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- [00:10]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those of our children coming down the pike. I wanted to begin today by telling you that today's program is going to be about Russia, China, the whole events of the Ukraine and so on, sanctions, and that after that, in the second half, we're going to have an interview with Adolph Reid, one of the most remarkable and insightful commentators on the United States that I have ever come across. I'm very proud to have him. So let me begin with reference to a story, an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal written by Michael Gordon on February 23rd of this year. He writes very smartly and helpfully about something I think many people don't see, but Michael Gordon does, that we are in the midst of a reorganization of the world economic and political order. I think he's right about that, and I think it is something we need to think more about as we look at current events. I do think, however, that he's wrong in how he describes it. He says it is something Russia and China are doing that seems to me to be a mistake. It is no more being done by Russia and China than it is being done by the United States or Japan or Britain or Europe or a whole host of other actors. Something as fundamental as the world order is always a collective project, whether or not the people involved admit it or even see it. If you look at the 19th and 20th centuries, you might say that the 19th was the rise of the British Empire, and the 20th was the decline of the British Empire and the rise of the American Empire. That's a good argument. It's been made. But to say that it was done by the British or done by the United States is a mistake. This is part of a global evolution. And some periods of time, global evolution raises one country and brings down another. That's been the story for a very long time. Remember the rise of Rome, the rise of Greece, the rise of the Italian city states, or whatever other period of history you want to see. In my view, what we're seeing is the evolution of capitalism. Just like in earlier phases, we saw the evolution of the slave economy, for example, in ancient Rome or Greece, and so on. So what's going on is a change in how capitalism, as our current economic system, is evolving. Let me give you simple examples. Once upon a time, capitalism made New England and then the Midwest, the core central success stories of American capitalism. Then capitalism evolved so that we refer to the Midwest not as the core of our capitalist system, but as the Rust Belt. And New England is a place where we have universities, medical centers, but we don't have heavy industry, because that's gone somewhere else. And so the capitalist system evolved and therefore rose. Certain areas were rising up and others were declining. I think what's happening now, and this is the scary part for some of you, is that the dominating role of the United States is over. We've had our shot. We've had a century, roughly after World War I. There was no real competitor to the opposition of the United states. World War I decimated Europe. It never really recovered. The beginnings of a recovery were smashed down by having another World War just a couple of decades after the first one was over. I mean, it was impossible for the Europeans to play the role they had once played. That was true for England, but it was also true for the other contester, Germany. And World War II also decimated Japan. So the United States had a free ride after World War II, literally the last 70 years. But it's over now. Capitalism is doing what it has always done. It's moved on. The core growth of the production of goods and services has moved from the United States to China above all else, India, Brazil, other parts of the world. And everybody's trying to figure out what the new World Order will now be. You can see it, particularly with Germany. It's desperately trying to catch up. It's been in that position for a long time. It tried and failed with World War I. It tried again and failed with World War II. And you can see it in the last few weeks with Ukraine. It begins, as most Europeans do, upset that Europe plays such a secondary role in the world order that's emerging. It looks like a world order dominated by the United States on one hand and China, Russia on the other. The role for Europe, therefore, is caught in between. And each European country wants to be independent, wants to be part of a unified Europe, as big and powerful as China and the United States. But they don't know how to do it. They can't get together. Each one is afraid of cutting a deal with either side for. For fear that that will unify everybody else in Europe against them. It's too scary. The Germans have now made a decision. At first, they flirted with Russia by having that pipeline built in the Nord Sea to get the gas from Russia to Germany and sideswipe everybody else. Then when Russia invaded the Ukraine, the Germans flipped, and now they want to make the deal with the United States. That kind of flip flop usually doesn't work real well because both sides understand how easily and quickly the flipping occurs. We will see with Germany, it just got the right to rearm on a scale no one thought would ever happen again. The United States says okay, because it needs an ally against the Russians out of these kinds of accommodations. We've had real trouble in the history of the world. We. But we'll see where this new world order takes us. I wanted to talk briefly about the impact of Ukraine, the events in Ukraine on inflation. It will make the inflation last longer, go further, and it'll hurt. It'll hurt everybody, including here in the United States. First of all, it'll affect oil and gas prices in ways we can't quite see yet. We don't even know what the Russians are going to do in response. But what we have is a turmoil in the world. Turmoil in the world economy, turmoil in the system of payments, swift and non swift and all of the rest of it. And in that environment, something happens which makes an inflation always worse. You see, typically an inflation can get held back because every business, and let's remember, inflations happen if and when the business community, 1% of the people raise prices. The vast majority of us are employees. We're not in a