Yves here. While Richard Wolff makes important observations about how both the purported left and right have abandoned ordinary citizens and cater to the interests of the wealthy, and that the collective mood is both sour and increasingly outraged, I have difficulty with his claims about “mass anger”. We do not see mass movements around the generally oppressive effects of modern rentierism. Neoliberalism has done such a great job of reducing identification with communities and indoctrinating citizens to see themselves as independent actors that mass movements and mass identification is close to non-existent. When it does occur, it is most often along tribal lines, not economic lines, such as pro and anti abortion advocates, pro and anti or anti-strong form trans rights, pro or anti Israeli genocide, and pro or anti Hair Furore.
Bernie Sanders was the last major politician to attempt what in the 1960s would have been called consciousness raising. The Democratic Party went full bore after him, preferring to elect the disastrous Biden to seeing Sanders possibly prevail.
This Killer Mike ad for Sanders illustrates the need to explicitly create a mass identity on economic issues. Killer Mike starts out by saying how he had personalized his experience as a black man with fewer rights, and then came to understand that everyone outside the 1% was oppressed:
Let’s return to the tribal issue. So not only is the US sorely lacking in “mass” movements, save along special interest lines like gunz, economic grievances generally lack the sense of urgency that hot button religious or quasi religious issues do.
On top of that, Wolff posits the enemy as capitalism. But that’s a system. That is not a target for anger or action. How do you attack capitalism? Is anyone outside hard core socialist and communists and anarchists able to work up anger about “capitalism’? They might hate their unscrupulous landlord, their abusive boss, or their openly-out-to-steal surprise billing hospital system. But systems are too abstract to elicit anger.
As I have said repeatedly, the US is too atomized for a revolution to be likely. More probable are increased episodes of individual violence. If you want to look at an example of mass anger, by contrast, look at the white hot level of hatred most Israelis voice towards Palestinians.
By Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the British people’s anger, as Labor leader Starmer now says as the anger explodes. Of course, such phrases from such politicians usually mean little or nothing and accomplish less. Such leaders and their parties just keep calculating how best to regain power when they lose it. In that, they are like the U.S. Democrats after Biden’s performance in his debate with Trump and like the U.S. Republicans after Trump’s loss in 2020. In both parties, a small group of top leaders and top donors made all the key decisions and then organized the political theater to ratify those decisions. Even surprises like Harris replacing Biden are temporary departures from resuming politics as usual.
However, unlike Trump, the others missed opportunities to identify with an already organized mass base of angry people. Trump stumbled into that identification by saying loudly and crudely what traditional politicians treated as publicly unspeakable about immigrants, women, NATO, and traditional political taboos. That set the tone for Trump then doubling down by insisting he had won the 2020 election but had been cheated out of it. The mass anger of populations feeling victimized in their workaday lives found a spokesperson loudly claiming parallel victimizations. Trump and base grasped that together they might victimize their victimizers.
Whether or not they can politically exploit voters’ anger, no mainstream leader in the collective West, including Trump, seems actually to “understand” it. They mostly see only as far as what they can plausibly blame on their opponents in the next election. Biden blamed Trump for a “bad” economy in 2020, while Trump reversed the same blame over the last year and will shortly adjust to blaming Harris. Presidential opponents blame the other for the “immigration crisis,” for inadequately protecting U.S. industry from Chinese competition, government budget deficits, and job exports.
No mainstream leader “understands” (or dares to hint or suggest) that mass anger these days might be something more and different from any collection of specific complaints and demands (about guns, abortion, taxes, and wars). Even the demagogues who like to speak about “culture wars” dare not ask why such “wars” are hot now. Angry “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) folks are notably vague and poorly informed as their critics enjoy exposing. Rarely do those critics offer persuasive alternative explanations for MAGA anger (explanations that are neither vague nor poorly informed).
In particular, we ask, might the anger that the MAGA movement enrolls express a genuine mass suffering that has not yet understood its cause? Might that cause be nothing less than the decline of Western capitalism and all it represents? If ideological taboos and blinders preclude admitting it, might that decline’s results—anxiety, despair, and anger—focus instead on suitable scapegoats? Are Trump and Biden, Macron and Sunak, and so many others competitively choosing scapegoats to mobilize an anger they misunderstand and dare not explore?
