Ask Prof Wolff: Socialism's Biggest Failures
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- A Patron of Economic Update asks: "Could you provide an analysis on the failures of the more prominent socialist societies in recent history and the contributing factors to these failures, real or perceived?"
This is Professor Richard Wolff's video response.
Submit your own question to be considered for a video response by Prof. Wolff on Patreon: / community .
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“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
Power does corrupt too, though. It's a double whammy.
This is so well put ~ we need an electoral system that doesn't favour bigots, and/or the corruptible, and/or those of seductive simplistic thinking, i.e. proponents this or that propaganda !!
@@martinhealourlovecamden9191 Maybe a new species. Money is the culprit. Take money out of the equation and these things can't exist. We are not created equal.
@@patrickvanmeter2922
I have designed 3 voting systems that remove the winning party from being the one with the best funded propaganda ~ but no one will listen to me; not even the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) ~ they are all STV bigots, obsessed with mathematics, not with what serves the populous best, nor what the public can understand ~ omg !!
My 3 systems I call:
Alternate Candidate (AC),
1st, 2nd, No, No (12NN),
and
Electronic Plato's Repiblic (EPR) !!
AC promotes meaningful / helpful publics debate ~ not just a Punch & Judy Show beteen different kinds of damage.
12NN normalises negative voting ~ we can all eliminate parties that we hate or fear ~ e.g. Tories, Labour & Fascists or Communists ~ chose 2 of these to vote against, then chose 1st and 2nd from what's left ~ i.e. those candidates / parties that have engaged their brains before standing for election !!
With EPR, we all vote online for someone / anyone who wants to stand (maybe zillions of candidates) ~ we vote for someone who's great at raising / educating / not damaging children (i.e. the next generation), and preferably someone we know personally, and all votes can be changed at any time, so politicians who turn evil can be removed from office right away ~ and all votes cascade upwards to give our top candidates for locals government, and 600 MP's for the UK House of Commons ~ who then elect their leader, deputy leader, and cabinet members in the same way !!
I have solution for equal numbers of female politicians with any all female shortlists too ~ so don't anyone say that I haven't thought this through !!
I've just thought of another great and even more simple voting system called GET RID OF THE GARBAGE (GROTG) ~ here you just give a negative vote to one to all parties on the list ~ no point in hating them all, as this is the same as not voting at all ~ then if you hate all but one party / independent, then it's the same as first past the post (FPTP) as we (in the UK) have now already ~ but you can also leave unhated as many parties / independents as you like ~ hating no one being the same as not voting at all !!
Who's with me on any of my new electoral systems ~ AC, 12NN, PER or GROTH ~ let's try out, GROTG with this choice of 4 now !!
Or make it a choice of 5 systems:
AC, 12NN, EPR, GROTG & FPTP (as we have at the moment in the UK) !!
Off you all go ~ vote negatively RIGHT NOW ....
Dear Professor Wolff,
I am a 17 year old high school senior from Louisiana but I’ve never had a fleshed out lesson in politics or economics in my entire public school experience. Do you think our schools should focus more on these topics and if so how do you think we can better educate children and teens about the complex structure of our economic and political systems?
Thank you🌹
Intro classes to sociology, critical thinking, and actually teaching history is a good place to start.
Jesus man Louisiana’s school system is awful. I read an intro to the civil war in one of their textbooks which was pretty explicitly pro confederacy.
Good on you for managing to find your way out of the bs they teach in schools.
Nations by and large create compulsory education for their children - not due to compassion, but rather to serve a purpose. If one is interested in subjects not included within that, gotta do the effort on one's own.
that's the point,they dont teach you the most important lesson .
I am a freshman here in Arizona, I think I am considered as a socialist, I do believe that the political things you talked about should not be in our curriculum just because we have an unfair democracy. If we do that in public school, then the government is in charge of the political ideologies so we might be effected to be an extreme-anti communism and socialism people just because the books are not always right.
@@fattyacid1901 i wouldn't suggest a libertarian economist as a good introduction about how the economy work. Richard Wolff wrote a book where be discribe neo-liberal economy thinking, Keynesian economics and Marxian economics it is a very good book to get some basic understanding of economics theories
Professor, regarding what you said that the socialist countries did not achieve, I think the current world economy is built under the framework of the capitalist economic system.
If a socialist country wants to compete with developed capitalism in such an environment National competition, it cannot start from the social structure you mentioned, but must first enter the capitalist stage, and then carry out socialist reforms.
Just like Marx said, communism is an advanced stage of socialism, and Socialism can only be achieved when capitalism develops to a certain stage.
The prerequisite for such a reform is that the government must have sufficient power to suppress the power of capital. Once such power is lost, just like the United States today, it will not be able to carry out effective reforms at all.
I want to apologize to the honest Marxists for my audacity to say wrong sometimes. I just learned something awesome about the versatility and unimagined creativity of the people to defeat capitalism . China truly is a historic lesson of immense importance.
Some say that things work in mysterious ways in another context and China is an extraordinary context indeed.
nonono
It`s not mystery. You should see what the nearly 200 million Chinese Communist Party members, Communist Youth League members and community volunteers have done. This is How China Socialism Working.
The Key is organaizing Work Class.Or just organazing the community members.
However, the organazing need sufficient material basis. This is Why we still consider Marxist is right.
But we also need to konw every science model is right when it is model.
So the CPC`s logic is
Work Class is Core, pushing whole society towards better place. This is political principle.
Capital is objective matters, using it with other differrent ideology and social form, to make Work Class live better. This is technical principle.
It`s look like Chinese Work Class take other country Work Class benefit away, but the truth is the capital market make other nations people lost job or have low laborage. "It`s not Russian problem, it`s international problem." as Rosa Luxemburg critique the soviet of Russian when Lenin and Trotsky keeping it.
For me , the reality is: China is not a Communist nation, It`s a native nation have a Work Class regime by CPC.
I m a communist, a marxist, a leninist, a maoist. But the reality is so much chinese is not communist, marxist, even a maoist. They don`t care about what is communist, what is socialism, even many of chinese don`t know who is Carl Marx, they often think Marx`s last name is Ma(马，姓氏）as chinese culture.
Most of chinese people just think about my life better or worse just like The Texan who want to have bigger farms. So I have to say the economic fundamental is not what marxist think but what economic community is.
In my mind, the socialism is not destory capitals, we could`t destory a social relationship subjectively, but control capitals for most of people in social.
So in my eyes, the Chinese Work Class`s biggest problem is not capital, but chinese bureaucracy.
Bigger economic community need bigger organization, bigger organization makes bigger bureaucracy. Sience 1980s, the chinese socialism direct problem is bureaucracy influence peddling. The democratic running theory in china is not different from US or UK. Senator or people's representative represent his own interest group.
Foreigner usually think the CPC is the source of power for goverment organization, actually, the Chinese People's Congress is. In this congress, worker, small producer, capitalist participate in democracy. But the problem is bureaucracy.
emmmm, I have to do some housework, after all, every one have their own shoes and we know ourself by know other people.
@@heinomaland6744 the religious people use to say that God works in mysterious ways. I made it more objective in the context of the world's socialist revolution in process of which China represent an alternative . I am certain many other propositions ignored are in action in many other fronts. Argentina and it's projects of recovery of productive infrastructure, Bolivia and the Democratic front that gave the people of Bolivia an electoral victory. Many things to learn of the Soviets experience are to be assessed. Cuba has some contributions. Is an international revolution underway.