position to raise prices. Companies do that, capitalists do that. And they do it usually with hesitance because they're always afraid that a competitor won't raise the price and then they'll raise theirs and nobody will buy their product. They'll all go to the competitor who didn't raise his. It's called the discipline of the market or the discipline of competition. What a big event like the Russian activity in the Ukraine and the response of the rest. What it does is give all businesses cover. It gives them an excuse. Everyone is raising their prices because their finances are in the air or there's a supply chain disruption. And if everybody does it, nobody has to hesitate. That's what we're going to see. We're going to see the events in Ukraine and the turmoil used as an excuse. Will in some cases it be the real situation? Sure. But most of the time it'll be an excuse. And that will make it easier for prices to rise. And we're going to live with those consequences into the next few months and years for sure. The last update I have time for before we get our MID program break has to do with the economics of sanctions. We're hearing a great deal about the sanctions imposed on the Russians in response to the invasion of the Ukraine. And here I want to draw everyone's attention to a book just published, just in time this year. So we're only two months into this year, Yale University Press published a new book. The author is Nicholas Mulder. And you know, I rarely do this, but if I do this, it's because this book really tells us something. Here's the title of this new book from the Yale University Press, the Economic Weapon the Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of War. Let me be clear. This book was written before the invasion of Ukraine. So it's a study of sanctions, how they've been used, particularly in the last 30 years, but earlier as well, and particularly against Russians, but also against others as well. So it was written before, but the insights are wonderful. First, the excuse for using sanctions, hurting your economy, shutting off your ability to take money in or make payments for goods you buy. The excuse for it has always been Mulder points out that it isn't as bad as war. Somehow it isn't as bad as dropping a bomb or shooting a missile or sending in a tank. And the whole point of Mulder's book is to tell you that's wrong. Don't be fooled. It's actually worse. Let me quote, by the way, instead of quoting him, let me quote who he quotes. He quotes President Woodrow Wilson of the United States in 1919 as saying the sanctions, said the President, are something more tremendous than war. And Mulder's whole book is devoted to showing that in a modern economic system, like you have in Russia or China or the United States or Western Europe, hierarchically organized employers, employees, whatever shock comes to the system is normally kicked down. In other words, the people at the top in these societies, by being at the top, have at their disposal the wealth and the power and the connections to push the burden of a shock onto people below them in the hierarchy. Rich people have resources they can move around to escape an inflation, to escape a depression. That's why when you look at these catastrophes, like when you look for example at COVID 19, the older, the poorer, the non white suffer much more than the rest of the population. And so the point Mulder makes is by imposing sanctions, you are allowing, whether it's in Russia or Iran or in China or anywhere else, you're allowing their system to shift the burden of your economic warfare onto those least able to protect themselves. It has devastating effects on, on the most innocent in the culture. So saying we're not dropping a bomb. The irony, says Mulder, is that the damage you do to the mass of people in the middle and the bottom lasts longer than any bomb does, lasts longer than the military wars do. It's not less, it's worse. Keep that in mind. Keep it in mind that an American scholar figured it out when you think about the sanction war being waged as I speak to you. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show, and as always, I want to say thank you to all of you whose support makes this show and the others we produce possible. To learn more about the different ways you can support democracy at work and economic Update, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate or visit our website democracyatwork.info Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and I'd like to encourage you to share what you've learned here today with your friends and family, as that also helps us reach more people than we can do alone. Please stay with us. We'll be right back with today's very special guest, Professor Adolf Reed, Jr. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic update. It is with very great pleasure that I bring to our microphones and our camera a guest for today's program, Professor Adolph Reed, Jr. This is a man from whose work I have learned an enormous amount over the years. He's been a teacher for me and as well as a colleague. And it's long overdue that he joins us here, and I really appreciate that he's taken the time. So let me introduce him to you in terms of the formalities and then get right down to our discussion. Adolph Reed, Jr. Is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at Howard, Yale and Northwestern universities, the University of Illinois in Chicago, and at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His most recent of many books published is the Jim Crow and Its Afterlives. He's working on other books, the one that I am most eager to read and I hope he will come back and talk with us about when it comes out. I'm going to give you at least a tentative title because it'll tease everyone a bit when compromises come home to roost. The Decline and Transformation of the US Left. Much of the writings I have learned from have been what I can now see as preliminary essays as he built his own understanding of that issue. He has written columns for a whole long list of major periodicals here in the United States. And among his many other achievements, I wanted to mention that he is an organizer in the Debs Jones Douglas Institute djdi, and a regular on that institute's Class Matters podcast. So, first of all, Adolf Reed, thank you very much for joining us.
