What Richard Wolff explains here could be the most powerful argument for the failure of capitalism: It has consistently eroded, rather than promoted, workplace democracy.
Democracy and liberalism don't mix. Democracy and "capitalism", a marxist term used to conflate liberalism and fascism, do mix, because democracy and fascism do mix. In fact, this is the dominant mode of the modern world.
The market is the purest expression of democracy where elections on everything take place constantly. When the US still approximated a laisses faire free market society, Henry Ford was able to attract workers by doubling prevailing wage rates. Following more than a century of progressivist regulatory interventions and ruinous tax policy, Detroit, once the richest city in the world thanks to Ford, is now one of the poorest thanks to government. The real reason the automakers left Detroit is because the Detroit pollical class, starting in the early 1970s, imposed huge tax increases not only on the automakers plants but also the equipment within those plants. The automakers told the Detroit political potentates they would leave unless the tax increases were rescinded - to which the potentates replied 'You're bluffing'.
@@robertcarpenter8077 Everything you said after the first sentence is the opposite of democracy. Like I said, liberalism is incompatible with democracy. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
@@authenticallysuperficial9874 That's an interesting point. I agree its important to distinguish between the sham of political democracy and the real democracy of the market where the only creatures with real teeth are the teeming billions of consumers :)
Capitalism is a wolf tending a herd of sheep. Democracy is what the wolf fears. 🤨 The majority workers wanted the value they produced to be used for public services, hence the taxes. That's democracy. 👍 The minority shareholders punished those workers for their insolence by reassigning that work to workers too hungry to complain about how they were being treated. That's autocracy. 👎
RD Wolff doesn't understand that generalized commodity production i.e. widespread production of goods for the purpose of selling on the market, inevitably leads to monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Even if there's democracy in the workplace, the logic of commodity production, of the market mechanism of exchange, creates dictatorship in the workplace and dictatorship of capital in society. What is needed is public ownership and planning of the main sectors of the economy. And that can only be achieved through class struggle methods and socialist revolution. Class negotiation isn't possible as Wolff imagines with his cooperatives.
@@Zayden.Marxist Wolff certainly does understand that, which is why he isn't Gene Epstein. Wolff wants to violently prevent voluntary exchange, to thieve and kidnap and murder, and to use the police state to force all enterprese to be run as a coop.
I'm a socialist but we do have to live in the real world, we live in a global mixed-economy and have to deal with that reality, Best to look at Capitalist reformers like Mariana Massacato and Ha-joon Chang, who are right on free markets being bad, but think a reformed market is the thing. That is what is on the menu at this time, since actual socialism is not on the docket. We have to bring that reality to fruition. We are not even at the debate stage yet. This reminds me of Graeber's idea about why we don't have flying cars.
Wolff has been making these fallacious arguments for many years. According to the standard ratings, Switzerland has a higher degree of capitalism than the US and makes more use of public referenda than any other country. Some cantons practice direct democracy; people vote directly on public policy without representatives. The degree of capitalism in the Netherlands and Germany is also high (more than 7.5 on a scale from 0 to 10), with relatively little corruption. It has long been understood by classically liberal thinkers ranging from de Tocqueville and Acton to Hayek that democracy must be restrained by constitutional rules (e.g., federalism, equality before the law) or else politicians will distribute favors to special interests. Unfortunately, the US constitution has been undermined. The Swiss constitution of 1848 was modeled after the US constitution and today even offers some compensation for "regulatory takings"--if government regulation reduces property values, injured parties can seek reimbursement. Yugoslavia offered "self-management" by workers in government-sponsored enterprises--good luck with that. One of my professors was Rudolf Meidner, author of the Meidner Plan underwhich workers would buy up shares of enterprises--again, good luck. In a free society workers should be free to seek ownership on the understanding that they then have to assume risk as well. In most cases, they don't want to do that.
Agreed. Crapitalism, aka 'crony capitalism', is a very bad thing. On the other hand, anarcho capitalism, where all power rests with the consumer, is a very good thing.
