“Global Capitalism: The Challenge of China”. ~~ Richard Wolff and Introduction by dmorista

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpD0Im5d9-c

~~ posted for dmorista with introduction by dmorista ~~

Introduction by dmorista

Richard Wolff gives a talk, generally about 1 hour long, every other month. He used to give the talks live at the Judson Church in Manhattan, but now he is doing it online, and his organization then posts you tubes of the talks at their website Democracy at Work. This is the most recent of his bimonthly talks.

This particular lecture “Global Capitalism: The Challenge of China” recorded on July 14, 2021 opens with about 3 minutes of a typical pitch for either financial support or help with work on various aspects of the website and its various youtubes and podcasts. Then for 7 or 8 minutes Wolff discusses the differences between the situation faced by Joe Biden and Franklin Roosevelt, and their respective responses to the two crises.

He emphasizes the difference in the level of organization of the working class in the U.S. now, as compared to that in the 1930s. He ascribes much of the weakness of Biden's response to the lack of organizational power and mobilization of working people in the U.S. now; as compared to that 80 years ago. He sees Biden's plan as falling far short of what Roosevelt, who had to contend with a strong, organized, and highly mobilized working class on his left. A class that had several active and growing unions, and that had 1 Communist Party and 2 Socialist Parties. All three of those leftwing political parties also played a major role in shaping the policies of the New Deal era.

In the main text of the talk Wolff succinctly analyzes the business deals made between the rulers of the U.S. and China. U.S. capital was in a serious crisis of low profitability, for most of its basic industries, in the early to late 1970s when the first opening to China took place. The capitalists in the U.S. thought they had found a solution to the problem of high wages, that American workers had fought for during the 1930s and 1940s. That solution was to move a significant portion of U.S. industrial production out of the country to low-wage low-regulation places.

American capitalists essentially went on an “investment strike” for the domestic U.S. economy. They moved their industrial investment to a variety of places including Mexico, Central America, S. Korea, and Taiwan. By the 1990s China became the main destination for U.S. and other Western and Japanese capital investment. The Chinese Communist Party guaranteed a low-wage, well educated, healthy, and docile workforce. In return they demanded some level of technology transfer as part of the investment process. Wolff does not try to paint China as a paradise, but he points out that the Chinese kept their end of the bargain. They were just smart enough to invest much of the profit into advancing Chinese social and technological and industrial development. The rulers in the West meanwhile, were disinvesting in their domestic societies.