Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id908531039
We take very basic, pretty simple ideas and run them through a special hamburger machine, and out comes gobbledygook—the material of textbooks and of classroom lectures—and the young people write it down in their notes and give it back to you on the exam. Then, when they try to apply the so-called learning of economics to the world around them, they find themselves lost. They can’t do it, and they revert, understandably, to what they learned because they don’t have any other vocabulary, basically. And so we end up with a population, and here I include not just the working class, but the media people, the academics, the politicians, the corporate leaders who have been to the same classes—I’ve taught them all, and I can assure you that they don’t understand it any better than the people they’re working with—which has, and I’m going to say this in a simple way, an extraordinarily low level of economic literacy.
✏️ What economists do… take simple concepts and obfuscate them intentionally. 🔗 View Highlight
id908531070
obvious features of ordinary reality that we can perceive without studying economics, that are hugely important to economic reality, and obscure them so that we no longer understand them.
id908531142
Here’s a reality that everybody understands: When you go to work and take a job, there is a person somewhere who has the power to fire you. It’s indeed more or less the same person who had the power to hire you. You don’t have that power over that person, they have it over you. This is rather crucial because it means they are free to do things that might displease you in 10 different ways, but you have no such freedom. And you are living all the time with the absence of that freedom, and no amount of telling you that we live in a world of liberty and harmony and equality takes away the reality of what you know,
id908531484
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and one of the things they do—very establishment, in no way tarnished by any association with Marxism or any other terrible ideology—is they keep track of the economic fluctuations. And they have taught us what everybody knows in economic history, that wherever capitalism has settled down, on average, every four to seven years, it experiences a crash of one kind or another. Some are short and shallow. Others are long and deep. That varies all over the lot, and it’s only an average, but you will not find an exception to that situation. It is an unstable system, and because it happens every four to seven years, it means that those of us that are adults have already, at the time we begin thinking, lived through a bunch of them. Therefore, to deny that instability is a remarkable act of ideological misspecification.
id908531969
his job was to show the answer to the question, why did capitalism not deliver on the promises of liberty, equality and fraternity? His answer is, because capitalism has within it the structural impediments that block it from doing so, so that if you want liberty, equality and fraternity, you’re going to have to go beyond capitalism because it cannot deliver on that promise.
✏️ What Marx had set out to do, simply stated. 🔗 View Highlight
id908532380
central to your analysis of what capitalism is, that is to say, the nature of relationships within the workplace.
✏️ Capitalism isn’t about property and markets.. it’s about wage relationships, right? 🔗 View Highlight
id908532341
Some people like to think of socialism as when the government owns and operates enterprises, the way they did particularly in the Soviet Union, and the way half of the enterprises in China today are organized. And I would argue that’s another mistake. Marx never said that what gets rid of capitalism is if you remove the private individuals and substitute state officials.
id908532343
Robinson Monarchy would be socialism. Wolff Yes, it really is a bizarre idea.
id908532456
One source of the misunderstanding seems to be that, as you say, in Democracy at Work, “most of the anti-capitalist movements that called themselves socialists in the last century did not prioritize, explicitly include, or if they came to power, institute an economic system in which the production and distribution of surplus were carried out by those who produce it.”
✏️ Again, the core part is that capitalism relies on getting more out of the worker than it pays them… When the surplus value stays in the hands of the owner/boss vs those that actually create that value, you have capitalism. Even if that boss is the state vs an individual. 🔗 View Highlight
id908532421
any real socialism, any authentic socialism, is, and I’ll quote you again:
[…]is yearning by people living in a capitalist economic system, whether private or state capitalist, to do better than what that capitalism permits and enables, and that can mean having a work that is more socially meaningful, less physically and environmentally destructive, more secure at delivering an adequate income for yourself, having the lifelong education, leisure and civil freedom to pursue real participation in politics. Socialists want to be able to explore and develop their full potential as individuals and members of society.
id908532670
what they would say is, yes, but you can’t argue against what it produces, which is prosperity, a vast outpouring of wealth. There’s often some version of a chart showing that human wealth exploded in a certain amount. I’m sure you’ve seen the chart where GDP explodes with the onset of capitalism. You say that there are billionaires next to people suffering poverty where you are in New York. But also, look at the New York of today versus New York in 1850.
