Guerrilla History - The Economics of Imperialism and Inflation w/ Richard Wolff

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

In this useful episode, we talk with Professor Richard Wolff about the economics of both imperialism and inflation - two major issues facing nearly everyone today, but that we often don't look at the economic drivers or mechanisms of.  An incredibly fun conversation with someone we've wanted to bring on the show for quite some time! Richard Wolff is a Professor Emeritus of Economics at UMass-Amherst and a Visiting Professor at The New School.  He is also the host of Economic Update and the founder of Democracy At Work.  You can follow him on Twitter @profwolff. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a new (free!) newsletter you can sign up for!

You remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bin-Bou? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history, Henry Huckmacky, joined by one of my usual co-hosts, Brett O'Shea, hosts of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you, and how is Omaha, Nebraska going? I think like everywhere else in the world, it's very hot here in Omaha, but I'm very excited to talk with Dr. Richard Wolf for sure. Absolutely. So unfortunately, we're not going to be joined by our other co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, who is in the middle of a travel right now and, you know, is about whatever, 30,000 feet in the air and can't join us right now. But we are joined, fortunately, by a very esteemed and distinguished guest, as Brett mentioned, Professor Richard Wolfe, which I think Professor Wolf probably doesn't need much of an introduction for the majority of our audience, but for those who are unfamiliar with him. He's a professor.

of Economics Emeritus from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visiting professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York, and also is the founder and chairman, I guess, of Democracy at Work, which is an excellent collective of, you know, materials, resources, podcasts, everything about democracy at the workplace. So, hello, Professor Wolfe. I know I've interviewed you a couple of times before, but it's been more than a year since I've seen you. It's nice to have you here. Yes, yes. Thank you very much. I am very glad to be with you. So the topic that we're going to be talking about today is imperialism and specifically the economic basis and the economic mechanisms behind imperialism.

Because I know that when a lot of our audience thinks of imperialism, they think about like U.S. military going into somewhere and bombing it and, you know, stealing oil. And that's about the extent of their understanding of what is imperialism. but they don't understand the economic basis and the economic mechanisms that this takes place by. And I thought, hey, who better to bring on to the show to explain this to our audience than Professor Richard Wolfe? So this is why you're here. Professor Wolfe, when you hear the word imperialism,

what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is that this economic system we call capitalism is by far the, most driven of all the basic systems we know much about, systems like slavery or feudalism or a whole bunch of others. This is the one most driven by its own internal mechanisms to become global, to literally expand from wherever it starts like a kind of weed, you know, certain kinds of weeds the minute you have them in your garden, if you don't deal with them, within three years,

that's all they will be in your garden. They have the ability to grow. They are some mechanism. They produce more seeds, more seeds that survive, more seeds that germinate. Capitalism has in it mechanisms that simply push it ever further a field geographically and in other ways. And that has meant that wherever, wherever capitalism has settled in and become a dominant system, the minute that happens, you begin to see, like a weed, the spreading as it literally absorbs the area around it, the fertile grounds of its own growth.

It's intrinsically expansionary. It really has built in those mechanisms and not as a choice, but as an absolute survival necessity. That's why capitalism can't get rid of imperialism. It can change the forms, but it is forever driven in one way or another, And that's why its political leadership pretty soon comes to internalize these mechanisms

and to understand itself as having to preside over the globe. Nobody should be surprised that the most developed capitalism of the last few centuries that we've had modern capitalism. I mean, it doesn't go back beyond 17th, 18th century, Britain, then Europe, and all that, but across these centuries, the most developed capitalism is the one with the most developed colonial or imperial system. The people who sit in Washington today literally sit with the globe. In a way, nobody else ever did before. Their troops are everywhere. Their concern is everywhere. Their border skirmishes in Asia or Africa are,

monitored, intervened in, with an intensity that if you were a psychologist and saw it in a person, you'd ask, why is this person so revved up about something so remote? And then your task as a psychologist would be to figure out why for that person it isn't remote. You see it as remote, but once you understand how that person makes sense of a world, this apparently remote event makes sense as something urgent for that. Capitalism has always had an urge to grow. It has always grown. It has sooner or later encountered limits or boundaries.

These have threatened its survival. It had to figure out a way over the limit. If it didn't, it had deeper and deeper. internal problems. We shouldn't be surprised that over 30 or 40 generations of capitalism, which is what we've had, people have adjusted. They've internalized a recognition that globalization is an appropriate thing for a capitalism to do. Neoliberalism isn't the interesting latest stage. It's using the word global and really bringing it into the notion of where we are with capitalism. It's now a global system. And that means the different parts of it are going to have

to be integrated and coordinated. And the question is, who's going to do that and toward what ends? Yeah, that's a wonderful opening. And I just have two terms to kind of get on the table with their relationship to economic imperialism in mind. And these two terms are super profits and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Can you talk about these two things like in the Marxist worldview and then how they relate to economic imperialism specifically? Sure. Let me start with the tendency for the rate of profit to fall because it's a nice story. We could go into it.

They're the famous three chapters of the third volume of capital, where Marx lays this out. It is, by the way, Marx's interpretation, as much of capital is, of work done before. People should not believe that Marx invented, for example, the labor theory of value, or that Marx invented the notion that capital has a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Those ideas were already around before Marx. Many of them articulated in the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Saying that shouldn't take away from Marx because what Marx did was radically reinterpret and reapply those ideas. So yes, you should credit others, as by the way Marx did. If you ever have a chance and if anyone listening would like to see that, there's another three-volume work by Marx, not as

well known as Capital. It's called theories of surplus value. And what it is, it was put together mostly after Marx died by Angles and I believe later, Kowdsky. Also, they took notebooks that he

had kept. Notebooks of when he, that is Marx, read through Adam Smith, read through David Ricardo, and made extensive comments and notes. Those have been gathered so you can, it's really a wonderful

window into Marxian economics where you can see how Marx learned from and in the process transformed ideas he was more than willing to credit. He had very nice

things, by the way, to say about Adam Smith and David Ricardo. None of the dismissive behavior toward Marx that comes later. You won't see that in Marx vis-a-vis the people who taught him and who he was grateful for having learned. So one of these older ideas is that capitalism has a capital

has a tendency for a rate of profit to fall. And the idea here is really very simple, that the first place, anyone with money in a capitalist system, the first place he or she looks to go with their, capital is where the rate of return is the highest. I mean, that's the logic of the system. The bigger the rate of profit, the more you'll make by investing, and the more you make, the safer you are. This is both an optimum defensive strategy and an optimum offensive strategy. You never know what the future holds. The more surplus you can get into your hands, that is, the more your

capital can grow by being invested where the profit is high, the better off you'll be to take advantage of a new invention, or to replicate one if your competitor got to jump on you with a new invention, or discover a cheaper source of inputs, or a cheaper location to hire workers, or whatever opportunity arises, the more wealth you have, the better the chance you'll be able to take advantage of that opportunity, which is, again, your best defense against your competitor and your best offense vis-a-vis that competitor. So that's what you do. Okay.

The minute the first five capitalists have gotten the highest rate of profit, what's left is a lower rate of profit. That is, there are investment opportunities. They're not all at the same rate. Some have greater. and the ones taken first will be the ones that have the largest. And so

here we go. What you'll tend to see unless other factors intervene is a tendency for lower and lower rates of profit to be earned. The problem of course is

that at a certain point the rate of return is so low that the capitalists anxiety about the risk of any investment begins to enter the picture. I'm willing to invest my money. I know there's a risk. The rate of return is so big, I'll take the risk.

