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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's program takes into account the fact that Americans are beginning to look into the election, the big one for president coming up next year, 2020. And because it's becoming an issue, and will of course become more of an issue as the months roll on, I thought it would be a good time to stop and take a look at the broader historical picture of American politics right up to the present. So I call today's program American history and the 2020 election. If you're interested in this argument that I'm going to be presenting over the next little while during this program, I should also mention to you that a written version was published on the electronic magazine Counterpunch, which you can find@CounterPunch.org dated June 3, 2019. Of course, if I'm talking about the American working class, I don't mean to suggest that everybody who's in that working class, roughly 150 million Americans, our fellow citizens, agree on every or act in the same way. There are important divisions of the working class. Men and women, whites and blacks, skilled and unskilled, more educated, less educated, regional south is different from the west and so on. But there were things over the last 75 to 100 years that brought all working people, and by working people, I mean what the government calls non supervisory employees, the workers who do the work that makes this country work and function, producing and distributing goods and services, roughly 150 million non supervisory workers. And they are important not just because they make everything go around and produce the goods and services without which we couldn't live, but they are also very important because the system capitalism, in which a relatively small minority of people, owners, CEOs, the people at the top, boards of directors, all of that, that's a very small part of our society. And they couldn't run it the way they do, have the power, have the wealth, have the income. If the mass of people, the vast majority, the non supervisory working classif that didn't allow this to continue, it wouldn't. So it has always been necessary for those at the top to find allies in the working class to survive, let alone to have the system work. And that's what we're going to be sketching. So our story starts back in the 1930s, in the great Depression. It starts there because capitalism crashed big time in 1929. Suddenly, an economy that had been booming along basically since the Civil War, growing richer faster than even Its old parent, Britain, could do as fast or faster than the only other quickly growing country at the time Germany could do. It was a success story of exploding wealth. We killed off enough of the native Americans in this country to allow an immense expansion of the immigrants from Europe across this country. The wealth created the great names of that time, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies. All of those people who got called by the name that most people understood applied. They were called robber barons. And they became extremely wealthy. And they celebrated a system that made them wealthy. And they convinced everyone pretty well that the wealth and the growth in this country was somehow their doing. Not the work of the mass of people, but the genius of the captains of industry, the robber barons. And they did a pretty good job of convincing people until the crash of 1929, when suddenly this great capitalist system, with all of these rich Rockefellers, et cetera, at the helm, fell apart. Between 1929 and 1933, there was a continuing collapse. By 1933, the unemployment rate in the United States was 25%. That means one out of four people were without a job, which means every family had either a mama or a papa or a cousin or an uncle without work, and therefore was affected. Whatever savings people had accumulated were quickly used up because there was no support for unemployed people. There was no unemployment compensation system then. People had nowhere to turn. The desperation was captured in novels like Of Mice and Men or the other great works of Steinbeck, Dreiser and the other novelists of the time, the Grapes of Wrath that you may remember when you read them as a high school or college student. And in that collapse, the mass of the American working class finally saw through the pretenses of a capitalism. They saw what capitalism could deliver, not the goods, but the really bads. And the American working class drew a conclusion. And the conclusion was the political party that represented capitalism, the support of capitalism, the wealth of the rich capitalists. The Republicans were the people that were not working men and women's friend. They turned and placed their hopes in a new direction. Some of them decided to go with the Democratic Party. At least it wasn't the Republicans. At least it showed some sympathy. And many of them decided to do something much more dramatic. They joined labor unions in a way that Americans had never done before. The greatest wave of labor organization in the history of the United States took place in the depths of the depression of the 1930s, as millions of Americans who had never been in a union before, whose parents had never had anything to do with unions before, decided the best way to get through the hard times of a terrible depression were to unify with other workers and work together to make something happen. Those who were even more upset by what was happening to them and to the economic system they thought they could rely on, they joined two socialist parties and a communist party. And those parties became very important in american history at that time. And indeed, there was a coalition, an alliance between the communist party, the socialist parties, the labor organizers under the heading of the cio, the congress of industrial organizations. And they went to the then newly elected president of the united states, a democrat brought in because of the upset with the republicans that had been boasting of the great achievements of capitalism. They