@@heinomaland6744 my first reply clarified the " mysterious " word. And after reading carefully your reply. I realize how important is for the Chinese people leadership to learn the American working class experience in its relationship with the USA's corporate class now deserting the USA's workers and going abroad to China and others. Yourself said exactly the reason for this other reply. The bureaucracy as a problem. And on the other side the convenience and pragmatic acceptance of the capital investments for technological and financial advantage. I comprehend that attitude. Is a double edge sword. If smart and wise it is indeed producing an advance but at the same time giving force to a potential and living threat. It is prudent to review the new deal era of the USA. How that " deal" gave birth to the present administrative state and how it evolved in transforming from the greatest ever administration infrastructure and era of industrial superspecialization to imperialism domination and today's world market and then to a betrayal of that deal or " truce" . Presently the corporate class is in the process of attempting to dismantle and destroy all achievements the working class of the USA achieved. The new deal is over for them and all democratic games are a burden for the wealthy. Fascism is the active inclination on a daily basis. To China represent the same threat in your bureocracy. Potentially the wealthy may easily corrupt and betray all possible concessions at the first opportunity.
@@georgefurman4371 oh my friend, you definetely understand me. Great communication for me. But I have to take more time to deal with long sentence for my primary english level.
@@heinomaland6744 don't worry. My Mexican Shakespeare is not excellent . I comprehend yours however. Solidarity friend.
Socialism, communism and capitalism all share a common flaw: People.
Well Said.
I appreciate your comment.
only people who can t see beond the dollar
Humanism is the most powerful theory.
Prof Wolff: socialism has been in Vietnam, not just North Vietnam since 1975.
Socialisam has been tried in the countries that suffered tremendous distructions in the world war,in constant opposition of the capitalist system in the form of distabilation,sunctions.trade obstacle etc.Having lived in one of those countries the progress and standard of living had jumped in leaps and bounds but from the low base in spate of the obstacles.
Social democracy tried at failed globally
Isn’t this the entire point of contradictions? This cannot be forgotten, and I think all marxists have to stand true to contradictions, and know that even after socialism and communism there will be another system after. And that’s ok. We just have to live in the time, and know that socialism is the next step, only because of the contradictions of capitalism.
Democracy or democratic control of work is the key, as in local control of resource utilization. Even this paradigm has difficulties, but in the long run it should encourage a sense of natural justice that goes far beyond the picayune and embraces humanity as a greater whole.
there is no such thing as democracy in the army.
The market is a battlefield.
Wolff is clueless. I have the only correct solution. "Worship" only me, not Wolff or anybody else.
I'll teach you now.
Ultimately, all employees can be aggregated in one employee and all owners can be aggregated in one owner.
In Capitalism there is only the Employee and the Owner.
Everybody else eventually becomes dead bio-mass or is maintained as a resource (as if spare parts).
Ultimately, the 'Employee' makes the products, takes those products to the market, sells the same products, he made, to himself and finally he pays a fee known as Profit to some 'Owner' for a permission to own the same products he made and sold to himself.
The owner gets to collect profit for doing nothing.....and many call that 'earning' instead of 'taking'.
(Basically, what is considered "good business" under Capitalism is taking as much as you can from whomever you can while making them believe they are being fairly compensated.)
Capitalism creates scarcity because the laws under capitalism protect ownership of wealth much more than the human life/wellbeing.
!!! The correct approach to ensure a prosperous and just society is a free market economy with corrective mechanisms working on the side in parallel and independently to compensate for the market's inherent problems (which are the simultaneous creation of Extreme concentration of Wealth and Poverty i.e Empty houses and homeless people).
Those mechanisms are
1) The Real UBI (for perpetual re-distribution of Wealth),
2) The Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA),
3) A voting system called 'Most Liked, Least Hated' gets elected. (It eliminates highly polarising candidates)
which, together, implement the true, real meaning of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
!!!
Classes are defined by wealth owned and power controlled. Oppression of a class, however, is a choice made by the oppressor.
Productive forces in the society are promoted by the needs of the humans with disposable Wealth/Income.
The way forward towards a better society is to increase and maintain a strong minimum purchasing power of the end-consumer using the magic formula.
(Magic Formula: 'Your minimum Purchasing Power' = 'minimum wage' + 'Benefits payments' + 'The real UBI' - 'Cost of dignified living from cradle to grave' - 'Taxes, fees, penalties')
@Ibrahim Awad
Ad-hominem. Instead, you should learn from me and confront the stupidity part in the ideas coming from the likes of Marxists, Leninists, Wolffist, Anarchists, etc.
I agree that it was failure, biggest one. BUT... I also understand why it was failure. Why focus was in government, why systems turned to be something what can be - at minimum - seen as dictatorship.
And maybe shortest answer is from Mao Zedong from summer 1949 (later on same year People's Republic of China was founded): ""Don't you want to abolish state power?"
Yes, we do, but not right now. We cannot do it yet. Why? Because
imperialism still exists, because domestic reaction still exists,
because classes still exist in our country. Our present task is to
strengthen the people's state apparatus - mainly the people's
army, the people's police and the people's courts - in order to
consolidate national defense and protect the people's
interests."
But same was in USSR too. The fact that Soviet Russia was invaded so soon after revolution, and how it made 5 years of war against domestic rebellions and against foreign invasions made clear, that security is question number one. And security question is also question about governing, since government organises everything what is needed for security: People, weapons, food, cloths, logistics, resources and production for all of them... so on. So build monolith in power, was needed to try to secure survive of revolution. And I cannot name any socialist nation which was not been attacked by capitalist nations (nations which use capitalism as economic power structure). China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, .... all been attacked, and some, like Germany (Eastern one) lived always in fear to be invaded.
And I see here similarities with Napoleonic wars, and how Napoleon made himself to be "emperor" in order to defend bourgeoisie revolution, bourgeoisie republics. And same way, kings and emperors from feudal inherited monarchs tried to kill bourgeoisie - "capitalistic" - revolution when it was "young". They defeated Napoleon, but they did not defeated the revolution. And century later, after WWI most of those monarch systems collapsed, and were replaced by bourgeoisie republics.
I personally tried to think lot about this dilemma... Where we need use so much (of focus, resources, etc) to use in stabilisation and security, and how we will have so much less possibility to focus on just build better society. And I'm pretty convinced that we need world revolution in order to disband focus on security and stabilisation - just like Mao sees in the quote. I am from European indigenous people, Sámi people. Our people never had despotism, nor feudalism, we were forced to live in capitalism, less than century ago. Lot of people still have touch in nature, and also sorrow, that we are forced to live against ways we want live. In maps, our land been occupied for millennia, but in reality, southern people (we are most north in the continent, so everyone else is "southern people") did not cared much about our ways of life before 20th century, when they started systematically destroy our cultures and our languages (9 different Sámi languages still exists, many already fully destroyed) - mostly in name of their religion and in name of "progress", since they saw that we are "undeveloped people" and we "need help" (by taking children from parents, and forcing them to forgot their own languages, cultures, punish them physically if they use their own language, humiliate them, teach them to shame their origins)... And this all was possible, because our people was by mindset quite pacifistic. We never had armies, nor "great leaders", nor states or governments - no currency (created money)... etc. We could not fight back. They did what they did to us, because we could not defend against their power.
