Upstream - The Sickness is the System with Richard Wolff

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

It won’t come as a surprise to most to hear that the Trump administration has completely dropped the ball on their response to the covid pandemic. The misinformation campaign, lack of empathy, and outright failure of this administration to address the dangers and impacts of covid are jaw-dropping. But it’s not just a matter of this particular administration. In his new book “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself,” Richard Wolff, a professor of economics and founder of Democracy at Work, outlines how the root cause of the failure to adequately respond to this pandemic is rooted in our economic system itself — capitalism. We spoke with Richard Wolff about how the Trump administration and our current economic system are both responsible for the disastrous response that the United States has shown in the face of such a major disaster. We go over how other countries have responded, how the United States could have done things differently, why capitalism is doomed to fail us, and how restructuring our economic system towards one that is more collective and cooperative could address many of the issues that we are facing today.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Ah What fundamentally ails us the disease we we have, the sickness we have, is not a virus. It's the economic system we live with, which has proven itself in the face of a virus to be stupefyingly incompetent, failing at every turn. And the book kind of goes through to demonstrate exactly what the failures were and exactly how they were rooted in the economic system, capitalism, so that people begin to understand that the real illness we have to confront, not the symptom, which is the failure to handle COVID, but the disease itself. And that's the system that is now no longer working for the vast majority of the people, which is its only justification for existence. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. You're listening to an Upstream conversation with Richard Wolff, professor at the New School in New York City, founder of the organization Democracy at Work, host of the show Economic Update, and author of several books, including most recently, The Sickness is the System, When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself. Upstream is a labor of love. If you like what you hear and want us to be able to produce more content, please consider donating at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you. Welcome, Richard Wolff. Thank you for joining me on Upstream again. It's wonderful to have you back. Thank you very much for the invitation, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the work. Yes. So you just released a book, The Sickness is in the System, When Capitalism Fails to

Save Us from the Pandemic or Itself. And you've released this collection of essays and articles still during the pandemic. Quite incredible. So I want to ask you, why? Why did you write and release this book and what inspired you to get it out now? Well, what inspired me to write the book was a mixture of excitement and frustration. Excitement that the kind of critical social analysis that I try to do finds its audience literally exploding. I am gratified. I'm satisfied. I am elated,

there's no other word to say, by the growing number of people that want to hear this message. I'm frustrated at the same time that for the vast majority of our population, this message has not been heard, this message has not been considered, and so the way to handle this mixture of elation and frustration was to write a book in the hopes that it would find its way from one person to another and make a basic point. And that basic point, I guess, could be summarized this way. What fundamentally ails the American society, and indeed others too, but I'm gonna focus on the United States, what fundamentally ails us, the disease we have, the sickness we have, is not a virus.

It's the economic system we live with, which has proven itself in the face of a virus to be stupefyingly incompetent, failing at every turn. And the book kind of goes through to demonstrate exactly what the failures were and exactly how they were rooted in the economic system, capitalism, so that people begin to understand that the real illness we have to confront, not the symptom, which is the failure to handle COVID, but the disease itself. And that's the system that is now no longer working for the vast majority of the people, which is its only justification for existence. Yeah, one way you articulate this is you say that COVID-19 was just the trigger, but the real vulnerability is in the system. And I appreciate that you bring in this historical perspective to your work. And one of the things that really stood out to me was how you said that the bubonic plague was the

death knell of feudalism and how COVID-19 might be similar for capitalism. So what can we learn about economic systems change from the transition from feudalism to capitalism for what we're doing where we are right now? I'm glad you asked. Let me put it this way to make the parallel or the metaphor clear. Nothing is more fundamental to any economic system than the notion that it serves to protect and to advance public health. We all know that. Everything in our lives depends on the functioning body that we are, each of us, and if something threatens or undermines or injures our bodies, we are very vulnerable. We are not, you know, brains all by

themselves. We are brains inside a physical material shell. And so you can see how well-oiled, how well-functioning an economic system is by how it handles recurring dangers to public health. Virus has been with the human race from the beginning. Viruses are thousands of years old. There is no excuse for any country in today's time not to be prepared for a virus. And let me be very concrete about the United States. We had a terrible virus a century ago, 1918. It killed over 600,000 Americans at a time when our population was much smaller. That's a very large percentage of our people. It was devastating. It was nationwide. We learned a great deal not only about how to deal with this thing but to be on the alert that it could happen anytime. And indeed in more recent years we've had

