Professor Richard Wolff: "Capitalism, with its inherent injustices, is speeding into a stone wall."

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Richard Wolff on the Changing Tides of Capitalism and Socialism

Tuesday, 07 June 2016 00:00
By Creston Davis, Truthout | Interview


Nearly 30 years ago, many capitalists were celebrating what political scientist Francis Fukuyama called the "ultimate victory of the VCR": where consumerism sank communism. However, they failed to calculate the effects of this consumerism on the environment. They also failed to predict how the public would start to tire of a situation in which a very small percentage of capitalists are reaping all the benefits while the rest of us are sinking deeper and deeper into debt, poverty and powerlessness.

Public dissatisfaction with the status quo began to spread in new directions in 2008, feeding into the global Occupy movement in 2011, and mass support for Bernie Sanders today. People are enraged; we feel doped, scammed, cheated.

An increasing proportion of the population is becoming receptive to the messages of the professors, activists, clergy, artists and other community organizers who have long been dismissed as "too radical," while the capitalist machine roars on and on. Dr. Richard D. Wolff has long been warning the US public that the capitalist machine is one of the biggest scams in history, and now it's finally becoming clear to the general public.

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You'll be teaching a seminar, "Capitalism and Socialism in the 20th Century," that focuses on your work in July at The Commons in Brooklyn, New York. What are your objectives in teaching this course?

The 20th century was one comprised of a cataclysmic struggle between two opposing ideologies: capitalism and socialism.... Toward the end of the century, around 1989-1990, one of these two ideologies, socialism collapses. The Soviet Union implodes, Eastern Europe follows in its wake, and in China some basic changes begin to manifest in terms of direction and orientation. China's shifts were made so that it could become popular and competitive in the new world order, which is globalized, unabated capitalism. Capitalism won, end of story.

.....(snip).....

Questions such as "What did we do wrong?" "What can we do differently?" "What was valuable in what socialism achieved despite its collapse?" "What was repugnant or didn't work in socialism?" And these sets of questions have produced, in the period between 1990 and 2016, a horizon of self-criticisms coupled with new directions for socialism in the 21st century.

.....(snip).....

Podemos is having gains and the traditional socialist parties no longer have the traction they once had. In France and in Germany, the democratic socialist parties are all falling apart. So you see classic socialism fading rapidly, and the same is true of capitalism. Capitalism, with its inherent injustices, is speeding into a stone wall, and everyone's staring at the wall but doesn't know what to do, like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. ............(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36319-richard-wolff-on-the-changing-tides-of-capitalism-and-socialism