After all, Western capitalism is no longer the world’s colonial master. The American empire that succeeded the European empires has now followed them into decline. The next empire will be Chinese or else the era of empires will give way to genuine global multipolarity. Western capitalism is likewise no longer the world’s dynamic growth center as that has moved eastward. Western capitalism is clearly losing its former position as the self-confident, unified, ultimate power behind the World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. dollar as world currency.
In terms of global economic footprints as measured by national GDPs, the United States and its major allies (G7) comprise a total, aggregated GDP now that is already significantly less than the comparable aggregated GDPs of China and its major allies (BRICS). The footprints of the two global economic power blocs were roughly equal in 2020. The difference between the two footprints has been widening ever since and continues to do so. China and its BRICS allies are increasingly the world economy’s richest bloc. Nothing prepared the populations of Western capitalism for this changed reality or its effects. Especially the sections of those populations already forced to absorb the costly burdens of Western capitalism’s decline feel betrayed, abandoned, and angry. Elections are merely one way for some of them to express those feelings.
Western capitalism’s rich, powerful, and small minority practices a combination of denial and adjustment to its decline. Prevailing politicians, mainstream media, and academics continue to orate, write, and act as if the collective West were still globally dominant. For them and their ways of thinking, their global dominance in the second half of the last century never ended. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza testify to that denial and exemplify the costly strategic mistakes it produces.
When not denying the new reality, significant portions of Western capitalism’s corporate rich and powerful are adjusting their preferred economic policies away from neoliberalism toward economic nationalism. The chief rationale for that adjustment is that it serves “national security” because it may at least slow “China’s aggressiveness.” Domestically, the rich and powerful in each country use their positions and resources to shift the costs of Western capitalism’s decline onto the mass of their middle-income and poorer fellow citizens. They worsen income and wealth inequalities, cut governmental social services, and harden police behaviors and prison conditions.
Denial facilitates the continued decline of Western capitalism. Too little is done too late against problems not yet admitted. Deteriorating social conditions flowing from that decline, especially for the middle income and the poor, provide opportunities for the usual right-wing demagogues. They proceed to blame the decline on immigrants, foreigners, excessive state power, the Democrats, China, secularism, abortion, and culture war enemies, hoping thereby to assemble a winning electoral constituency. Sadly, left-wing commentary focuses on refuting the right’s claims about its chosen scapegoats. While its refutations are often well-documented and effective in media combat against right-wing Republicans, the left too rarely invokes explicit, sustained arguments about mass anger’s links to declining capitalism. The left fails sufficiently to stress that government regulators, however well-intentioned, have been captured by and subordinated to specifically private capitalist profiteers.
The mass of people therefore became deeply skeptical about relying on the government to correct or offset the failings of private capitalism. People grasp, often just intuitively, that today’s problem is the merger of capitalists and government. Left and right increasingly feel betrayed by all the promises of center-left and center-right politicians. More or less government intervention has changed too little in the trajectory of modern capitalism. To growing numbers, politicians of the center-left and center-right seem equally docile servants of the capitalist-government merger that constitutes modern capitalism with all its failures and flaws. Thus today’s right succeeds if, when, and where it can portray itself as not centrist, its candidates explicitly anti-centrist. The left is weaker because too many of its programs seem still linked to the idea that government interventions will correct or offset capitalism’s shortcomings.
In short, mass anger is disconnected from declining capitalism in part because left, right and center deny, avoid, or neglect their link. Mass anger does not translate into or yet move to explicit anti-capitalist politics in part because too few organized political movements lead in that way.
Thus, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain’s new Labour Party government—its top financial officer—blithely announces, “There is not a lot of money there.” She prepares the public—and preemptively excuses the new government—for how little the new government will even try to do. She goes further and defines her key goal as “unlocking private investment.” Even the words she chooses mirror what the old Conservatives want to hear and would themselves say. In declining capitalisms, electoral changes can and often do serve to avoid or at least postpone real change.
Chancellor Reeves’s words assure major corporations and the 1 percent they enrich that Starmer’s Labour Party will not heavily tax them. This matters since it is precisely in major corporations and the rich that “a lot of money” is located. The wealth of the top 1 percent could easily fund a genuinely democratic rebuilding of a seriously depleted post-2008 UK economy. In stark contrast, the typical Conservative programs prioritizing private investment are what got the UK to its present sad state. They were the problem; they are not the solution.