went to that new president and they said, we put you in office. You're here to help us through this terrible depression. If you do, we will celebrate you. And if you don't, we will vote you out. The communists, the socialists, and the unions, and together they represented tens of millions of people. And the president, Mr. Roosevelt, got the message. He went back to the rich people he came from and the big leaders of business that he was one of. And he said, I just had a meeting with the communist socialists and the unionists, and they basically read me the riot act. I better help those people, the mass of americans, through this depression or I'm out of here. And gentlemen, he said, looking at them, there were very few ladies present in that room. He said, I advise you to go with me in this effort, because if you don't, these people are very angry. They're already talking, particularly those socialists and communists, about a revolution here, you know, like the one they had in russia just a few years ago, back in 1917, which wasn't that long ago, when you're talking in the early 30s. So he finished his conversation, Mr. Roosevelt did to the rich people. He said, the government has no money. With millions of people unemployed, businesses falling apart, nobody's paying taxes, the government can't help these people. The only way to help these people is to get money. And the only people who have money are you, you, corporate leader, you, wealthy billionaire, etc. So you've got to give me the money that I can take care of the mass of people. And I urge you to do it, because if you don't, there's a good chance those people will remove whatever money you have and you won't be in a position to give anybody anything. Half of those businesses bought Mr. Roosevelt's argument, and they said, okay. And Mr. Roosevelt then went and did something. And what he did was to take money from the rich, taxing them very highly, borrowing what he didn't tax from them, basically telling them they had no choice. And he used the money to create the Social Security system to suddenly go to all American families and say, you're elderly, your people 65 years of age and older. I'm going to give them a government Social Security check every month for the rest of their lives. He created the unemployment compensation system. For the first time you lose a job through no fault of your own, the government will give you a check every week for a year or two to help you through number three, a minimum wage. We never had that before in America, Just like we never had a Social Security system before or unemployment compensation. Suddenly, if you had a job, you couldn't be paid below a certain amount because it was indignant in for you and without dignity for the society to treat people this way. What an idea. And finally, the government hiring program. Roosevelt telling the American people, if the private capitalists of this country can't or won't hire millions of Americans who only ask for a job, then I will as president. And he did. He hired roughly 15 million people between 1934. And the American working class could not believe what they had accomplished through that alliance of the communists, the socialists and the unions. They had gotten a president to tax the rich and the corporations to provide a vast program of help and support to working men and women, the working class. And the working class made a commitment. This is our guy, Mr. Roosevelt. And so they turned to his party, the democratic party, and said, this is the party of the working class and we're going to support you. And how powerful was it? Well, let's see. Mr. Roosevelt was president four times. He was re elected three times by overwhelming support of the American working class. It became the democratic party. The Democratic party became it. It's an extraordinary story and it's where the politics of this country were shaped in a profound way. The role of the democratic party and of Roosevelt was capitalism as a system. If left in the hands of private enterprises, capitalists and big corporations can and will blow itself up and produce catastrophes like the great depression. And the only way to manage that, to prevent it from happening over and over again, is to bring the government in, in a massive intervention of an ongoing sort like Social Security, unemployment compensation, minimum wage legislation, and federal jobs. When the private sector can't provide a living wage to everybody who needs and wants one. What a commitment. And who's to pay for it? Big business and the rich. And that set the tone for what The Democratic Party did. But it also set the tone for what the business community would do next. Confronted by a massive defeat. They had to pay. They had to pay taxes like they had never paid before to fund a program of helping the mass of people. They had been made to be the problems of our society, the robber barons who cared for profits but not for the condition of the American people. Capitalism had given itself a black eye and the Democratic Party pointed at it and said, never again. And the business community was horrified. Would they have to pay big taxes forever in this system? Would they not be on top of it? Would they be having to be responsible? No, they said. And the rest of this story is how American politics were changed after Mr. Roosevelt was gone. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. So before I, having teased you a bit, take you to the next step, bringing it up to the present, I want to remind you, please to follow us on YouTube. YouTube. Democracyatwork is how you can find this program. And supporting us that way is an enormous encouragement in a very practical way for us. Please make use of our websites, rdwolffwith2f's.com and democracyatwork.info and as always, a special thanks to the Patreon community, whose support and encouragement is crucial to every program we produce. Stay with us. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. We had taken our story of the American working class's history through the Great Depression and even to the end of World War II. And that was the crucial time, because the Depression was now over. The working class had embraced the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and vice versa. The war had put Americans back to work. Half of the unemployed took on a uniform. The other half went to work producing the uniforms and guns and ships and all the rest. And so 1945 is the crucial end of the Depression, the return of people to jobs and the death of Mr. Roosevelt. And that was the opportunity for the reaction, for the Republican Party to lead the way in pushing back against all that had been accomplished in the 1930s, undoing what had been done. That thing had been called the New Deal. So now the agenda was to undo the New Deal. And the way the Republican Party and the business community, working very closely together did that was to destroy the New Deal coalition. That combination of communists and socialists on the one hand and unions on the other. The working class's leadership congealed in those groups. Communists, socialists and labor unions had to be destroyed so that the Republicans could then find allies within the working class to pull over to their side so it wouldn't face them in the devastatingly successful run of the Democrats under four presidencies of Mr. Roosevelt. So here's how they did it. First, they went after the Communists. They were not leaders of a working class. They were evil agents of a foreign power. And you got rid of them. The minute you finished, you did the same to the socialists and said they were the same as the Communists. They just spelled it in a different way. And you taught Americans to be very frightened of all of that and very hostile. And Russia became the great enemy. This is step one, break the coalition. Step two, you hobble the labor movement. The Taft Hartley act of 1946, a law which said anything that a trade union won at a workplace had to be given to everybody who worked there, whether or not they were members of the union, whether or not they had gone out on strike when the union called them to do that, whether or not they paid dues to the union, which gave everybody an incentive to be a free rider to get the benefits of labor without being part of the union movement. That marks the beginning of the downhill run of the labor movement, which was eviscerated in this way. Businesses decided they could make more money by going out of the country. You began that hemorrhaging of jobs out of the country to cheap labor somewhere else, which the unions couldn't fight because they were fighting a battle to survive the onslaught of the government's attack on them. It worked. The long and the short of it is, it worked. The New Deal coalition was broken up. Part of the effort was also to send the women who had been pulled into the labor force during World War II. When the men went off to fight women, Rosie the Riveter became workers everywhere in America. Now, after the war, the Republicans led the charge women must go back in the household. A woman wasn't a hero if she was doing the work that the men used to do and doing her part for the war effort. No, no, no. She became a person who ought to be at home, who ought to be taking care of children. The whole women's liberation movement is born out of women being pushed back to a subordinate household role that was not valued. And yet they were told they were to do it. Black people who had begun to emerge from the Jim Crow segregations of the past into the modern American working class alongside white people, they were pushed back and made bad in various ways. White workers were told they really are different from black workers. The opposite of the message of the 1930s. In many cases, you built up the divisions within the working class to break them apart, to stop them from being unified, that capitalism was their problem and that the Democratic party would be the party that would save them from what capitalists would otherwise be prepared to do to them again. And it worked, in large part. The working class, the labor movement, the communists, fell apart. Women and men started playing the old roles again, not the new ones. Segregation and race hostilities were revved up again where they hadn't survived so well before. And so the working class fractured and the Republicans were able to make real gains. To be the champion of white against black, but to be the champion of the male worker on the job, less the women. You could see the whole modern identity politics being born in this onslaught to undo the new deal. And what did the Democratic party do? Did it go to their roots and say, no, we're going to be the united working class? No. They didn't know how to fight this battle. They too were hobbled. They didn't rely on their left wing because those were tarred with the brush of communism and socialism. So they fell for that kind of splitting and they split. So a new generation of Democrats, led by people like Bill Clinton emerged who said, okay, if we can't hold on to the working class, maybe we can keep our party going by appealing to the capitalists, the party not of Franklin Roosevelt, but the party of the other side. If the Republicans split the working class and hurt us, we'll split the capitalist class and pull over a bunch of them to support us. And what you have is the result. Two political parties, both of whom begging for money from the rich and the powerful, and the capitalists. And each of them with a hand on part of the working class. The Republicans more and more white and male, and the Democratics more and more female, non white minority. The modern picture that we're used to. But both parties unwilling and unable to challenge capitalism because they depend on the same funders, they depend on the same support. From that part, they could not maintain their oppositional position that they had developed in the 30s. And the man who comes to power and puts it all together, Ronald Reagan, he takes the step to finish the job. He begins his presidency by throwing the air traffic controllers out of their jobs, showing that he is going to crunch down on