If we then continue when the rate of return gets less and less, now my risk factor enters the picture. I may not do it. And then we get a situation, which, by the way, also was understood before Marx, not an idea original to Marx. Before Marx, what I'm about to describe, had a name. It was called the stationary state. The idea was we got a problem because the way capitalist work,

they compete with one another that drives down the rate of return and it can get so low that no more investment is made. Uh-oh, now we have people procreating. I'm going to be crude here for a minute, but to make the point simple, we have people procreating. They're growing up. They want jobs. How are they going to get jobs?

The capitalists have to invest. The capitalists aren't investing. Uh-oh, the stationary state, here we go, is a threat to capitalization. It's a threat. It has to be dealt with. You can't not pay attention because it will threaten all of us.

So we have to now, and then Marx begins to say, wait a minute, slow down. You've gotten the story right in the sense that this could happen, but the system has, and here is like a biologist or a medical doctor. Yes, you can get sick in this way. But your body has certain mechanisms that kick in when you start getting sick in order to get you through the period of illness. And then Marks, if you remember, goes in, I believe it's chapter 13, 14, 15, and volume 3, or very close to that.

In the next chapter, he talks what he calls about internal contradictions, the way in which the very decline in the rate of profit, provokes adjustments that offset the decline in the rate of profit. So, for example, the very process of investing will involve new technologies. If the new technologies lower the amount of labor necessary per unit, say, of machinery, well, then the rate of profit will go up because you don't have to lay out as much. much much. Okay, so that's an internal mechanism that can neutralize. And then the third chapter are external factors, things that are not internal to the mechanism, but environmental situations. And let me give you one, because it'll take us right into the present. Your profit

rate is falling. The internal mechanisms are working, but not enough to stop the decline. You're getting nervous and then suddenly you can send your political representatives, for example, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, you put them on an airplane and you go to China and you say to them, we haven't recognized you since the revolution of 1949, but we're all, you're going to put that behind us and let's all be friends. And how about this? you let American capital come to China, employ your workers, produce goods, pay your workers significantly more than you're paying them now, thereby build up a market, you let us in here to hire them, you let us sell the output to the market being created inside.

China. And here's what we will do. Number one, we'll stop hassling you the way we have since 1949. Number two, we will support and encourage American businesses to make deals with you about how to develop all these industries, cooperation agreements, shared technology, which we have and you need and the Chinese said done. That's a deal. We'll do that. And for the next

until now, including now, I mean, it didn't stop yet, it may, but it didn't yet. That's the deal. The Chinese get two things. Cooperation with technological

sharing, very important to them. Not as important. because most of that sharing has been done. Indeed, the sharing is now a two-way operation. The United States needs their technology more, literally more every day. But that sharing was done. The United States suddenly, and I cannot exaggerate the importance of this, China is the biggest country by population in the world.

That deal brought into the circulation of capital in the world. A vast new supply of relatively well-educated, relatively very well-disciplined, industrial labor force, dirt cheap. This is a gift to capitalism. That's the secret of the last 70 years. Not neoliberalism.

the only role it played was the veneer, the ideological fluff to cover that deal. That deal was super good for Western capitalism, by the way, including European, Japanese, not just the United States. Part of the reason the United States went was because the Europeans and Japanese had already gone there and done all this. So it was a good deal for the Western capitalist. That's why we've had stagnant real wages, for 40 years. That's why. Because suddenly, the high level of wages had the rug pulled out under it because you brought in a billion. Look at the numbers we're talking about. A billion

low-wage workers. And in the end, it wasn't, of course, just China. It was Indo-China. It was Latin America. I mean, but the Chinese are still the outsized example of it all. And the second thing, by the way, the United States gave China was a market. You see, you couldn't have done all of this unless there was a market for the Chinese to put

all their people to work in this capitalism that was now going to become available to them thanks to U.S. capital, Western European capital. All of that could put people at work, build the factory, build the infrastructure. But the final step

was we're going to sell all his shit. that comes out of here. The people of China can't afford it. They can't buy it back. That's going to take a while. The answer, in a word, Walmart. The answer is the United States stimulated, subsidized, literally put a blessing as if they were cardinal somebody at the church. They said, okay, Walmart, you are, I mean, I'm exaggerating, but you get the picture. You are an obscure Arkansas department stores. You count for nothing.

But we're going to make you the number one retailer in the world. Why? Because you're going to become the market for everything produced in China. China can do everything, but it can't get the crap into

the American household. You can. You're in the position, especially if we quadruple the number of your stores, and locate them everywhere and not just in the U.S. in Mexico and Canada, wherever, you're going to be the outlet taking the Chinese product and making it a global consumer good. And, of course, why is this good? It brings cheap goods back to the United States. Cheap consumer goods, here we go now, is another counteracting factor listed by Marx at the

If you can cheapen the consumer goods, then the real wage of the worker can go up, but the value of labor power doesn't. It could even go down. Remember the arithmetic, the value of labor power can go down. If the cost per unit of the consumer goods goes down more, then the real wage goes up while the value of labor. By the way, I once tried to explain. this. I can't remember whether it was Jordan

Peterson or another esteemed professor. They couldn't wrap their head because if you take neoclassical economics and university, there is no comparable arithmetic, so these folks are lost, even though it's a very simple idea. Anyway,

the reason I like this story is it if I can jump the gun just a bit. What it does is it undercuts a kind of of tendency among both Marxists and non-Marxists to look for the magic bullet, the key essential cause of. And so there are immense debates. Is it inadequate, effective demand,

or is it the falling rate of profit? I mean, is the problem too much capital? Is the like a glut, in the words that you use, or a shortage? of it, is it hunting for raw materials, is it hunting for cheap labor, is it looking for an outlet of market for your product? And the answer shouldn't, this is a pointless debate because it's all of those things. None of those things are under control. They're not under the control of the capitalist. They're not anybody's control. They're part of what Marx elsewhere calls uneven development of society. You never know what your opportunity news. People 10 years or five years before didn't know that Kissinger and Nixon would go to China

or what would emerge from their trip. Five years ago, people would not have had it in their head the war in Ukraine or its consequences or the collapse of U.S.-China deal, which is what's happening, and so on. And so you can't, I mean, you can't fault people for not planning for that which is unforeseeable. I mean, how do you do that? And if it looks like you're doing it, it's luck. And unless you're a sheister,

you admit that to people. I'm lucky I did this thing, but I didn't know. And by the way, a large part, this is the greatness of Keynes and those people. They understood that neoclassical economics sat on a completely

phony foundation because it didn't understand uncertainty. It whooshed it away. I used to be a mathematician. To take a probability analysis as a substitute for certainty,

in other words, instead of saying the price of something is X, you say that the probability that the price of something is X is say 0.4 or something. You've now said, see, I take it into account that I don't know it's going to be

X. There's only a probability. Yeah, but you don't know what probability unless you know the distribution. And that's what you don't know. So the minute you do this probability, you're assuming you know the distribution. But you have no, there's no more reason for that than to assume you know what interest rates are going to be three years from now. Either there's uncertainty or there isn't. And if there is, your whole approach has to be rethought to take into a, account, for example, that every capitalist investment decision is wrapped up with uncertainty.