And I am sure, that if we would somehow manage create communist society in somewhere in this planet - it would be destroyed in same way, as our ways of life was destroyed. Because there would not be strength to defend what we have. And that is why we need world revolution. To secure all societies in the planet. To disarm whole humankind. To make every society - if not friendly, then at least not hostile to each others.
I see that building communist society is rebuilding old indigenous societies again, but with modern technology and modern scientific knowledge. Some people believe that we want learn from past, we must give up everything created, including medicines etc. But that view is not even realistic - even if we would try to destroy all that knowledge, we would not succeed in it. But instead, we could use all technology what we already achieved, but lower quantity so much that it our planet would start cure from wounds we created for it. In reality - when we talking about as big questions as economy or structures of society, or power structures - it is not question of choosing between black or white (this is from propaganda, focused on suppress new ideas and questioning of status quo), because it all is so many millions and millions of questions, not one or two, meaning that were always will have mixtures of different things. In good and in bad. (This also means, that there is no system where one person really have all power... Russian imperators* - emperors - since Peter The Great had absolute power in Russia, but several of them tried to abolish serfdom in Russia during their reigns, and they failed in it... because no system is absolute extreme. Power is never in hands of one, but there can always bee illusion of such. Even Hitler did not had absolute power, but since many enough in important positions agreed with him, it created illusion of absolute power.
(*Russian emperors had tittle "imperator" since Peter The Great. Title "tsar" was used before that, and Russians see it as equal with title "king", while "imperator" is "emperor". Etymologically "tsar" comes from "Caesar", G.J.Caesar, similar way as German word "kaiser" - which is seen as "emperor". But Russians see "tsar" lesser title than imperator, which is fully copied title from Roman Empire).
We need to stop using 1950s socialism vs capitalism BS. It's not all one or the other. We need to have the best solutions to each individual problem. Is medicine better done by government? Yeah? Then let's do that. Is making cars and produce better done by private enterprise? Well let's do that. Let's not make blanket solutions like we're all sitting around a campus class room reading Marx and Adam Smith. Every problem is unique, there's isn't a single solution to everything.
Actually, more concentration on exactly what freedom and justice can look like is the better strategy. Whatever you call our current economic arrangements, they don’t work for the bulk of humanity. If you believe that such an arrangement is the best possible, Wolff is not your man. Best then to work toward “improvement” and open discussion rather than a magical belief that quantitative summations of “utility” will show the way, or a Rand-style “hymn to money” if properly intoned and incanted will invoke the statistical fictions of the unseen hand, a Demi-god usually only seen on reruns of The Adams Family. 😎
@@m.rebman7221 Dialogue is welcome. At no point should we become the CCP and shut down dialogue.
@@toddfarkman2177 although the situation is always a bit more complex than can be easily explained here, most North Americans do not really want to end dialogue; the problem we face is extreme individualism and rampant narcissism. Fighting that is difficult because the sufferers of these syndromes are the least able to recognize the base issues. I come to this site to find out how many people are responding to Professor Wolff’s acute sense of history and fact. Of course there are a couple of trolls on this site hoping we will concede our common sense to an 11 year old’s understanding of the world, but some of us have what is colloquially called “real life” experience and are thus inoculated from such magical thinking….
Empirically the private sector does anything good better than the government since by definition if it is good then it will not be a loss-making endeavor.
@@ExPwner It depends on what you mean by "better". Providing essential services that are not subject to a profit motive are best done by the state. I find getting my car repaired by guys that make more money damaging my car than repairing it is not "better". Or doctors that make more money keeping me sick than healthy is not "better". The profit motive helps certainly to improve things, but it also can be a huge negative to society.
The failure is people don't see the difference between seeing a honest bank employee for a business loan and gambling in self-serving investors like the stockmarket, and real estate.
was your other comment removed? I don't see it anymore. Strange..
@@martiendejong8857 with our #1 (biggest expense, the most influential) expense being our rent/mortgage; it needs to be honest. If the bottom 99% do poorly, the economy suffers. The bottom 99% being the bottom of the real estate pyramid scheme.
Understand the difference between investment banking and regular banking.
I'm talking about our largest expense is beneficial to the top %1 while hurting the bottom 99%.
A investor is self-serving even a gambler. The other is a honest person seeing a bank employee for a business loan. Understand the difference.
With the bottom 99% taking the position of the bottom of the real estate investor's pyramid. We all do poorly. And its the top of the pyramid (the 1%) to blame. Because they are not being honest, seeing a bank employee for a honest business loan.
@@noel7777noel I agree with you. And I don't know how and I will become self sustaining and independent but I'm trying as best as I can and I'd advise others to try the same. My goal is to achieve this for myself and try to help as many others reach the same as possible. I'm still in a very early stage though.
In an optimal system there would be a mutual relationship between the owner of the capital and the person using it. Instead of a balance that is always tilted in favor of the capitalist. Paying for the use of a property is not immoral per se, it's that you have to pay ten times the amount of what is reasonable and all the laws are against you.
Take into account all the taxes that you have to pay that rich people like Trump, Bezos, Musk or can avoid and that a lot of the taxes you pay go to these same people who avoid paying any tax themselves. They aren't gonna change this and too few people understand how hard they are being screwed.
Failure is only the ivory philosophers who see these systems as black and white issues. We need simple pragmatic applications of both...
Unions breed mediocrity.
Thank you, professor Wolff for your multifaceted and finely tuned analysis. Unfortunately, there are too many locked into the self-serving amorality of political demagoguery and dichotomous thinking to understand the humanity of a self-regulated democratic economic policy based on the greater good and not based on static and cold economic systems and political talking points. Economic systems, like living beings, need to adapt and change. Democracies are in a good place to institute change, but static thinking is always detrimental to adaptability, and static economic systems are also doomed to extinction. Political bias, in this sense, is a form of static thinking that fails to recognize the potential good of diverse viewpoints and adaptability. The bottom line is life and health, not systems or ideology. TY ♥️
*Waves hand*
You will feed the algorithm
Ahh mr. Wulf , you do profess but you do not ponder , we in scandinavia , are we a biggest mistake ? Come an d visit us.
For socialism to succeed each and every individual must cease to be individual with distinct character. Your assumption is that humans are reasonable and guided by ethical and moral principles. Have you not learned from history?
Human being is the worst problem to the world, that's why a righteousness Gov't needs to step in.
Governments are created by humans. From a band of selfish and depraved human animals you cannot form a rightous government. Convicts form governments too. The only difference is that they are confined to a smaller space, while the rest of us have more room to manouvere. One keeps praying for Divine Grace. Christianity rose out of the Roman sespool, to redeem the monster. Yet take a look at the Catholic Church, from day one to this day.
@@mikewu8120 governments are made of people, dumb dumb.
@@JSwift-jq3wn You got it right !
@@ExPwner Yout got it Right ! That's why US Gov't is dumb dumb.
Socialism...this time it's different. Don't be naive boys and girls
The problem is that both socialism and capitalism create a system that selects for predatory psychopaths in the power hierarchy, while socially conscious, empathetic, and nurturing personalities are selected against. The motto of the French revolution, fraternity, equality, liberty, is the goal, but it is hard to those with other motives out of the system.
Everything +followers...
