Notes from a lecture by political economist Richard Wolff, author of Capitalism Hits the Fan: Capitalism is sick and American capitalism is the disease. To understand this we need to understand the history. In the 1970s real wages stopped rising. In the U.S. the people believe that upward moving wages is a good for economics and stagnation leads to decline. Since we are in stagnation why aren’t people concerned? Why aren’t we discussing how we need to adjust? Are we in denial as individuals? Well, no. Workers reacted by trying to fix it.

First, workers worked harder. Second, women joined the work force but this took income for clothes, a second car, and child care. Third, we worked longer hours, more than most other industrialized countries. This only made us more exhausted as we still sought the American Dream. Fourth, we borrowed money. We took collateral on our homes, cars, credit cards. We borrowed money for education thinking if I only had more education I could reach the American Dream. That didn’t work either. It only put us more in debt and gave the money to banks. And fifth, we became anxious and sick over worry about our debt. The attempts at fixing capitalism by workers have not worked.

What did employers think about this stagnation? Employers thought that if they could get production up and lower wages, this should fix the economy. But it didn’t. What happened instead? It helped the employers by giving them rising profits but it made the gap between income of employers and workers increase, raising inequality. The U.S. began losing the middle class. Employers/CEOs joined the 1% and more workers were becoming part of the poor class. Employers and CEOs began ‘buying’ congress and the judiciary to keep the profits flowing to their pockets. When they saw there were cheaper workers in other countries, they shut down American businesses and moved them to Mumbai, using jets for their travel along with the internet to run their businesses. But with the American worker now losing jobs and not able to afford to buy the products employers are now making over seas, employers begin to realize they don’t need to sell to just Americans, so they find markets in other countries.

In 2008 something happened to disrupt this whole American capitalism. Capitialism crashed. CEOs and the financial system became terrified. They didn’t trust one another and they wouldn’t help one another. Where did they reach out for help? The U.S. government. The financial industry demanded credit and to be bailed out by the government. The banks got help but the workers didn’t. Unemployment skyrocketed. Inequality got worse. Governments cut, cut, cut. One of the big cuts was in education. This was the one place workers thought they might get ahead but instead their future was to be hurt.

The workers begin to see what is really happening. They see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. But what can they do? Do they get to help make any decisions within the corporations or do the corporations just tell they what to do? Who is making the decisions about their work and jobs? Boards of directors and the share holders make the decisions which affect the workers. Why are all the profits going to the 1% and none shared with the workers?

Richard Wolff believes we need to change the whole American capitalist system. We need to put democracy back into the decisions which affect workers. We need democracy in the work place. This could cure the sick capitalism. Workers need to help make decisions including decisions about technology and pollution. Workers should help decide where profits go. They should design the jobs and help run the enterprise.

Workers need to criticize capitalism. They need to find an alternative to the present system. Richard Wolff suggests democratic worker capitalism. Labor needs to organize. Workers need to rebuild unions. They need to look at examples working in other countries. An example he suggested workers should look at is Mondragon Enterprise in Spain that has been functioning since 1956. It is a 100,000 cooperative where the CEO makes only 8 times what the highest worker makes. Workers can only work at a repetitive job for 2 hours. Workers serve on the Board of Directors and make decisions on market sales and distribution based on need and make decisions about salaries. They run their own bank and a university. They use profits for lots of research.

Wolff believes that only if we can democratize the corporation, capitalism might survive. The workers need to be part of the process, not just employers.

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Last week, I watched  a documentary shown by the St. Louis Peace Economy Project and Instead of War. It was called Dirty Wars and was based on the book by investigative reporter, Jeremy Scahill. It concerned America’s covert wars and our use of drones. It was very disturbing to me.

Beginning with a  ,night raid on a remote village in Afghanistan, which goes wrong, it continues with the cover up by those taking part in the raid, and it eventually leads to an investigation of American’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Scahill follows the activities of JSOC,  an organization unknown to the American public because there are no names or paperwork done on their operations. Scahill follows two operations. Some of the CIA operators, victims of night raids and drone strikes, warlords and military generals come forth to share their part in these raids for the first time.

Scahill also follows the targeted drone strike on the first American citizen, allegedly an Al Qaeda operative, Anwar al-Awlaki, and later the drone strike on his teenage son and his friends in Yemen. We learn of the US President Obama’s killing list as part of our War on Terror. Obama’s drone wars have killed more than 2400 civilians in countries whose governments pose no threat to us and with whom we are not at war. We are not following international law or our own U.S. Constitution. The whole world has become a battlefield.

We are left with disturbing questions of secret wars, freedom, justice and democracy.  Scahill persuasively argues that the war on terror is ultimately unwinnable because indiscriminate killings radicalize whole populations.

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We need to work to end wars. One way to do that is to get rid of all nuclear weapons. Eleanor Holmes Norton has introduced H.R. 1650 in the U.S. House of Representatives to abolish all nuclear weapons by 2020. Also supporting this legislation is the US Conference of Mayors in a 2012 Resolution. We need to get each of our representatives to co-sponsor this legislation.

This may seem like a pipe dream and not possible, but we must be persistent and have our representatives work for things we believe are important. We know that for the world’s security and justice we must end violence and war. War can and must be eliminated as an instrument of national policy. We need to declare our opposition to all weapons of mass destruction, which includes the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons. and we can begin by dismantling all nuclear arsenals and passing treaties banning all future weapons by any nation. We need to be the instruments of peace.

General Douglas MacArthur in July 1951 said it better than I can. He said, “

The abolition of war is no longer an ethical question to be pondered solely by learned philosophers and ecclesiastics, but a hard core one for the decision of the masses whose survival is the issue. Many will tell you with mockery and ridicule that the abolition of war can only be a dream – that it is the vague imagining of a visionary. But we must go on or we will go under….We must have new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts. We must break out of the straight jacket of the past. We must have sufficient imagination and courage to translate the universal wish for peace – which is rapidly becoming a necessity – into actuality.”

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With winter coming, I love to go out when it snows and the air is so peaceful.  I even like to shovel snow at night when it is a quiet time with few people outside and few cars.  But in other places in the world there is no peace. People hear drones moving across the sky.  There are American troops banging on their doors.  There are battles raging still in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The war on terror continues endlessly. Since 2001 there have already been over 100,000 people killed; some terrorists, some soldiers, some civilians.

What we have done so far has not stopped the terror.  We need to remove all our forces from Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to not be doing anything in other countries that makes more people hate us. Too much money is being used to continue this endless war. Too much money is being used for military endeavors. I think it would be better to find the root causes of conflict and find non-violent ways to create conditions to defuse the hostility.

There are now bills in Congress to repeal the authorization for use of military forces, H.R. 2324  and H.R. 198. We need to support these bills. Since US citizens are war weary, this is the time to influence our Congresspeople. Then we need to turn to the UN Security Council to respond to global threats multilaterally.

[Reprinted, by permission of the author, from WILPF November 2013 newsletter]

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