✏️ Most common defense of capitalism is that, while it may not provide equality and fraternity, those don’t matter in comparison to the wealth and prosperity it creates. Good questions about capitalism. Did capitalism really provide actual benefit and prosperity? 🔗 View Highlight
id908532726
I acknowledge absolutely this argument. Here’s my response. I find it a clever maneuver of the defenders of capitalism to make that argument, and the reason why I feel that way is that every one of the gains they refer to, whether it be in the diet or the work conditions or the housing quality or the schooling, whatever it is, what was unique—and that’s true in the history of England, the United States, the world today—capitalists were always against it. They had to be fought, against massive opposition, to grant any of these things.
✏️ Interesting.. his response is that, all that prosperity provided to the masses? It happened despite massive efforts to prevent it. Capitalists fought to keep those to themselves and had to, I assume begrudgingly and against their will, cede them to the people. 🔗 View Highlight
id908533252
The federal government started in the Great Depression in the 1930s to pass laws mandating a minimum wage. Okay, so we’ve had that since, to be exact, 1938. So, almost a century. It was passed under enormous pressure from below, from the union movement in the United States—the CIO, during the 1930s, abetted by two socialists and one communist party. They all worked together, and they threatened the president, Franklin Roosevelt, that he wouldn’t be president much longer unless he did this, and he was smart enough and understood they were not bluffing him. His political career depended on it, so he went to work, and he got the bill passed. It took him years, during which the opposition was the capitalist class of the United States. The chambers of commerce—that’s their official organization, and subgroups of them, and industrial groups of them—fought it. They delayed it. They were very successful. The idea had been around for decades. They had postponed it, blocked it, delayed it, diluted it, and finally, it passed.
✏️ An example of that capitalist opposition to prosperity to the masses. And it continues to this day, as outlined in next highlight. 🔗 View Highlight
id908533294
The last time the Congress looked at and passed on the minimum wage was in the year 2009, and it was then set at 7.25. During every one of those 16 years, the price level in this country went up, sometimes as little as one or two percent, sometimes as high as nine or 10 percent, but we never raised the minimum wage. And why not? We had Republicans and Democrats in the Congress, in the White House, but one thing both of the two parties managed to do was to savage the people living on a minimum wage. It is extraordinary.
id908533332
if you look at public health, the sewer system, electrification, public education, minimum wages, workplace safety— Wolff The eight-hour day. Robinson —a lot of innovations capitalism doesn’t deserve credit for. These things occurred despite capitalism, due to the struggles of workers.
✏️ Basically, all of the good things we’ve gotten is from the people fighting to get it, not because capitalism provided it outright. 🔗 View Highlight
id908535689
Here’s the most important thing: over the last 40 years, the United States has become deindustrialized. I’m not sure the Europeans get this, even though you’ve had the same thing happened to you. We’re done. Ohio, Pennsylvania—all the areas of concentration of American industry are wastelands. They’re gone. And that all happened after 1970. They all went abroad, and the American working class lost their jobs, most particularly white men, because they were the ones in the unions. They were the ones who fought their battles and got the good wages. And they were the ones that were replaced when you either automated them out of existence, or you moved the jobs to China, Asia, and so on. At the same time—this is so important—that you destroyed the white male working class, you had a movement with different roots, a civil rights movement for Black people and an anti-sexism movement among women, demanding not to have the glass ceiling, demanding not to be treated as second-class. And the genius of the right wing—and I’d take my hat off if I wore one. Here’s their genius: they link these two. [They say] one is the cause, the other the effect. Your job was lost because those white women and those black and brown men took your job. The Democrats gave them your jobs, gave them programs to help them—diversity, inclusion. All of that junk is taking your job. These immigrant invaders made common cause with the evil Democrats, screwing you out of your life and your children as well. Very well done. And guess what? The Democratic Party had no idea how to deal with this, and so they developed a lame me-too-ism, which has landed them in the place they’re in now.
✏️ The propaganda of tying the loss of white jobs and the increase in rights for women and marginalized people within the jobs market. Instant immigrant-hate. 🔗 View Highlight