In
another interesting interview with Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff
explains why the Trump presidency is the last resort of a system that
is about to collapse:
Finally,
if everybody tries to save themselves (protection), we have a
historical example: after the Great Depression that happened in
Europe. And most people believe that it was a large part of what led
to WWII after WWI, rather than a much saner collective effort. But
capitalism doesn't go for collective efforts, it tends to destroy
itself by its own mechanisms.
There
has to be a movement from below. Otherwise, there is no counter force
that can take us in another direction.
So,
absent that counter force we are going to see this system spinning
out of control and destroying itself in the very way its critics have
for so long foreseen it well might.
When
Trump announced his big tariffs on China, we saw the stock market
dropped 700 points in a day. That's a sign of the anxiety, the
danger, even in the minds of capitalists, about where this is going.
If we hadn't been a country with two or three decades of a middle
class - working class paid really well - maybe we could have gotten
away with this. But in a society that has celebrated its capacity to
do what it now fails to do, you have an explosive situation.
Everything
is done to avoid asking the question to what degree the system we
have in place - capitalism is its name - is the problem. It's the
Russians, it's the immigrants, it's the tariffs, it's anything else,
even the pornstar, to distract us from the debate we need to have had
that we haven't had for a half a century, which puts us in a very bad
place. We've given a free pass to a capitalist system because we've
been afraid to debate it. And when you give a free pass to any
institution you create the conditions for it to rot, right behind the
facade.
The
Trump presidency is the last gasp, it's letting it all hang out. A
system that's gonna do whatever it can, take advantage of this
moment, grab it all before it disappears. In France, it was said
'Après
moi, le déluge' (after me the catastrophe). The
storm will break.
Thank you for this blog, I've enjoyed ''on contact with Chris Hedges'' for some time now and believe it to be an enlightening show. This episode was definitely one of their best.
ReplyDeleteThank you!
Delete10 or 11 million poor immigrants of questionable legal status? It's 25 million and they are here ILLEGALLY. You just got done ranting about how the unemployment numbers are rigged to show a low unemployment rate and then you pooh-pooh the idea that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens. That's 25 MILLION! That's probably 10 million jobs that could be recovered for Americans right there. Let's try to be more consistent with our arguments.
ReplyDeleteThis is for you. Enjoy:
DeleteTrump proves he is completely clueless on what's the real reason behind the mass layoffs epidemic in big businesses and how to deal with it