It takes time, months, years, between a decision to invest and the emergence of the output that comes from that investment. The profitability will depend on the outcome three years from now. You can't know that. You cannot know it. By the way, I'd say this to you as a person without going into details who has earned money off of people's craziness. When I was a younger economist, it quickly became clear to me that being a professor is not a way to have enough money. I was married. I had two children and on a professor's salary, marriage and two children is a problem, unless your wife makes as much or more than you do. which at the time I was coming, she did work, but she didn't make more than I did. So I quickly discovered that there are jobs.

Corporations will hire economists, and they'll bring him into a run. I did it a few times. I paid very well, way better than being in that. And the vice president in charge would call me and a few others in, and he would say to us, I want you to make an estimate, of the likely demand for whatever it is our company produces in this part of the world over the next three to six years. Well, when I was a little bit more sure of myself,

I would take the vice president aside, and I would explain to him, I'm a mathematician, I've studied a lot of philosophy, and I'm here to tell you something, which I believe, if you're smart, you already know. that I can't tell you what the demand of something is going to be in the future. Nobody can. Nobody ever has done that.

And if you're going to pay me a lot of money to do what you and I both know is a fraud, it makes me nervous. Eventually, I found someone who could handle the humor and who said to me, and I never forget this because it was a good learning instinct. He says, oh, you don't understand. I know what you're saying. I know you're right. I don't dispute it for a minute.

But that's not why you're here. I'm a vice president. My goal is to become the president of this corporation. By the way, a big one whose name you all know. But I won't tell you. Okay? Because I want to be the president of this corporation. But I have to, as a vice president, I have to make a decision.

Do we invest $130 million building out a president? factory shipping arrangements supply chains and all the rest to have be ready to meet this demand three to six years from that i've already made the decision to do it and i know the risk i know that i can't know but i can't go to the president and whine about this he doesn't care and it's not because he doesn't care about the company for sure he doesn't he's covering his own ass

he's not going to make the decision that's what I'm for I've got to make it I've got to make a decision that I can't make and you're here and I'm going to pay you and your assistance $284,000

to write a report that tells me that this is a good idea And you know why? Because if it turns out that it wasn't, I'm going to protect myself by saying, I got these fancy economists, these consultants, and they said, go ahead.

That may not work, he said, but it's better than having no protection at all. And that's why you're here. Do you have any questions? There was four of us. no question this was the first time a vice president

opened up maybe he had one martini for lunch too many who knows and there it was and everything that's ever happened to me since confirms that nobody knows nobody knows

imperialism really is it's an expression of capitalism capitalists have to grow If you don't grow, you are risking disappearing. Your competitor who's growing, he's going to have, because he hires more workers, because he produces more crap, he's going to have more surplus than you do if you don't. And that disparity will enable him to do something you won't have adequate surplus to do yourself. and then he'll produce

cheaply relative to you and then he'll steal all your customers and you're dead in the water so your survival depends on growing as fast as you can you don't you don't want to hear about

environmental sustainability are you kidding I'm worried about sustaining myself I agree with you nature is beautiful I don't want it But I can't. I don't want to be a penniless beggar

enjoying nature because I'm sleeping in a ditch. I don't want that. Therefore, I'm playing the capitalist game. And in the capitalist game, I have to grow. I have to increase output, get more inputs, pollute. I have to do everything necessary to expand. And when the region in which I'm working runs out of either buyers or workers or suppliers, of course I'll go further afield.

My competitors are going further afield. Geography for me is of no interest at all. It's just a different set of constraints. Now I have to go to the next village. That's relatively easier than to the next state or to the next country or to the next continent, but it's only a matter of time before I'll need to do all of that. And in the end, the opposition, and this is the politics, of course, the opposition to all of the people savaged along the way,

that opposition cannot succeed as long as all they focus on is the particularity of their being savage, or the family, or the community, or fill it in. it's the system that's your problem if you don't change the system it has way more people with way more resources to overcome your opposition then you have especially because

you haven't even gotten the ideas clear in your mind let alone built the coalition which could stop it but which only if it's mobilized an organization it's a professor i want to jump in here for a second and um we were talking about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall uh you were also i mean there was a lot of things that were going on here that we should you know try to explore a little bit further so we've mentioned the rate of the tendency of profit to fall um making it less inviting for further investment uh this and then we mentioned

capital glut where there's too much capital present and this being a threat to capitalism itself We also mentioned how, you know, opening up an entire new labor market like China. We didn't use these words, but I will. It basically creates an external reserve army of labor. You know, you have an entire new population that then can undermine wages domestically. And of course, with the internationalization, the globalization of manufacture, having this labor force abroad really isn't a detriment. You know, you, it's just another reserve army of labor that you can undermine wages with that, at home, quote unquote. And you also mentioned that, you know, by having this, then the products are cheaper, which justifies having a lower wage at home.

So all of these things are related. But I want to quote from Hobson, this is in, I believe, let me see, I have this saved, Chapter 6 of imperialism, which Hobbson, for listeners who are on, aware was this, you know, bourgeois economist that Lenin then draws heavily on for his work, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. But I think that Hobson, he puts forth this argument here and he's making a hypothetical argument from a British industrialist capitalist, and it goes as follows. And again, this is not Hobson speaking. This is a hypothetical conversation. We must have markets for our growing manufacturers. We need. must have new outlets for the investment of our surplus capital and for the energies of

the adventurous surplus of our population. Such expansion is a necessity of life to a nation with our great and growing powers of production. An ever larger scale of our population is devoted to the manufacturers and commerce of towns and is thus dependent for life and work upon food and raw materials from foreign lands. In order to buy and pay for these things, we must sell our goods abroad. So this quote, this, you know, hypothetical argument from a British industrialist pulls a lot of the things that we were talking about together, the fact that we need to get natural resources from abroad, the fact that we need labor from abroad, the fact that we need the products to come back in, all of these things come together and in this work, imperialism by

Hobson. So this is just kind of a preamble with some ideas for the listeners to chew over, What I want to see is if you can explain how a capital glut, so again, too much capital, how this can contribute to imperialism, because I think that this, like, maybe isn't intuitive to a lot of the listeners who haven't read these sorts of materials from, you know, people like Hobson or Lenin or a lot of dependency theorists like, you know, Samirameen and the Patnikes, you know, how is it that too much capital already in the society makes it so that you have an increased need for imperialism? Very simple, to keep it very simple.

The term, which is highly debated, by the way, I'll put that aside, the term glut of capital. If it means anything, it means that in some sense there's capital that does not know where to be invested, that there are people who dispose of wealth. They are not going to consume it. So it is in some sense available for investment. The system's reproduction requires that that money circulate, if we think of it in money form. If it isn't going to be used for consumption, then it has to be used for investment.