MERS and SARS and the Ebola. I mean, we know that viruses are part of nature and that we have to be prepared. It's really not that different from having a house because, you know, periodically it rains and it would be nice if you could stay dry. This is not rocket science. So what do we have? We have here in the United States all the knowledge. We are a rich country. We're pretty well educated. We have a pretty well developed medical system, health care system. So what was the problem?

And that there was a problem, only Mr. Trump and the people who think like that can pretend otherwise. and the people who think like that can pretend otherwise. The United States, let's all remember, has four and a half percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the COVID cases and the COVID deaths. For a rich country with a medical establishment like ours, that is a statistic of stupefying failure. So what happened? Well, here's the answer. And the book develops this in detail. No private capitalist company can afford to take unprofitable risks. That's the law of this system. You don't survive competitively, the law of this system. You don't survive competitively, you do not grow, you do not satisfy your shareholders unless you generate profits. A company that could make, for example, masks or gloves or ventilators or hospital beds or anything else we know we need to combat a virus, we have companies that can make those things, but they

didn't do so. Why didn't they do so? Because it's not profitable. If you make a million masks, you have to wait for the virus. What are you going to do? Store it in a warehouse? Have the warehouses scattered around the country near population centers so the masks are quickly available? Are you going to make sure the masks retain their quality? They have to have a certain humidity, a certain temperature. You have to check that they stay clean. You have to replace those that deteriorate. This is an enormous expense over an unknown number of years because you're waiting for the virus to come. No private company does that. It's not profitable. And before I go on, let's be real clear what I've

just said. The logic of profit-driven capitalism is inconsistent with public health. It is a system so organized that it will not in fact prepare for something that is known to endanger the public health. That's a criticism of capitalism that stands even beyond what I'm about to say. All right, what could have happened? Well, the government could have come in. The government could have come in and said, as I just did, private capitalism is incompetent to secure public health, so we will do it. The government will come in and it'll say to the mask company, we will buy your masks at a price that generates a good profit for you

as fast as they come off the assembly line. And we'll do the same for ventilators and gloves and all the rest. And then at government expense, that's you and me as taxpayers, the government can distribute them geographically, put them in warehouses, monitor them, replace them, clean them, everything else that has to be done. And then we would have been prepared because the government would have compensated for the

failure of private capitalism. But our government didn't do it. Why not? Well, there are many reasons. I'm just going to emphasize one. Our government is entrapped within a crazy ideology, and the ideology runs like this. Private capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is the most efficient way to do everything. It is the best way to do everything. And that's what we're going to do. We are not going to allow the government to intrude upon, to regulate, to control, to mess up, in short, the wonders of... Well, if you have that idea, you don't come in and fix the failures, because you can't even admit that private capitalism has failures, let alone to come in. So they didn't. They

didn't come in. They didn't develop the stockpiles they should have. They didn't develop enough of them. They didn't maintain them. It was a disaster. So capitalism in a rich country was utterly unprepared, which is why it did such a terrible job. Last point that I think might interest people. The failure of the government happened despite the fact that in another area, the government does exactly what I just said it failed to do in the case of public health. And the example is military. It is equally unprofitable for a company to produce a missile, for example, a military missile, put it in a warehouse somewhere, and then wait an unknown number of years until a war happens where the government will come in and get the thing. So they wouldn't do it. You

wouldn't have planes, guns, ships, all the rest of it, unless the government did what? Comes into the defense producer and says, I will buy the missile as fast as it comes off the assembly line, and at government expense, I will store it and prepare it and clean it and monitor it. I will do all of that in the name of defense. Wow. In the name of military defense, these mental midgets could see their way to do it. But when it comes to public health, and let's be clear, we've already lost 200,000 people. That's more than we've lost in most of the wars this country has participated in. So if you give a damn about human life, what you could have and should have done to save us from a virus is at

