Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome back to Going Underground, broadcasting all around the world from the uae as the world wakes up to sobering results from Brazil ahead of economic superpower China having its fifth Communist party plenum and elections in uk, us, eu, armed genocidal Israel. The wars on Gaza, Iran and Russia through Ukraine continue. Not a day goes by without a widening gap between finance and actual prices for oil and commodities required for human life. Billions have been affected and millions killed, wounded or displaced by the Trump Netanyahu war on Iran. Polling suggests Trump is finished as a president after he endorsed Netanyahu at upcoming elections in Israel. The midterms may set the stage for Trump impeachment and the advance of a Democrat party apparently bent on nuclear war with Russia, though maybe diluting historical DNC support of genocide for Arabs while Western Europe burns with class warfare. Next month could see a trilateral between Putin, Trump and XI at apec. But any optimism has to be tempered by the shadow of NATO nation military escalation cast across Eurasia. Joining me now from New York City is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who co founded the nonprofit Democracy at Work, Professor Richard Wolff. Also, he hosts the podcast Economic Update. Professor Wolff, thank you so much for coming on Going Underground so it's clear Western Europe is not fighting Russia to support Ukraine, clear that the US And Israel are not fighting Iran and Palestine and Yemen for human rights or nuclear weapons. Why are they immiserating their people for these wars?
[00:01:43] Speaker A: They made a terrific mistake, both the United States and Israel, in going into Iran, which most of the people here in the United States already admit. What they're not yet ready to admit is that Europe is making a similar mistake, having lost the link as to being the junior partner of the United States, something they agreed to in 1945.
They are holding on even after Mr. Trump, on behalf of the United States, has thrown them collectively under the bus. They are to become tributaries of the United States the way Latin America has, and that's their future. They don't know what to do. They cannot deny what's going on. They are, for their whole lives devoted to the United States. They made their careers that way, Mr. Mertz, Macron, Benham, all of them. And as a result, they're stuck. How are they going to survive politically?
Demonize Russia, make Russia out so bad that Mr. Putin begins to look like Mr. Stalin was once portrayed, and therefore on that basis justify a rearmament, which is basically a massive fiscal subsidy to big business that does the military and the way to fund that is to Take the money away from public services.
So the French are angry about the public service of education being compromised. The Portuguese, the Italians and others enraged by the lack of support for housing. Wherever you turn, turn.
Public services won over decades by social democracy are being taken away in order to rearm for a war against Russia, which even under their notion, would be a devastating endpoint to this sad story.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: You know what was even more surprising, and perhaps this will come out if they continue to demonize Russia, is that between 2022 and 2026, Russia says it sold 320 billion dol billion worth of Russian energy to the European Union. The EU is saying it's only 209 billion. Either way, it's in the ballpark of 255 billion. The EU says it's poured into the bank accounts of dictator Zelenskyy. Why is it that the European elites don't think there's anything ironic that they're funding Putin's war?
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Because had they not done so, they would have had an even greater inflationary impact on energy costs than they did. Look at Germany. Germany's number one company is Volkswagen. They have laid off 100,000 workers. It's the end of industrialization of the sort that used to be given the name in German, Wirtschaft wunde. You know, the miracle of their economic system. They're going in reverse. And had they not funded cheap energy from Russia, the way the numbers now show, it would have been even worse for them than it was. And they were not prepared for that, as they are not prepared now.
I believe you're about to see in Europe a massive reaction against all of this that will sweep from power the Mertzes, the Macrons and all of the others that had gone along with with this strange end of the post World War II arrangements.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: But can't the elites in Western Europe harness their cultural capital, the films, the television, the literature, to their military Keynesianism, which doesn't seem to be working. As they put up all the surveillance cameras up, and certainly in Britain they're talking about war all the time, and, and across Western Europe, the idea of a draft. Can't they harness military Keynesianism to get their economies kick started and make their countries wartime economies?
[00:06:04] Speaker A: They could, if military Keynesianism could replace what they lost.
But here's the way to understand it in economics.
World Wars I and 2 were the culmination of European colonialism, in which the leading colonial powers slaughtered each other on a spectacular level that the world had never seen before or since, luckily speaking. But that was the end. Of all of those empires, only one survived, the United States. Protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and by the limits of air power at that time, they came through.