I am not in agreement in calling the first, second and third socialists states a failure when they are surrounded by hostility from capitalist states.
Seems the hostile states pressure the new socialists states to throw all their human and material resources to defense of the new socialist republic that the workplace is not democratized. Seen this way even Stalin's War Communism is rational.
If this were not the case the US would not have the largest military in the world and a Military Industrial Complex, coming out of the experience of the Russian Revolution and two political parties that agree on strengthening the MIC; cooperating democrats and republicans who make no commitment to a better world unless it means a world without socialism. Which to me is its prime mission. This will come to light when this MIC turns against the American people, particularly Black, Brown and Yellow People who because of and out of desperation from abject poverty become radicalized as a last stand against extinction and slow genocide from poverty.
I'm glad to hear you talk about some downsides of socialist states so far. It's important to address these things because we hear it all the time from capitalists.
Capitalists rarely bring up these criticisms. Only really the one about too much centralisation of power in the government which they themselves do all the time though. They never bring up the failures of transforming the workplace because then they would have to admit that democratising the workplace is a good thing.
Capitalism is easy to understand, i.e. "Do what is best for yourself".
Socialism is much more confusing., i.e. "Do what is best for somebody else".
Do what is best for the promotion co-operation between all individuals and teams; not a scramble for supremacy, regardless of the effect on those not interested in this kind of scrambling for supremacy !!
Scrambling for supremacy begets those better at scrambling for supremacy, leading to fantastic material advance for the rich and the middle classes, with no regard to any horrors created in the process, and without regard to sustainably, and/or the rape and pillage of the present, and/or the eventual destruction of the planet / the whole human race ~ Capitalism may be looking forward to ever better technology, but in all other ways is myopic !!
@@reasonerenlightened2456 socialism is about what is best for yourself, as long as you aren't one of the very few capitalists. But whats best for you in socialism is also best for the majority. It doesn't incentivize exploitation, just ordinary self interest.
@@mechanussunrise
My self interest tells me that it is better for me to get others to do all the work while I collect all the benefits aka Capitalism.
Keep up the good work, hopefully more people will learn from your videos. The world is out of tilt and a rebalance is long overdue.
If you mean Socialist in terms of the Soviet system it was largely lack of inovation. Everything from cars, to space shuttles were knock offs of capitalist products. One area where the Soviet industry was very inovative was the aerospace industry. I read not long ago half of the passenger jets still flying in the world is the Ilyushin IL62 & Tupolev TU-154 series planes. Check out the Ushaka Show on TH-cam it is run by Sergei Sputikoff a former Soviet citizen who offers insight in to everything Soviet , the good the bad and the ugly.
Can't imagine Johnson and Trump ever offering up a critique of their shortcomings.
Integrity, Timothy!
Despite the economy structure is still the right time to start up an investment
Crypto is the future
Trading on your own is very risky, I've lost alot trading for my self
Trading crypto now will be very wise but trading without a professional is not
Absolutely right , I got 70% of my total portfolio in crypto and I have been making good profits
I wanted to trade crypto but got confused by the fluctuations in price
Bravo!
This is what I've been thinking for years.
The real problem in almost all human relationships is proper balance of power.
This is as much true among institutions as it is among individual people.
The more one-sided this gets, the more unstable the relationship gets.
The attitude I now have toward US capitalism is similar to the one that I have heard Soviet citizens had toward Soviet socialism.
It is a sort of "I don't agree at all with any of it. But I don't have much choice."
Wolff must be watched at double speed to make him more palatable.
Professor, can you talk about the democratic workplaces in China? How prevalent are they?
Is a sharp knife , it does its job great but should be handled with care .
While a lot of companies are owned by the workers (like huawei, and i support this), the working enviorment is bad (by western standarts), a lot of people work long hours because the other guy works long hours and they are highly competitive 😐
@@ihatehandles3
Democracy in the workplace is not on the agenda in China, nor can it be. Only after China has surpassed Western countries in wealth; other peoples will start looking at his model as a successful model to follow; when it has developed its productive forces to the maximum and has won the challenge of competition from the capitalist countries; not before then "working conditions" could become a topic on the agenda in China. Yet, if you look at the history of China over the past 30 years, much more than a little has already changed in this regard.
Rit on the money!
excellent point Dr. Wolff.
In a word Giving workers political power. Thank you.
The current Chinese position is very promising. To clip wings of Capitalists and redistribute the wealth.
Chinese socialism has Confucianism built in. It is a Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Therefore China does not encourage others to copy it.
Were those economies socialist, or merely state-sponsored capitalism? 🤔
I suggest socialism cannot be until the State becomes synonymous with it's People, i.e. a true democracy.
#AMoreDirectDemocracy ASAP 🖐🖐🖐
Power to the People ✌🙂
I hope you meant: Power to the educated People.
1-6 were people too ...
@@xFD2x I did not.
We've always been governed by the best educated. How's that worked out?
@@aglimmerofhope5321
So you don't mind being governed by uneducated people ?
@@xFD2x a special skill is required for building a bridge, but not for deciding if the bridge should be built, or if the resources to build it are available.
@@aglimmerofhope5321
I've witnessed too many votes in meetings where many voters chose a side not because they were familiar with the subject, but because the wanted to please someone.
When you go that way you'll find it's a dead end.
This is the bias of my Democrat/Democratic Socialist self. I think if you keep fairness & Democracy in mind. Either Capitalism or Socialism can be a forced to be reckoned with. I am a Socialist because the Democracy, History and circumstances call for me to be one! If I was in a stagnant and lazy society... I might be a Capitalist. However instead we are in an age of workers that are way too productive & wages that way too low! This is undemocratic & this is a kleptocracy!
I think most people confuse capitalism/socialism with authoritarian/libertarian. The military is authoritarian/socialism, and you worship them. I was born on a military base..they are a country and gov to them selves.
Veteran here, yep you're absolutely right about that.
Being invaded by the US
Where flashier speakers like Chris Hedges go into fanatical rants, Prof. Wolf’s objectivity is sobering and refreshing. Sharp mind!
Chris Hedges is good at exposing the truth, but he can leave me in a very negative frame of mind.
@@benangel3268 That’s correct. He might be good at identifying some problems, but his solutions are so impractical and negative that they practically cancel themselves out.
@@heyhey3185 I think we are all struggling to find solutions. And Hedges is definitely not wrong in saying that we should all protest the system.
@@martiendejong8857 Certainly. Hedges has excellent observations, and protests are essential. I wish he could be more of a unifier, though, instead of attacking folks like AOC, just because they have a different strategy. She doesn’t deserve to be called a “sellout”. Unity and strategic thinking is needed, or we will hand the system over forever to the fascists.
@@heyhey3185 You're an idiot. You've fallen for their act. AOC is not even trying to help people, just herself. The squad actually has the power, right now, today, to force Nancy to do more for the working class, but won't. They tweet, they write letters, they go on podcasts & TV to whine, but when it comes to voting, they tow the party line every time. Prove me wrong.
Why isn't Prof Wolf in a democratic coop? Sorry I do not know is he?
I find it hard to believe that after decades of time investment and study that he is going to allow the person who cleans his office to have an equal vote in the product he produces, but let's see. I feel those that propose changes like these should live what they are selling
What corporate America did and doing to workplace , is nothing short of regressive. It’s like going back in time to legal slavery , and flat out feudalistic .It’s manifested in the shape of CEO’s,and board of directors as plantation heads , and capital controllers .
