Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: Karl Marx and the Fall of the West (MUST WATCH!!! If you didn’t watched this you don’t understand real world)

I am really astonished by this. I NEVER SAW A MORE COMPREHENSIVE EXPLANATION OF THE WORLD!!! It starts slow in the beginning but it shows McCarthyism, ideology and thought control. I know it’s over 3 hours but it is a must watch in full. I agree with 99.9% of what he says because I guess I could find only little things I disagree with if I had to look but it’s closest to my world view I have ever seen. Last time I wrote about ideology which clouds the world since people don’t understand the real world. While I write and post about how this world is made, through geopolitics, like the CIA, organized crime and drugs trade, brainwashing through propaganda etc… Here you have explained the real world, a world we are creating hidden behind ideology. It’s over 3 hours but every minute is worth it! I wrote we are like Nazis hiding behind the ideology of eugenics while we hide behind the ideology of efficiency. Here you have explained to the real world this ideology and propaganda is hiding from you.

I BEG YOU WATCH IT FULL!!!

2:06:06

“The 19th century, late 19th century, everybody realized this. They were all calling what was happening socialism in one way or another, but it turned out that the winning form of course is Nazism, national socialism of Hitler. They didn’t want classical socialism, they didn’t want Marxist socialism, they wanted Nazism, and that’s what America now calls Nazism—democracy, with the two greatest democracies being Israel and Ukraine. They both share a visceral racial hatred, ethnic hatred for people who don’t believe what they do, who speak a different language than they do.

Once the American foreign policy decided we will support any country that’s a Nazi country and call it a democracy, and depict the world conflict as a crisis of civilization between authoritarianism (which means the state is acting on behalf of the people) or democracy (meaning oligarchy, meaning financial oligarchy), then indeed, if you just realize what the vocabulary means, there is a split in civilization today. It’s between a financial oligarchy defending itself by the most violent America’s Foreign Legion. The Foreign Legion of it began with ISIS and Al-Qaeda, formed under the Carter Administration, as the alternative to the secular productive society of Afghanistan—to destroy the secular society and destroy the equality of women.

And the fascism, the Nazism you have in Ukraine and the apartheid state in Israel. Once you realize that that’s the fight for civilization, you say, well, then what are these countries that America calls authoritarian? That means where the state prevents rent-seeking, the state acts to treat money as a private utility, the state tries to prevent rising housing prices being paid to the bank as mortgage interest, because the government will collect the rising value of the rising price of some locations as the economy gets more productive. And we won’t have to have an income tax on labor or a value-added tax that falls on consumers or a flat tax that is anti-progressive. All these things are things that America is producing—they have to be able to spell it out.

But my students in China tell me that their jobs are usually overshadowed by Chinese students who study economics in American universities. Well, if China sends its economic students to American universities, how are they going to learn about these things? If the BRICS countries send their students here, how are they going to have the vocabulary and the economic terminology and the concepts of economic rent that they need to reinvent the wheel? By saying, how did Europe, how did the classical political economists solve this problem in Europe to get rid of the rent-seeking, the financialization, the monopolization? How it’s all been done before— all they have to do is look at how it was done before, and it was going pretty good lines. And how did it evolve in a good way? Marx is describing all of these changes in terms of the laws of motion, and if the BRICS countries are saying, what kind of laws of motion do we want our economies to be restructured and follow? That’s how you will find and create the same kind of productive economy that the late 19th century created from the United States to Germany.”

3:31:53

The biggest myth about Marxism that we haven’t touched on yet today that you think are important in understanding today’s economy is that the big misconception is that Marx is what he wrote in Volume 1 of Capital and it’s all about employer-labor relations. That everything else is outside of Marxism, that Volume 2 and Volume 3 don’t have anything to do with Marxism, that finance and rent don’t have anything to do with Marxism, and the economy is not an economic system. All that Marxism talk about is labor-capital relations, and you need a big state for that. The state becomes the employer of labor. That’s the trivialization of capitalism that I encountered at the New School when I was teaching there. It’s changed a bit since then, which is why Richard can be an adjunct teaching part-time, but they don’t have enough money to hire full professors at the New School because their graduates don’t get many jobs teaching what they learned at the New School, so they’re in a budget squeeze.

Yeah, that’s basically the problem. Say the question once again, what the misinterpretation of Marxism is. We already said people think Marxism is the big state, Marxism is Stalinism, Marxism is why Russia didn’t develop, and they ended up having to have neoliberalism to destroy more Russian lives than World War II destroyed. That’s the alternative to Marxism, which proves that Marxism doesn’t work because Marxism is like World War II and its destructive effect on Stalinist Russia. The fact is, if the Russians had read Volumes 2 and 3, they would have known what was in store for them when they let the American neoliberals take over.

