Fox Paine & Company

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Today on The Laura Flanders Show - is socialism still an American taboo? Not so much says Prof. Richard Wolff, host of a hit podcast on the subject. Then - nor was it ever, says Nation columnist John Nichols author of The "S" Word. And an F Word from me in which I propose renaming capitalism. Welcome to our program. So, Bernie Sanders, who calls himself an "independent socialist" is running for President of the United States. Fox News is still out there calling President Obama a socialist. The U.S. is making peace with the socialism of Cuba but saber-rattling still over the socialism of Venezuela. Our next guest is here to help us try to make sense of all these different socialisms. Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at University of Massachusetts and visiting professor in the graduate program of international affairs at the New School University here in New York. He's co-authored or authored more than a dozen books, including his most recent, "Capitalism's Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown 2010-14." He also hosts the weekly Economic Update podcast, one of my favorites. Rick, welcome back to the program, glad to have you. Thank you Laura. One of the things you talk about so brilliantly in your podcast is the question of education as a commodity. Just quickly, can you talk about how that commodity, that value, is spread about, or not? Yeah, I think that it's a catastrophe, frankly, that education is understood as some object that you buy, like any other commodity, so you decide whether it's worth it or not, and you think about it as an individual, "should I spend the money, will it pay off?" Education is something that changes the community, changes the whole society. We want to live in a society where people are educated, where people can enjoy a vast array of things in life, and bring their own creativity out for themselves and for everybody else. It's the quintessential "social arrangement," the way we relate to one another. If we want to live in a good society, a commitment to first class education is the first thing we would do if we understood the importance to all of our lives. And not just to the narrow question of making a living or making a profit. That's the tragedy. That's why in our times now, when we're having economic difficulty, we as a nation are cutting education, when anyone with half a brain would know that the future of the United States in a world economy depends more on the quality and quantity of educated people we produce than on anything else. We are shooting ourselves in the foot because we're so focused on the profit/ loss statement we don't understand the broader meaning and significance and benefit to all of us of a good education system for everybody. Now, it's a classic example of "we" vs. "me" thinking. We in the U.S. tend to do the "me" thinking. But the socialist countries we're talking about focus more on the "we." You're seeing extraordinary turnout to your sessions around the country teaching about socialism. How do you explain it? I think Americans are finally coming to terms with the fact that this isn't just another economic downturn, that this is a long, deep crisis, that there isn't an upturn around the corner, despite all the talk about recovery. And they're asking questions like intelligent people would do. What's going on? Why is this happening? And then the big one: could we do better than this? And suddenly, since I deal with those questions, I'm in demand, and I won't deny, there's an ego gratification here that is part of the story. Well, it's pretty fascinating. I mean I've been to a bunch of your monthly updates which are live events in a church basement in New York City once a month. The crowd has done nothing but grow, at least this year. Week after week, you've got hundreds of people cramming in that room to talk about what is socialism, what is happening in our economy, and what are some of the ways of understanding what is going on, now that people are paying the attention that they are? Well I was hesitant, for example, to schedule a discussion of socialism, but so many people asked that I realized, okay, the taboo has been broken. It was unacceptable in America for most of the post-war period, since 1945, to talk about this because you had a kind of aroma that you were being unpatriotic, that you were not a lover of our country, and all of that kind of talk. Which was effective and shut people down and freaked them out and frightened them. Even at the end of the Cold War, when the big bugaboo of the Soviet Union had imploded on itself, it still seemed, decade after decade - it's been 25 years now - that it was still impossible. And then, with the crash of 2008, everything has changed. I mean it is fairly significant that a man who called himself for years an independent socialist is running for President of the United States, albeit on the Democratic Party ticket. What do you make of the Sanders' candidacy? I think it's the same phenomena as I'm encountering: that he realizes that - there's two ways of saying it - either the taboo against socialism has lifted, and I'm sure that's part of what going on; but the other part is, all of the rest of American politics has moved several steps to the right, so that a man like Bernie Sanders is all that there is left of center that's running, and otherwise there'd be nobody, and he is looking to cash in on a gathering of people for whom everybody else is so problematic that he looks, by comparison, to be the right one. So let's define a few terms. What's the difference between socialism