Workplace is anything but democratic.I’m not even saying full democracy, no,just partial democracy, where the worker has some voice .
Corporations are the demise of the American Economy . Those conglomerates are way too powerful and influential.
they’re becoming shadow Governments,who actually dictates what’s acceptable and not.
America is in dire need for reform . The first step is to truly believe in a secular, yes absolute secular system . Then the breakdown of corporations has to start . It’s way overdue.
Wrong. You already have a voice and it's called signing the papers or walking out.
@@ExPwner
What exactly is wrong ? My outlook or my analysis?
Oversimplification of anything doesn’t make it as such my friend . Millions upon millions of Workers would simply do what you suggest , walk out . Only if they really could afford so . And only because there is a reason for Workers for wanting to walk out to begin with . If they felt human and comfortable in their jobs , they would be a little bit happier i recon !
Thank you for this video. I think you explained it very well. One thing that has always worried me about socialism, is the total dominance of the state, as we have seen in many of the ealier socialist "experiments". I totally agree with your idea of a democratic workplace.
Professor Wolff just like a gentle version of George Carlin, love it!
Man Prof Wolff you are taking a very long time to get around to answering the question! The video is at 6 minutes and you have not even started answering the question!
All questions require the "obligatory" setup period so that the "official narrative" which is
repeated ad nauseum, can now be superimposed over the question actually being asked,
so that the answer becomes the question that Wolff wanted to answer...but still can't find
among his disciples, even though they are paying for the privilege of asking them.
You get what you pay for...of course, you could get the same b.s. for free, like we do here...
but apparently, his disciples haven't figured that out yet.
@@jgalt308 You mean "ad nauseum" and "obligatory" and "superimposed" and blah blah blah must be a "Latte Liberal" here!
Remember Elitist Liberals really have done nothing for anybody except self serving themselves with delusions of grandeur. Follow, Like, and Subscribe to this guy: “My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everyone drinks water.
From Mark Twain's Notebook, 1885” And then March! Find that hill to die on! Maybe M4A?
Substantial RISE IN PER CAPITAL INCOME outcome is a possibility if we invest more in creative SYSTEM approaches embedded in absolute quality: innovative design thinking.
Spot on. Not only the workplace needs to be transformed, also the government. So that there are no more centralized power structures that can be abused.
Bravo, We are slowly peeling back the layers and exposing the truth. But socialists or societies or communities of simple people or middle class have never naturally assembled in unison to establish democratic, cooperative, work environments or working majorities with enough power or influence over governments of any sort. With the exception of temporary revolutions which afterwards were reorganized by a new government again (some which were slowly overturned to the original powers of finance) and not the people. Perhaps the only pure socialist established societies I can imagine are the Pennsylvania Amish communities or the American Indians before we arrived and even they had a chief, trading mostly in services in the absence of CASH!.
This is bs from even your pov tho. Co-op and communal ownership structures were way way more prevalent and for sure way more tasted and large scale in the USSR and Maoist China than any western liberal democracy, socdem or not, past or not. And opperating within a non capitalist or non “free market economy” on top . Hell modern China has a larger % of its economy being co-op structured than any western nation. So if AES and historical socialist projects had more of your “type of socialism” than any other nation in history how is he still gonna go around in popular discourse and not aknowledge that and just go for “their type of socialism was about goberment doing stuff and mine isnt and thats their biggest failure”
Right on Prof. Wolff!!
Do what is best for the promotion co-operation between all individuals and teams; not a scramble for supremacy, regardless of the effect on those not interested in this kind of scrambling for supremacy !!
Scrambling for supremacy begets those who are ever better at scrambling for supremacy, leading to fantastic material advance for the rich and the middle classes, with no regard to any horrors created for large numbers of others in the process, and without regard to sustainably, and/or the rape and pillage of the planet, and/or the eventual destruction of the planet / the whole human race ~ Capitalism may be looking forward to ever better technology, but in all other more important ways (humanity compatible ways) is myopic !!
Perhaps what we need are some new words to define a system in set into capitalism. All that is happening here is that taxes are being returned to citizens rather than simply offering tax breaks and incentives typically given to businesses. And, what we spend on the military. Making home ownership, health care, home health care, and child care more affordable. There is no innate reason for private enterprise to be negated. That the resources come from the collective pocket via taxes is different only that it supports individuals in growth and financial expansion. That promotes more wealth, more spending, more local businesses and jobs.
Why am I wrong?
None of them is perfect, we need a MIX, a relative better mix
NO MIXES. we need something completely new. Wolff is clueless. Only I know the true solution.
Ultimately, all employees can be aggregated in one employee and all owners can be aggregated in one owner.
In Capitalism there is only the Employee and the Owner.
Everybody else eventually becomes dead bio-mass or is maintained as a resource (as if spare parts).
Ultimately, the 'Employee' makes the products, takes those products to the market, sells the same products, he made, to himself and finally he pays a fee known as Profit to some 'Owner' for a permission to own the same products he made and sold to himself.
The owner gets to collect profit for doing nothing.....and many call that 'earning' instead of 'taking'.
(Basically, what is considered "good business" under Capitalism is taking as much as you can from whomever you can while making them believe they are being fairly compensated.)
Capitalism creates scarcity because the laws under capitalism protect ownership of wealth much more than the human life/wellbeing.
!!! The correct approach to ensure a prosperous and just society is a free market economy with corrective mechanisms working on the side in parallel and independently to compensate for the market's inherent problems (which are the simultaneous creation of Extreme concentration of Wealth and Poverty i.e Empty houses and homeless people).
Those mechanisms are
1) The Real UBI (for perpetual re-distribution of Wealth),
2) The Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA),
3) A voting system called 'Most Liked, Least Hated' gets elected. (It eliminates highly polarising candidates)
which, together, implement the true, real meaning of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
!!!
Classes are defined by wealth owned and power controlled. Oppression of a class, however, is a choice made by the oppressor.
Productive forces in the society are promoted by the needs of the humans with disposable Wealth/Income.
The way forward towards a better society is to increase and maintain a strong minimum purchasing power of the end-consumer using the magic formula.
(Magic Formula: 'Your minimum Purchasing Power' = 'minimum wage' + 'Benefits payments' + 'The real UBI' - 'Cost of dignified living from cradle to grave' - 'Taxes, fees, penalties')
@Lord Word
We will use a type of rank choice voting (RCV)
RCV yes, however, the human brain judges differently when asked to vote 'For' compared to being asked to vote 'Against'.
Therefore, each RCV ballot must have two halves. One half ranked "for" the candidates, the other half ranked "against" the candidates. The two halves are then separated and each is processes individually as a separate RCV half-ballot.
At the end each candidate receives so many 'For' votes and so many 'Against' votes.
The winner is the candidate who is most liked and least hated.
Genius.
The human brain judges/ranks differently when asked what it hates and what it likes therefore the ranking of what is liked does not match the ranking of what is hated when applied to the same objects/subjects of judgement.