If it isn't used for investment, first question, why not? The only answer to that question is that the people who own it are not willing to risk investment. investing it. And so they hold on to it literally in cash. Okay. This is a danger because in society, the output has to be purchased for the system to keep going. If the people with capital bought the stuff to invest, it would have been sold to them and the circular nature of the system would be uninterrupted. The great day, and Keynes explained this to everybody, the great danger in a capitalist system is that the only way we get income is if money is spent on what we help to produce. So in order to get income, we have to spend whatever income we have. If we

don't spend it, somebody doesn't get it because we didn't spend it. If the investor, the rich, don't spend their profits on growing richer than somebody who in the past was able to earn an income by selling stuff to them is now without an income. And that can drive the system into depression. Because the people without an income, because the capitalist didn't invest their money, that person now can't spend if they didn't get an income, which means yet another person doesn't get an income. And that's the spiral we call recession or depression. So the first problem of a glut of capital is the always urgent one, that something has happened in this system so that all the money earned isn't spent by those who earn it so that they can

continue to earn it since it's the same money going around and around. That's the first problem. That's why people have gotten excited about the term glut of capital. They'll be a bit more honest if people said, the capitalists who draw into their hand a disproportionate amount of wealth are then, of course, in this crazy system, free not to spend it. Because if I earn billion dollars a year, I spend $5 million on eating myself silly, but I literally, what am I going to do? How many houses am I going to buy? How many yachts am I going to buy? The answer, Jeffrey Bezos or Elon Musk, what are they going to do with all that money? So they have to invest it. Otherwise, it's not.

going to be spent at all, and then there are going to be people without an income, so they have to spend. So we call it a glut because we are wanting to neutralize the blame. We don't want to say who's the problem. Poor people are not the problem. You know why? They spend whatever they get. There's no risk. The poor in the middle spend it all. In fact, most of them are in debt, which means they spend even more than they get. And you know who lends them? The rich, who thereby get the money spent by lending it to the poor. That literally, in case you're not familiar,

that's where the money lent to Americans for their mortgage, for their home, for their auto loan for their car, for their credit card, and their student loan. That's mostly rich people taking their capital and lending it to these folks, who, of course, have to borrow because you've repressed their real wages to the point where they have to. But it gets the money spent.

Now, here comes the solution of Mr. Hobson. Here is another way we could solve this problem. We could have colonies. And we could say to people, in these colonies, we're going to give you a higher rate of return than what you would get at home. And because the rate of return at home wasn't higher, that's why you held back.

That's what produced the glut. We can undo the glut in the way most desired by you by saying here, here's the rest of the world where you can make a good, fat profit. And to make sure we're going to set up colonies. We're going to literally go there take over the place, run it so that it is profitable for you to invest your money.

We will do that as the government because that, look, that's the same thing in a right-wing fashion as what a left-winger might do. Here's what a left-winger might do. There's a glut of capital. You guys are not investing it, okay? We're taking it from you. We're going to tax you because you're not investing, and that's socially dangerous. We're not going to allow you to do that. And the government will then take the money and spend it. Give it to welfare moms, expand the schools, provide everybody with health care. The money will get spent.

There's no blood problem solved at the expense of the rich. They don't want that. It's the old, you know, it's Marx's old point. Capitalism has a fundamental contradiction it really can't solve. It needs to sell what it produces, but it needs to sell it to its own working class. But the only way the working class can buy it

is if you give them higher wages. But if you give them higher wages, you kill the incentive for the capitalist to invest the money and the system breaks down. If you don't give them higher wages, then you can't sell what you produce and the system breaks down. Uh-oh, you're screwed either way.

And you're caught in this contradiction and the system, like that famous remark, twisting in the wind, the whole system twists as it tries to thread this weird needle. Do just enough to keep the working class from revolting. just enough that they can buy back the stuff

and then do enough stuff for the rich you know the national debt Marx was brilliant about this the national debt is the cushion when there's a glut of capital and they don't invest it domestically and you can't create an imperial opportunity you know what the final the last resort is

lend it to the government It will give you the money back after 10 years. It will give you a nice rate of interest. The risk is virtually zero. And you know what the government does with the money they borrow from you? They get it spent, which means it's going back into the system, keeping the system going. The national debt is a gift to the ruling class. The way it is understood by the rulers, and I literally mean this,

is they say, well, we have a choice. Either the government is going to come in and tax the money we don't invest, or it's going to borrow it. And that's an easy choice. So we will always come down against taxes, and we'll be very critical of deficit spending. But make no mistake, the deficit spending is what we much prefer, which is why we never get them taxed,

and we always get deficits. Yeah, truly, truly brilliant breakdown. I really appreciate that. So I'm really interested in helping people understand that the current situation with inflation. Something you hear a lot, especially from conservative corners, is this is all a product of giving the proles too much money during the pandemic, and now they're spending lavishly, and that's causing inflation or whatever. They want to put the onus on the people. Can you tell us what's really causing inflation and how corporations who aren't directly impacted by inflation, are using this as an opportunity to price gouge the American consumer? I want to jump in with a follow-up on that. If we have time for this, so as you finish talking about inflation, I'm going to again cite the Pat Nixen. They state that once you hit a certain level of inflation, the people will actually want

to carry their form of wealth in commodities rather than money. and that this carrying of wealth and commodities rather than money is perhaps the biggest risk to capitalism as a system in the short term. So as you finish up answering Brett's question, I would just be curious as to your thoughts on that theory that's put forth by the Patnikes. All right. Let me do it this way. Let's assume for the moment that we have a government that has given the working class a lot of money, the way the United States government boosted unemployment payments

for a bunch of months during the worst of the pandemic which is what a lot of these conservative site and the checks that were mailed out to Americans. So now we have a public with much more money in their pocket than they had

before because the government gave it to them. Okay? Now these people, everybody knows that this is going on, Now these people put on their shirts and pants and march directly to the nearest mall. They're going to spend the extra money that they got. Now, let's follow. What does the storekeeper, the owner-operator, the employer, the employer of the personnel at the store,

what is his or her situation? I'm going to use the pronoun, the male pronoun, but I understand the problems with doing so just for speed of communication. That storekeeper has a choice to make. Very important that that is never lost sight. He can do one of two things. He can say, oh, goody, all these people have more money. I'm going to order a lot more produce, put it on my shelf, because, all these people with extra money will be able to buy much more than they were able to buy

before. And instead of selling 27 shirts, I'm going to sell 82 shirts. And boy, that's more profitable for me because I make a profit on each shirt. This is great. Or, or he can say, I got a lot of jerkoffs coming to my store. They're stupid. They're not used to having all this money, and I can make a lot of profit in a second different way, not order anymore. Just jack up the price of what I already have. And man, there's no risk. They're flush. They're not going to have anywhere else to go. You know why? Because I know real well my fellow storekeepers, they're all doing it. And as soon as any one of them does it, we'll all do it anyway.

So the first thing is to understand and you'll never see it or almost never in a mainstream piece of writing. A tiny minority of people in capitalism set prices. They're the

employers of this society. That's less than 1% of the U.S. population. Employees are excluded from setting prices. That's what the word employee mostly means. You come in there, you do your job, you help produce, but the question of what price will be charged, no, no, no, no, your employer keeps that for himself. Inflations occur if and only if employers choose to raise prices.

