help, because their soybeans are going nowhere and it's happening to other products as well. One of the things that used to make fertilizer in the United States is potash, a mineral brought in from Canada. And with the tariffs and with the alienation of our Canadian neighbor, that's not coming in or it's coming in at a much higher price. You can't sell your soybeans, but you got to pay more for the fertilizer, without which you can't grow the soybeans in the first place. The United States agricultural system, like so much else, is in decline. And the decline is wrapped up with the decline of our empire and the hostile turning inward, isolation that are the best words to describe Mr. Trump's economic policy. I want to turn next to a particular group of people in America that you may not have thought about in this way. I'm talking about white male Christian unionized workers. That's who got the highest wages in general in the American working class. These were the people who monopolized, in many cases, the best jobs, the highest paid jobs. They had struggled and fought for and built the labor movement, the unions, particularly in heavy industry, in the factories of this country. And they were well paid. And so they suffered. The irony of capitalism, one of its great ironies. The more successful you are as a worker in getting together with your fellow workers to get better wages, to get better working conditions, to be treated properly. The more you're successful at it, the greater the incentive to your employer to get out of paying you those high wages. And you know how we can do it? By replacing you with a machine, or in the case of this country, by exporting the job to another part of the world where you can get away with paying much, much less. The workers who were lined up first to be screwed in this were way were the white male Christian unionized factory workers. And who is the big support for, Mr. Trump? Ready? The white male, Christian unionized and non unionized labor force in the factories of this country. I want to remind you of a statistic that summarizes it in 1970, the most successful city economically was Detroit. It had 2 million people. It had high wages, a high standard of living. Even African Americans were allowed in to participate in the auto plants. And let's fast forward to right now, the population of detroiteround 700,000. That's right. A majority, a big majority of the people of Detroit were hounded out of the city because there were no more jobs. The employers went elsewhere to get cheap labor so that the workers there, white and black, got screwed. No wonder Mr. Trump has a rageful white male Christian support group. It's a core part of whatever MAGA actually is. And now the final point. That's a good segue into our interview. What is it that AI is going to do? All we hear is terrible predictions of all the white collar jobs it will make redundant, all the people that will lose their jobs. Why? Because it's more profitable to an employer to have an AI machine do work than to pay a human being. It's not good for that human being. It's not good for that human being's family, is not good for the community where that worker will now have no job. But it is good for the profits of a few. You know, if we didn't think about the profits of the few as the thing to do, we'd understand that if you want to bring in AI and it makes every worker twice as productive, you don't fire half the workers so that the employer gets more profit. That's what you do in capitalism. In a better system, you'd say to all the workers, you now work half time because you can produce in four hours a day with this AI or with this new technology what it used to take you eight hours to do. And that benefit of technology is going to come in your life. You're the workers. You're the majority.
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The.
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You're the one that democracy is supposed to favor, not the profiteers. Why are they allowed to institute a technology that helps them without helping us? That's not democratic. It's the opposite. Stay with us. We're going to look deeper into AI and the whole technological revolution with our guests in today's second half. 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. I am very proud and pleased to bring to our microphones and our cameras Professor Ramesh Srinivasan. He is an engineer, social scientist, academic, author, and host of the Utopias Podcast. He's also a Professor of Information Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles with a joint appointment in Design and Media Arts. His work explores the connection between technology, politics, and culture. He is the founder and Director of the Digital cultures lab at UCLA since 2015 and serves as assistant director of UCLA's Datax Initiative. So, first of all, shall I call you professor, or how would you like me to address you?
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Oh, please, just call me Ramesh. And it's really nice to speak with you.
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Okay, Ramesh, I really want to take advantage of the remarkable spread of material that you engage with, you teach, and that you do your research. So permit me an observation as an economic historian, which I've been all my life, that the history of capitalism, at least the last three or four hundred years, has been a remarkable technological story of breakthroughs from looms to mining to electricity to atomic energy to modern chemistry and, and on and on and on, and in almost every case, enormous hyperbole to the effect that this would really finally take the drudgery out of the life of most people, stop us being work animals, and to begin to explore our humanity, our relationships, our creativity and so on. And yet the statistics show people are working their rear ends off harder than they ever have. Where did it go wrong? What happened here? Is it the problem with the technology, or is it the problem that the capitalist system, which brings in the technology, installs it in a way that denies us the potential it had?