Covid vaccine grade is ^A in addition to Richard wolff video lectures are ^A+. Very good something new which is birds singing. Thank you
I don't think a true comparison can be made between the two systems, as longs as the dominate economies in the world all practice capitalism. If the major economies were to have been socialist over the same time span that, capitalism has been dominate, then a fairer comparison could be made. The bigger question is what would economies around the world look like, if war was never a major concern for countries, and they did not spend so much of their wealth on armaments, which have only a secondary, life affirming value. The nature is big and costly enough a foe for humanity, we need not be our own worst enemy.
Chinese has a proverb 取長補短，another well known word “white cat black cat things” why so stuck by ideas.
The problem now is that we can't have work place like we have now. We need to drastically shrink the economy and production if we hope to survive and with that little bit of production we need to make sure everyone gets a share so that no one goes without enough. So the Socialism you speak of time is gone and the new socialism is more rationing for all or most will die. I don't see it happening since hard times are coming and usually that spell authoritarianism not socialism but I guess we'll see.
Some religious sects have attempted to establish socialist economies ("From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"). All have failed or fizzled.
because they never introduced the real UBI within their communes as well as two more additional mechanisms. Those mechanisms are
1) The Real UBI (for perpetual re-distribution of Wealth),
2) The Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA),
3) A voting system called 'Most Liked, Least Hated' gets elected. (It eliminates highly polarising candidates)
which, together, implement the true, real meaning of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
@@reasonerenlightened2456 no, they had UBI too. Still garbage.
@@ExPwner
religious sects are designed to concentrate wealth , not to distribute it as UBI.
For me, real socialism is workers' self-management and direct democracy. Bureaucrats in hierarchies exploiting workers strike me as a mixture of fascism and "asian mode of production".
Wolff is clueless. Only I know the true solution.
Ultimately, all employees can be aggregated in one employee and all owners can be aggregated in one owner.
In Capitalism there is only the Employee and the Owner.
Everybody else eventually becomes dead bio-mass or is maintained as a resource (as if spare parts).
Ultimately, the 'Employee' makes the products, takes those products to the market, sells the same products, he made, to himself and finally he pays a fee known as Profit to some 'Owner' for a permission to own the same products he made and sold to himself.
The owner gets to collect profit for doing nothing.....and many call that 'earning' instead of 'taking'.
(Basically, what is considered "good business" under Capitalism is taking as much as you can from whomever you can while making them believe they are being fairly compensated.)
Capitalism creates scarcity because the laws under capitalism protect ownership of wealth much more than the human life/wellbeing.
!!! The correct approach to ensure a prosperous and just society is a free market economy with corrective mechanisms working on the side in parallel and independently to compensate for the market's inherent problems (which are the simultaneous creation of Extreme concentration of Wealth and Poverty i.e Empty houses and homeless people).
Those mechanisms are
1) The Real UBI (for perpetual re-distribution of Wealth),
2) The Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA),
3) A voting system called 'Most Liked, Least Hated' gets elected. (It eliminates highly polarising candidates)
which, together, implement the true, real meaning of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
!!!
Classes are defined by wealth owned and power controlled. Oppression of a class, however, is a choice made by the oppressor.
Productive forces in the society are promoted by the needs of the humans with disposable Wealth/Income.
The way forward towards a better society is to increase and maintain a strong minimum purchasing power of the end-consumer using the magic formula.
(Magic Formula: 'Your minimum Purchasing Power' = 'minimum wage' + 'Benefits payments' + 'The real UBI' - 'Cost of dignified living from cradle to grave' - 'Taxes, fees, penalties')
@@reasonerenlightened2456 -the owner risks his/her Capital......at the very least
@@richardwyse7817 the employee risks its livelihood.
To quote Pao-yu Ching, it hasn’t failed, it’s been defeated.
So if it's defeated why it became still popular now, huh??? Soviet Union wasn't the center of communism because as long as US intervene in other countrie's affairs which it will always, communism will always still be alive. Communism don't revolve only around the past only but to the present too.
Sure, if lab leak theory is true then Xi must not be the only to be held accountable but Trump, Fauci and the Republican party too for allowing the gain-of-function research in 2017.
@@zidorovichburblyatya2862 I agree with you! Losing a battle does NOT mean the war is lost. Defeat is NOT failure.
Edit: agree with regard to communism, idk about lab leak or Fort Detrick or w/e
Transforming the workplace - participatory economics - is the ultimate task; the most complex struggle of humanity and the core necessity for a sustainable existence.
This may very well be true
@Joseph Norm good point
capitaliism is falling to bits , lets hope people see there need to be a raical socialist alternative
He uses the term socialism as though it is interchangeable with communism. To me socialism is a system with democratic elections.
EXISTENCE
MASS MURDER
‘democratization of the workplace' does not bring social justice. A monopoly fetching extraordinary profit is still a monopoly, even if it is run by a cooperative of workers. It is necessary to have an authority beyond the narrow minds of each corporation.
What you say is the necessity to maintain competition between companies and corportations, which is absolutely right, but I think that was besides the point. In the end, it is important to also focus on the inner workings of a company, since it seems like one of the most forgotten matters.
Proletarian democracy is better than dictatorship of the proletariat. Just like how we have 2 capitalist parties holding onto state power to protect capital and keep each other in check. The mistake by early socialist thinkers especially Marx was insisting the state should be run by a type of “dictatorship” which is why he expelled all anarchists. Had the anarchists and Marxist’s both let go of their dogmas about the state and had both worked together to both make state power less horrible then we’d see the revolution succeed. Not enough state power would see revolution fail but too much state power results in horrible consequences and tyranny. Socialists need to keep each other in check which is key to the success of revolution and also preventing political excesses. That’s my personal thought
Proletarian democracy _is_ a dictatorship of the proletariat.
We don't really use that term anymore because people are so confused about it, but it doesn't literally mean a dictatorship -- it means a system of governance where the people have power over government, rather than capitalists having power over government.
So, a proletarian democracy is a dictatorship of the proletariat in the same way that a bourgeois democracy is a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
It's a technical term that doesn't mean the same thing you would assume in common parlance... which is why it's generally not that helpful when talking to normal people.
Great summary Prof!
cool
What Prof Wolff is saying is right, but it had a historic reason: when Bolshevik arrived to the power Lenin and others got the idea that was needed a proletariam dictatorship in order to remove lots of preexising economic forms and becuase the need to defend the Revolution agains other countries. Them they gave too much power to the State for those reasons... that combined with the early death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin was fatal to avoid give more power to the Goverment and to look for democracy in the workplace... what a pity
It's kinda ironic. People saying "Now that you're free from capitalist oppression let us oppress you to protect you from the capitalists"
Was the Soviet economy socialist, or merely a state-sponsored capitalism? 🤔
I suggest socialism cannot be until the State becomes synonymous with it's People, i.e. a true democracy.
#AMoreDirectDemocracy ASAP 🖐🖐🖐
Power to the People ✌🙂
@@aglimmerofhope5321 well said. true democracy is by consent.
@@aglimmerofhope5321 I think it's a valid point of view, but it should be also based on economics terms.
For example, the surplus generated by labor should be owned by the labor and NOT by the Capitalist, either a private or a state entity. Moreover, combined with your point, all the surplus generated by the Society should be owned by itself, and distributed back to the labor or workers...
@@DavidSanchez-vx4bv seems a more elaborate way of saying a People should collectively own, and thus manage, their regional production. 👍
I think that societies should adopt and institute the best of socialism and capitalism rather than concentrate on having one or the other. A hybridized model is something that China has adopted and achieved. I find it interesting that Americans still thinks and refers to China as a Communist or (strictly) Socialist society... when it is not.