least as important as what you have been doing with record amounts of money. Last point. As a professor of economics, I have been asked to teach over the years how efficient capitalism is. It's basically a part of the universal curriculums that capitalist societies promote. Well here's an example of why what we teach is, and I'm being polite now, wide of the mark. Okay? The amount of money it would have taken for either the government or the private sector to amass sufficient masks, gloves, ventilators, and all the rest that we would have needed to be prepared, is a trivial amount of money compared to the trillions of dollars lost. I'm not even counting the dead people.

lost. I'm not even counting the dead people. I'm not going to put a dollar amount on 200,000 dead Americans, and not to speak of all the injuries, but simply the loss of production from unemployed people. This is the most inefficient system imaginable to have done this, to have not prepared for our public health in the face of a known danger. This is a system that is badly broken. That's why the book is called The Sickness is the System, because I wanted people to take what's in their heads, the COVID reality we're all living with, but realize that behind that is a much more profound sickness, which luckily we can do something about, whereas viruses, that's a whole different question. Yeah, so I appreciate in the book, you do go over these elements of capitalism and how they are very flawed and particularly

exposed in their flawness right now due to COVID-19. So yeah, you go over the profit motive. You also go over the crashes of capitalism that happen and also our reliance on the market and thinking that everything should be on the market. And hopefully folks do see with this intensity of COVID-19 how the system is the sickness. I'm wondering what happened, though,

in the change in the bubonic plague and feudalism? Did the bubonic plague expose the problems within feudalism? How did it help to bring its demise? And what can we learn from that transition? You had this part in your book where you talked about how there were certain small examples of capitalism that were coming out like prototypes or trials, and some of them lasted, some of them didn't, but they particularly emerged during the end of feudalism. And yeah, I'm wondering what can we see now with these alternative economics, more cooperative or social democratic economics now? So yeah, what can we learn from the parallel of that transition for this one? Good. Let me begin this way. The bubonic plague was another virus, just like

COVID-19. It was carried by fleas, who in turn lived on rats. And the rats, as they moved through the population, infected the people. And it was much more deadly than the coronavirus. It is believed to have killed a third of the population of Europe. Now what this did with that level of destruction is it undermined feudalism in a number of ways. First, feudalism in a number of ways. First, millions of serfs who did all the work died. Okay, so all kinds of lords, the people who ran the feudal society, were suddenly deprived of all income because the people who did the work, who farmed the land, who raised the animals, who made the crafts, they were all dead, and so they could not produce. So it wasn't just the serfs who died, but the lord, the minority

class that sits at the top, was bereft, was deprived of its manifestations of life. And all of this, by the way, happened 13th, 14th century, a long time ago. But it disrupted the feudal economy. If one lord, if one feudal area traded with another, that trade was disrupted because the people carrying the goods died or the people producing them died. So think of it as giving a fantastic shock to the daily life of everybody. What did a serf do whose lord died? What did a lord do whose serfs died? They were cut loose from feudalism. They couldn't continue to be a serf. They had no lord over them. They couldn't continue to be a lord. What did they do? They became wanderers. They became people without a place in society. They began to look for alternative ways to survive in a society where the places they had occupied,

which had been occupied by their parents and grandparents for millennia, were no longer available to them. The shock of the new ways they found to survive. You know, stories like Robin Hood, those come out of runaway serfs from a disaster getting together and collectively, if you know the story of Robin Hood, helping each other in a band that didn't have lords and serfs, that didn't have big shots and little shots,

that was very collective in the woods, you know, outlaws and so forth. That was one thing. Second thing, it was harder and harder for people to justify the dominant religion of that time, which was Roman Catholicism, because that was the universal church in Europe during this period. You know, if God loves you, and if you're going to church all the time, and if you're praying and behaving and following the dictates, why are you dead? Why did you watch your child expire from this disease? The conviction that the world was an orderly place with God at the head making sure everything worked out. This, I mean, some people kept to that belief for sure, but it shook for millions of people. It shook their whole attitude. And you can see why very soon, historically thereafter,