You know, Russia lost 27 million people in World War II. The United States death count 400,000.
No comparison between these two. The last 70 years have been the uni empire. The United States inherited, benefited from and consolidated and became the global empire with all the wealth that had been siphoned out of the so called global south to Europe now going instead, here we go, instead here to the United States.
The United States gave a portion of that back to Europe, a kind of debt, if you like, of having inherited all that empire, all that wealth. But they never gave the empire back to the Europeans, so they lost it. And now they're losing what little bit they held onto and it's over. And the question is, can military Keynesianism replace the fantastic transfer of wealth in the 17th, 18th and 19th century into the 20th? And my answer is no. There is no way that that domestic program can do for England or for Europe, all the colonial powers, what they lost. The only way to do that, ironically, would be for European countries to understand the need to reorient themselves to the rest of the world. And there's only one country in Europe that has done that, and that's Russia.
And the lesson there is going to be driven home to the whole world in the months and years ahead.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll get to that. Trump Xi, Putin, trilateral in a second. But just very quick sidebar on that.
Given that people in Western Europe and the education systems teach that Western Europe was the main focus of World War II, not Eastern Europe, not the Soviet front, not Japan and China.
Was Churchill just a dupe then used by the United States to decolonize so that the US could inherit the global South?
[00:09:05] Speaker A: Yes, he was not so much a dupe. He was the front man. He was the public relations character. He could be the hero with the cigar and the top hat and all the rest of it, to make the transition from a European based colonial system to a unipolar moment. Not unipolar only in the government, but unipolar in the much more global empire sense of that term. Yeah, he was a transition, performing his act alongside that of General De Gaulle, who had another role to play in the same transition.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: No wonder pro Nazi aristocrats didn't like him at the time. But I mean, how good are China and Russia at being anti imperialists? I mean, Putin took eight years to intervene in Donbass 14,000 had been killed before he decided to go in.
And they'd been killed obviously by US, uk, EU armed forces and China and Russia.
They didn't go anywhere near Palestine to help stop the genocide in Gaza.
How far have China and Russia succeeded in being anti imperialist over the past year or so?
[00:10:25] Speaker A: I don't think they've been very successful. If that was their goal, I would have to agree that they haven't succeeded. I don't think it was their goal. I think it was their goal to be safely away as much as they could from the disintegration of the unipolar empire moment of the United States.
They want to watch the United States implode on itself, unable to fight two wars at the same time. We are full of information in this country that one of the reasons Mr. Trump can't do what he would like to do in Iran is we don't have. We. The US doesn't have the munitions anymore. Well, that's another way of saying what every other empire that collapsed said in the final years of its collapse. It was overreaching. It was trying in too many ways to hold on to the empire against the resistance of too many people coming at them from too many directions. That's what Iran demonstrates now in the most dramatic way. This relatively poor country that no one in the United States ever took seriously is in the position of blocking the American military from doing what nothing else in the United States can do, which is to bring them to heel, the Russians and the Chinese, but for sure the Chinese, their interest is let's not get drawn into this. And I will tell you why. Because it's an economic story. For the last 35 years, 35 without interruption every year, the economic growth of the GDP, the gross domestic product of China was larger, two to three times what larger than that of the United States.
Therein, everything is understandable.
They have time on their side. They've had it for the last 35 years, which is why they are the power they are now.
The longer they can survive, the better the odds are getting that they will come through the decline of the Western empire in a way that the Western empire cannot do. And so I think what you're watching is you're watching the Chinese watching the west and watching the west learn the lesson. Russia made the deal with China much earlier than the rest of them and is going to be benefiting from it as it already is.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Yeah. By PPP figures Professor Richard Wolff. I'll stop you there. More from the co founder of Democracy At Work and host of Economic Update after this break.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Welcome back to Going Underground. I'm still here with the co founder of Democracy at Work and host of Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff. Professor Wolff, we were talking about, well, the, the next new order, as it were. What about in your country and the so called progressives in the United States, they're the ones that have supported genocide, obviously in Gaza, the war on Russia.
How far can the working classes of America trust this new they use words like socialism and so forth in their rhetoric. How far can the working classes trust them? Ahead of these midterms?