China is run by a Stalinist sect that turned Marxism Leninism into a new religion with Deng Xiaoping as the new holy priest.
In a worker’s cooperative there must still be people who have more knowledge and skill to lead others for the success of the enterprise, so how does that work if some inequality is necessary based on knowledge and skill even if all share in the fruits of their labour?
In USSR it was the Soviet (councils') job to solve disparities in input.
Your BOSS loves to have complete control over you. The BOSS loves to have recurring revenue with the system and process in place to let you generate those lovely recurring revenue. Now it is even easier to squeeze all the productivity out of you by placing sensors and cameras to get the last drop out of you. Yes, all the CEO have their money-making goals tie to their large bonus packages. But for the ordinary worker like you and me, not so much. BOSS will say no, it is not about the money. "WORKERS" loves to get recognition and having better equipment to be excited and happy at work. That's funny! They honestly don't believe that workers are not worthy of any amount of extra money other than their wages. My question to them is, Let's say if you, the CEO comes up with your plans and metrics KPI, Are those performance goals achieved by themselves or by that CEO's ability alone? NO! The employee carries out the work, and managers motivate their workers to go above and beyond. Employees carry out those executions. Therefore, why do these CEOs think that all those "GOALS" come out of their ability? That's a very shameful act!
2:15 "Socialism, like Capitalism, has strengths and weaknesses". This is the sort of discussion we should be having! I'm so tired of hearing people on both the left and right present their black and white arguments.
In Europe a lot of countries have a mix of capitalism and socialism.
Would it be a bad idea to study how they do it ?
I don't know about the workplaces, but I do know you didn't have anywhere near the level of inequality you have in capitalist governments. Russia's level of inequality is equal if not worse than the United States. Socialism is more democratic for the majority of the population unlike capitalism which lately benefits multi-millionaires and billionaires.
I love this guys vids. I think the many failed collectivizations of agriculture that led to famines should be mentioned. Lenins, stalins, maos, and vietnams. I mean 80 mil ppl died in those.
pol pot also-lets not forget the "year Zero",,,,cuba, Angola,etc
"One mans death is a tragedy-the death of Millions is merely a statistic"....Stalin
I have mentioned this in other comments... but I will ask it this way... if the next presidential election enough voters wrote in " Professor Richard Wolff " how would you change all the private corporations to worker Co Op As president
The USSR had socialized child care, medical care, education and retirement. We have NONE of that. Any questions? No homelessness, low "crime" (capitalism and its states are CRIMINAL, never mind the criminalized in the lower classes) and job security, low food costs, etc.........
no known system works for long. sooner or later they all fail which is why we keep abandoning 1 for the other in a vicious cycle. been doing it for 1,000's of years
Have you ever research the Islamic political and economic system? I think this the right time for you and for western world.
Outline Prof Wolff outline so far, may be there are other minor issue and details on this serious subject, Prof Wolff probably can dig deeper and talk further in another video segment.
It should be noted that this is the first time in the history of the change of economic formations when the states of the previous economic formations intentionally suppress the states of the new economic formation. simply because the previously ruling classes could not understand the threats from states with a new formation. The feudal Holy Roman Empire did not impose sanctions on the early Italian capitalist states just because they were capitalist. Just as the slaveholding states of antiquity did not declare war on their neighbors just because they began to receive the main income from a relatively free peasant working on an allotment of land, and not from slave labor. At that time, this was impossible due to people's misunderstanding of the labor theory of value and the theory of classes.
Thus, the reasons for the collapse of the first socialist states are not limited to just trying different approaches to the planned economy and carrying out some experiments with it. In addition to these reasons, there was also colossal political and military pressure on these new states from neighboring capitalist states.
That's a good point. Unfortunately many of us are still used to talking about "states" and "countries" as if they existed in a vacuum. This was never the case, not even in ancient times. So called socialist regimes like Vietnam or Cuba are actually more nationalist and anti-colonial than utopian projects. The question should be more about how different people at different times tried to cope with power imposed on them from outside and how they tried to tame it when power fell into their hands.
After five and a half minutes tap dancing around he starts...
No Gods, No Masters. Do we truly believe in the proletariat to govern themselves?
As a class for and of itself, well, we'll see and hopefully we get to be part of that.
Why should we believe there should be a superior versus inferior class at all? Push one group down long enough, they resist and reciprocate. It becomes a see-saw of control. Why should work be pejoratised , why should people be deprived of dignity merely for the act being in the position of carrying out the necessary functions that create society? What justifies superiority and dominance? What justifies dominance? An antiquated insistence that an as yet undetermined and unobservable deity supposedly told the ones that have already established dominance, most often by violence, those are simply the breaks? I call bullshit. The proclivity to make wealth is simply the insistence of dominance solely to suit those self interested.
They can't do worse than the fat cats have.
big thanks
I wonder who gave the yellow vest to Prof Wolff?
Lol, "didn't transform the workplace"
8 hour work days? Stalin's Co-Ops? Soviets (literally: councils) made up of workers? Stakhanov movement?
In longer presentations he explains the USSR had centralized power and hierarchical decision making down the the laborer who only obeys what is dictated, mirroring the capitalist system of centralized power and hierarchical decision making down the the laborer who only obeys what is dictated. Private or public centralized power, the result was mostly the same for the individual workers i.e. not transformed in that way.
Prof Wolff would you please make a video explaining the pore to distribution. Often when I debate capitalist they bring it up as a reason why the inequality is not done to the system's fault and people suttch as Jordan Peterson often brig it up
Wolff, as EVERY Marxist, is clueless. We need a new paradigm. I have the only correct solution. "Worship" only me, not Wolff or anybody else.
I'll teach you now.
Ultimately, all employees can be aggregated in one employee and all owners can be aggregated in one owner.
In Capitalism there is only the Employee and the Owner.
Everybody else eventually becomes dead bio-mass or is maintained as a resource (as if spare parts).
Ultimately, the 'Employee' makes the products, takes those products to the market, sells the same products, he made, to himself and finally he pays a fee known as Profit to some 'Owner' for a permission to own the same products he made and sold to himself.
The owner gets to collect profit for doing nothing.....and many call that 'earning' instead of 'taking'.
(Basically, what is considered "good business" under Capitalism is taking as much as you can from whomever you can while making them believe they are being fairly compensated.)
Capitalism creates scarcity because the laws under capitalism protect ownership of wealth much more than the human life/wellbeing.
!!! The correct approach to ensure a prosperous and just society is a free market economy with corrective mechanisms working on the side in parallel and independently to compensate for the market's inherent problems (which are the simultaneous creation of Extreme concentration of Wealth and Poverty i.e Empty houses and homeless people).
Those mechanisms are
1) The Real UBI (for perpetual re-distribution of Wealth),
2) The Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA),
3) A voting system called 'Most Liked, Least Hated' gets elected. (It eliminates highly polarising candidates)
which, together, implement the true, real meaning of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
!!!
Classes are defined by wealth owned and power controlled. Oppression of a class, however, is a choice made by the oppressor.
Productive forces in the society are promoted by the needs of the humans with disposable Wealth/Income.
The way forward towards a better society is to increase and maintain a strong minimum purchasing power of the end-consumer using the magic formula.