Second point, you can, once you admit that, which is why it never appears, then you can ask the second question. Why do employers raise prices? Well, the answer to that is very simple. I know the answer because I've actually taught in business schools where this is explained to students, roughly, I don't know, two to three million times. If you run a business, every decision you make, every decision you make has to be connected to the bottom line. You ask of every option, will it enhance my profits or will it diminish them? Doesn't mean you might not do something that diminishes them, say in the short run or in this way. But if there's an offset, okay, then you could, but everything is in terms of the impact on the rate of profit. So the only honest answer, any employer can give you as to why he raised the

price was because it was profitable to do so. And if it hadn't been profitable, he wouldn't have done it because that's how he operates his business. But here comes the ideological problem. If you're a minority of 1%, and you raise the prices that are a fact of life for the other 99 percent. Guess what? They're going to be pissed at you. You're pulling more money out of their pocket for the box of cereal than they had to pay last time, and they are not happy about it. Therefore, ideologically, you've got a problem. And here's how you solve the problem. You come up with alternative explanations, the polite way of saying it. impolite way, you've got to find a scapego. Somebody you can blame that makes it look like your

increase in prices was nothing you wanted to do. Oh no, nothing you profited from. Oh, no. Something imposed on you by a deos ex-Makina that fell from the sky and said to you, either you raise prices or I shoot you in the nose. So here we go. The war in the Ukraine. No, the hot one. Why not? Mr. Putin, why not? Pick somebody nobody likes. Immigrants, poor immigrants from Central America. The logic here doesn't matter. You just need a scapegoat. The one I like best, everybody I'm buying inputs from is raising their prices. So I have to raise my, in other words, the working class is to supposed to listen to Capitalist A, justifying his inflation of prices, because Capitalist B is doing it to him. This is charming. I mean, if you fall for this, maybe you deserve that wait a little longer

before you have a revolution. My goodness, gracious here. Now, let's do the real story. Capitalists need to make more money. That's why they're raising prices. If you know any of them, And I do. Because I went to, I don't know if you know, I went to all the right elite universities in America. I know, you know, Janet Yellen was my classmate, all of that. I know all those people. So I've had many occasions in my life to have a cup of coffee or a drink with these people. They're raising prices because it's profitable to do so. The only relevance of the money is one of the things in their mind that led them to say, now is a good time to do it, is because there was this extra money pumped into the economy.

Not just the extra money from the pandemic, but the extra money for the last 20 years because we've had three terrible crashes and we have increased the money supply a lot in response to each of them. So the country is awash in money. That doesn't tell you why an inflation happened because the country was a wash in money in the years 2000 to 2005. Then they're washing more money from 2005 to 10. Then they're washing more money from 210 to 250. And there wasn't always inflation. So having more money is not some magic weird cause of inflation. Only a right winger, terrified about where the blame for inflation lies, is busy inventing this or gathering us up to put a hate on the Federal Reserve.

That's not the issue. Capitalists wanted more profits, the money made it possible, other things made it difficult. What were the other things? Answer. We've had three crashes in the first 20 years of this century. 2000, the dot-com crisis. 2008, the subprime mortgage crisis, 2020, the so-called COVID crisis. Three terrible crises.

And in this last one, a literal shutdown of the economy for a year and a half, during which the profits of many, many companies were adversely affected. They want to catch up. They want to make up in a hurry for the profits that they had to forego over the last two years. and the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to do that is to jack up the prices. That's why they did that. Nobody knows how long it'll last. Nobody knows how far it'll go.

But those are the reasons the employers are raising prices. All the rest of it is not a debate and a discussion. It really doesn't deserve those polite terms. it is a hustle to get the mass of people away from the anger they are fully justified in feeling. We have subjected the American working class to a million dead people in COVID, the worst response of a government to a public health disaster in the history of the United States. Then we subjected them to an economic crash. I don't know if you're aware of this, but in 2020 and 2020,

over one half of the labor force in America, over 80 million workers experienced unemployment for some period of time. For some, it was only a few weeks. For some, it was the whole two years. We've never done that to our labor force. Half the workers had to go on unemployment, which means they had to dip into their savings,

if they had any, they had to lean on their husband, their wife, their family, on the community, they don't feel good about themselves, they feel very insecure. We're seeing that because as they go back to work, they're quitting everywhere, there's worker dissatisfaction, unions are springing up, strikes are happening, labor military, we see all the signs of turmoil of a working class. But not only did you hit them with COVID and the failure to deal and with a crash,

then you hit them with a 10%, excuse me, 9% inflation, and later this, next week, they will raise the interest rates yet again. You know what you're doing? You're provoking the working class to do stuff that is really bizarre. And because of the American politics, the most bizarre stuff happens first on the right, because this country allows the right to be crazy. But I'll make you a prediction. I'm no longer hesitant in making.

Crazy stuff on the left, it's coming too. It takes longer in this culture. But you're already seeing it. The defeat of Monsieur Macron in France, he is re-elected president. One month later, his party gets a third of the vote, Two-thirds of the French people don't want him in there. They only voted for him because he's not as awful as Le Pen.

And the most amazing thing is Mr. Melanchon, a leftist, very well-known in France, but utterly unknown outside, is able to do what no one in France has been able to do for 50 years. unify the communist, socialist, greens, and his ensumee's party into a powerhouse force that got one-third of the vote, just a little bit less than Mr. Macron got. This is a bombshell. What in the world is going on here? Nobody wants, by the way, the French don't want the Ukraine war.

That's over. The extreme left and right in Germany, the Lincoln Party on one side, the Ausstant to Deutschland on the other. They don't want the war either. The Italians are out to lunch. They're finished. They're not there.

But what's left? Boorish Johnson is gone to be replaced by someone who will be another kind of joke. And Mr. Biden is a president who is present by virtue of his absence. You know, you know who got weak? by the war in Ukraine, not the Russians, the West. Mr. Putin's probably stronger now inside Russia than he's ever been. And the West is in complete the blur.

This isn't like a surprise. It wouldn't be a surprise to people in the West that you're saying this either. There was just a poll that came out from Germany a few days ago. And I keep my eye on polls from Germany because before I moved to Russia, I was living in Germany. There was just a poll that came out. They asked Germans, have the sanctions that Germany, as well as the rest of the European Union, have put on Russia.

Are they hurting Russia more or Germans more? And 49% of Germans said it's hurting Germans more. Only 12% said that it's hurting Russia more. And then the rest said they either didn't know or that it's hurting them equally. But half of the Germans in this poll said it's hurting Germans. more. Only 12% thought that the sanctions were actually having their intended effect on Russia. Anyway, that was just an aside. Yeah, you know, and the most amazing thing about that isn't the result.

It's that result given a level of intensity of hysterical propaganda that is really mind-bend. I mean, I've been around the long time. I know we demonize Saddam Hussein and we demonized, you know, Gaddafi and Libya and all it. We demonize, oh, you know, that's the Puritan history of the United States. But this is really over the fence. It's over the line a kind of crazed hysterical notion of some total of evil. You know, it outdoes all the Cold War rhetoric.

Turns out that this Putin, who hates communism, is a greater risk than the communists who used to be in the, I mean, and, you know, as this craziness unfolds, you know, there's this wonderful song by the Canadian songwriter, Leonard Cohen. I don't know if you're familiar with his song, but one of them is called Everybody Knows. If you've never listened to that song, do yourself a pleasure. Go to Google, it's easy to find him, Leonard Cohen, C-O-H-E-N. he died some years ago but you can find renditions

where he's singing that it's the anthem for our times everybody kind of knows but everybody still has to pretend and so we go around acting out

for me I must tell you watching the discourse whether it's about the inflation I mean let me give you one more of it Just to feed, I hope, your interest and your intimate. Everyone is this, everyone, the Republicans and Democrats, the pundits, are all discussing what we do about the inflation. You see, and it's all about raising interest rates.