there's a split in the church. The Protestant Reformation breaks away from Roman Catholicism, Martin Luther, and all the rest. You're undoing the glue, in this case, the church that held feudal society together. I mean, it's not that feudalism just keeled over, but it was also a sign to people, literally, from mass extermination. It didn't know how to cope with the disease. It didn't know how to repel the disease. It didn't know how to cure the disease. It was shown to be monumentally incompetent about literally life and death. I would argue everything I just said applies to our time now. Yes, the arrangements are different. It's a different religion. The circumstances are no doubt different, but there's something dissolving around us and we kind of know it.

Let me drive it home in yet another way. There's a dramatic difference, which the book goes into, in yet another way. There's a dramatic difference, which the book goes into, between the way the United States reacted and the Europeans, who are close to us in type of society. I'm talking about the British and the French and the Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, and so on. I'll give you an example. Here in the United States, we responded, in late March as a nation by firing tens of millions of people. Over 50 million Americans have had to file for unemployment compensation over the last six months. It's actually now closer to 60 million. That's a stupefying fact. Nothing like that happened in Europe.

I'll give you an example. In March, unemployment rate in Germany was 5%. Today, it's 6%. In Italy, the unemployment rate now is lower than it was a year ago when there was no virus. What happened in Europe was that the governments there helped businesses just as the government here helped businesses, but there was a condition attached in Europe that was so universal it didn't even have to be said in each country. It was understood and the condition was this the government will help you and you will fire no one the people keep their job whether they come to work during the day or not that's completely separate you work that out with your employee and we the government will help you by kicking in somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of that worker's wages.

So the worker is employed, continues to keep his or her income, or at least the great bulk of it. And here's the most important, they know that whenever this crisis is over, they have a job. They have a job to return to. They are not bedeviled by the uncertainty that is literally driving Americans crazy under these circumstances. You know, you're pending at home, your children can't go to school, you don't know when this will end, you're afraid of getting sick, and now this crazed government adds another anxiety. Will there be a job for you whenever we get a vaccine or whatever? The Europeans didn't do that. And here's what it reveals. In Europe, they couldn't do it

because they know something. All the leaders know something. And that is that the power of the labor unions, the socialist parties, the communist parties, the anti-capitalist parties, because they have all of it, and even many of the Green Party's. Their attitude is if you had dared as the government to disemploy people, to take away their jobs during a pandemic when you have enough suffering, it's unthinkable in Europe, and if they had dared to do it, those workers would not have left the factory, the office, and the store to go home and watch TV. They would have gone right into the streets, and in those streets they would have shut down those economies much more totally than any virus ever could. The

reason it was done here is we don't have that. We don't have that labor movement, we don't have that socialist party, we don't have any of it. And so the business community here could respond by firing tens of millions of people in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, middle of a pandemic. I mean, historians will look back on this and scratch their heads at what self-destructive lunacy could have prevailed in the halls of power to do such a thing. And I think what you're seeing now is the consequences as they play themselves out. We have an economy now here in the United States that is literally on life support from the government. I mean, I enjoy it in a certain black humor kind of way because, you know, we're surrounded by ideologues who tell us that the government is a big burden and the private sector is

where innovation happens and dynamic and efficient and all of that. I love it. I like the libertarians who blame the government for literally everything. The government's all that's holding it up now. I don't know whether people are familiar with the details. The Federal Reserve prints money and it's now lending that money directly to corporations.