in western Europe, northern Europe, Venezuela, and Cuba, Latin America? Is it the same animal? It is and it isn't. Socialism has a long history. It starts before Karl Marx, even though his name is associated with it. But I think the most important thing to understand is, from a relatively few people in a few parts of Europe calling themselves Socialists at the end of the 18th or early 19th century, over the next 150 years the thing spreads globally. That's an incredibly short time, historically, for an idea to become part of the life of every country on this planet. If things go that quickly, then there's no alternative but to see people interpreting it differently depending on their own religions, their own cultures, their own histories. What Cubans mean by socialism, what Venezuelans mean, what Swedes mean, what Nigerians mean, that couldn't possibly be the same. They don't interpret Christianity the same, they don't interpret almost anything the same. I think there you find the explanation for why the word socialism is on the one hand so very attractive to people and yet so differently interpreted. Now there is that word "social," right there in the middle. And that has something to do with it, right? Absolutely. What? The early critics of capitalism. Let me take a step back. Every system, like capitalism, whether it's slavery or feudalism or any other systems we've had as our economic arrangements, have always had people who loved them and people who felt we could do better. There's nothing new about a criticism of capitalism. It was part of the birth of that system itself. And the people who were critical, who weren't happy about how capitalism was evolving already in the 19th century, looked around for a word, because that's part of the problem. How do we capture in a word what we don't like about capitalism? And the word - there were many candidates, but the one that ended up being in people's minds, the way to grasp that idea, was to say, in capitalism, everybody is for himself, herself as an individual. Put the community out of your mind, put the collectivity out of your mind. Margaret Thatcher famously said "there is no such thing as community, only individual." Absolutely. You're on your own, you're on your own goal, you're gonna build yourselves, we're all for ourselves. It's Adam Smith. If we all do what's good for us individually, it'll somehow magically work out to be the best for everybody. Socialists were always the people who said "no no no, that's nutty." If you want the community to be good, if you want the society you live in to be good, you have to work at that. That has to be part of what you care about, what you give yourself to. If you give yourself only to yourself, you will end up maybe being rich, but you will be the loneliest person on the planet. And the criticisms of capitalism settled around this word. "We're not individualists, we are committed to a good community, a good society; we are Social-ists." And it also has wrapped up in the idea, an idea of central planning. That we will plan society somehow, right? Yes, because if you care about the society, then you have to work some plan of how to go about making a good society. You know, I like to point out to people that, whenever a corporate leader tries to figure out how to organize his or her organization, they get together a group of people who spend all day every day planning the community of this corporation: the thousands of employees, the relationships with the vendors. Capitalism is not the negative of planning. Capitalism does planning, but always for a few people, for the benefit of the few. It is not socialist planning, where the whole idea was, you plan for the benefit of the community, of the totality. So give us an example. I mean, I get it. Slavery took a lot of planning, it was a decision. Give us an example of by shareholders now that maybe would be different if we took it out of their hands. Well at this point, shareholders have become ancillary to most companies. The planning is in the hand of a group of people that are elected by the shareholders. They elect this thing called the "board of directors," 15, 20 people that sit at the top of the pyramid of all of the major corporations anywhere in the world. And to them is assigned the task: plan. Decide where you're gonna produce, decide how you're gonna produce. They organize the technological choices the company makes. They decide who to employ, how to employ, what the pay, what the change, what price to charge. All the big decisions are made by a tiny group of people (or their assistants) so everything is planned, but two key things: it's planned by a tiny minority of people, without the participation of everybody else; and it is planned for their benefit, as corporate executives, or for the shareholders that gave them their jobs as board of directors. So we have planning, but it is for the private benefit of the few, and the whole idea of socialism was planning for everybody. But it's not planning or not planning, that's a mistake. And how does environmental crisis affect all of this? I mean, one of the situations we have right now is students and activists and others petitioning oil companies and gas companies to please pay attention to global warming. This is an odd way to plan our future as a planet. Right, and it's perfect fodder for this socialism vs. capitalism, because if your only interest is to plan to make the most money you can, the most profit for your company, the most income for your shareholders, then you put aside the other questions, you don't worry about that. The worst example in the world is the shift of the last 20 