And we raised them last month. And then next week, I believe it's on the 28th, the Federal Reserve meets again. And then the great discussion, will they raise it? quarters of a point, will they raise it a full point? I believe yesterday, the ECB raised their European rate by half a point, etc. And I'm listening to, I can't believe this. The last time we had an inflation that scared this country was in 1971. At that time, a conservative president, Nixon, goes on the radio, August 15th, 1971. Radio television and gives a speech. And in the course of this speech, he says what I'm about to tell you.

Dear William, my fellow Americans, American, I'm a conservative Republican, which everybody already knew, but I'd be having inflation. We've got to do something about it. So as of tomorrow morning, here's what we're going to do. If you are a businessman or woman, and if you raise the price of anything that you sell. We will come, we will arrest you, and we will throw you in jail. If you are a worker or a union and you push for higher wages, we will come and arrest and imprison you two. Tomorrow begins a price, wage, freeze. Okay? It was to last 90 days. It ended up lasted a good bit longer than that. It stopped the inflation on a dime, and Mr. Nixon was nicely re-elected president a few months later. The conversation in the United States

about what to do about this inflation never mentions a word of this. This is historical amnesia on a scale. You really ought to, you know, this ought to be written up in the book. It's what? The conversation is as if no alternative existed except the one that's going to give to the American working class after COVID, after the crash, after the inflation, a recession. And the financial press is full of when the recession is going to come later this year, early in the – whoa. You know, when people go back and look at the collapse of the Roman Empire, what strikes me. what strikes many is that we from the outside

can see what's coming and the mystery is what does it matter with those people how could they heap one more problem how could how can Maria Antoinette do to the French and Parisian

masses yet another insult I mean are you completely blind? Are you so gone into the morass of your own craziness? It really is, on the social level, the equivalent of encountering on a street corner, one of those sad people who's having a really intense conversation with nobody. And you don't know quite, you wouldn't like to hug them, but you're afraid to. You don't know, because it's over the line. You don't you don't know what to do.

It's absolutely remarkable. And by the way, it's very important to do this stuff with the imperialism. I hope I haven't taken you away from this topic. But the United States is now, it is such a story, having become the world's superpower, having become the imperialist par excellence, the one that uses everything. If you want us to have a colony, visit Puerto Rico.

We have a colony for you. If you want an independent country that works like a colony, we can show you half of Latin America. You used to be able to show you all of Latin America. Now we can only show you half of Latin America. But we're working on it. We're going to get some of those other ones back. We have, no, we have, what is it now,

40 military bases scattered through, Africa. We have, you know, we have our fleet in the South China Sea. We tell our people that China is provocative. They have no boats near us. We only have boats near them. I mean, on and on and on. And yet it can't deal with it. It can't handle it. It lost the war in Vietnam. It lost the war in Afghanistan. It lost the war in Iraq. It lost the effort. And Libya. I mean, hello. Hello. Wait a minute. Is it, you know, the European Alliance, whatever the theater around Ukraine is in very deep, too do, you know, the bricks alone, if you follow this stuff. The bricks is an anti-imperialist coalition. That's what

it is. And I don't deny that, by the way, the capitalists in those countries are also growing and are also competing and are also expanding and will also be highly tempted. We'll see how they handle the temptation. For the moment, they're not in a position to do much, but they may. But for the moment, they're anti-the-power of the United States, and they are undermining it as fast as they can.

Their limits, they can't go as fast as they wish they could. They're not going to replace the dollar as the global currency this year or next. But they are chipping away at it. Part of the reason the war, the sanctions against Russia are not working is because this alliance has got some real strength. India and Brazil, they're buying Russian oil. Okay. I mean, you got to deal with that. You got to deal with that.

And that the West didn't foresee this, didn't understand it. Wow. wow and if the right-wing republicans get into office which it now looks in our country that they will then all of this is going to be even crazier than it was before because they live they they've checked out they live they are saving um white Christians from an onslaught and they live in that world and who knows where that goes but for the rest of the world I wish I could show you

my family is part German and part French my father was born in France my mother was born in Germany and French and German were my first language English I was born in the United States but English I had to learn when I went to school

at home we spoke mostly German but I've never seen this country in the condition that it is now never and when I get together with other economists people to my right I was about to say people to my left

but I don't find too many of those people in the middle right left we don't agree on how the country got into this situation and we don't agree on how to get out but we do agree that it's in the worst shape we've ever seen in our life thought and we're all amazed

that we agree on that we do agree on that and I think that the one part of it is that the imperial project I wouldn't say it's exhausted Marxists have been too eager for that and I've seen it too many times when it wasn't there so I'm not going to do it now again but it is in very very deep difficult

the Chinese have figured something out And let me leave you with that and offer, you know, to do this again. We don't have to wait a whole year, Henry. Yeah, for sure. Well, I'll let you know, Professor, you have an open invitation to come on the show anytime you want, believe me. This last thought, the Chinese have developed a remarkable thing. I'm not talking about their Civil Liberties record, which is not so good.

and all kinds of other things. And I'm not defending them. I'm not interested in the economics of what they've done. They have produced a hybrid, part private capitalism, sort of like the United States, part state-owned and operated enterprises, like the old Soviet Union. But unlike the Soviet Union, they've allowed an enormous space for private capitalist enterprise both foreign and domestic. That is both Chinese and non-Chine. And they have this state. And then they have this political structure, basically the Communist Party, that is kind of riding herd on this hybrid. We've

never seen that before. Russia is too much no private. And the United States, if you like, is too much no state. And by the way, Russia had its private sector and the United States has its state. But just to make the image it. But nobody puts them together the way the Chinese did. And you have to at least ask the question,

is this spectacular economic growth over the last 40 years in China out distancing everybody else? Is it a product of that? configuration, is the rise of the standard of living of the Chinese working class, which is equally extraordinary. Is that a product of this complicated? Or is it a system spinning and breaking apart?

I mean, that question has to be asked too. But at least for the last 30 to 40 years, they have managed to operate this composite it in a way that I hope soon will get the kind of analytical discussion and debate that it deserves, but hasn't gotten, because the ideological leftovers of the Cold War preclude asking and debating those questions. And I really mean it. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know even if it's a viable long term, but they sure have done enormous with it. Look at the position.

that China has achieved in the world at this point. You know, I sometimes end my talks with a little statistic. I say, I'm going to tell you now that you're going to rethink Russia, China, U.S. when I give you these statistics. The GDP of Russia, you know, GDP, gross domestic product, a rough measure of the output of goods and services in a year in the country. To the GDP of Russia, most recent year, one and a half trillion dollar, T, put it to the United States' GDP most recent year, $21 trillion. Okay?