The Labour Party was once socialist. Socialism once meant a thoroughgoing critique of the capitalist system and advocacy of something totally different. Socialists sought electoral victories to win government power and use it to transition society to a post-capitalist order. But today’s Labour Party has thrown that history away. It wants to administer contemporary British capitalism just a bit less harshly than Conservatives do. It works to persuade the British working class that “less harsh” is the best they can hope and vote for. And British Conservatives can indeed smile and condescendingly approve such a Labour Party or else quibble with it over how much harshness today’s capitalism “needs.”
Macron, also once a socialist, plays a similar role in France. Indeed, so do Biden and Trump in the United States, Justin Trudeau in Canada, and Olaf Scholz in Germany. All offer administrations of their contemporary capitalisms. None have programs aimed at solving modern capitalisms’ basic, accumulated, and persistently unsolved problems. Solutions would require first admitting what those problems are: cyclically recurring instability, increasingly unequal distributions of income and wealth, monied corruption of politics, mass media, and culture, and increasingly oppressive foreign policies that fail to offset a declining Western capitalism. Insistent denial across the collective West precludes admitting those problems, let alone fashioning solutions to them woven into programs for real change. Alternative governments administer; they dare not lead. Would a Kamala Harris-Tim Walz regime break with this pattern?
Their administrations will experiment with and perhaps oscillate between free-trade and protectionist policies—as past capitalist governments often did. In the United States, recent GOP and Democrat steps toward economic nationalism remain vote-seeking exceptions to still widespread commitments to neoliberal globalization. Western megacorporations, including many based in the United States, welcome China’s new role as the global champion of free trade (even as it retaliates moderately against tariffs and trade wars initiated by the collective West). Support remains strong for negotiations to shape generally acceptable global divisions of trade and investment flows. The latter are seen as profitable as well as a means to avoid dangerous wars. Elections will continue to include clashes between capitalism’s free-trade and protectionist tendencies.
But the more fundamental issue of 2024 elections is mass anger in the collective West aroused by its historic decline and the effects of that decline on the mass of average citizens. How will that anger shape the elections?
The more extreme right wing recognizes and rides the deeper anger without, of course, grasping its relationship to capitalism. Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Trump are all examples. They all mock and deride the center-left and center-right governments that merely administer what they depict as a sinking ship that needs new, different leadership. But their donor base (capitalist) and long-standing ideology (pro-capitalist) block them from going beyond extreme scapegoating (of immigrants, ethnic minorities, heterodox sexualities, and foreign demons).
The mainstream media likewise cannot grasp the relationship of mass anger to capitalism. Thus they dismiss the anger as irrational or caused by inadequate “messaging” from mainstream influencers. For many months, mainstream economic pundits have bemoaned the “strange” coexistence of a “great economy” and polls showing mass disappointment at the “bad” economy. By “strange” they mean “stupid” or “ignorant” or “politically-motivated/dishonest”: sets of words often condensed into “populist.”
The left is jealous of the extreme right’s significant mass base now in working-class areas. In most countries, the left has spent the last many decades trying to hold on to its working-class base as the mainstream’s center-left movement pulled it away. That meant a greater or lesser shift from communist and anarchist to ever more “moderate” socialist and democratic affiliations. That shift included downplaying the goal of a comprehensively different post-capitalism in favor of the immediate goal of a state-fostered softer, humane capitalism where wages and benefits were greater, taxes more progressive, cycles more regulated, and minorities less oppressed. For that left, what mass anger it could recognize flowed from failures to achieve such a state-fostered softer capitalism, not from Western capitalism’s decline.
As capitalism’s dynamic center moved to Asia and elsewhere in the global South, decline set in among its old, more-or-less abandoned centers. Old center capitalists participated in and profited greatly as the system relocated its dynamic center. Capitalists, both state and private, in the new centers profited even more. In the old centers, the rich and powerful shifted the burdens of decline onto the masses. In the new centers, the rich and powerful gathered the new capitalist wealth there mostly into their hands but with enough trickling down to satisfy large portions of their working classes. That’s how capitalism works and always has. For the mass of employees, however, the ride upwards when capitalism’s dynamic center is where they work and live is far more pleasant and hopeful than when decline sets in. The ride down provokes depression and traumas. When they fester without admission or discussion, they often morph into anger.