Every corporation in America that has any kind of problem, it's producing of something that people don't want, or perhaps it has a technology that's out of date, or perhaps it has internal struggles between managers and workers, who knows? Whatever the problem, here is the quickest, easiest, cheapest solution. Go get money from the Federal Reserve. They are creating it by the trillions, and they're lending it out at barely above zero percent interest. So every corporation in America is now on life support from the government. Meanwhile, the mass of people are unsupportable. Unemployment compensation

at record levels. I mean, the consumers, the producers, everybody is dependent on the government. Okay, that has itself enormous problems. But then this dysfunctional government decided not to continue the extra $600 a week for unemployed people that stopped as of the 31st of July. In addition to the government lending money to all of our corporations on a pace we've never seen, corporate debt in this country is higher than it has ever been by all measures in the history of the United States because of all this free money that every corporation is using. And to imagine that all those corporations are being very careful and very prudent in how they use this effectively free money

would be delusional. That's part of what keeps the stock market going. All of this new money, very low interest, into the hands of corporations who buy their own stock in the stock market, who give each other huge salaries, which they then use to buy stocks in the stock market. So the stock market keeps going up, and the rest of the population wonders how in the middle of a pandemic, when I'm unemployed and my neighborhood is turning to disaster, are the rich people getting even richer than they were before. The largest stock market in the United States, the Nasdaq,

is now 22% higher than it was on January 1st. As far as the stock market is concerned, there's been no pandemic. They're doing better this year than in many years when there was no virus. The vast mass of us, our lives are in turmoil. Our futures are in question. But for the rich, there's something terribly wrong in a society that works this way. If you took, the rough estimate is between the bottom of the pandemic hitting late March and now, the 643 richest Americans have become richer by the sum of 845 billion dollars. Here's a way to understand these crazy numbers. catastrophe we're living with, which could make a difference, because that's more money than the total stimulus that they've talked about.

So why this is not being discussed, why this is not being done, these are signs of systemic failure. Whether you look at the preparation for the virus or containing the virus or you look at this growing inequality, we hear all this talk we're gonna get through this together. No we're not. Some of us are going to get through this richer and others of us are going to get through it a lot poorer and the number of those impoverished is much larger than the number of those enriched. That's a problem. So for me, these are signs not just of a crisis of the year 2020. These are signs of an economic system that is sick, that is broken, that does not work except for a tiny number of people at the top. That's not a sustainable arrangement. And that's a major reason why I wrote the book. And he talks about how systems like ecological systems unravel.

And so he calls this time that we're in the great unraveling. And so that really speaks to what you're saying. Absolutely. I may steal that from him. It's a great metaphor. Of course. You're right. It gets at the process.

I don't want people to think it's all a big single kind of momentary event. It isn't. It unravels slowly in each individual's particular brain and particular circumstances and particular relationships each of us had. It works its way in there, but it is unstoppable once it gets going. It needs an extraordinary political leadership to manage this. And we not only don't have that level of leadership, we have the opposite. We have people who demonstrate day in and day out, they're the wrong people for this job. And yet this system, part of its dysfunction is to produce that as our leadership. And I appreciate that you brought up Europe and how different countries are responding. And one thing that I saw was in the UK, they were giving out like food stipends

for folks so that they could still support local and independent businesses in the area to keep them up and running. So yeah, there's there's some really innovative and creative and supportive policies coming from the government. And I know you speak about that in the book. And then, of course, you also talk about, as you often do, how we also need to reform the business structure, right? And worker cooperatives are central to that. So reorganizing our country, not just the government, but all of our spaces in a more social democratic way. And one question that's been coming up for me as I get deeper into worker cooperatives and not-for-profit worker self-directed enterprises

is what do we do about accountability and responsibility? A lot of folks worry that this is a downfall or a challenge for worker cooperatives as we democratize the workplace, and maybe even see that a capitalist enterprise is maybe better at that kind of managing or holding folks accountable. And then of course, unions are a way of holding the bosses or employers accountable. But yeah, just what have you seen or heard or thought of in terms of accountability in the more social democratic horizontal governance worker cooperative economy? Is this something that comes up? And what do you how do you feel about it? Yes, it does come up. And I think it's a perfectly reasonable question. I expect those questions,

because part of what we're doing, particularly those of us that are advocates for worker co-ops, as I am, is we're constantly encountering people who have never thought about this before, who have imagined that somehow it's written in the Bible or some other holy book, that you must organize your business with a small number of people at the top, you know, the owner or the board of directors or the major shareholders or whatever the little group is, and that they are somehow endowed by some mystical procedure with the appropriate competence to make all the decisions, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce,