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Oh, Rick, thank you very much for having me, man. It's my honor. That's a real pleasure. And plus, you know, I think I voted for you once.
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That's right. Years ago I ran for you. That's right. In New Haven. That's right.
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B
That's right.
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A
Okay. I want to begin with your latest book, the South Jim Crow and Its Afterlives. And you argue there that there are long lasting consequences to the whole Jim Crow period, after Reconstruction and so on. Tell us a little bit about what you think those consequences or the main ones were or still are.
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B
Right. Yeah, that's important. I mean, I think I'm kind of of two, two minds about that. Right. Because at the same time that current political arrangements, at least in the south, are a direct outgrowth of that regime. As a really good friend and comrade of mine, another political scientist, Professor Willie Leggett in South Carolina, said in what would have been a Nobel Prize worthy utterance if there were a Nobel Prize for apothegms, that the only thing that hasn't changed about Black politics since 1965 is how we think about it. And in that sense, I think what's the Jim Crow era kind of hangs over contemporary American political life as a kind of misdirection. Right. Principally so we tend to lose sight of the fact that while the segregationist regime was directly and most explicitly a regime of racial regulation and explicit racial subordination. And I think another problem that we have today is that as more and more people have lost the ability to distinguish between the individual attitudes and social structures and institutions, racism has displaced in the popular imagination and the popular way of talking about inequality. Racism has displaced the workings of institutions. Right. So that people are much more inclined now, as you know, to sort of see an unbroken line or chain of racist inequality from slavery through the Jim Crow era to last week. But those are different regimes, different social orders. And what has ultimately the continuation of or what remains of the Jim Crow past in the present tends to be a sort of hollowed out understanding of the bad old timey times when bigotry prevailed and people don't have enough of a sense, for instance, of how or the extent to which the Jim Crow order was imposed on whites as much as it was blacks. Although obviously right before people stopped pulling their hair out, the principle and direct purpose of the set of institutions was to impose white supremacy. That was the whole point. That's when it was written in the Constitutions but it wasn't imposed significantly until after the defeat of the populist insurgency in the early 1890s and followed actually the systematic campaign of disfranchisement of 90% of black voters in the south. And depending on what state you were in, up to a quarter of white voters.
- [19:53]
A
So tell me, let me jump a little bit because I know it's in the minds of my audience, how do you see the resurgence of white supremacy into the headlines of our society, into the consciousness? Why is this happening when so many believed, rightly or wrongly, that somehow that was behind us? Can you help us? How do you understand that?
