And the last question.
And in the end, the most important
one that we will be answering and that will shape
the future we see in the new world economy.
And that question is, will the kinds of friction
and change and difficulty
of this phase of capitalist development,
this moving of its old centers
and the creation of new centers,
will it have the effect
of agitating, mobilizing
and educating a global working class?
I end with that because I think it's
the most important thing to leave with you.
We have had 40 years of a traumatic change
in the global capitalist system.
That's what this program today
has summarized or tried to.
But along the way, we have really put
the working classes of the world through the wringer.
In China, we took
hundreds of millions of rural people
and put them into urban coastal cities,
transforming everything about their lives.
Of course, there's going to be trauma and upset
and reconfiguring ways of living and being.
The working class of China is going through a transformation
in decades that took Europeans centuries.
Yeah, that will agitate your working class.
But look also at the United States and Western Europe
for the last 40 years, the middle class wrecked.
The inequality made much worse.
Tiny groups, two, four, 6% of super wealthy people,
and the mass of people having a harder and harder time.
And then on top of it, an economic crash in 2020, a
global pandemic that was horrid in its effects,
and then in inflation and now rising interest rates.
All of that crammed into a historical short period of time.
Of course, the French people are in the streets.
They’re always among the first to go there and the German workers
and the women in Iran and fill in the blank.
There are many more.
And the militancy of the labor movement
rediscovered in this country.
The question is, will this working class turmoil
congeal into its own
notion of where the future lies?
Because if they do, they will be able
not only to reshape the world economy as it emerges,
but they might be able to finally realize their dream
of an economic system that didn't position a tiny number of people at the top,
making all the decisions, gathering the wealth
and shaping the world economy to their desire.
It might finally mean a world economy shaped
in the desire of what most of the people living in it would prefer.
That, too,
is on the horizon as a possibility.