Very interesting take. I think he’s talking about an empire system, the highest state of monopoly capitalism, of the US and the West in decline. This isn’t about left v right, imo.
The Due Dissidence guys had a very interesting discussion with Caleb Maupin about empire systems. utube, ~9 minutes. Maupin explains capitalist imperial systems in Marxist terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fwrUqQRsMU
How good is Due Dissidence, they new to the scene?
Jimmy Dore blew up the Due Dissidence guys when he had them cohost his show. I assume it was while he detoxed from weed???
I like them. They have good views for the most part, but they get lost in the weeds of racism and are reactionary.
I get the impression, starting after 6:00, that Maupin doesn’t take “planetary limits” seriously, To be anti-imperialist does not mean that liberated countries are not faced with the same physical constraints that face the imperialist countries.
“innovationism” seems to me worrisomely close to the fantasy that every problem can be solved with new technologies. Perhaps he is thinking more broadly, to include “new forms of social organization” or “new ways of relating to the environment.”
“Degrowth” is an innovative way of relating the environment and should, IMO, remain in view as an adaptive approach to the problems facing humanity.
Yeah, I’ve been rereading Lenin’s Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism (it’s surprisingly short and well-referenced). In my opinion Mr Ulyanov more or less nailed what we’re going through now.
Hey NC Commentariat,
I’d like to formally invite y’all to participate at a local level IRL and at some online political education discussions by joining this little group called Class Unity! I’d love y’all’s help and knowledge if you’re in America!
I hope Yves won’t mind, and I hope she will help us as well by letting me post this.
Strength & Honor,
Jonathan B
***
CLASS UNITY EVENTS
Class
Fellow Stupidpolrs, Heretics, Workers, and People of the Internet!
The great race to form a Third Party has begun! Sublation Media and their proto party, Midwestern Marx and the American Communist Party, and us idpol rejecting class firsters at Class Unity!
It’s never been a greater time to join Class Unity and participate in our great economic discussions and learn how the real economy works. Come help lead the way in your local community and make a difference!
Last week we had Professor Steve Keen on to talk about the Australian Debt Crisis in 2008. This week we have Vijay Prashad talking about US imperialism and the CIA in his book, Washington Bullets, on Thursday and Professor Sarah Knuthe talking about the role of asset management companies and investment capital in the green energy transition on Saturday. We might have the Legendary Michael Hudson in October!
CLASS UNITY WANTS YOU!
Jonathan B MemCom Chair Classunity.org
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1eqxvef/class_unity_events/
I am not eligible to join but good luck and Godspeed!
As Shakespeare says, “The readiness is all!”
The road ahead will be hard, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
For The People!
In my personal experiences with most people is that they are angry, but don’t know who or what to blame. Most people I speak to know that they are getting gouged, ripped off, corruption is increasing, and that general living conditions have slowly declined. The vast majority of US dwellers have been highly misled, and misinformed about economic, financial, and political issues, so they don’t know what to do.
Most people don’t know what socialism, capitalism, anarchism etc. is in the first place: they have been fed a diet of misinformation, and lies for their entire lives.
Since our BigMoney Public Relations Democracy Inc. does not offer meaningful choice, angry, and desperate people will choose the DT or KH and hope that it will change something. The desperate, misinformed population are herded into two camps and told to fight against each other while the oligarchy pillages the place. The population is further manipulated with emotional, religious and cultural issues, while the “meat and potatoes” issues like foreign policy, economics, institutional corruption, health care, housing, etc. is “off the table” as they like to say. This has worked very well for the oligarchy and their representatives, so I don’t expect any change.
I agree, there will be no revolution in the US, the population is far too misinformed, conditioned, fractured, divided, and emotionally-manipulated and electronically lobotomized. However, the combination of a heavily armed, misinformed and ignorant society means that even more violence is almost certain.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Though to expand on Yves’ point about atomization, I blame car dependent suburbanization and the destruction of easily accessible “third places.” Pubs, churches, and other such third places were, historically, where information within your community occurred, ideas exchanged, and revolutions were born. Car dependent sprawl means these places are further away and thus, less accessible. Combined with people overworked from endless hours and multiple jobs to make ends meet, driving to a third place after dealing with commute traffic is probably a dealbreaker for many people. That’s even assuming they have a functioning car and aren’t relying on crappy, unreliable transit services that get stuck in the same traffic as cars. All of this serves the purpose of atomizing the populace to prevent them from organizing and fighting back against our predatory economic system.