@@rawbebaba The 'emergent' institutions of money, markets, private property and the price mechanism taken collectively ARE capitalism. It is capitalism which predates the urban industrial barracks system while it is the appearance of certain technologies which make possible the formation of the mass production industrial factory. What you see in the early 19th century UK is not at all a fledgling capitalism but rather the industrial factory system still in its embryonic form. And one should note that nothing prevented this system from developing along the lines of say modern day Mondragon, as an industrial factory system owned and operated as a worker co-op. The problem came about because of the existence of political power - not because of anything innate to capitalism. That is, the bourgeoise, which came out of the smaller scale workhouses, rather than working within the emergent institutions of capitalism, instead resorted to the use of political power in order to coerce, in order to drive the subsistence farmer off the land and into the factory. The industrial factory system was from its inception a deformation of capitalism, was if you like, born crony-capitalist. Marx correctly analyzed this. The problem with Marx is that he mistakenly went for the counterpunch, he mistakenly sought to seize political power in order to arrest the operational core of money, markets, private property and the price mechanisms - rather than to dismantle the state which made possible the deformation of capitalism into crony-capitalism.
@robertcarpenter8077 sorry, that's so a-historic is almost insane. Capitalism literally emerged out of fudalism, out of the aristocracy surrounding fudalism, who often in fact ran the kings, not the other way around. Capitalism was literally the arsitocrats trying to protect thier social and financial power as kingdoms fell and democracy emerged. Your take I mean, you don't understand anything about power, politics, history, Capitalism, any of it. Which makes sense given your take requires complete ignorance on all these subjects
@@rawbebaba To the contrary, the French Revolution, like the American Revolution which preceded it, was a bourgeoise revolution. The bureaucracies of judicial and administrative power were already fully formed by the time of the ancien régime. The French Revolution merely served to transfer control of these institutions from an aristocratic class to the bourgeoise. You are right that the workhouses which arose during the feudal period catered to an aristocratic clientele. What happened is that technological innovation combined with specialization of labor allowed these workhouses to become so productive they could sell to each other in addition to the aristocracy. This created an escape route out of feudalism, functioned as a competitor system to feudalism. In no sense did feudalism 'develop' into the embryonic factory system of the workhouse. Rather the workhouse permitted a decisive break from feudalism manifesting in the French Revolution.
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What Richard Wolff explains here could be the most powerful argument for the failure of capitalism: It has consistently eroded, rather than promoted, workplace democracy.
Democracy and liberalism don't mix.
Democracy and "capitalism", a marxist term used to conflate liberalism and fascism, do mix, because democracy and fascism do mix. In fact, this is the dominant mode of the modern world.
The market is the purest expression of democracy where elections on everything take place constantly. When the US still approximated a laisses faire free market society, Henry Ford was able to attract workers by doubling prevailing wage rates. Following more than a century of progressivist regulatory interventions and ruinous tax policy, Detroit, once the richest city in the world thanks to Ford, is now one of the poorest thanks to government. The real reason the automakers left Detroit is because the Detroit pollical class, starting in the early 1970s, imposed huge tax increases not only on the automakers plants but also the equipment within those plants. The automakers told the Detroit political potentates they would leave unless the tax increases were rescinded - to which the potentates replied 'You're bluffing'.
@@robertcarpenter8077 Everything you said after the first sentence is the opposite of democracy. Like I said, liberalism is incompatible with democracy. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
@@authenticallysuperficial9874 That's an interesting point. I agree its important to distinguish between the sham of political democracy and the real democracy of the market where the only creatures with real teeth are the teeming billions of consumers :)
Capitalism is a wolf tending a herd of sheep. Democracy is what the wolf fears. 🤨
The majority workers wanted the value they produced to be used for public services, hence the taxes. That's democracy. 👍 The minority shareholders punished those workers for their insolence by reassigning that work to workers too hungry to complain about how they were being treated. That's autocracy. 👎
RD Wolff doesn't understand that generalized commodity production i.e. widespread production of goods for the purpose of selling on the market, inevitably leads to monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Even if there's democracy in the workplace, the logic of commodity production, of the market mechanism of exchange, creates dictatorship in the workplace and dictatorship of capital in society. What is needed is public ownership and planning of the main sectors of the economy. And that can only be achieved through class struggle methods and socialist revolution. Class negotiation isn't possible as Wolff imagines with his cooperatives.