[00:14:16] Speaker A: Well, ahead of these midterms, that is the big question here in the United States, whether they can break out the progressives, the democratic socialists of America, which is the organization that is doing this.
They're trying very hard to break out of their origins. You have to remember when you talk about the United States that for the last 70 years, maybe 75 years, we have lived under a regime. I'm born here in the United States. I've lived and worked in that regime all my life. It is a regime that has demonized anything and everything having to do with the Soviet Union, the arch enemy, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, most of my students who are otherwise intelligent, hardworking, very good young men and women.
But when you ask them about these issues, they talk as if socialism, communism, Marxism, anarchism and many other things are synonyms. They have no concept of them beyond they're bad, they're foreign, they're negative.
Therefore, for there to even be a serious socialism in this country, which there now is, is an amazing achievement.
The whole country is indebted to Bernie Sanders because he broke the taboo by saying, no, I'm not going to run away from the label socialist. But we are in the early stages now, so it's basically too early to answer your question. Beyond saying it's very impressive how quickly it's growing.
The latest Gallup polls in our country show that if you ask people below the age of 34, the majority now say they prefer socialism to capitalism and just interrupt there.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: They're defining it by class because increasingly what people, and certainly the poor, dare I say it, white working classes mostly, it seems about identity politics rather than any issue of class. The public face of it is that is what, what is Mahmoud Mamdani and what do they mean by this Marxism that they talk about? Because it doesn't seem recognizable by anyone in, I don't know, in the global South?
[00:16:54] Speaker A: No, your question is perfectly appropriate, but the answer is Literally that the American socialist left is a completely new phenomena. It is clear. Rejecting the capitalism we have and we live in, its inadequacy is the ground zero. Everybody agrees on that. The minute you get into the specifics of what socialism would mean, you get every variety. You get a pale imitation of what Scandinavia used to represent.
Basically, socialism is when the government does a bit more in the way of public services than it does in countries where socialists are weak.
That's all they mean. And so when they get power, they have more government programs. Mr. Mamdani, and I'm speaking to you from New York City. Mr. Mamdani is famous in our city. Very popular as a mayor, an openly socialist Muslim to beat.
But he is very popular because he has government programs.
He speaks to the working class. He talks. He wants the working class support. So do the socialists generally.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I should have said Zoran Muhammadani, we've had his father on the show talking about Sudan brilliantly. And whereas obviously with his father, we can take what he says seriously. There's no priority. The sun clearly is. The suspicion is they're using these buzzwords to attract the poor and the working classes of New York to their policies.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
But they are beginning to do it. And I think what you will see, I'm very confident about this, you will see in the months and years ahead the emergence of people who define socialism differently. At this point, all those people are not wanting to dim the opening to socialism that Mamdani and Ocasio, Cortez and the others and Bernie have achieved. They don't want to tarnish, they don't want to split. But they are right behind there developing their own notion of what socialism is, that is picking up the global south definitions, the old European traditions. I'm asked to teach courses in which what the students want to learn is have me explain to them what Rosa Luxemburg had to say or what Antonio Gramsci had to say, or what Louis Altusser had to say. They are rediscovering, or maybe I should be more accurate, they are discovering all of this history and that is important, and gonna develop a diversified socialism here that you will find more recognizable looking at it from the standpoint of Europe or the Global South.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: And how is the military industrial complex in your country gonna take this so far? Elite level formation.
How is the military industrial complex going to take it? And was it important that Israel and the genocide in Palestine obviously had a big influence over catalyzing this movement in terms of.
Well, just look at American Jews who now don't favor Israel elections tomorrow, I should say in Israel itself, for what that's worth.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Well, I think the model here is the military industrial complex. As was noted by our President Eisenhower at the end of his term he warned the American people that this was a danger, that there was a coming together of the military producers with the military apparatus. The producers wanted the money of government contracts. So they bought the representatives, they went into the Congress, gave the contracts to the businesses, they gave donations to the politicians. It became a very cozy self reproducing totality. And I want to just to show you how powerful they are. We are now dealing with a budget proposal for the coming year which has just begun here, the fiscal year which will move defense spending in the United States from the current level of $900 billion to $1.5 trillion. That's a 2/3 increase in, in one year. So the military industrial complex has been the pioneer, but we now have a medical industrial complex. Four industries that explain why we pay more for a medical care in this country than any other country on earth as a percentage of gdp.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: And because of the. Just to make it clear, this passes through Congress because the Congress itself is completely corrupt
[00:22:03] Speaker A: absolutely.