Russia, one and a half, U.S. 21. Russia or the Soviet Union were never economic competitors or threats to the United States. The very idea is ridiculous. People's Republic of China, GDP, most recent year, $15 trillion. Never forget those numbers, because they'll help you have a sense of what is going on here. Russia is not a threat to the United States economically and never was. China is and that's revolutionary by itself

because for the last century the United States has had no economic competitor World War I got rid of the only country that might have Germany and World War II finished off Germany again and the only other one Japan

leaving the United States are completely unchallenged. Nobody close and the United States is a country that had got used to that, as any country would. And now it is

confronted and it doesn't know what to do. And much of what you're watching are hysterical gestures of desperation because nobody knows what to do. The Republicans don't know what to do.

the Democrats don't know what to do and the academics don't know what partly because they haven't looked at this in a reasonable way for so long that they've lost, they're perfectly smart people. It has nothing to do with capability, but they're caught up in a web of

confusion that doesn't even let them ask the questions. You should see the faces when I go over the numbers. I say, you know, go Google it. Check out whether the number I gave you was in the ballpark. irony is they won't check it out. They accept what I say because they didn't know. It never occurred to them. You know, every economist uses GDP table. You have an idea of what the

company. Everybody, this is nothing. There's no secret here. There's no mystery. There's nothing. All right. I got to go. I hope this has been helpful and not too far from the topic you had hoped for. It's been amazing. Thank you. But I took you at your word that you wanted an open, free-flowing conversation. Absolutely. It was a lot of fun. So, again, listeners, Brett and I will be right back with a little wrap-up segment ourselves, but our guest was Richard Wolfe, Professor of Economics Emeritus from University of Massachusetts Amherst.

And, of course, a podcast host in his own right. He hosts Economic Update, which is one of the podcasts hosted from Democracy at Work, along with global capitalism live economic update, all things co-op, David Harvey's anti-capitalist chronicles, Harriet Fraud's capitalism hits home, cities after. I mean, if you're listening to a podcast right now, you obviously like podcasts, go check out the podcast that Democracy at Works puts out. That would be my highly recommended suggestion for you. Professor Wolf, is there anywhere that you, anywhere else that you'd like to direct the listeners

to follow up with you and follow your. everything we do is available on two websites so if i might let me give you those two and i don't know maybe later you can put them on the screen the first one is uh democracy at work that's all one word democracy at work dot info i and at all and the other one is r d wolf my name dot com so either of those but particularly the Democracy at Work. Info, podcast, films, books, an enormous interviews. This coming Monday,

economic update, when we tape it, we tape it in advance. We'll be, our guest will be Noam Chomsky. Ah, we'll be talking with him, we'll be talking with him next week.

So that's very interesting. Both of us. There we go. I'd say hi for us. If I'm right, he's 94 years old and is therefore a model on many levels beyond the obvious ones even staying with it this way is extraordinary absolutely and you know you're no slouch yourself professor hopefully we'll talk again relatively soon i hope so too bye bye and listeners

we'll be right back with the wrap-up Okay, listeners, we're back with the wrap-up. We literally just stopped recording with Professor Richard Wolfe and Brett and I. I can see Brett smiling, so I think he's pretty happy with how the conversation went. Brett, why don't I just turn it over to you for your thoughts on the conversation that we have in anything that you want to say about it? Yeah, well, I just, I loved having the opportunity to talk with him at length and to listen to him at length. I think, you know, on the Marxist left broadly, there's lots of understanding about politics. and the Vanguard Party and historical materialism sometimes, including myself,

we get kind of lazy with regards to the economic aspect of Marxism, which is, of course, crucial. So to have somebody with that firm position and the deep knowledge and training to be a world-class economist talk and teach us about these things is very, very important. Something as simple as inflation. You go ask the people in your life, your friends and family, hey, can you tell me what inflation is or why it's happening? People are at a loss.

So to have that really laid out and to show that so much of the ideological mystifications around why inflation is happening need to be penetrated through and seen through and seen for what they are. And this idea that you hear all the time, that it's because us plebes got a couple, you know, checks during the pandemic is why we've had the highest inflation in 40 years is complete and utter bullshit. And a lot of these corporations are not directly impacted by inflation, but are raising their prices and gouged. prices and raking in record profits. You can hear on investor calls, you know, CEOs of companies that aren't even in the realm of oil or food or gas talking about how they're raking in record profits because they've been able to price gouge and jack up the prices. That little story he told about Nixon threatening both capital and labor during the last

inflation crisis is something I knew nothing about and is at least interesting to hear that story. But yeah, I just, there's so much there. And one of the things that really comes away whenever I talk about or think about economics is that so much of mainstream economics and certainly the representatives of economics that you'll see on CNN in Fox News or whatever is pure capitalist ideology masquerading as science. And it's really important to see that for what it is and to not take a lot of these goons and these talking heads to be anything other than mouthpieces for the capitalist class. Luckily, we have people like Richard Wolfe who do the exact opposite of that and our breaths of fresh air in that regard. But I thought that was very

interesting. And then just the point that I really wanted to reiterate that he makes very clear, you know, there's plenty to blame individual capitalists for, right? They're oftentimes very scummy people. And in fact, to get to that level to be a top CEO and you have to be an absolute evil scumbag, but the systematic incentive structure of capitalism, make it so that if you, as a CEO of a company, decide, hey, maybe we're going to pull back on profiteering for a second, give our workers more of a wage or take into consideration externalities, like our impact on the environment, you know, we're going to be a responsible corporation, you will have a vampire ready to slash your throat and take your place. And so it really is this, not the

individual moral failings of individuals, although that's at play, but really understanding how capitalism incentivizes this insanity, which every day is being more and more recognized for the insanity that it is. And it's the working class, as, as Professor Wolf points out, that is getting punished and continuing to get punished. When the Fed is jacking up interest rates, you know, any hope for you to buy a house, like me and my family, you have no chance of buying a house anytime soon. you're going to cause a recession. It's going to devastate the working class. Rich people have plenty of extra capital and money to get through recessions. It's the poor in the working class that get devastated.

After already being devastated again and again and again, you know, Americans are like a beaten dog. We have been beaten into submission in every way. And every time a crisis comes, it is on our shoulders that the crisis is put. And the question, when Americans will stand up on their feet and fight back, is one that I'm deeply interested in. You know, and of course, organization is essential. Education is essential for people to rise up. They have to understand what's actually happening to them.

And the mainstream news in this country is nothing but a smokescreen of mystification. And so if you're going to try to understand the world by reading the New York Times or going on to CNN or heaven forbid Fox News and MSNBC, you literally cannot understand the world around you. And you have to look in other places for an actual understanding of what's happening. And once again, it's going to be the poor and working class Americans that take the brunt of whatever the fuck's coming next. And so those are just some things that I wanted to touch on after he left. And there's so many more things I wanted to ask him about. But his promise to come back on one of these shows in the future is nice.