what remains of the labor movement and he is going to celebrate globalization. Of course we'll help American companies that want to go abroad. Of course we'll help American companies that want to use this new Invention of the computer to get rid of millions of jobs, throwing people into the chaos of unemployment and hunting for a new job. The power of the business community rebuilt as it was before the Great Depression and the American working class split. And Mr. Reagan gets enough of, particularly what white male workers to pull enough away from the Democratic Party to get power. And Mr. Clinton, who comes afterwards, he has given up. He supports the same capitalists, he supports globalization, he supports all of it. His only claim to the mass of the working class is, look, you should vote for me, not Mr. Reagan, because I'll soften it. I mean, I'll do the same stuff he does, but I won't do it so harshly, I won't do it so quickly. Yeah, you'll lose your job through a computer, but I'll give you some help along the way so it won't be as bad as those Republicans. Republicans will let it be. The Democrats become Republican light. And that's not a winning strategy, not at all. Because the white working class, the men and the white men who supported mostly the Republicans because the Republicans went after them, they are getting upset, as are the women and the blacks and the others. Because across all this period, whether it's Reagan or it's Clinton, whether it's the old Republicans or the, the underlying reality is both of those parties are letting capitalism do what it replace people with machines, move jobs abroad, build up the profits and neglect the conditions of the mass of people. And people get angry. It takes a while, takes decades. But across the 80s and 90s and the first decade of this century, all of these processes are at work until finally the working class is angry enough to say, we don't care whether it's the Reagan Republicans or the Clinton Democrats, this is all the same. We want something different. There is a memory, an echo, a historical trace of what they remember. Even if it was their parents told them about it back in the 1930s. And they want something different. For a while. You can begin to see it as each candidate for president says to the audience as he begins his efforts, effort, I'm not like every other politician. Oh, I wonder why you're saying that. I'm something new and different because that's what people wanted to hear. And then along comes a character, a narcissist, a baby, a boaster, a bully, Mr. Trump. And he says I'm different from all the Republicans. And he looks it and he acts it and he speaks it and he defeats all of the old Republicans inside that party and then he defeats the Clinton other side in the other party, and he becomes the president because the working class was so angry at what had been done to them in the rollback of the New Deal by Republicans and Democrats, with the only difference being the Democrats did it a little slower. They were so angry, they wanted somebody different. And if the only offer of something really different was Mr. Trump, well, they'll surprise everybody, raising their collective middle finger and vote for that, really hoping it'll make a change. No, Maybe. But what's to lose, as Mr. Trump himself said? So here we have it. We have. The working class has been crucial at every step of the way in allowing, in coming forward, in retreating, in allowing the destruction of its institutions that had protected it. You know, in Europe, none of this kind of thing happened in the same way. Why? Because the working class did not suffer the kind of crushing that happened here. They held on to their socialist parties, they held on to their Communist parties, and they held on to their unions, which is why you couldn't do in Italy or France or Germany or Scandinavia what the capitalists could do here after the war, which is why they have universal health insurance and subsidized colleges and all the things that Americans vaguely dream of, which they have, and they will not let go in Europe. So the American working class is at a kind of crossroads, isn't it? What's it going to do now? Is it going to realize that the unity of the white and black and men and women and African Americans and on and on, is it gonna pull that all together? And why? Because that's what you won the last time in the 1930s, and that's what you lost since then. And no way is Mr. Trump gonna bring you any of that back. He's one of them. Even if he acts the bully and acts the crazy, he's one of them. He's part of the rollback of the New Deal. And the Democratic Party in 2020 will have to face that. If they go for someone like Mr. Biden, they're saying to the American working class, we've learned nothing from this history. We're going to give you more of what you've shown us. You will reject first when you voted for Reagan and again when you voted for Trump, another one of those losers? Or are you going to go in a direction of unity, unity of a working class across all these divisions with someone more like Mr. Sanders or more like others? It doesn't have to be him, and it doesn't even have to be any of the declared people now. It has to be something new. And different in terms of the recent history, but something old that we've learned from in terms of what the Democratic Party was in the 1930s, what it was, it can be again. But the question is when and how and who will make that happen. And this election coming up in 2020 is a first step in figuring out whether the Democratic Party can rise to this situation, and if it can't, whether new and different parties will have to emerge that do learn the lesson of the history of the American working class and its relationship to politics, and therefore, can make a difference and surprise everybody from the left, the way Mr. Trump's victory surprised everyone from the right. I hope you found this interesting as a way to think about the election coming up. That's what this program was designed to help you to do. Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.