People will drive to their kids’ sports practices and events. You’re not going to start a revolution, but if you want to talk about education or health-care reform, start there. Just make sure you have a specific kid you’re there to support so you don’t look creepy.
People increasingly don’t have children, or even if they do, can’t afford to have them play sports. It’s a rather narrow band of ppl who meet at kids’ sports practocrs.
Keep talking to those people. Maybe opining about the evils of capitalism isn’t going to radicalize anybody, but people know they’re getting the shaft, and talking about it makes people feel less isolated.
Much better to put the blame on actual policy makers rather than isms. I was speaking with a local bus driver yesterday who, for reasons I won’t get into here, is likely to get the shaft soon by city officials. I pointed out that those city officials were often given rather large raises so they wouldn’t leave for greener pastures, with the rationale being it is necessary to retain “top talent”, and that those same city officials feel that giving regular raises to people who actually perform the work, like bus drivers, was some sort of moral hazard. Start giving raises to the working class and soon everybody will want one, so more money for me but not for thee according to management.
The bus driver pointed out that a friend of his got into real estate and was able to sell a high priced condo on spec for $3 mil before it was even built, gaining a commission of around $90K for very little actual work, or approximately 2-3 times the driver’s own annual take home pay. That such a disparity even exists is an obscenity.
People get it, so keep talking, keep agitating.
Solidarity!
yes. The revelatory aspects of an orchestrated oligarchical and media disinformation juggernaut…
have jettisoned the graphic interests of state…in favor of abetting the mundane…hence evoking a term, (and i use it loosely here)….’the great unvexed’.
I agree with the other posters: it is plausible to assume that there is plenty of anger at a mass level, but that it is contained and defused. While it can be argued that for many people we could say that it gets redirected, e.g. at this or that scapegoat group, for many people it doesn’t attain that degree of outwardly directed organization.
In mainstream social science discussions of this question confusion often sets in when a researcher, who’s tried to dig into the complexity of popular attitudes with open-ended interviews, ends up trying to make sense of apparently contradictory material by trying to be clear about one thing above all else: they are not going to imply that an interviewee suffers from “false consciousness” regarding their interests. This leads them to deny the significance of expressions of anger. In critical work that I’ve done on this I’ve been struck at how a collusion seems to develop between the researcher and the interviewee to let sleeping dogs lie. It’s a shame, because very good work, for example Arlie Hochschild’s “Strangers in a Strange Land,” ends up being compromised. In her case, she literally concocts a cover story of her own that nicely contains her interviewees’ frustrations, which they of course tend to agree with.
They miss the point that interviewees are burdened with outrage that “will get them into trouble,” or “just leave me feeling down,” or “make me bitter,” etc. So they come up with a way, usually combining elements of personal adjustment strategies that are assembled as they grow up and adjustment formulae pushed at a mass level — “don’t worry, be happy,” or “they’ll get theirs on Judgement Day” — and settle themselves down. Their consciousness isn’t “false,” but rather it’s shaped by patterns of adjustment managing the tensions in a mix of explicit and hidden ways. You get by.
As an aside, Bourdieu tried to get at this with his concept of “habitus,” but in doing so ignored, as he was so inclined to do, the work of others, in this case people like Sennet and Cobb in their “Hidden Injuries of Class,” who were more alert to the tensions that underlie nominal adjustment. He came up with a social psychology that was dynamically flat and deaf to these tensions.
Wow great comment thank you.
100%
JonnyJames, when you said “Most people don’t know what socialism, capitalism, anarchism etc. is in the first place: they have been fed a diet of misinformation, and lies for their entire lives.” I nodded my head in agreements. And then I wondered whether I knew what … is other than differentiating political slogans.
Well said JJ.
There is most definitely mass anger and rightfully so, but all parties of power are playing on that discontent to their advantage and not to the broader benefit of the people rightfully angry. As I recall the largest block of voters in 2016 cast neither a vote for Hilary or Trump.