years, from producing the clothing we all wear here, nearby, to producing it 10,000 miles away in Bangladesh, or China or India, and then bringing it 10,000 miles back, wasting enormous amounts of energy, polluting the air and the water as we do it. That was profitable, that's why it was done, but it wasn't a plan, because anyone with even a little bit of ecological sense would have said, to save the planet, which we do as the planned outcome of our society, that's crazy, that only makes sense if you're planning how to make profit for a company, then you do that. And I think for socialists it's always been "of course the planet has to be taken care of," that's part of what it means to take care of a society, is to preserve your relationship to nature. The private capitalist is not worried about the society - that's what capitalism is - and that's why capitalists have an instinctual resistance against ecological and environmental thinking: because it's very close to the old socialist idea that what ought to be decided is what's good for the community as a whole, rather than what makes money for a minority. This is some of what Naomi Klein writes about in "This Changes Everything." Absolutely. The other thing you have to do is build political power. I'm looking at Spain, I'm looking at Greece, even Alberta, Canada, and seeing other countries are way further along in building movements and parties related to those movements expressing some of these ideas than we are here. What's holding us back? I think that we haven't yet accepted that the crisis is as deep, and the crisis is as long, as it actually is. And I understand it. I'm an American, I understand my fellow citizens: they don't want to see what's a scary sight. They don't want to face what is scary. And I notice that it took a long time for the Greeks to go through a very bad struggle, before Syriza becomes an important political movement. The same thing in Spain before Podemos does, the same thing in Alberta before the new Democratic party galvanizes, and I think there are signs that things that have been percolating slowly have suddenly speeded up. The leader in Alberta, the leader in Spain, they're all women. They're women coming to the fore, playing a role in a left-wing rejection of all that has come before. I think it's accumulating. When it goes, it goes very fast. Everybody was surprised by the outcome in Alberta, couldn't imagine it. The government in Spain still hasn't made a statement cause it can't get over what happened in the month of May to the elections there. Two major cities never presented electing people who will be mayors, who are women from the left, one a former Communist, one a former fighter of evictions. Absolutely, and the fighter for evictions in Barcelona is becoming a regional hero, inspiring people, it's remarkable. And Syriza, with all the negative publicity it gets, is also fighting to change Greece from the top to the bottom, and even opposition parliamentarians in Greece acknowledge that this left wing government - which they don't like cause it's left wing - has had more courage to fight, to free Greece from being the small poor corner of Europe, than all of the previous governments, and that's why the support is there. And I think we will be surprised in the United States by how fast it goes when that last little moment comes, the way we were in the autumn of 2011 when Occupy Wall Street came literally out of nowhere and became the determining metaphor for what was going on in the next four/five months. Rick Wolff thanks so much for coming in, it's always great to talk with you. My pleasure, thank you Laura. You can find more information about Rick Wolff's podcast at our website. Nation magazine reporter John Nichols has written a whole book about socialism in the USA - The "S" Word. It has a long and storied American history, in fact, he says. Last summer I had a chance to ask John about his book and more - for more information about The "S" Word, you can go to our website. I'm John Nichols. I write about politics for The Nation magazine, but one of the things I'm most interested in is social movements and political movements. And one of the things that always strikes me is that we have a very poor sense of history as regards our social movements in America. The fact of the matter is that many ideologies have deep roots in this country. You can find Libertarian streams that go back to the founding of the Republic. You can also find socialist streams to the founding of the Republic. Tom Paine's last great pamphlet was called Agrarian Justice and in it he outlined a theory of a social welfare state. In the years that followed, radical activists were often referred to by even The New York Times as red painites - i.e. that they were advocating for ideas oulined in Agrarian Justice, a rather social democratic notion. The Republican Party was clearly founded by many people who identified as social Democrats, including some friends of Karl Marx who had immigrated after the 1848 uprisings in Europe. And it just goes on throughout our history. The truth of the matter is that America has a very rich, radical, socialist, social democratic history and when we begin to look at it what we find is that it didn't always define this country but it added ideas to the discourse. And I think that's part of our crisis today. Our discourse has become very very narrow and very defined by wealthy and powerful folks. We don't have the inputs that we used to have, demanding social security, Medicare, Medicaid. Demanding civil rights, demanding big changes. Now that's not to say that we don't have movements today that are making