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Yeah, it's the, it's, it's the question of our times in many ways. So technology, if you just look at the root of the word technology, techni and we go to its sort of Aristotelian and Greek history, even technology is nothing but what materializes, what comes out of our rational mind, but also our heart and spirit. So technology can be many different things, right? It can be. I even believe that meditation is a technology as a practicing Buddhist. But I also believe that writing is a technology. Technologies are that which we externalize, we materialize based on ideas, based on metaphysics, ideas of what can be, what should be. Now, the real question is the question of technologies that literally redefine and shape people's lives and the lives of non humans around the planet, and who controls them, who monetizes them, who gains from them. And so the real question is, and that we want. That we really need to zero in on when we discuss technology and its relationship to economic precarity, to people suffering, to people's loneliness, to people feeling like they're working harder for less. This has a lot to do with power, right? This has a lot to do with power. And particularly, as you alluded to, and you're, you know, one of the foremost historians and scholars of the ways in which particular sorts of calculuses involving technology involve the extraction of particular resources or labor or people. In the case of digital capitalism, the hormones in our brain to create those are the raw materials from which profit can be accumulated. Or in the zombie case of big tech, it's all about valuation. Stock market valuation, which may not always be profit in the immediate term, right? Think about companies like Amazon or Uber. That Uber was worth hundreds of billions of dollars before it even made any profit because it was all subsidized by venture capitalists. So this is a ghoulish, zombified version of a technological economy that is all about extracting as much as possible from people and planet for the accumulation of stock valuation or ultimately deep amounts of profitability. So this has all to do with power and who really monetizes and gains from the drawstrings of anything we call technology?
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Is it your view, in any case, what is your view of the relationship between these relatively newer technological data processing mechanisms and modern society is capitalism? My colleague Yanis Varoufakis coins the term techno feudalism. Are we in a transition of some sort that's crucial that we need to take more account of?
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Yeah. And we have done one of our podcast Conversations with Dr. Varoufakas. I met him in the context of the Bernie Campaign and Progressive International. And of course, one of our future guests coming up will be yourself. And so what Yanis makes a point very, very importantly is he calls it cloud capital, Right? So basically everything and anything that could be turned into what we call data, which is basically binary integers, is being. It's all being done through surveillance without People understanding what is being captured from them by whom, for how long and for what gain, Right? So basically what we're looking at here is if you really want to look at what the raw materials are, to kind of allude to classical economic terms, including Marxist terms around digital capitalism, it's labor, it's rare earth minerals, it's energy resources, it's water, it's the hormones in our brain, right? So it's all of these, it's our attention, but all of it is being taken from us without our knowledge and is being used and extracted and exploited to make the wealthiest in the history of the world even wealthier than ever. So in that sense it veers toward a feudal kind of system because you can imagine that a platform like Amazon essentially charges rent, right? So they basically charge rent for folks to advertise on there. And they use that data because remember, Amazon's not just an E commerce company, it's a cloud based company. They use all that data to manipulate and stranglehold and essentially monopolize the market by creating generic versions of products based on data they have and basically taking out the people who actually pay for rent on Amazon are actually taken out by Amazon itself based on what is being surveilled about them. So the whole game is turning everything and anything into data, putting it into these server farms that require astronomical costs for energy and water cooling, including related to artificial intelligence, and basically using data that is gathered and scraped about us to order the world in ways that benefit these companies at profound cost to the rest of us as consumers, as workers, and more importantly, as citizens and living beings of this planet.
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You know, I'm provoked by your, by your comments and maybe this is a conversation we can continue at another time. Again, my historical. The height of European feudalism comes at the end when the concentration of wealth has produced Louis Quatorze in France and the Versailles. To this day people go and wonder at the incredible concentration of wealth that was achieved. But that height, that concentration of literally a million serfs producing this surplus that funds the king of France is also the end. It's their peak and their collapse all at this. Is there anything like that going on now?
