"the capitalist organization of production has now finished its period of usefulness in human histor
Richard Wolff has emerged as one of the most prominent progressive economists in America. He appears on Free Speech TV, Link TV, and Pacifica Radio, and has been a repeat guest on Bill Moyers’s program, as well as appearing on Charlie Rose’s show. His books include Capitalism Hits the Fan, Occupy the Economy, and Democracy at Work. Wolff got his B.A. from Harvard, a Master’s from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program for international affairs at the New School University in Manhattan, where he lives. Born in 1942 in Youngstown, Ohio, he’s the son of working class parents who were refugees from the Nazis. After his family moved around the Midwest, they relocated to New York. In the 1980s, Wolff ran to be New Haven’s mayor and city councilman on the Green Party ticket.
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Q: Why do business leaders in the United States and Western Europe favor austerity? Doesn’t it reduce demand for their products, and thus lower their potential profits?
Wolff: The question is good. Why are executives of corporations constantly looking for every conceivable way to lower labor costs? The more successful capitalists are in cutting their wage costs, the less money workers will have to buy back what those same capitalists produce. It’s a contradiction.
Sure, businesses would like lots of purchases. But the only way to deal with a depressed economy would be to tax the rich, who are hoarding their money, and move it into the hands of the middle and lower classes, because they’re in a situation where they’ll spend it as fast as they get it. That would solve the problem of demand, but only at the expense of the rich and corporations.
They’ve made a choice: They’d rather tough it out—stick it to the mass of people, even at the cost of losing customers—than be the one who gets hit with the tab for boosting the masses’ purchasing power.
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Q: What’s the alternative?
Wolff: A cooperative enterprise is the key alternative to a traditional capitalist enterprise. All the workers, whatever they do inside an enterprise, have to be able to participate in collectively arriving at the decisions about what, how, where to produce, and what to do with the profits in a democratic way. One person, one vote should decide how these things are done.
The reason why we’re interested in making a transition from the top-down capitalist organization of enterprises to a radically different cooperative or democratic organization is simple: We believe the capitalist organization of production has now finished its period of usefulness in human history. It is now no longer able to deliver the goods.
It’s bringing profits and prosperity to a tiny portion of the population, and delivering not the goods but the “bads” to most people. Jobs are steadily more insecure, unemployment is high and lastingly high, benefits are increasingly being reduced, and the prospects for our children are even worse, as more of them go deeper and deeper in debt to get the degrees that do not provide them with the jobs and incomes to get out of that debt. ..................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://rdwolff.com/content/progressive-interview
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...Wolff is quite candid on these same points. If we ever do go coop, it'll have to be from the top-down. I've tried it the other way and it doesn't work.
- If you have the time, it's worth a watch:
K&R
http://vimeo.com/20355767
[font color=red]It's time to wake up people.[/font]
