On this week’s Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff discusses the special dimensions and qualities of the U.S. labor movement’s current dynamism.
Thomas Piketty’s analysis shows how capitalism generates widening wealth and income gaps, leading to crashes or simmering, divisive, and domestic resentments. The system itself becomes destabilized and can then lurch to the left, as happened via the New Deal in the U.S., or to the right, as in Nazi Germany, Italy, and Spain (fascism). Both movements advocated government intervention to stabilize capitalism: one left, one right. The left worked via massive supports to working people (minimum wages, government jobs, social security, and so on). The right attempted forced labor and anti-immigrant efforts, demonizing immigrants to support employers.
Right turns have their parallels now in Brexit, Trump, Milei (Argentina), and Miloni in Italy. The big question: since these past rightward moves failed and sent Germany, Italy, and Spain over into social democracy, will their behavior be equalled again?