The Killer Mike video IS the real situation, but the 1% elite and powerful can NOT live with the average person/worker being in control. So the time honored tradition of defeating ones enemy by dividing and conquering is rinsed and repeated. Sadly that rinse and repeat has a shelf life and when it expires all hell could break loose and while it may feel like the “revolution” or “civil war” that media keeps talking about it probably will end up looking more like what already goes on, on the streets of other banana republics.
Confucius said calling things by their proper names is the beginning of wisdom.
Please define “mass anger”. I see a lot of individual anger of varying temperatures directed at many different targets. I do not see that as “mass anger”. I see this phrase as obfuscatory rather than informative.
Agreed. I mean mass in lots of related individual anger. Nothing organized by a “mass” of angry people (however some angry people on either side are organized by those looking to take advantage of their anger).
The mass anger I see is populations of individuals who are angry about issues that affect them collectively. The anger is communicated within the collective, but rarely finds collective expression externally (largely I’d say on account of the loss of radical working class political formations). In France the gilets jaunes would be an example that did find expression (and repression). Also the pensions movement. The 2011 riots in the UK. And in the UK currently the anger driving the anti-migrant pogroms is heavily driven by four decades of bottled up anger over crap lives in crap communities. Current voting patterns across Europe back this up – we’ll vote for anyone who is anti. Big heap of dry twigs waiting for a spark.
Wolff is of course engaging in his own brand of marxist denialism by characterizing Trump, Le Pen or Farage as “extreme far right.” Their positions are the center to mild center-right.
We occasionally have manifestations of mass anger in France. I’d say that the Gilets Jaunes was certainly one. From the reactionary side, there were the Manif pour tous people who hated the idea of homosexual marriage and family raising. I’m surprised that we didn’t have any actions during the Olympics, but they locked down the country very tight. Rather foreboding that they could crank up that security level at will again for other uses.
Yes, the French have a robust history of protest. It is a strong part of their national identity.
I don’t see that, however, as generalizable to the US, and this post is about US elections. The US regards protestors as losers, while in France, they are heirs to important French traditions.
I used to be angry too when I first learned about politics and the way the politicians don’t actually do anything for the people. I went through the Junior Republican- Obama Democrat- Bernie Democrat- Idpol Socialism- Marxism- Populism.
It’s useful to catch angry newbies early and direct them into fruitful pipelines of political participation and party building instead of sending them on wild goose chases of tea parties and BLM statue tear downs!
Somebody has to warn the people.
“the US is too atomized for a revolution to be likely.”
That is quite true up to a point. I am waiting for climate change and chemical excess to affect physical well being and food production… Grumbling stomachs are the best unifier.
The French and the Russian Revolutions were started in earnest by women waiting in line for bread…
French women i breadlines didn’t start the revolition to crown Napoleon, though. Social disruption gets things in motion, but what emerges at the end is not what was “intended.”
Indeed, something has to be intended in the first place. Outbursts of mass anger may not be so well directed. But the organizing and planning work is often – usually? – viewed as treasonous conspiracy by tptb. Which is indeed somewhat limiting.
Not to minimize the impact of the long-standing food crunch due to population growth and then the 1788 bad harvest, but France had experienced more acute starvation before and that had not generated a revolt. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/3132553
I am very leery of an article that can’t seem to get around to defining “Western” “capitalism,” “decline,” and “denial.” If Wolff thinks that this description is of the height of Western civilization, instead of a moment of Anglo-American supremacy, I beg to differ:
Western capitalism is clearly losing its former position as the self-confident, unified, ultimate power behind the World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. dollar as world currency.
Note that the World Bank and IMF are continuing put-up jobs (scams) and that the results have been mayhem and murders in Greece, Guatemala, Congo (including Dag Hammerskjöld of the UN), Chile, and Vietnam. Cambodia. Syria. I can go on…
Further, the instant diagnosis of anxiety, despair, and anger tends toward the psychobabble that I see too often these days. I am very leery of Americans who diagnose Trump as a narcissist. Oh? Americans talking about narcissism? That’s rich. Likewise, anger. Americans are always “angry.”
Anyone who has participated in a demonstration knows that it isn’t anxiety, despair, and anger, all of which are corrosive and paralyzing, that get one out on the streets. So there is more going on out in the world than simple diagnosis-by-social-scientists. Even to go to the local precinct to vote requires more than anger.