(Magic Formula: 'Your minimum Purchasing Power' = 'minimum wage' + 'Benefits payments' + 'The real UBI' - 'Cost of dignified living from cradle to grave' - 'Taxes, fees, penalties')
Jordan never specifies the Alpha coefficient of his imagined Pareto distribution.
it has to be about 1.16 for the 80/20 rule to be true. However in reality Alpha is so large that the distribution resembles an impulse function (i.e. Dirac delta function) which happens when Alpha is becoming infinity. Jordan talks BS as well as Wolff.
I wondered how socialism got focused on government control, rather than focusing on the most important element that really defines socialism: democracy in the workplace and the marketplace.
I believe the divergence began with Lenin in an attempt to jumpstart a world revolution, which never materialized.
@@jimbo2227 No the argument concerns the nature of the state. If you don't have a workers state to defend the new relations of production than you will be easily overrun by capitalist states and the old state apparatus resulting in a defeat. The revolutionary situations appeared what was lacking was a leadership that could carry the revolutions forward.
Because it is "government" which is "in control"...and everything else is a product of that "control".
All else is irrelevant. This includes foolish economists who seek to pretend otherwise.
@@jgalt308 So is it like a tautology? If it's in control, it's government by definition. If it's being controlled, it's not "the government."
@@Jimi_Lee No. A tautology is a logical statement in which the conclusion is equivalent to the premise.
"the sickness is the system."
"all men are created equal."
It contains no useful information in itself, so it demands further inquiry...and becomes a tautology when
the answer reduces to "all men are equal as men." because there is no other aspect of equality that can be identified.
In the first case, and for Wolff, the "sickness" and the "system" ... it is claimed to be "economics" which
is in control, and this is clearly not true...and this error is further compounded by a failure to identify
or apply a consistent definition regarding the characteristics of any specific economic system.
Proceeding further, one now adds a governmental system to an element of the undefined economic one
all without establishing the validity that it IS economics which in control in the first place.
So one might ask is this an effort to actually explain anything in a manner that results in
"understanding" or is it advanced for the opposite purpose? Because the result is certainly
not one of consistent understanding of governments or the economics that emerges from them.
Why would an individual invest their time, capital, blood, sweat, and tears to get a business operating successfully if the employees then will run the company democratically? I certainly wouldn’t.
They have no coherent answer for this, and that's because they don't understand capital formation.
What about the self employed? Are they exploiting themselves?
@@ministryoftruth8090 he has, a channel dedicated to cooperative workplaces. No one can blame him if you haven't bothered to view it.
Be careful how you define self-employed. Once you answer that and then you start to see how complex such a simple question can be.
@@ministryoftruth8090 In Cuba they have a certain number of professions you can work at independently. The Teamsters use to represent indepentents who owned thie own truck. They are categorized as workers who own their own tools.
@@ministryoftruth8090 The problem I see is people like you who have think of themselves as the Supreme Commissar Who elected you supreme commissar and supreme commissar of what may I ask?.
@@ministryoftruth8090 Right your People's Democratic Coop leads to a one member coop.
Thanks for the response Professor Wolff! Can’t say enough how much I enjoy and rely on your analysis every week. The critical point in my opinion, which should be carried forward in current movements, is the notion that power cannot be concentrated in any one sphere of influence under any socialist system - as it has been. This message can be refined and presented to the mass of people in a way which allows for a juxtaposition against corporatism as well as call to social constructs rooted in justice and equity. Thanks again for the excellent analysis!
People are flawed. Thus systems are flawed.
Prof Wolff has become a very important figure for pulling Americans into materialist understandings of major issues, something that here in the West, we've been deprived, and I'd dare say, steered directly clear of. While I certainly have my own disagreements or critiques of the professor, I can only hope that he continues for a long time to keep breaking through to people. Once we have the workers and the resources, then we can decide how to build the house.
The Soviet Union was founded on the basis of Socialism, but like the United States' promise of life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness, it fell short of what it promised.
Capitalism-Socialism Innivationrs. Perhaps: one's a generation ahead as Pioneer of how about SOCIAL-CAPITAL Innovation ✍️ IPRs
The sinfull nature of us, humans, is always there whatever type of cooperation we try to create. The most important treasure we have to manage to keep is our Liberty and Freedom if we hope to survive and improve. Concentration of wealth and power is the biggest threat to our society. Honest conservative and honest socialists lately sees the same problems for our future. There is a hope if we use cool heads!!!
your premise is based on humans being "sinful"...so you already presuppose that a book written by primitive superstitious savages 2,000 years ago is factually correct and/or relevant today.
The goal, as it is sometimes stated, is "the abolition of the exploitation of man by man." This is what very many people want, though we disagree on the best way to achieve it.
@@RobertMuldooJP Thank you for your comment/response!
Let me respond as nice as I can: I didn't presuppose, my personal life experience led me to believe the stories told 2000 years ago by brave and wise man. If there is a person in this world who can claim to be Creator of himself or herself, only then that person has a good reason to deny the gospels. Is there anybody around or in history who created himself? Evolution doesn't cut it, because it is a process, not the driving force behind the process.
Concise and cogent. I emphatically agree with all of these points. I've just been wondering how to pragmatically apply this philosophy: you can't just force businesses to become cooperatives, so do you just subsidize the creation of new ones?
Of course you can force that. Capitalists forced the Lords to change or give up their economic system. We can do that with Capitalism.
@@Domi_2204 Little harder with democratic socialism, which is what I'd advocate for. I abhor violence except in extreme cases.
@@troy242621 "I abhor violence except in extreme cases." What do you do about currently existing structural and passive violence? Cause - and push back if I come off strong - this quote's principlism seems too anemic and ill-prepared to confront a lot of the human suffering and degradation that characterizes this economic system.
As for your initial question, I like your idea about preferential subsidies. Maybe we can throw in preferential loans (by public banks) and a right of first refusal for converting currently existing capitalist entreprises?
I don't have the links handy, but in a few of his talks Prof Wolff describes your extact suggestion being attempted in the UK, and creating a growing co-op sector in Italy.
In Socialist Yugoslavia the work place was substantially transformed for the benefit of the working classes eg: free health care, free education, free social care, free nursery care , access to housing etc
Allowing Truman to be foisted on the US.
Yes, but Truman was just a pliable puppet. The real failure was in not reigning in the power structure that was subsequently able to push aside the popular choice for VP (Henry Wallace) and put Truman on the ticket with FDR in 1944. The left was successful in convincing FDR to push for the New Deal reforms, but didn't convince him to deal with the bankers and business leaders (Morgan, Brown Bros, du Pont, etc.) who were behind the fascist coup attempt, exposed in 1934, that was planning to oust FDR and run Congress. Instead of prosecuting them for treason, FDR struck a deal with them to support the New Deal. This enabled the men behind the curtain to keep their positions and continue to exercise the power they have to this day.
What do you like most? The wars or the poverty?
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We need a hybrid system with a bunch of geniuses in charge / overseeing / making course corrections / grooming the next leadership team for onwards and upwards continuity purposes !!
Thanks for piece on this subject
Russians had better healthcare , and cheap vodka, we had better cars and variety of food . About it
Professor wolf, can you make comment about current Chinese policy of third wealth re-distribution ?
No free questions are allowed...you gotta PAY...
this is chinese propaganda channel