Richard D. Wolff

Wages and benefits are trending downward while profits are simultaneously increasing.

Members and leaders agreed that unions were working people’s best weapons against the ravages of a severely depressed capitalism.

In the current crisis of capitalism, an FDR-type solution has not emerged, for several reasons. First, the fifty-year decline and consequent weakness of the labor union movement and the extreme decline of socialist and communist movements removed them as effective agents for such a solution.

Second, the majority of businesses and the rich see little need—yet—for any compromise solution that would increase their taxes.

Second, the majority of businesses and the rich see little need—yet—for any compromise solution that would increase their taxes. Third, no actually existing socialism (such as the Soviet Union represented during the 1930s) poses an alternative today that might attract significant working-class support and thereby frighten conservatives into FDR-type political partnerships.

Political Dysfunction Worsens Economic Dysfunction

The absence of a left-wing force from below has left the United States with a severe crisis but without government intervention adequate to sustain a broad economic recovery.

The government-enhanced wealth at the top does not “trickle down” in the real world. Instead, boards of directors continue to see their self-interest in not sharing the recovery funds poured into their hands. Thus we experience continuing high unemployment, massive numbers of home foreclosures, declining real wages and job benefits, and inaccessibility of credit for personal borrowing. Stagnant consumption and investment are the results. They undermine the recovery of business and the stock markets. The global capitalist crisis deepens.

Business profits funded the parties, politicians, public relations campaigns, and professional think tanks that together shaped the real social effects and historical decline of government economic regulation. Examples include the destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act, the current assault on Social Security, the shift in the federal tax burden from business to individuals and from upper- to middle-income individuals, and so on.

Cure for Capitalism

An increasing number of people are seeking a very different solution to the economic and political morass engulfing the United States and beyond. For them, that solution must have several key components. One is a permanent end to the periodic crises generated by capitalism (promised repeatedly but never achieved by its leaders over the last century). Another component is an economic system reorganized to secure greater income and wealth equality. Still another component is a genuinely democratic distribution of power among individuals inside both their workplaces and their communities.

This cure involves, first, replacing the current capitalist organization of production inside offices, factories, stores, and other workplaces in modern societies. In short, exploitation—the production of a surplus appropriated and distributed by those other than its producers—would stop.