and what to do with the product that we have all helped to produce. Whereas the mass, the employee in capitalism, is excluded from all those decisions, has to live with the result even though they cannot participate. I mean, if I were a teacher of political science and I wanted to give students a real concrete example of the absence of democracy, I would just describe the enterprise in which my students, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers work. You don't need to create an abstract idea, just there. And let me explain to you, when your mother crosses the threshold into that workplace, she gives up the control of her mind and her body for eight hours. Somebody else tells her where to sit, what to do, what kind of equipment to use. And at the end of the day,

at five o'clock, she is told, now you go home and what you have helped produce with your brains and your muscle belongs to the employer and you have nothing to say about the fruits of your brain and your body. It's staggering what you accept. And I stress it always because of the larger point. In my judgment, and the book makes this argument, the kinds of problems that we've been talking about, the failure to handle the COVID, the inequality that you make worse during a pandemic, I mean, these hair-raising things, I think they have a root, and the root is in the undemocratic, hierarchical, authoritarian organization of the business enterprise. Let's be really clear. Most adults spend most of their lives at work. Five out of seven days, the best hours of the day,

you know, those eight hours in the middle, right after you're awake and have your coffee, right after you're awake and have your coffee, and before you get tired, you're at work. If you believe in democracy, if you believe in the collective intelligence that we have as being greater than that of any subgroup within us, then you must understand that the workplace denies all of that. And I think that has seeped into the ways we think about the world, about ourselves, in very destructive ways. I think many Americans don't care about politics, for example. Why? Because they're so used to spending five out of seven days, the best hours of the day, in a place where they have no authority at all, where their opinion has no impact on anything, where the employer tells them what to do, and they do it, or else they risk

being fired, lose their job, lose their income, throw their family into chaos, blah, blah, blah. So they don't participate. They don't see the point. That's not because they're stupid or uneducated. It's because they have accommodated, as they've had to, to the reality of the workplace, the dictatorial position of a tiny, unaccountable minority. this because I want folks to understand there will be problems of accountability in worker co-ops, but look where you are coming from. Compared to your lack of accountability in a capitalist enterprise, we are nirvana. But having said that, I want to say, yes, there will be problems. Worker co-ops encounter all kinds of problems that should surprise no one. You know, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, millions and millions of people, it's still going on, leave the countryside, the rural life, the rural rhythms of life, and they come into the urban city and the industry. It's a completely different way of living. It's a kind of slavery to a clock,

not to the rising and falling of the sun. And it takes people generations to readjust. I expect it's going to take a good bit of readjustment, that every worker is going to have to understand you have a particular task at this workplace, but in addition to that, you have to be a responsible leader. You're part of the decision-making

because in a worker co-op, you have to make the big decisions that used to be made by the capitalists who ran the business, but you're going to make it. So I don't want to hear from you, gee, at the end of the day, I want to go home. Sure, we all do, but we have other work to do. Now we can put it during the day. There's all kinds of accommodations, but this is going to be an adjustment for people who now begin, I think in the long run, it's better for them, it's better for society, but it will take some adjusting to. Here's some of the things that have been done creatively already by worker co-ops is some futuristic pie in the sky, I hope maybe will happen. No, no, no. Worker co-ops have been around for thousands of years. They exist here in the

United States. They exist all over the world. They've been around for a long time. So there's lots of empirical reality to build from and to learn from. And here's some of the ways they built into accountability. One is a very old idea, but pioneered really by socialists, which say that in any workplace there should be full rotation of function. In other words, in capitalism, they stick you in a particular job. You do it all day, over and over and over again. Drives you crazy. This is not good for you, but it's also not good for the business.