These conglomerates learning from the military. Now it's been four doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers and medical insurance, because we don't have a national insurance, all the medical insurance is private. You have to pay for it through your job or otherwise. So they've gotten together and gotten a fantastic deal. Which is one of the reasons why American capitalism is in trouble.
Because the private capitalist has to pay this monopoly for the medical coverage of the worker. The government doesn't do it and that has hurt the capitalists, but they can't control it. Well, why am I telling you this? Because everybody can play this game. You know who learned how to play the game? Israel.
We have something here called aipac.
It is an association of wealthy Jewish and non Jewish interest groups in this country, buying and controlling the politicians who in turn fund Israeli wars, who in turn order the equipment from the American manufacturer. You see, it's the same game, it's just this time with a foreign country playing a role which normally it wouldn't have played. But that's why our politics are so weird. We're the only country that basically supports Israel in the world. Now they figured out to their credit the game that had to be played. But here's the problem, everybody else is now aware of it. And so we're seeing elections here in New York won by the candidate who is able to say about his or her opponent. They're funded by aipac. They're in the pocket of the military. It's become.
Hegel would have loved this as a German philosopher. It has become its own opposite from being the guarantee of controlling the Congress. These people are now in the process of losing it for the same reason.
And the socialists are going to pick up on this. They may not understand.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: But to make it clear though, aoc, Bernie Sanders, these type of figureheads, they support the war on Russia through Ukraine while Trump is trying to seek to end it. Just explain why it is that the so called progressive left want war on Russia through Ukraine. They vote and want more money being sent to Zelensky. Whereas Trump property developer sends another property developer to try and negotiate a deal.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Yeah, Mr. Trump is being pragmatic. He denounces communism, socialism. By the way, he's one of the people, like my students, although he has no excuse about being young, who equates socialism, communism, Marxism. He adds something which even my students don't do. He adds fascism. For him, that's also a synonym. And he puts them together in his speeches.
But this is different. The Democratic Party is still the party of the left, half of the population.
That's why Bernie and all of them, including Mamdani, still have positions in that party. Because if you're going to be left of center, that's where you will have been for the last 75 years.
You have to understand that because when Trump defeated, yes, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, instead of Clinton apologizing to the working class for having abandoned them, which her husband and she have always done, she found a scapegoat. And the scapegoat was Russia and Mr. Putin. And therefore a propaganda began which continues to this day, led by the Democratic Party, led by them and the most right wing parts of the Republican who could clam onto this, of scapegoating Russia as though it were the danger. We have two scapegoats in the United States. One are immigrants, like in Europe.
There's always a right wing politician willing to blame immigrants for anything and everything imaginable and carefully forgetting that it was the leading capitalists in our countries that brought the immigrants in as cheap labor for the whole game anyway, forget all that.
But the other demon beside the immigrant has been Russia. And here you're counting on 75 years of cold War.
I encounter, and it's not rare, just so you know, here in New York, I encounter perfectly nice people. We have a conversation and they don't know. It becomes clear that Something happened in 1990 that radically altered what Russia was relative to the rest of the world.
In other words, they don't know the Soviet Union. Bye bye.
Something else, whatever you want to call it, takes its place.
There is a notion of. That was developed over 75 years of genuinely relentless propaganda. And I'm a product of the elite universities.
I went to Harvard, Stanford and Yale. That's all I went to. And I can assure you, at those high levels, I was surrounded by people who felt that way.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: Professor Richard Wolf.
Professor Richard Wolf. We're out of time. Thank you.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: Okay, that's my pleasure. Thank you.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: And that's it for the show. Our condolences to all those of you bereaved or affected by Washington's wars of aggression. We'll be back on Saturday with a brand new show. Until then, you can keep in touch. Fire all our social media if it's not censored in your country, and head to our channel, goingundergroundtv on rubble.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Underground. See you Saturday.
