this is richard wolff for democracy at
work
responding to another ask prof wolf
question
from our patreon community this one
comes from tom
hall tom says he's been looking at
robert rice book saving capitalism or i
believe that's the title i want to be
unfair
and he wonders what my response is
to the argument that professor rice
makes
in that book so here goes briefly but i
hope to the point
robert writes like many other liberal or
left liberal
thinkers in america and beyond
wants to save capitalism because he
believes the kind of capitalism we have
uh is misguided unfortunate
wrong-headed but changeable
fixable uh he refers to the kind of
capitalism we have
very critically by the way as
laissez-faire
capitalism capitalism where the
government doesn't
intervene to control to manage to
regulate
to limit how the system works
uh he also criticizes to
contemporary capitalism for the big
businesses that dominated
and he refers as many do to something
called
crony capitalism where the big shots the
big ceos
help each other to stay on top of a
system
that they dominate and he wants to fix
that
he wants to take the system away from
the cronies
and to reintroduce a healthy dose of
regulation
that would make capitalism less unequal
than it is less unstable with business
cycle
crashes than it is and all around
less unjust and less harsh
than it is robert reich is in a long
line of people with that perspective
they are the fixers they're going to fix
capitalism
make it work as it somehow they think
should work would work might work if
only
it were properly managed where the
laissez-faire
libertarian types think that properly
managed capitalism
is unmanaged capitalism with no
government
to intrude its management on the system
robert reich has kind of the opposite
view you might call it the new deal
rooseveltian view that capitalism left
to itself
has got a lot of wrong things that
happen
and so you need the government to get
what's good
out of capitalism but repress and block
what isn't well you know
i might have been willing to go along
with such an idea
a hundred years ago when capitalism was
still
relatively young i might have been able
even willing 50 years ago
but i'm not anymore and the reason
is simple efforts like robert
rice's to get out of the bad kind of
capitalism
and get us over into what he sees as the
good kind
haven't worked out real well
look around us now we have greater
inequality
than we did 10 20 30 40 50
years ago capitalism isn't moving us
towards
more equality it's doing exactly the
opposite
what about stability well i would answer
we've had three crashes in the first 20
years of this century's capitalism
the dot-com crash in 2000 the subprime
mortgage crash
in 2008 and the covet 19 crash
so-called right now this system is very
unstable and if you have really bad luck
like we do we have a very bad
virus pandemic on top of our capitalist
systems
latest and one of its worst crashes
so i'm not persuaded that fixing it
is a viable strategy the people who
fixed it after the great crash of the 19
29 30s the great depression
the people who fixed it then their fixes
came undone no sooner was
franklin roosevelt in his grave and
world war
ii over then the business community the
capitalists
took over the government and rammed
through
the undoing of the new deal all those
fix-its the kind that robert rice book
advocates
were undone they weren't secure and you
know why they weren't secure
because fixing capitalism isn't
enough it's time to get rid
of this system it doesn't work
even when after much struggle
you can make a few fix it adjustments
like robert reich wants and like we did
as a nation
in the 1930s even if you struggle long
and hard
and even if you win the system leaves
the
power and the profits in the hands of
the capitalists
who use their position and use those
profits to undo whatever fix it
the mass of people has been able to
achieve
my view we've worked real hard to fix
capitalism
over and over again and either we failed
to fix it
or the fix-its when we succeeded were
undone because capitalism is a system
that undoes the very fix it
that the mass of people imposed on it
we've been there the fix it game we've
done that
we're not going to do it again i think
you have to realize
after all of our experiments with the
fix-its
and the undoing of the fix-its that
we're not going down that road anymore
we have to change the system so there
isn't a group of capitalists
who own and operate the economy
who are in a position to undo the fix-it
efforts
you want to fix it to stick to survive
to become the new normal the new reality
then you have to make sure that there
isn't
a powerful organized group
called employers who have the resources
because they get the profits to undo
every fix it
you achieve and the solution
change business enterprises from top
down
undemocratic small groups who run the
business
into worker co-ops democratic one person
one vote
everybody together decides then
you will have a system that can find its
flaws
fix them and there's nobody to
undo it that's where i disagree with
robert
reich don't ask us once again
to go into the fray to struggle to fix
an
economy only to watch yet again
as an unchanged capitalist organization
of enterprises
undoes whatever fix-its we achieve
this is richard wolff for democracy at
work
responding to another ask prof wolf
question