You flag after a while. Your body, your mind rebels against the repetitive task. So all functions should be rotated. In particular, the function in which one person directs or supervises or coordinates other people, it's important to rotate you from the position of coordinator to coordinated. Why? That way you understand what it feels like. You're not going to be the abusive coordinator because you're going to be that person you abuse. He's going to be or she's going to be, you know, understand. So we, rotation is a way of building in a co-respectivity among workers that capitalism doesn't know and

that worker co-ops will need to get that kind of equality of opportunity and equality of responsibility that they need. So that's one. Here's another one, that the curriculum in schools will have to be changed. You will want now for children, and as early as elementary school, to be given a course of study alongside their others, learn the language and learn the mathematics and all that, but learn cooperation. How do you work out a disagreement? If you're standing next to another person and they do something that upsets you, what do you do? What are the ways to... This kind of emotional, psychological, whatever you want to call it,

awareness of interpersonal relationships is widely understood to be badly underdeveloped in capitalism. It is, for sure. But you can see already in worker co-ops, they have to solve that problem in a very practical way because they don't have a hierarchy. They cannot say, I'm not going to talk to you about you're upset with me because I'm your superior and I can tell you what to do and I can fire you. Okay. End of conversation. But to believe

you've resolved it, to be unaware that it just goes underground and will come up at some other moment and bite you right in the behind. We know that, but we don't know how to deal with it because we can't question the capitalist hierarchy. So I think worker co-ops can and will want these kinds of interpersonal management issues to be part of what people learn. And there's a gender dimension here too. In capitalism, for all kinds of historical reasons, men dominate in the capitalist enterprise, but women are much more sensitive to working out interpersonal issues. I mean, they make mistakes too. It's not white and black, but there is, I've seen it all in my life.

Women have a sense of one another. Maybe it has to do with childcare. Maybe it has to do with being the sort of the emotional manager of the household that so many women find their way into, that the society pushes them into. And it's, by the way, interesting because in modern capitalism

women are replacing men at a growing percentage in all the ranks of management because it turns out they're better managers because they have that feeling for the emotional dimensions which the men have imagined they're supposed to filter out, not be touched by, be above, another crazy notion. So the irony is, I like worker co-ops because they will put that front and center. They have to. They don't have a hierarchy they can hide behind to force people to do things. They have to persuade. They have to work out a compromise. They have to imagine the other person's perspective. And I think the transition is both in the workplace and also governmental, largely systemic. And I appreciate that you're pointing to the ways that it's already happening, the ways that it's already here, and the ways that it's possible. So I hope for folks

that they read your book. And yes, it is a absolute great unraveling that we're seeing and feeling in our personal lives, relationships, work lives. And yet the potential for this transition is absolutely possible. And we've done transitions like this before. So very hopeful and very inspiring. Thank you so much for this. Oh, I'm glad to have talked with you. And I thank you for your interest in the book. And as I say, I hope it's a way for people to engage this set of ideas in their own time and in their own way. Absolutely. And yeah, you do speak about how there's so much resistance to even accepting that the

system is the challenge. So I think that's the first step, right, for folks to just relax into being okay with knowing that the system is the problem and that other alternatives are possible. Yeah, if I could borrow a strange metaphor that shouldn't be felt to be all that strange. If you have problems with alcohol and you go to an alcoholic anonymous meeting, you are required to begin whatever you say by saying, I am an alcoholic. And the reason for that is not to embarrass you or humiliate you, but to teach everyone, we all have our problems. I have this particular one and I know it and I'm here because I want to fix it. I want to get beyond it. I want to

overcome it. And that gives you in a moment of solidarity because everybody there has something comparable and it gives you the collective support to now go find a better way. And that's exactly why we need to face the failure of our capitalist economic system, because once we admit that, then we can get together with other people and look for and develop the solutions. Beautiful. Well, I'm so happy for this book. The Sickness is the System When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from the Pandemic or Itself.

May it bring clarity and acceptance to the gravity of the problem and inspiration for the solutions. Thank you so much for your time today, Richard. I really appreciate you and your work. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Richard Wolff, professor at the New School in New York City, founder of the organization Democracy at Work, host of the show Economic Update, and author of several books, including most recently, The Sickness is the System, When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself. Thank you to Elle Bisgard Church for her research on this interview and to Robert Raymond

for producing our theme music. Upstream is a labor of love. If you like what you've heard, please consider donating at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.