Richard Wolff reflects on greater meaning of elections in Brazil, Germany, and U.S.
I think these elections have something in common. The rejection of the mass of
people in Brazil, in Germany and here in the United States as well, with
conventional politics, with the old establishment, with that cozy arrangement
between slightly left-of-center politics and slightly right-of-center politics,
changing places as time required but all of them presiding over a capitalism that
they thought would never end. Well, the massive people don't want that
anymore. The capitalism they've had to live with since 2008 and the terrible
crash then has been awful. First was the crash itself and the massive suffering
and unemployment. Then came the quick bailouts of the banks and big
corporations who were mostly responsible for the crash in the first place. And as
if that wasn't ugly enough it was followed by the last 10 years of
austerity politics in which the cost of bailing out those big corporations was
borne by mass withdrawal of government services, mass dying out of wage
increases: austerity. And of course people are angry. They're angry at what
happened but they're angry at the political parties that presided over all of that.
That's also what prompted the British working-class to vote for Brexit as if
cutting yourself off from Europe would solve your problems. And it also explains
the votes here in the United States for Mr. Trump, and all that he represents, and
the GOP, in its rush into the right wing. Well I'm not surprised that 'right wing'
is the direction most of the upset of the mass of people is taking as they
contest with and deal with a dying capitalism. Where else would we have
expected them to go? The last 50 years have been an endless drumbeat of
anti-leftism, anti-socialism, anti-communism. The right has been able to take over.
Liberals went more to the right with each passing year. So yes, people look to
the right as maybe the kind of change that will help them.
They will discover soon enough, and indeed some already are, that the right
wing has no solutions for this problem of a dying capitalism since mostly they
pretend that that problem isn't there. So what will happen? Well the right will
fail. It's already failing where it has taken over. Brexit is a disaster. Mr.
Trump is going in that direction. The danger for all of us is that a right
wing that cannot solve the problems it promised to, will need to blame somebody
for its failure. It won't blame itself. It won't blame its own lack of a solution
to the problems of a capitalism that is failing and that they cannot recognize
as such. So they will blame the left
