Capitalism Hits the Fan A Marxian View

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October 8 2008 Richard Wolff a professor of economics at UMass Amherst talks on the current "financial" crisis and capitialism in general. A form of socialism is presented as a possible alternative.

The solution to fix the economy or Epic Failure?

I haven't watched it yet but I'm pretty sure it's an epic failure. Socialism is not an alternative. When people are arguing in favor of socialism they're arguing in favor of getting rid of the free market. That's not a solution or an alternative. They want to take away our rights.

If you watch the video, his solution is to make more cooperative businesses or legislate corporations to be more democratic.

reply to post by stereotype


That's exactly what I'm saying. Socialists want for the government to nationalize businesses or to legislate businesses. They want intervention to make them more equal and freer for people in them. But, when you think about it having the government step in isn't the solution and isn't an alternative, and, having the government step in is another codeword for interventionism.

He's actually right on pretty much all counts. It was basically 35 minutes worth of facts about how our the average American saw their inflation-adjusted wages flat-line while production continued to increase, and then we compensated by using ridiculous amounts of credit. He points out that this is likely an unavoidable outcome of capitalism. Then in the last few minutes he puts forth an alternative that wouldn't require government intervention (and is, in fact, the way that some CompSci companies have willingly gone).

Of course, he fails to mention that, in the 1950s, our military started classifying technological breakthroughs (notice that most of the past 50 years has been little more than the culmination of semiconductor research that was done in the 1940s) and that without invention/innovation, capitalism fails. He also could have touched on the fact that major corpoations have a vested interest in preventing new Entrepreneurs from being innovative (although some made it in the computer revolution), and from preventing innovation from leaking out (the status quo has lower upstart costs).

There's also the fact that many people in the financial sector were committing outright fraud, and capitalism can't function if fraud is tolerated.

Then there's our deteriorating education system -- one of the worst in the world -- which has led us into a situation where people can't find jobs because they're dumber than immigrants who got their education in Asia ("they took our jobs" rhetoric aside, they're simply better at what they do).

The current economic collapse is really a multi-headed monster, and any theorist of any ideology will probably be at least partially about the some of the causes.

[edit on 15-4-2009 by theWCH]