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Yeah, because if you look at those who are the wealthiest and most powerful in the history of the world, the Elon Musks, the Peter Thiels, many of these people who have essentially taken on a fascist, pretty explicitly fascist kind of lens to the ways they look at we fellow human beings, they look at democracy, etc. These people have almost no faith or Hope for our planet or our species. So this is what you know, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor describe as end times fascism in one of their wonderful pieces that they co wrote together in the Guardian that came out a few months ago. Basically the solution to the. Because those driving these big tech platforms, including the social media platforms, don't have much aspiration or hope or faith in the only planet we've ever known life to be. That's why so many of them are investing in post apocalyptic Dr. Strangelove type bunkers. I thought you might like that reference or like ready to go out to space. But as Gil Scott Heron reminded us, or the Last Poets or even Tribe Called Quest, these are like great black artists. It's not for them, it's just for these people, right? It's not for the rest of us, right? So everyone wants to escape a planet that they're wealthier than ever, where they could use their profound amounts of wealth to actually heal the planet, to heal our problems, to make technology work for everybody, to allow us all to do those creative and caregiving activities that the Bauhaus for example, predicted a long time ago. So look what the way we double down on those who have hopelessness, who drive everything and are creating greater hopelessness and loneliness for all of us is by doubling down on life, by doubling down on, on this, the only planet we've ever known, on our communities, on our recognition. We're all actually in it together, you know. So I have my beautiful canine right next to me, I'm speaking to my friends right now. And you? I'm about to head to my campus and meet colleagues. This gives me some kind of energy of resilience and hope amidst the profound challenges that I would say techno fascism. And in certain ways, as Varoufakas points out, various forms of techno feudalism have taken root. It's really hard not to feel homeless, hopeless, isolated, divided and just down on everything. But we have to restore that energy by really connecting to what it really means to be human. Right? What it, as Dr. Cornel west has asked for decades, what it really means to be alive. And so right now there are moral and existential questions that are at play when it comes to big tech because it's foreclosing our lives, foreclosing our identities and driving us all insane by placing attention seeking, often AI generated content that drives us all crazy and moves us into polarized rabbit holes.
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A
This might be a logical moment. Tell us about your Utopias project and how it fits into what you've been saying.
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So Even the term utopia itself, dating back to Thomas More's writing of, you know, this, this text, you know, in the late 1500s, if I'm not mistaken, was. Was a satire, right? But what a utopia is, is a North Star that we look toward, right? It doesn't mean that there's only one utopia. The. The podcast is called Utopias. And what the podcast is about is recognizing that we have to have resilience and hope based on what we choose to pay attention to. So the podcast has many folks who are critics, you know, and keeping it real, as we like to say, like yourself. But as you know, and about yourself, as I see in you, you're not just a cynic. You're actually calling for certain changes. You're reminding us to look to the future, to look at history, right? But right now, with tech inundating our lives, capturing all our attention, and essentially putting, like, blinders over our eyes, we no longer can connect with the future. We don't even have a sense of history anymore. So what utopia is is reminding us about what we already know, that being alive is a sacred experience. And so as a result, I have amazing scholars like yourself, Dr. West, Dr. Varoufakas, Astra Taylor, many other folks. I've had fairly mainstream journalists. I've had some artists. I was very influenced by punk rock and music. That's why I'm not a big tech guy myself. I have monks on there. As a practicing Buddhist, I bring monks and, and, and even theologian type folks like Dr. West on there, who remind us of what is beautiful about being alive and allow us to feel like there's actions we can take right now, that in an environment that feels totally overwhelming and depression creating. So we want to do better than that, and we want to keep our North Star at a different type of vision for life on our planet.
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You know, all I can say, we've run out of time. My wife's a psychotherapist, and she uses your kinds of metaphors to give me an understanding of the utter loneliness that has overtaken her clientele in recent years. It's really becoming an overwhelming key problem for her. We've come to the end. I want to thank you, and I hope that we can bring you back. Your project is one that itself, I think, will give my audience hope that this kind of work and this mentality going into the work is spreading. Thanks again, and I look forward to speaking with you soon again.
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Absolutely. Dr. Wolf, it's such a pleasure to join you. Thank you for having me.
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Take care and to all of you. I look forward to spending next week with you once again.