Marxism, as I said before, has two approaches: one is to start with the biography of Marx, work forward, and move quickly into Russia and why Stalinism failed, and the other is to look at Marx as the culmination of classical economics, including all of the critique of economic rent that went before him—the culmination of Adam Smith, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and all the other familiar names. I could have said a lot of names that are not familiar, but so if you’re talking about Marxism as really a study of the laws of motion of modern capitalist society, not only labor and capital, but landlordism, property relations, financial relations, property, industry, and employment, and the role of government infrastructure—all different layers of the economy—you have to look at the big picture and not suddenly use Marxism as a kind of tunnel vision, only looking at what Marx wrote in Volume 1 of Capital.

I think I mentioned that as a kid, my father would take me to his friends, and I think I mentioned before they all had the three volumes of Capital on their shelf, the Charles Kerr edition, that red. And, you know, I’d be a little bored while they were watching the football games or whatever, and I’d look through the volumes, and I noticed Volumes 2 and 3 had never been opened. They were all tightly bound, Volume 1 was open. This seemed to me to be the beginning, and I realized that most people who call themselves Marxists didn’t really read Marx.

2:45:03

Leaders, well here’s the problem: there’s no way that you can fit what Richard and I talk about into the economics curriculum. You can’t fit a critique of the GDP and the national income accounts into the curriculum because it’s not taught anywhere. I think I was told that the only course, since World War II, that was taught that dealt with the balance of payments was the balance of payments course that I gave, actually in the statistics at the New School. I had the students, I had them use the format that I developed for U.S. balance of payment statistics, and with the world I said, “Take how does this relate to Japan? How does this relate to Europe? How does this relate to Latin America?” They all had to actually walk through statistics. There’s no university economics course that teaches people what the components of GDP are, so they get surprised when you tell them. We haven’t taught that in school. They’re not taught about, you know, what the balance of payments is. They think that when they talk about a trade deficit, the trade deficit means a balance of payments deficit, when actually a lot of what the value of foreign trade doesn’t involve similar payments. They won’t get into that, but I’ve written books about it. There’s no understanding of what the words mean. It’s all there; it’s like they’re talking about something very abstract that really should be taught maybe in the literature department. It should not be called economics anymore. It’s all a hypothetical world. If you start with this assumption, then what follows? But you have to start all of your analysis with assumptions that are false. Namely, that banks don’t create money. If you read someone who doesn’t know economics, like Paul Krugman, he says banks don’t create money, they’re intermediaries. And you, depositors put the money in banks, and that gives money—the bank’s money—to lend. He doesn’t realize that the banks can create deposits that banks lend. Steve Keen has been writing about this a lot in his monetary analysis. There’s no way to fit… none of us are teaching economics anymore. There’s no way to fit a realistic view of the economy, and even the concepts that define an economy’s laws of motion, into the curriculum that’s taught today. And the universities are not hiring any more tenured professors because they have financial managers, just like Boeing and other companies have financial managers. They’ve decided that universities can save money by hiring deans and administrators whose job is to cut the cost of what they have to pay to the content providers, the professors. So universities are now replacing tenured professors with part-timers, adjuncts. They call them visiting assistant professors or adjuncts, who are paid maybe $3,000 or $4,000 per class instead of $100,000 or $200,000 a year for a tenured professor. So you’re only going to get new graduates who’ve gone through the brainwashing program of what modern economic teaching is to teach economics. You’ll have to have it. I think already in the 1970s, Elvin Toffler and I went away for a weekend, July 4th weekend, to discuss what kind of university department we should create that isn’t called economics. I thought, why don’t you just call it futurism? If you call it that, it doesn’t mean anything, and if it doesn’t mean anything, it can mean whatever you want. But you have to realize that what we’re saying is not in competition with what the tunnel-visioned economics profession is all about because we’re not competing with them. We’re not trying to project GDP, what it’s going to be, or employment next quarter. We’re looking at how the future is going to change. How do you talk about structural change? Well, I think people had this problem way back in the late 19th century, and the economists who began the American Economic Association in the United States were all trained in Germany, and they gradually, even the Economic Association, became so narrow that the economists got together and started a new discipline: sociology. Then they thought, okay, sociology will talk about everything that’s happening, but then, just like the University of Chicago and Standard Oil took over the economics profession, they took over sociology. Now sociology is just about status. You talk about status. But what we’re talking about is the transformation of the status categories—a transformation of status, not just how do you compete within a given system to get a house. So sociology is in as bad a state as economics. Archaeology got into, you know, pretty much the same problem. There wasn’t any… the archaeologists didn’t really talk about economics, and especially the field that I was in for many years at Harvard, serology, didn’t let economists come anywhere near them because they said whenever economists tried to involve us in a discussion about Sumer, Babylonia, the Bronze Age, they have categories that are completely anachronistic, and they say things like, “Civilization could not have started the way you say it started because that’s not what Margaret Thatcher would have done.” Or Milton Friedman would have done. I’m obviously exaggerating, but I think the group I put together—I was the only economist in the group we put together at Harvard to rewrite the economic history of the ancient Near East and classical antiquity—there was no room for economists in it because they couldn’t believe that there was such a thing as debt cancellation, that you and I spoke about in our earlier lecture. So you have people who don’t believe, you have a profession of economics that can’t believe that economies actually evolved the way they did over the last 5,000 years or even the last 200 years. They can’t imagine what made European industrialization and America’s industrial takeoff so successful. Because if you realize what made industrial capitalism so revolutionary and successful, then you’d have to say, well, is that what’s happening today? You have to realize that we’re no longer following that. Finance capitalism is no longer industrial capitalism. We’re in a whole new world. What do you call it? Neo-feudalism? Road to perdition? Yeah, what are you going to call it? And what are you going to call the discipline that calls that? What if you have a university teaching courses, what are you going to call it? What department are you going to call that teaches these courses? I don’t know. That’s why, I mean, Richard had a niche position in teaching Marxism, and I stopped teaching and went to work as a government advisor 50 years ago. Because for governments, they didn’t care. Wall Street had a freedom that I didn’t have in academia. In academia at the New School, all they cared about was what you believed. Are you one of us? At Wall Street, they didn’t care about my politics. They came to know that I was a Marxist, but all they cared about was whether my forecasts were right or wrong, whether I was telling them what was going to happen. And because of that, I became very successful. They didn’t care about the ideology. That’s the difference between at least Wall Street and the business community. It was free of the economic categories that prevented economists from playing a productive role in the American economy. It all sounds ridiculous, but I mean, I find when I go to China, I mean, they made me an honorary professor in Wuhan, which is their university city with, I think, a million students. And again, I was in a niche. Like Richard was in as a professor at the School of Economics at the School of Marxist Studies at Ping University. But there’s no department of colonialism. There’s no department in a… you could call it civilization, the civilization department. I guess you could call it that. Maybe you can come up with a word. I’ve very rarely come up with the titles for any of my books, even though you say that I’m clear in discussion, I’m not clear enough to boil it all down to a title for my book. Someone else always makes a suggestion for that.

While Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson focused on what world we create and how to describe it. I understood it some time ago. My question was how do they create a world in which someone not understanding economics can get the Nobel prize for economy. How do we create a world in which fact and logic and critical analysis are replaced with ideology and belief. Either this economic system or killing 3000 of your citizens during 9/11 or Nord Stream or Creating ISIS while claiming to fight terrorism, being responsible for organized crime and drug trade while claiming to fight it. Their are so many absurd lies people believe, we literally live in upside down world devoid of logic which is best described by this part of video I will leave you:

2:26:05

Well, without a realistic economic policy or a realistic military policy, how are you going to have a strategy that works with the rest of the world except to say, “If you don’t do what we want, we’ll bomb you”? We’ll have our Foreign Legion, we’ll set ISIS and Al-Qaeda on you if you’re in the Middle East, we’ll set the Nazis on you if you’re in Russia or Europe. We have Nazi groups all over there that we can promote. If you’re in Africa, we’ll have again ISIS there. Our foreign legions are there. The Israelis also have a whole contingent fighting in Ukraine alongside the Nazis against the Russians because of the common native common denominator they both hate Russians for different reasons. The Israelis hate Russians because of their anti-Semitism that they had in the 19th century under the Czar. Nazis fight Russians because uh they weren’t anti-semitic. I mean it’s very uh, it’s ironic.

Welcome to my world—the real world, the world you were deprived of. I would like to point out one thing: people see BRICS as a way to save the world. However, I would like to mention that the people building BRICS live in the same imaginary world that people in the West live in. They do not want to stop oligarchy; they simply want to swap our Western oligarchs and Western oppression for their internal national oligarchic oppression. Not to mention that the little amount of freedom in the West is still ten times more than what is allowed in countries like India or China.

I said China introduced the cancer of capitalism into their system. Maybe it’s less bad, less financial, but it’s still capitalism—and even more authoritarian. As I wrote before, China and BRICS are economically a little better than the West, but they are part of the same club as the West, and they are even more authoritarian.

This is why I speculate that there could be a bigger picture where all this BRICS and multipolarity, while changing the world a little, won’t change the base structure of the world, which is the root cause of all our problems. And it could be used to control us. As I said, they may regret ending the Cold War since the Cold War gave them legitimacy to do whatever they wanted, simply by saying, “the enemy is doing it.”

So, when I remember China’s reaction to COVID, which was worse than in the West because they are more authoritarian, and now hearing about BRICS’ CBDC, I cannot see China as a force for good.

Just because China offers a little less exploitation for more oppression and less freedom is not something I can subscribe to!

17:51

The situation would become even worse; we would be constantly yearning for something but unable to communicate or even articulate it. We often tell toddlers to use their words because we understand that the ability to express our emotional needs is vital for our long-term happiness. But if the Party had their way, we would spend our entire lives like toddlers, with holes cut out of our minds and a gaping void in our emotions that we cannot put into words.

Maybe we would assume that this is just the human condition—to be subtly empty in a thousand different ways. I think this is perhaps one of the most frightening images in all fiction, and it is all Orwell’s genius to be able to put it into words.