We finally do get a kind-of diagnosis, but the plan of action is nonexistent:
Solutions would require first admitting what those problems are: cyclically recurring instability, increasingly unequal distributions of income and wealth, monied corruption of politics, mass media, and culture, and increasingly oppressive foreign policies that fail to offset a declining Western capitalism.
There’s that “declining Western capitalism” again. From what to what?
But there is hope, O angry ones. Trickle down.
In the new centers, the rich and powerful gathered the new capitalist wealth there mostly into their hands but with enough trickling down to satisfy large portions of their working classes.
And I am the tsar of all the Russias.
“I am very leery of an article that can’t seem to get around to defining ‘Western capitalism’ ”
Surely so, but suppose we use these points to define Western capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus
The concept and name of the Washington Consensus were first presented in 1989 by John Williamson, an economist from the Institute for International Economics, an international economic think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The consensus as originally stated by Williamson included ten broad sets of relatively specific policy recommendations:
1) Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2) Redirection of public spending from subsidies (“especially indiscriminate subsidies”) toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;
3) Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4) Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5) Competitive exchange rates;
6) Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;
7) Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8) Privatization of state enterprises;
9) Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight of financial institutions;
10) Legal security for property rights.
This almost sounds rather reasonable, but I would love to read Michael Hudson’s take on the list.
“systems are too abstract to elicit anger” You’d certainly have a hard time convincing the half of humanity that engaged in revolutionary activity against capitalism for a century that this is the case! Yes, it’s capitalists you go after, but the general idea that you can’t attack it because it’s a system. . .
You absolutely do need to understand a system before you can take it apart, though–no doubt. For many adherents, it’s a faith. No scientist would pretend to investigate any domain whatever without trying to apprehend it’s systematic character. We try, though–to return to your original point–to change many systems, though–can and do.
This post is about modern US. I stand by my comment with respect to the US now. People will oppose particular institutions and people but systems are too removed from their personal experience and grievances.
Capitalism’s great strength; an atomised society with no clear King to behead.
This is what Tim Morgan is calling civilisational inflexion in his latest essay. The party is over with resource constraints becoming a constant going forwards, just enough so that those in power feel able to ignore it for a while, kind of like Covid. No wonder they won’t give up poking the bear, they need those resources to keep the party going during their lifetimes.
Mass lassitude caused by the complete loss of agency, perhaps?
Accompanied by the performative anger of the TDS-addled PMC and MAGAmericans who prattle constantly about a “Radical Left” that is as real as a unicorn?
It’s high time those MAGAmericans meet the real radical left IRL.
Then let them deny our destiny!
I have this hunch that the real (as opposed to the posers) “MAGAmericans,” aka the Deplorables, would love the real radical left should they find each other. That may be why the propagandists try to keep them apart through their fantastical nonsense.
As GM likes to say, Americans like to think of themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. With that kind of attitude, a revolution is very unlikely, but when the depression inevitably comes, immigrants will bear the brunt of hatred and violence.
The aim of the Starmer ‘liberal authoritarianism’ government is to increase Control. this has nothing to do with ‘capitalism’, left or right. The technocrats know what is best for everyone and to make sure that is brought to fruition there needs to be obedience.
Successive UK governments of every hue have followed this trail for the last 3 decades, turbo charged under Blair. Now the vagaries of the UK election process, together with its basically undemocratic processes of government have left a party with approx 20% of the electoral votes with absolute power.
With almost total support of the popular media there is little ‘anger’ or even awareness.
Over the next 5 years we will see how far the ‘human rights’ leader will take the country down the road of totalitarianism under the banner of ‘liberalism’.
The US is one Harris led executive from the same position. I am unconvinced that a second Trump led one would delay matters much.
I also “have difficulty with his claims about ‘mass anger’”. I’m convinced the emotion many people feel is anxiety and it’s only when they interact with others does it come across, and misinterpreted, as anger. Drug overdoses, suicides, alienation, violence, etc., are not the result of mass anger but persistent anxiety.
The spur of unemployment and other destabilizing events that induce anxiety, is generally something the 1% view favorably as a means to maintain control over the behavior of all workers. Killer Mike’s speech is a great example of what anger looks like without any anxiety.
Unlike the French Revolution where ending feudalism and granting land to freed peasants was a priority, Prof Wolff has, for years, promoted worker cooperatives as a means for restoring worker control and reducing exploitation, and which I think is a good idea.