And we'll have to take him up on that. Yeah, absolutely. I've been emailing him pretty frequently for the last couple of years now. So I can get him out any time that we want, really. Yeah. And it's really a privilege to have Richard Wolfe like in my email inbox pretty periodically. Like it's very surreal because I've been listening to him for at least seven or eight years now. I know that economic update just hit its 10th year anniversary. And I wasn't like at the very beginning. But I've been listening to him for like seven or eight years. And

now just, you know, I'll wake up some days and look in my email inbox and they'll say like from Richard Wolfe. I was okay. I'll take that. But yeah, I just want to, I echo everything that you say, Brett, the thing that you said that I want to focus on particularly to drive home, this will be my final point. And if you have anything that you want to reflect on it, go ahead. But we do have to take the economics seriously. Like the politics is very intuitive for a lot of people, which makes it very attractive. Even some of the more difficult political theories, like, you know, once you get it, you can use it for analyzing a lot of things and it makes it kind of fun to analyze the world than having these, you know, political theories in your head.

economics if you're like me i am not an economist and reading the economic works that i'm reading they're very challenging like i'm not going to say yeah these works are easy these works are you know necessarily fun to get through i would be lying if i said that and i will be honest with you like they're difficult but it's essential that we do these sorts of things because unless we have that broad-based understanding from a philosophical standpoint from a political theory standpoint and from economic standpoint. Without the integration of all of these things, we're not able to fully analyze what's happening. So using that example that we briefly touched on during the interview with Professor Wolfe, if you have just a random person on the street who, I mean not, when I say

on the street, I don't mean homeless. I mean, you're just passing somebody in the street and you ask them, what is imperialism? And they'll say, well, when you send your tanks in somewhere else, this is imperialism. Like, okay, that might be one manifestation of imperialism, but it's not really a root cause of imperialism. It doesn't look at any of the underlying factors at play. Maybe then you talk to somebody that has a little bit better understanding of maybe political theory, maybe a little bit of economics. And they say, okay, well, imperialism might be due to looking for labor markets abroad that they can exploit. They can extract excess profits from because these people are working at, you know, depressed wages, being depressed both by, you know,

the comparador bourgeois Z class within their country, as well as the international capitalist leading the multinational corporations that are going in and extracting the natural resources of these companies. Maybe these people understand that the imperialist nations go into other countries to extract natural resources. Maybe they understand that they're opening up markets there. Maybe they understand that, you know, by getting the natural resources from there, they're going to be able to produce more at home. I mean, maybe they understand these things. that would be a pretty, you know, this person's been thinking about it, at least some. But it's another level of analysis to really understand that, like, fully, the economics of

talking about things like, you know, capital glut, super profits, talking about how, you know, inflation works, all of these interlocking components, because as Richard Wolfe said, and I think that this is probably the most important thing that he said, there are debates that go on within economics, is this what's causing this, or is this what's causing this? Or is this what's causing this? Or is that what's causing this? Almost never are any of those arguments correct, because almost always they each play a role in contributing to a specific phenomenon that we're identifying. So in the case of imperialism, it's not one specific thing that's causing the imperialism to take place. It's all of these interlocking components coming together that

causes the drive for imperialism, and then we have these mechanisms by which imperialism takes place, which we didn't really get into in this interview, but perhaps in a future interview, we will. So understanding fully, the economics as well as the politics is the only way that we're going to have a deep understanding of why these sorts of things like imperialism are happening. And without having that, you know, at least taking some look at the economics, because again, it is very difficult. Like, for me very difficult i'm not an economist and i'll be the first to admit that but i at least have to give it a try because until i see that kind of thing i know that i'm not understanding why or at least as

fully as i could be why some of these these things like imperialism or you know inflation like we had as the other example in this interview why these things are actually happening without that economic understanding so that's my final thoughts you have anything that you want to say on that yeah couldn't agree more with that and you know you could read something like and imperialism and get a wonderful understanding of imperialism broadly. But, you know, it's limited in what it can explain this in what is the economic situation in 2022 in the United States. So it's a foundation of understanding, but you also have to continue to, you know, inform yourself on what's happening. And economics is tough. It's a number thing. It's a mathematical thing. Never been my

strong points personally. But more and more, I'm seeing that to really get a full grasp of the situation, I have to deepen my knowledge of economics. And that's what I'm trying to do in various ways. I just wanted to say one more point, my last words on this, and one thing we weren't able to get to, but I wanted to talk to him a little bit about was how coming out of the pandemic, you know, coming out of COVID, there was a tight labor market. And that was used, that was taken advantage of by working people across the country, unionizing, fighting for higher wages, etc. It is very hard for me to see how this basically engineered recession coming down from the Fed through the jacking up of interest rates to, you know, ostensibly stop inflation.

is not at the same time going to function to put a lid on that rambunctious working class movement upward in the tight labor market that came out of the pandemic. And so it goes back to his point about what is the American working class going to do when it's hit over the head with a recession after all this other shit. But one of the things that does function, if you're looking at it from the perspective of the capitalist class, not even saying that this is why they're doing it, but it functions to destroy that nascent upcoming, blossoming. working class militancy and to destroy the working class through another brutal recession. And so, you know, you can never, ever separate what's happening and the choices that are made from the fact that we truly live in a dictatorship of capital and the interest of capital is always and everywhere prioritized over the interest of the working class, even though the working class makes up the vast majority of human beings in this goddamn country and on this goddamn earth.

So hopefully we can have him back to talk even more about that stuff. But something to keep in mind as this year goes on. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with all of that. And just one quick thing before we, you know, read ourselves out here is you mentioned, you know, the Fed manufacturing, essentially what looks like it's going to be, you know, a recession partially due to the raising of the interest rates. Now, I know I had seen maybe a month ago or so you had put on Twitter that, you know, the Fed is using this raising of interest rates to push down on workers' power. And some people had fired back at you like, this sounds very conspiratorial. Well, I, you know, maybe it's a conspiracy, but the conspiracy was fan, the fans of the conspiracy were, the flames of the conspiracy were fanned by none other than Jerome Powell himself, the head of the Federal Reserve.

He came right out and said it. Like, this is why we're raising the interest rates as to, you know, push down on, you know, all of that worker power, worker solidarity. wage increases, which would, you know, thereby fuel inflation, according to him. Like, these are things that they openly admit. So when you have people tell you that it's a conspiracy, like a very cursory Google search would tell you that there's really not a conspiracy. They're very explicit about this.

Absolutely. Yeah. And there's no conspiracy, like a smoky room where people are coming up with this stuff. It's the logic of capitalism. It's the logic of the dictatorship with the bourgeoisie. It is unquestioned premises and assumptions that get put into practice. It doesn't need, you know, smoky rooms and cigar-filled discussions about what we're going to do to destroy the working class. And so if you think that I mean that, of course, you know, that's not conspiratorial and I'm not saying that.

It's just the logic and the basic functioning of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and how they see the world and how they see problems like this and whose interest they're ultimately there to serve. It's very simple. Absolutely. Well, Brett, how can the listeners find you and your excellent podcast that you do? You can go to infowars.com. I'm just kidding. No, you can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com,

find everything I do. Yeah, I'm sure Richard Wolfe will love hearing that pitch for Info Wars when he, you know, listens to this interview. We were very serious the whole way, and then he had to screw it up. That's what I do. Anyway, I'll give the pitch for our co-host

who was unable to join us today, Professor Adnan-Hus-U-N-H-N-H-N. You should definitely follow him on Twitter at Adnan-A-H-U-S-A-I-N. And you should follow was other podcasts if you're interested in the Middle East and Islamic world. It's called the M-A-J-L-I-S. Do not pick the Radio Free Central Asia version. I beg of you. Now, as for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. My wife and I recently started our own podcast, our

latest episode at the time of recording. This was about translation, hegemony, and commoditization with Sina from the East as a podcast. A lot of people seem to like that episode. So this episode is called, or the show is called What the Huck? You can find it on any podcast player or YouTube. And if you don't know how to find it, just find me on Twitter and you can find it usually is my pinned tweet. And as for Gorilla History, you can find us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-I-L-L-A

underscore pod. And you can support the show by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.