@@Zayden.Marxist Wolff certainly does understand that, which is why he isn't Gene Epstein. Wolff wants to violently prevent voluntary exchange, to thieve and kidnap and murder, and to use the police state to force all enterprese to be run as a coop.
I'm a socialist but we do have to live in the real world, we live in a global mixed-economy and have to deal with that reality, Best to look at Capitalist reformers like Mariana Massacato and Ha-joon Chang, who are right on free markets being bad, but think a reformed market is the thing. That is what is on the menu at this time, since actual socialism is not on the docket. We have to bring that reality to fruition. We are not even at the debate stage yet. This reminds me of Graeber's idea about why we don't have flying cars.
Wolff has been making these fallacious arguments for many years. According to the standard ratings, Switzerland has a higher degree of capitalism than the US and makes more use of public referenda than any other country. Some cantons practice direct democracy; people vote directly on public policy without representatives. The degree of capitalism in the Netherlands and Germany is also high (more than 7.5 on a scale from 0 to 10), with relatively little corruption. It has long been understood by classically liberal thinkers ranging from de Tocqueville and Acton to Hayek that democracy must be restrained by constitutional rules (e.g., federalism, equality before the law) or else politicians will distribute favors to special interests. Unfortunately, the US constitution has been undermined. The Swiss constitution of 1848 was modeled after the US constitution and today even offers some compensation for "regulatory takings"--if government regulation reduces property values, injured parties can seek reimbursement. Yugoslavia offered "self-management" by workers in government-sponsored enterprises--good luck with that. One of my professors was Rudolf Meidner, author of the Meidner Plan underwhich workers would buy up shares of enterprises--again, good luck. In a free society workers should be free to seek ownership on the understanding that they then have to assume risk as well. In most cases, they don't want to do that.
Agreed. Crapitalism, aka 'crony capitalism', is a very bad thing. On the other hand, anarcho capitalism, where all power rests with the consumer, is a very good thing.
Um. Lol this is a joke yes?
@@rawbebaba The 'emergent' institutions of money, markets, private property and the price mechanism taken collectively ARE capitalism. It is capitalism which predates the urban industrial barracks system while it is the appearance of certain technologies which make possible the formation of the mass production industrial factory. What you see in the early 19th century UK is not at all a fledgling capitalism but rather the industrial factory system still in its embryonic form. And one should note that nothing prevented this system from developing along the lines of say modern day Mondragon, as an industrial factory system owned and operated as a worker co-op. The problem came about because of the existence of political power - not because of anything innate to capitalism. That is, the bourgeoise, which came out of the smaller scale workhouses, rather than working within the emergent institutions of capitalism, instead resorted to the use of political power in order to coerce, in order to drive the subsistence farmer off the land and into the factory. The industrial factory system was from its inception a deformation of capitalism, was if you like, born crony-capitalist. Marx correctly analyzed this. The problem with Marx is that he mistakenly went for the counterpunch, he mistakenly sought to seize political power in order to arrest the operational core of money, markets, private property and the price mechanisms - rather than to dismantle the state which made possible the deformation of capitalism into crony-capitalism.
@robertcarpenter8077 oh, that's a lot of historical illiteracy.
@robertcarpenter8077 sorry, that's so a-historic is almost insane. Capitalism literally emerged out of fudalism, out of the aristocracy surrounding fudalism, who often in fact ran the kings, not the other way around. Capitalism was literally the arsitocrats trying to protect thier social and financial power as kingdoms fell and democracy emerged. Your take I mean, you don't understand anything about power, politics, history, Capitalism, any of it. Which makes sense given your take requires complete ignorance on all these subjects
@@rawbebaba To the contrary, the French Revolution, like the American Revolution which preceded it, was a bourgeoise revolution. The bureaucracies of judicial and administrative power were already fully formed by the time of the ancien régime. The French Revolution merely served to transfer control of these institutions from an aristocratic class to the bourgeoise. You are right that the workhouses which arose during the feudal period catered to an aristocratic clientele. What happened is that technological innovation combined with specialization of labor allowed these workhouses to become so productive they could sell to each other in addition to the aristocracy. This created an escape route out of feudalism, functioned as a competitor system to feudalism. In no sense did feudalism 'develop' into the embryonic factory system of the workhouse. Rather the workhouse permitted a decisive break from feudalism manifesting in the French Revolution.