demands, and some of them are rising. And we have a new era where we're seeing things happen. But we outta understand that it was not uncommon in the era of say, Franklin Roosevelt, to have President Roosevelt sit down with Norman Thomas, a socialist candidate for president of the United States. It's very comfortably to have John Kennedy read socialist Michael Herrington's book The Other America and to have Lydon Johnson invite Herrington, as well as radicals like A. Philip Randolph to the White House to outline ideas for how to address poverty. What about Lincoln? Well Lincoln was a fascinating case. Abraham Lincoln was a great reader of Horace Greeley's New York Herald-Tribune and other publication that Greeley put out over the years and the important thing to understand was that Karl Marx was Greeley's European correspondent and so there's very little question that Abraham Lincoln read really radical ideas and read a lot of really radical ideas. And what's interesting is - in a book I did on all this - it's interesting that when you listen to Lincoln speeches you will find that while I wouldn't necessarily say he was a social Democrat except on some land issues, I think he he may have been there - but what I will say is that he often integrated language that was clearly radical ideas, class analysis, talking about the importance of labor as it relates to capital, you think "well wow, that's certainly sounding like a foreign idea" No, that was something that abraham Lincoln talked about in his first state of the union address. Who is Meyer London? Meyer London was an immigrant from Lithuania who came to New York and his father had been an activist. He grew up in the Lower East Side, he became very active in needle trades, the unions that make clothing. In the early years of the 20th century, that was a big deal. Meyer London represented many of the rising unions. He was an activist. And in 1914, 100 years ago, Meyer London filed his paperwork to run for the United States Congress as a socialist. He ran against a Democrat and a Republican, from the Lower East Side, and he was elected. Now what's fascinating about this was, that when he was elected, it wasn't that big a deal. Because, in New York City, there was a large social democratic, socialist movement there and it wasn't that shocking to people. He went up to Congress and served in Congress as a very bold, very radical player. As did another socialist elected from Milwaukee two years earlier, Victor Burger. And I think this is one of the things that people ought to understand - that historically, we have had socialists sit in our Congress, we've had social Democrats sit in our Congress, we've had some very very radical people there. And they had not hectored from the sidelines, they have often framed out ideas and important ideas, and Meyer London, as we note the 100th anniversary of his election to Congress was someone who was a great leader on a host of economic issues, healthcare issues, social justice issues, trade union issues framing out much of what would become the new deal but also on issues like anti-Semitism, and civil rights.This is an important part of our history. When we deny third parties, and I will say third parties on the right and the left and groupings that are outside of our mainstream politics. When we deny that history, we don't understand how things happen. Things happen when people on the Lower East Side of New York elect a guy like Meyer London to Congress. [music] That was The Nation magazine's John Nichols interviewed last year. You'll find a link to his book, the S Word at our website. Not so long ago, Yale University received a $150 million gift, that looked like a lot until Harvard scooped up $400 million a few weeks later. Both gifts came from Wall Street speculators, Blackstone group CEO and Founder Stephen Schwarzman and hedge fund executive John. S. Paulson. Paulson's donation alone was more money than 98% of US colleges have in their entire endowments. It shows just how bad inequality's become, said critics, it also reveals a thing or two about what's become of our democracy. As economist Richard Wolff’s pointed out, with their charitable contributions Paulson and Schwarzman gave – in one case to endow an engineering school and in the other to build an arts center (Yale’s third.) But the multi billionaires also took – from the state – that's because under the law they can use their gifts to their alma maters, to pay less to Uncle Sam in tax. Wolff calculates Schwarzman will save upwards of $75 million –and Paulson way more. Public coffers, stretched already, will be that much worse off. Yale was already the second richest college in the country. Harvard the first. The two have scholarship funds and claim to consider all qualified applicants. But lets face it - If as a society we really wanted to diminish inequality and reduce the problems associated with unequal access to education and opportunity – would we really be giving more millions to a few private schools while the mass of public one cry out for books? Freedom of choice for those who can choose. Say the boosters. That's what makes capitalist economies distinct. From the communist or socialist sort. We let the self, not the state decide our fate. That's what makes capitalism great, "we" as oppose to "they" believe in maximum freedom for those who have money and minimum government. If such is the way things are, let’s at least tweak the terminology. As "selfish" as a word is taken, let’s call capitalism what it is: anti-socialism. It’s flat out anti-social and proud of it. Tell me what you think, write to me - [email protected]. And thanks. [music]