Economic Update
U.S. Capitalism At The Crossroads
Sendetermin 06.02.2024 09:30 bis 10:00
This week's updates are divided into two parts. Part A: the special dimensions and qualities of the US labor movement's current dynamism, Piketty shows capitalism generates widening wealth and income gaps leading to crashes or else simmering, divisive, domestic resentments. The system itself becomes destabilized. It can then lurch to the left as happened via The New Deal in the USA or right as in Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain (fascism). Both movements advocated gov 't intervention to stabilize capitalism: one left, one right. The left worked via massive supports to working people (minimum wages, gov't jobs, social security, etc.). The right went to try forced labor, anti-immigrant efforts, demonizing immigrants to support employers. Turns right have their parallels now: Brexit, Trump, Milei (Argentina) and Miloni in Italy. The big question: since all the rightward moves failed and sent Germany, Italy and Spain over into social democracy." Will their behavior be equalled again?"
Information zur Sendereihe
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, and the University of Paris I (Sorbonne).
Wolff has published many books and articles, both scholarly and popular. Most recently, in 2012, he published the books Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket Books) and Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with Stephen Resnick (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT University Press). He writes regularly for Truthout.org.
He has been interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show, Up With Chris Hayes, Bill Maher’s Real Time, RT-TV, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera English, Thom Hartman, National Public Radio, Alternative Radio, and many other radio and TV programs in the United States and abroad. The New York Times Magazine named him “America’s most prominent Marxist economist.”
Email: programmrat@helsinki.at
Website: http://www.democracyatwork.info/