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B
Well, I try. Right. I was going to say I can help. Yeah, I can help you. At the same time, I try to help myself. So I taught for a long time a grad seminar in 20th century race theory. And after the first four or five weeks, the graduate students found themselves getting really depressed because they came to realize that that sort of Whiggish narrative right of progress didn't quite quite work. And they came to recognize that the commitments to inegalitarian ideologies aren't based on evidence, they're ontological. So what happens is when one narrative of naturalized inequality gets defeated, then it doesn't go away. But what happens is those people who are committed to a belief that there are essential, meaningful differences among subsections of Homo sapiens will just say to themselves, well, I know it's true, but we just don't have the evidence yet to demonstrate it. So then when somebody discovers genes, then they all get happy and say ah, ah. So now we can get the evidence. So white supremacy is an ideology, right? I mean, I remember like when. Well, yeah, I said, when we were both living in southern Connecticut in the early 80s, the Klan marched in Meriden, right. And my colleagues are going nuts about this, right? And asked me what this meant. I said, well, look, in first place, the Klan in American is a bunch of alienated, disaffected, washed out of the working class people. They were mainly youngsters with the first wave of what de industrialization was going to look like from 1868 to 1970, right? The operative question was it was in the south at least. And of course in the twenties the Klan was something different anyway, but was in the south at least whether it was more significant that the Klan was the above or the underground wing of the Democratic Party, or that the Democratic or the Democratic Party was the above ground wing of the Klan. So it was a powerful political and social institution. White supremacy as an ideology has been around since race was invented, basically, or at least since the 19th century. And it's there as a set of scapegoating discourses that frankly, like I, I blame the rise of white supremacy, or the resurgence, if you want to call it that, of white supremacy as much on, on the neoliberalized, I mean, Democratic Party as, as I do on the right. Right. My good friend Anthony Mazaki often said that neoliberalism can't satisfy people's needs and concerns and anxieties. The farther along it goes, the more and more people who are going to be tossed onto the ash heap. And if we aren't there to provide them with plausible explanations of what's messing their lives up and at least the outline of a plausible seeming roadmap about how to make things better, then these right wing forces that have always been there doing the same thing, offering the same set of bromides and snake oil and scapegoating, are going to be there to take advantage of it. And I think, like I've argued this too, I think you have as well, that we may have gotten to a point at which, like the equivalent of a T intersection, right, at which neoliberalism has exhausted its capacities for delivering enough to, enough of the population to maintain its legitimacy as a political system. And if that's happened, then there are only two ways to go, like at the T intersection. One is to the right and that's authoritarianism of fascism. And I also understand that academics like to quibble about when authoritarianism becomes fascism or whatever. And my view is that when the question arises, it's beyond time to think about taxonomizing it. All you need to do is figure out how to fight it. But the other direction is in our direction. Basically the big punchline is, like with everything else, that what we need is to figure out how to start generating a movement anchored in the working class that can restore popular faith in public action, public life, public goods. And that's going to be a longer and a more uphill climb than a lot of our friends, especially our young friends who identify as leftist would like to imagine. But how?
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I mean, I know this is an enormous follow up question, but on one hand I would like to believe, and I know it's a wish, that the reality of the failure of neoliberal capitalism, the crisis that it's clearly in my mind in now and has been for a few decades already, and it keeps worsening, will in some way explode in an awareness that no matter what you think about the concept of race, whether it makes sense to you or it doesn't, it's really, and I know I'm going far here somehow beside the point that there's a basic issue here about how you organize the production and distribution of the goods and services we all have. And if you're not prepared to change that, then you're only choosing among the horrible consequences of not choosing to go in a different direction. Does any of that make sense to you?
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B
Oh, it makes total sense to me. Right. And I take it like a step and a half beyond. I'd say that the options that exist in that scenario, Right. If are really have more to do with organizing people to fight over. I mean, the distribution of the injustice. Right. Like instead of confronting the injustice. And that leads to this other observation that one of the ways that, that we as leftists need to alter our thinking about this is it is just to face up to the fact that there's identity based movements or discourses aren't our allies. They're actually agents of the other side. Right. I mean, they've got much more in common with the ruling class agenda than they have with the working class agenda. And I think we've seen this about black politics, but in some ways also about bourgeois feminism since 2015. Right. I mean, the response to Bernie Sanders, like, I'm working on a little polemic now, that was sparked by an interview that I saw with that Joy Ann Reid did with Buttigieg on the anniversary of the inauguration. And she, in the middle of it, made a gratuitous, totally gratuitous swipe at the infrastructure bill, calling it a white guy's employment bill. So this is what we're up against.
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A
Look, Adolf Reid, can I persuade you here in public to agree to come back so we can resume this conversation and focus particularly on your work about the compromises of the left coming home to roost. Can we do that in a few months?
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B
Oh, absolutely. I'd love to, man. I'd love to stay in touch.
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A
Thank you very much for your time and to my audience. Go read what Adolph Reed writes, the forthcoming book, but also those that are available. And as always, I thank you for your time and your attention and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam.