285 - Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: The Destruction of Modern Nations

37:45And so many people call me a Marxist, and I'm a Marxist in the sense that Marx was the culmination of this whole long doctrine of political economy that really was classical economics. So you could say him at classical economics because that's what Marx was. And the attacks that you're seeing by Trump and the Republicans and the Democrats on socialism, they're denouncing Adam Smith. They're denouncing Ricardo. They're denouncing John Stuart Mill. In addition to Marx, they're discussing the whole tradition that steered industrial capitalism to make it so successful in the years leading up to World War I, which really changed the whole direction of history and set the world's economy on a new direction.

38:46Value, price, and rent theory, that was how the classical economists analyzed economies. What Marx said, Marx was the great optimist for capitalism. He was an optimist because he thought capitalism was productive, it cleared away. The feudalism that Richard has mentioned, it prepared the way for socialism, for a mixed economy, that all of that was very productive. And what Marx said, and especially he outlined it in Volume 3 of Capital, which not that many Marxists today read, in Volume 3 of the series of surplus value. He said, how is making profits productive and making land rent or monopoly rent or getting rich financially, how is that unproductive?

39:51He said, well, the capitalist profits are part of value. You're not going to include economic rent as value because that doesn't really create value. If you make it in the sleep, there's no cost to production for that. But the capitalist, Marx wrote, plays a productive role. He organizes production. He develops markets for it. He makes long-term investment in research and development. He organizes the supply of labor and raw materials and the markets. All of this is necessary for an economy to work. What is not necessary is for a landlord class to just benefit as the industrial economy gets richer and urbanized and people can afford to pay more for housing and the land sites and the rent of location as the public, as governments invest in public transportation, roads, highways, subway systems, railroads.

41:02All of the cost of this infrastructure creates rising land rents for the real estate along these routes. Then Thorstein Veblen in the United States became the great analyst showing how most real estate was all a development by bankers to induce real estate speculators and developers to borrow money to help push up, essentially hawk the real estate prices. so that speculators could make a capital gain, meaning a land price gain, from cities building new parks and museums and schools in desirable areas. All of this. You had a transformation of industrial economies into finance, insurance, and real estate, fire sector economies, and that's basically what's been developing.

42:11This was not how industrial capitalism was expected to develop, and nobody expected Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to be the voice of industrial capitalist planning. And, of course, they're not. They're the public voice of the counterrevolution against everything that made industrial capitalism so progressive and revolutionary in its day. You know, there's another way, again, of getting at this. And I think it helps, you know, to create a multiple way of getting at these key points, because one of them will work for this person, another one will work for the other person, and so on. So Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx all spent a great deal of time and energy distinguishing what they call productive labor from unproductive labor.

43:12And let me drive home, that is not done in the mainstream economics classes that I ever learned at the elite institutions that I was trained at, and I know Michael didn't either, and they aren't taught today. It's as if we have an undistinguishable or undifferentiated mass of employees or wage earners or workers. That's a concept you begin with. Then you break it down into its important coordinate differences. You can try to unite those differences in the shared movement. That makes sense. But it sure doesn't make sense to try to unify these different categories by pretending they're not there.

44:03This is a terrible mistake. And the way Marx liked to teach it was to stare at his audience and to say, if we remove the landlord, you'll notice something. The land is still there. What we need is the land to grow crops, to house people, to locate the factory. We don't need the landlord. And if we stopped having him and stopped paying him, we still had the land. And yet another way to say it, did the landlord create this land? Did he produce it by his labor, by the sweat of his brow? No, no, no. If you're religious, God put it there. And so by what right do we give John a payment for something God put there?

44:57And then you can take the even more daring step, because there were people in Marx's time who understood this about landlords, and then came Marx's killer argument. The same applies to the capitalist. If we stop giving him the profits of our industry, the profits are still there. We can get them ourselves. We do the work. We produce the goods. We don't need to give payments, not to bankers, not to landlords, and not to the capitalists themselves. It's the most important point to understand that relationship between the classes inherited from feudalism that you don't need versus those that you do, and the productive, unproductive apparatus of classical political economy.

46:00Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, above all else, give you the wherewithal to do that. And that has had to be, and there's no nice way of saying this, that has had to be repressed in order for modern capitalism to cope with its own demons, which include the inheritance from feudalism, the mistaking of the role of the government as some sort of evil to be minimized. And if you listen to Mr. Trump's MAGA theoreticians, they will still quote Thomas Jefferson, who said that government is best, which governs least, to which the only reasonable answer is no, it isn't. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome.

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47:44Well, here's a question. Why don't most Marxists talk about what Richard and I have just been discussing? Why don't the denouncers of Marx focus on what we've been talking about? Productive versus unproductive labor. Does it exist or not? Why don't they talk about value and rent? Are these rent collectors producing value? Do our GDP statistics reflect real product, or do they reflect largely economic overhead? And they just use Marx as a word as if, well, what it means is Soviet Russia under Stalin. Well, that's not Marxism at all. All that is completely different somehow. Or they're talking about problems that are not really economic.

48:36They're denounced for supporting immigrant rights or talking about race relations or anti-war. But they're not talking about what Marx was talking about because that was what Adam Smith and Ricardo and Mill and everyone else in his epoch was also talking about besides Marx. And as Richard said, what at least was taught is the history of economic thought in the classes that I had to take in graduate studies are no longer taught. They've been replaced by classes in mathematics and mathematical forecasting. And if you use a mathematics, you say, well, just take the existing economic structure for granted.

49:28Well, classical economics is all about how to structure an economy in the most efficient, most productive, most competitive way. That's not what mathematical economics does at all. So you've had, there's really nowhere to fit what Richard and I have just been talking about into the economic curriculum. Where are you going to find it? Maybe instead of an economic prize, there should be a literature prize or something for what we're talking about. What on earth do we call what we're doing? The whole word Marxism has become as amorphous as Christianity. I mean, what does that mean? How do we refocus discussion on what we're talking about?

50:22Well, already in the late 19th century, the American economists who were in charge of, who taught at the business schools and went into the government, had this very problem. And they said, well, most economics is all panel vision now. The American economics is all taught at the prestige universities like Harvard and Yale. And these were all founded as religious colleges to train the priesthood, basically. And the final course in these colleges was moral philosophy. And it was all basically free trade theory. And so the Americans, first of all, after the Civil War, the industrialists said, well, we don't want to teach this tunnel vision.

51:08So they founded state universities that had an agenda supporting protectionism and saying how colonialism is exploitative and we want to escape from that. And by the late 19th century, most of the leading American economists had been trained in Germany, and they came back and said, well, we've got to have a new discipline. Let's call it sociology, the study of society, because economics is really political economy, and let's call it sociology. But then the same interests, the same Ranquier interests that sort of turned economics into tunnel vision went to places like the University of Chicago and turned sociology into tunnel vision of just, let's just look at status.

51:58Let's not look at society. So then you had anthropology. Well, is what Richard and I talking about anthropology? Is it sociology? What are we talking about, Richard? Well, we're talking about understanding society without what you call tunnel vision or what Americans who have been sensitized to these questions call the so-called discipline of our university, these rigid walls. I remember trying as a professor of economics in an unorthodox economics program at the University of Massachusetts, which I was a part of because it was unorthodox, I tried, and I wasn't alone, a few of us tried to hire a very good prospect who happened not to have an economics degree.

52:53He had a sociology degree, and my colleagues wouldn't allow it. My colleagues required them, anybody in an economics department had to be. stamped with the approval of a PhD in economics from an appropriately prestigious university. You know, and it had become the kind of situation where a student would raise her hand or his hand, ask a question, and have a disoriented professor who didn't know the answer say, that's not an appropriate question. You should ask that to your history professor or your psychology professor or your... And this is a discipline of economics, which for those who may not know, begins in most cases, certainly in every course I ever took, by beginning with psychological propositions that people are confronted by a universe of commodities, and they have to choose between an ice cream and a shirt, and they evaluate the utility.

54:05I'm not making this up. They evaluate the pleasure and utility they derive from the ice cream cone relative to the shirt, and then make a purchase decision based on that. Now, whatever you think of that, and in my judgment this is nonsense, but when I explained to my psychotherapist wife what I just summarized as the psychological basis of economics, she fell off her chair laughing at the thought that adult people would think that simple-mindedly. Yet, at the same time that the foundation of the discipline has to do with the desire, commodities, pleasure, utility, all subjects of psychology, the economics professor uses the most narrow understanding of them while insisting that this is a different topic, not economic.

55:14The contradictions of this are so staggering that they go a long way in explaining why economics has such a feature that, you know, you get three of them together and they don't agree on hardly anything. Well, what Richard and I are talking about is economic history, basically. This whole discussion has been that. But historians don't study economics. So they're not going to discuss economic history. They're discussing who and what war and what parties won, and it's a study of individuals.

55:54I wanted to study the history of money and debt. I wanted to see how it began in civilization. And I was at Harvard for 25 years organizing an archaeological group of the seriologists, archaeologists, Egyptologists, and Hebraists, to look at how did money and interest begin. Well, there was a distrust in all these groups, seriologists saying, look, everybody, you have all of these economic ideologues. You have socialists, you have Thatcherites, free traders all saying that they have myths about how money and credit developed, and it really would, what passed for being taught in economics courses was, what if Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher got into a time machine and went back to ancient Babylonia?

56:57How would they have advised Hammurabi to organize society? And that says, well, don't cancel the debts. Don't prevent financial oligarchy from developing and monopolizing the land. That's the market forces. Well, there wouldn't have been civilization if the economists would have gone back to the beginning and advised everybody how to do it. So I didn't try to impose any view on them because I didn't know anything about Sumer and Babylonia and Israel and the ancient West Asia. So all I did was ask the questions, tell me everything you know about how did money develop, how did interest rates develop, who got it, who created the money, what was it?

57:46And I just asked questions, and we published five volumes rewriting, or I should say writing for the first time, an economic history of the ancient Middle East, now called West Asia. And I'm having the same problem, and I've just finished a book on the development of international banking from the Crusades to World War I. And economic historians basically left out everything about how it was the Roman church that sponsored international banking to make loans to rulers and essentially Norman warlords that would work for the church on behalf of it to fight against any Christian church not controlled by Romans.

58:40to have international bankers subsidize the fight by Rome against Germany, because German wasn't Roman Catholicism. They didn't want to obey the Pope to fight against the Cathars in France, and especially to fight against the Christian Orthodox churches, the four leading patriarchates dominated by Constantinople. The Crusades were essentially aimed at conquering and looting Constantinople and attempting to impose the Roman papal rule, and that's what led to the banking. And so the papacy not only inverted the whole Christian doctrine of forgive them their debts and avoid this, the popes excommunicated kings, and especially they excommunicated the barons of England who opposed King John's and Henry III's living taxes to pay foreign creditors.

59:46They opposed anyone who supported the 15 Magna Carta and the Civil War. So you had a whole inversion of Christianity, as Rome essentially said. In order to get papal power, we have to destroy. all other Christian rules that are different from what we're doing. Well, this is not what medievalists talk about. They talk about, well, what's feudalism all about? Well, it's about kings and knights and their serfs that accompanied them into war. And the church is left out of the whole economic history. It's as if they're embarrassed to say the role that the church itself played in all this. And if you leave out the fact that it was Rome that created international banking, there goes the whole mythology of how banking developed.

1:00:50just as there was a mythology that money developed out of barter, which it didn't, instead of out of organized by, is a public utility by the palaces and temples of Sumer, Babylonia, and other West Asian economies in the Bronze Age. So, not only is there no discussion of classical economics, as Richard and I have discussed, there is no discussion of the economic history of the whole world. Oh, it's all as if somehow it's all Austrian economics and Chicago school for enterprise economics. There is no role for government, no role for palaces, no role for the temples, no role for religion. It's all left out of account, and there's no context for what is the surrounding environment in which economic exchange and wealth is embedded.

1:01:52Nothing of all of this. Karl Polanyi tried to do that almost a century ago, and the group that we had out of Harvard was really the successor to Polanyi's group. And yet, we're on the flinges. We have no academic presence, really. And Richard mentioned the University of Massachusetts, where he taught. The other sort of somewhat alternative academic university is where I taught, the New School in New York. And I was teaching national income theory, and my textbook was, again, the first history of economic thought. I used Marx's theories of surplus value. The first translation was called History of Economic Doctrines, and I used that.

1:02:57Well, Heilbronner, who wanted to make the new school into a Marxist department, said, well, what are you talking about productive versus unproductive labor? That's the most useless argument we can possibly have. It doesn't exist. And his idea of Marxism was just, well, you use neoclassical economics of liberal anti-post-classical economics, but you talk about social problems, race problem, wars, monopolies, and all of this. So I left academia at that because I couldn't fit what Richard and I have been talking about into the curriculum, even at the new school. He was lucky. Richard was lucky to be able to do this in Massachusetts.

1:03:51But now there's really nowhere. That's why we're having this discussion on your show, Robinson. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. Still waiting in line?

1:04:27Again? That's time you will never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. Well, I feel one more very quickly. There's a way to explain why we have the situation that Michael has quite correctly described to us.

1:05:09It is very dangerous to explain to a people how very, very differently other human beings have organized the production and distribution of surplus or the production and distribution of goods and services. Because if you explain to them how different the past could be understood to have been, you raise, whether you intended or not, the reality that it could be different now and that the world is open and that you don't have to have a bank and you don't have to have landlord and you don't have to have categories of rent and they came into existence and they can go out. This is not good. This is not good.

1:06:00You don't want to really do that. You want to make people either believe that the way it is now is the way it has always been, or that the way it is now is such a wonderful height of achievement that no one in their right mind would question or look for alternatives in the past that might be relevant to a better future. There is something deeply optimistic about what Marxists do, and something deeply pessimistic about non-Marxists who don't do it. And what Michael did was to ask, of course, the appropriate question. if you want to think creatively about the current institutions of capitalism, whatever they are, then of course you have to ask about their origin, how they came to be, what conditions they were meant to solve.

1:07:07And then they ask the logical question, do those conditions still apply? are then those responses what we still want to see, or could we do better? You know, people who lived with slavery figured out they could do better, so we don't have it anymore. And people who lived with feudalism revolted, and we don't have it anymore. And there is no reason to believe that the class of people we call employees won't reach the same conclusion about capitalism that the working classes of feudalism and slavery reached about those systems. That's an opening to the possibility of change and evolution. So when Michael says we're economic historians, that is an ideological commitment, whatever else it is.

1:08:05So what we're confronting, Richard, is Margaret Thatcher's Tina. There is no alternative. And this is what you described as the belief that somehow what economics is taught today is a struggle for existence that we're at the peak of history moving forward. Those very words were talked to me when I wanted to write my PhD dissertation at New York University on productivity. And so I went to Solomon Fabricant, who was teaching courses sort of about productivity, and he was the research director of the National Bureau of Economic Research. And he said, that why would I want to discuss past concepts of productivity and productive labor?

1:09:03And he said just what you described in words. He said all of these ideas have been fought in the marketplace of ideas, and they've all been rejected. What we have now is the peak of economic theory, And this has defeated all the others because it's won the struggle for existence. And I think he even said the intellectual marketplace. Well, what is a market? What is a marketplace? Just as you could say, what is a political marketplace? It's a very heavily subsidized marketplace. It's controlled by the vested interests that contributed the money that founded the major business schools like the Horton Schools.

1:09:55All these schools were founded by wealthy Americans or their counterparts abroad. So the fact is that if you really believe that history has moved forward and what has it achieved? It's achieved Americans' policy of deindustrialization. It's turned America from the creditor country and industrial power that it was in 1945 into today's economy. The national security strategy has said we've got to resist and replace all of this early American policy. We've got to be protectionist. We've got to create chaos throughout the world to sort of force it to subsidize the United States. This is the theory.

1:10:50Is this really the end of civilization's struggle for existence? Or does the world have an alternative to maybe the neoliberalism and financialization and privatization of Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the United States? Is all of that a blind alley that is now going to be left in the dustbin of history as the rest of the world goes forward? Well, that's what the whole fight of Donald Trump's war against Iran and Russia, the oil war, is all about. What's the future going to be? What are other countries going to do now that we're facing a world depression resulting from the fact that the oil trade has interrupted oil, that economies are going to be closed down because they don't have the energy or the fertilizer or the chemicals that were coming from the Persian Gulf?

1:11:52All of that stopped. That's going to lead to a world depression. How can other countries protect themselves against this aggressive American attempt to achieve its own form of imperialism that Trump is trying to do by demanding subsidies for foreign countries, creating a crisis as a price of letting them have access to the American markets by imposing prohibitive tariffs? if they don't agree to adopt the America's sanctions against Russia and Iran and China and isolate them all. Well, will America end up isolating itself from the whole rest of world civilization, go forward and leave what's now considered to be the peak of civilization's economic theory, all in the dust by picking up the direction in which economic thought was evolving in the 19th century takeoff of industrial capitalism.

1:13:02That's the question that I guess we're posing. Well, I would like to add my little story about when I got my PhD, just to round it out, because it illustrates the same thing. So, 50 years ago, I'm finishing my PhD and I sit with my professors committee. This was at Yale University where I got my PhD and there were the three distinguished professors whose names I will not give you because you know them. And so I presented that my dissertation was based on my research in East Africa, where I went and did this research, and I proposed the title, The Economics of British Colonialism in Kenya, which is a big country in that part of the world.

1:14:01And my professors, who liked my dissertation, they said, and who, in fact, helped me get it published, which I did at the Yale University Press a year later, would not accept that title. They told me it was not value neutral. That was their word, their phrase. And so if you look up my dissertation, which is that, you know, interlibrary loan from Yale, you will see my name and you'll see, here we go, economic aspects of British foreign policy in Kenya. I could not use the word colonialism, even though half of my research was in London at a place called the Colonial Office, which had been maintained by Britain for centuries and had accumulated the documentation that I had to look at to understand the economics of their colony.

1:15:17But the ideology was more powerful than the history, and so we couldn't use that word. that tells you about the narrowness of mentality that is everything that Michael and I have been talking about. I feel like the disoriented student in the back of class that you hypothetically reformanded a little earlier, Rick, though, with my emotional support animal. but can i ask a question about anything that the two of you have raised or is there a particular direction that you want to go from here no no go ahead that's i'm not gonna have you ask okay well something you mentioned earlier rick um the possibility of oh russia losing a war and then being broken up into smaller states reminds me of a conversation that i just had with timothy Snyder.

1:16:19And I said that I thought that it was hard to imagine the United States breaking up into smaller states that did not have this one federal government. And he said that once upon a time, it was impossible to imagine the Soviet Union being broken up into smaller states. And this was time before I was around. But what I wanted to ask the two of you is, one, does it really seem like a live possibility that Russia could be broken up? And then, given where we started the conversation discussing the socialism, the socialist victory in Michigan, do you see the struggle between socialism in the United States with the victory of Mamdani with other forces like Trump or states like Florida that are far from socialist, possibly resulting in a breakup of the United States?

1:17:24My first answer is I can imagine both the United States and Russia breaking up into different units. And that's because they weren't always one unit, neither of them. They were in fact broken up in a variety of ways. The indigenous people here had never carved up the United States, what became the United States in a similar way. If you wanted, you could carve up the United States among tribal groups. I'm not saying that this is inappropriate, but you could do that because there was a certain meaning to Navajo people as opposed to Kiowa people as opposed to Iroquois communities and so on. And likewise, Russia, as part of a feudal background, had different boundaries.

1:18:24That's part of what the struggle in Ukraine right now is about. There's a strong feeling in Russia that at the very least, the four oblasts on the eastern end of Ukraine are more Russia than they are Ukrainian. And there are some Russians who believe that there's no justification for Ukraine. It should once again be what it wasn't so long ago, namely a part of some greater entity. So those things, I think, are always in flux. I want to remind people that even though the alliance between Russia and China now is very strong, at an earlier point, and I'm talking about the 1960s, so this is not ancient history, even though at that time, both Russia and China were allies via the communist parties that ruled in both places, they actually went to war against each other and might very well have redesigned their geographies in ways that are open to God knows what forms.

1:19:38And there are secessionist movements all around us, and we would be very, very poorly advised historically to make believe they can never worked. The province of Alberta in Canada is now well along the process of seceding from Canada. Texas has a history, as do other parts of the United States, of wanting to back away and to secede. There are significant parts of the so-called MAGA community behind Trump who are pushing for what they call a civil war, which might require, if you were to have it, or if you were to avoid it, to redo the geography of this country in ways that we don't want to think about now.

1:20:33Capitalists want to have a unified market. They don't want to have, often, the breakup of a large country into a small one. On the other hand, sometimes they do. So the capitalists of Western Europe are excited about breaking up Russia because they see a possibility of at least postponing the death of Europe by having a quasi-colonial afterthought in what once was Russia. So Kaya Kalas, who is the foreign minister of the EU, at least she's as close to that as you can get, that's an official position, she could talk about doing that and not be characterized as a lunatic by the leaders of Europe, because she was articulating the fantasy that inspires them.

1:21:36If you like the utopian image, when you hear Macron or when you used to hear Starmer talk about it's not possible for Russia to be allowed to win, well, why not? What in the world prompts you to make a statement as extreme as that? So I would argue that we can see already all kinds of incipient challenges to the configuration of states. And I don't see any reason whatsoever for the United States and Russia to be exempted from those kinds of movements and fissures and opportunities for change. And that election that you cite in Michigan, the results of which are just becoming known around the world, is very, very important.

1:22:35And here's why. Because an enormous amount of money poured in to prevent what is happening now from happening, namely to defeat that candidate who had the nerve to take a position on the Israeli, Arab, and other issues. All right, this is very important that you had a result that the capitalist class, to the extent that it operates as a class, was opposed to. So what else that they like is not happening and they are opposed to it. Well, I'll give you an example. If the goal, if Michael is right, and the goal of capitalists is to save on labor costs, which every capitalist I've ever met says is indeed a goal of theirs, then they are not interested in scapegoating immigrants.

1:23:41It's not their interest. They would like there to be lots of immigrants here. They would like there to be lots of undocumented immigrants. Why? Because you can pay them much less, and they dare not go to the authorities because they don't have a document. So, they're very good for business, which is why for 150 years, American capitalism welcomed immigrants, seeing them as the source of profits for years to come, which they were. It's a sign of the weakness of American capitalism that it is now unable to welcome and to absorb in a productive way immigrants. That's a sign of weakness, But it's also a sign that what the capitalist class wants and what the capitalist class has to accommodate are not the same thing.

1:24:41And the bigness of the United States, the large unified market, sure, it's something they want, but it's not clear whether the conditions will enable them to have what they want or otherwise have to accommodate movements they can't otherwise control.

1:25:30We'll be right back.

1:25:42Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. Getting back to your question, Robinson, it's not Russia that's going to be broken up. It's the EU and NATO that already are beginning to break up to their internal strains. I don't see the EU remaining in its current form as an American satellite and client oligarchy because the whole U.S.

1:26:29empire is being broken up. And this breakup is being catalyzed by the world depression that's caused by the oil war and the rising, soaring price inflation of oil prices that's leading to all of this. So Russia has such a military dominance over Europe that there's no way that Europe can do what it tried to do under Yeltsin with the neoliberal takeover when Russia became so disillusioned with Stalinism and with the kind of state planning it had. Russia now sees that there is an alternative that's kept the kleptocracy subordinate to it, and it's seen how China has provided the model that it's taking.

1:27:31And now that the whole world economy, the center of increasing production, productivity, industrial dominance, research and development, technology, is all passing to China and other its Asian neighbors, you're going to have a new world bloc led by China, Russia, and Iran, absorbing an increasing number of BRICS countries and global South countries into an alternative. So instead of a breakup occurring in Russia or Iran, which there were also plans to break up as there were for China, instead you're going to find a new consolidation leaving Europe and the United States isolated. And European economies and their political societies are being torn apart by essentially the U.S.

1:28:38attempt to mobilize them with this U.S. obsession to try to break up Russia and China and Iran. And I think that that U.S. drive for breakup will end up isolating the United States and its client oligarchies throughout the world. And the world will be reconsolidating, I think, in picket way. Hope would be to pick up the whole momentum of history and of civilization back on the track that it seemed to be moving in the 19th century. of the whole flowering of industry, of economic organization, and the whole of classical political economy providing a model for all of this. I think that's what's going to happen.

1:29:32Consolidation, the broad breakup of Europe and a breakaway from the United States, leading to America to economically polarize and economically break up, but not necessarily politically break up. But who knows? I worked with Alvin Toffler on Norman Mailer's campaign in New York back in the city, back in the 1960s, about should New York City withdraw from New York State to be free of the Republican upstate control that was stifling New York City. We'll see what Mayor Mandami has to say about that dynamic in years to come. Yeah, we live in a time, right, when the president of the United States speaks about converting Canada into a 51st state.

1:30:24I mean, that shows you that these kinds of changes are never that far below the surface. Never. Even if they're not spoken about. And here's another way to see what Michael was saying. If you look at the polling for Mr. Mertz in Germany or the polling for Mr. Macron in France, these people are getting between 10 and 15 percent public approval. They are headed for the dustbin of history and soon. Mr. Mertz's government is literally tottering today because of his assistance, in case you haven't heard. In Germany, the law makes surrogate parenting illegal. You cannot arrange for a fetus to be carried to term by a person other than your spouse.

1:31:27that's the law in Germany and there is a gay couple who are very high advisors to Mr. Mertz and one of whom has made a political career about the importance of banning surrogacy in Germany has a little bit like the opposition to abortion in parts of the United States and he had the bad taste to arrange with his partner for a surrogacy for him in the United States. And it became public knowledge last week. And it is causing a very unpopular government to be on the edge. There are now public calls in Germany for Mr. Mertz to resign. And in case you don't know, Mr. Mertz's job before he became chancellor of Germany was the head of BlackRock in Germany.

1:32:35That's an American venture capitalist, hedge fund, etc. So he's seen as an agent of the United States. And he will likely be replaced if there's an election by the Alternative für Deutschland, a right-wing mass party that is the strongest of such right-wing mass parties in Europe, although the second strongest is in France. and the afd in germany is committed to ending support for the war in ukraine number one and reopening trade with russia so that germany can once again get cheap gas and cheap oil from Russia. That alone does what Michael before said. That breaks up the NATO European totality in a fundamental way from which it's hard to imagine they can emerge.

1:33:42So the irony is that they can see it in Russia, but they are actually closer to it inside Europe. It sounds like the two of you agree about Europe degrading. It seems like there might be some disagreement about whether Russia breaking up is a live possibility. But, Michael, what did you think about the United States breaking up? The United States and what? The United States breaking up. I don't see it. I think it'll polarize. I think that we're headed for a long crisis because most of the population, as a result of the neoliberal policies here, you have a debt crisis here. You have a breakup of faith in the fact that the economic system can work in the way it is.

1:34:44I see a political and economic revolution here, or else just a slow crash into deepening depression. One of the responses may indeed be particular states are going to get together and saying we've got to have a different system. But the United States is not only a failed economy, but it's a failed state because of the whole way the Constitution was created, enabling the present right wing to take over the Supreme Court and essentially have the Supreme Court do here what Richard has just been describing is happening in Germany. I don't see any way of solving the problems here. Even the Democratic Socialist candidates opposing the Democratic National Committee are being isolated within Congress by every dirty trick in the book, such as Hillary Clinton used against Bernie Sanders way back in 2016, when the Democrats said we would rather lose with Hillary than win with Bernie, because the Democratic Party is the financial party.

1:36:08It was a party that became Obama and Robert Rubin and Wall Street and Citibank and the whole of financial capitalism. So the Democrats and Republicans, both their policies advocate polarization, impoverishment, defaults, and a concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%. How long can such an economy and such a country or state that is so polarizing survive? Well, we have an equivalent of a French Revolution in the 18th century. What can there be? There's obviously going—what we're really talking about is the inherent instability and unsurvivability of U.S. foreign policy as it is, because as Richard and I have been describing, not only here, but almost every week in our various interviews, we've been describing how the United States is trying to do today what European colonialism was trying to do in the 19th century, achieve its own prosperity by exploiting other countries.

1:37:35That has reached the limit. And just as there is an anti-colonialism reaction in other countries. And it's also against financial colonialism and military dominance. You're having the same feeling now against the United States. Trump is destroyed. It's as if Trump set out to destroy the American empire. He's done what Richard and I and our supporters could never do. He's driven other countries to take a different path just to survive themselves. And you know, ironically, Robinson, if the United States was the global hegemon, as I think it was, and if it grew into that position as a result of World Wars I and II, which I think it did, and then it was accepted in the world because they had no choice that the many colonialisms had become one in the way that, you know, multitheism became monotheism, you know, graduated to having one God rather than lots of them.

1:38:49Well, then I think you have to see what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz for what it is. That was an American-controlled passageway. If you listen to Mr. Trump, he taught, no one is going to charge fees. No one is going to control. We control. We will make sure. It must be a free... It's America losing its position there. That's all that's going on. The Iranians figured out that they can, by having their missiles and drones right on the edge, control the passage. They can take this little piece of water and withdraw it to some extent from the American empire, which was de facto in charge of it before.

1:39:39And the Americans are outraged. But their power, here comes the punchline, they're powerless to stop it. They can't. Even as we're speaking, Mr. Trump has to repeatedly talk about negotiations with another side, which repeatedly explains to the press that no negotiations are going on. You know, that's a sign they're not communicating terribly well. Right? And the reason is the United States can't accommodate what it is that the Iranians demand, and the Iranians cannot accommodate what? The continuation of the American empire. They don't put it quite in that language, although some of them get pretty close.

1:40:36One of the demands has been the United States withdraw from that part of the world. Does not rebuild those American bases in the Gulf states that the Iranians have been bombing. Don't rebuild them. Let them go. And several of the Gulf states support that position. have already made that clear. Because the United States has not functioned as the security blanket that was the idea of those bases, but instead, those bases have become targets for the Iranians, the literal opposite of security. They are emblems of their insecurity, which they will continue to be no matter what happens now. Wow, we are watching in real time the constriction of the American empire as its various subordinate units break away.

1:41:45Nor should we miss that the reason Iran can do it is heavily dependent on their alliance with Russia and with China. But the problem is there are literally dozens of other countries who are in that alliance too and are going to be able to draw on the support. The line of change is unmistakable. And one word about Trump. It's not a coincidence that the rise of socialism in American politics is about literally coterminous with the rise of Mr. Trump. I think honest socialists would tell you that he is the best organizer they could have. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome?

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1:43:43Well, I hope I'm not feeding a fed horse as PETA would have me say. But Michael, you mentioned the possibility of a French revolution and you discussed polarization. And Rick, you talked about the desire of some on the right for civil war. And what I'm wondering is, even if the United States does not break up, let's assume it doesn't, there's certainly lots of unrest and growing unrest in the country that could turn violent. And I wonder what you two think about what is going to prevent this from turning into like serious drawn out violent conflict and whether that's the continued normalization of a militarized police force like we're seeing throughout the country.

1:44:39I mean, advancements in surveillance, AI, and robotics, or just, I don't know, more natural political easing? Well, I would answer you right away by disagreeing with you. I don't think it's incipient or coming or possible or likely. I think it's already here. And this is not rhetorical. I mean it very, very concretely. In my judgment, the creation of a new specialized army, the ICE Army, ICE, ostensibly targeting undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, which was the original designation of the founding of that and its purpose. We now know that it has gone after all kinds of immigrant groups, some undocumented, plenty of them documented.

1:45:46It has mistaken regular people who are not immigrants, citizens for immigrants, and makes very little effort to do otherwise. But even more important to me are the horrific conditions that are being imposed on the people that are designated as the official scapegoats. The people dying in detention centers, the separation of children from their families, the wearing of ankle bracelets on Haitians in a couple of states, I forget which they are, that started apparently this week. What in the world is going on? This is not necessary. Hasn't been necessary before in American history. We behaved outrageously to the Japanese in World War II, even though we have apologized for having gone way overboard in what was done to them in California during World War II.

1:46:59But it's as though the history doesn't matter. And now for me, the most important example of all. Over the last six months, the United States military, according to Mr. Hagseth, our Secretary of War, and according to President Trump as well, we have, the nation, we have executed, killed over 200 people in boats. These are small fishing type boats in the Caribbean and sea and on the Pacific Ocean coast of Latin America. The explanation given by Hegseth and Trump were that these people are quote-unquote narco-terrorists, subtitle drug traders or drug dealers or something like that. To remind everyone, The American military kills the people, sinks the boats by means of rockets or drones or both.

1:48:12These are people who have been convicted of nothing, have not been given a lawyer, cannot confront their accuser, cannot appear before a judge, cannot be adjudicated by a jury. All of that is denied them. They are simply killed.

1:48:39Up until this decision made to do this, the procedure for handling these people was to have either the Navy or the Coast Guard of the United States stop and board vessels that they might suspect of doing something illegal, to ascertain whether or not they were, in the event that they were, they would be towed to a place where they would go through a trial and all that. if they were found guilty of doing drug trade, they would be given a sentence of imprisonment. Why? Because drug trade in the United States is not a capital crime. We don't kill people for that.

1:49:39what possible rationale could be given by the way last week not that it's relevant to what i'm about to say but last week the drug enforcement agency under mr trump issued a report that there is no evidence that the flow of cocaine into the United States has been in any way affected by this program of killing these people. Well, I wasn't surprised because that behavior couldn't possibly be justified by the so-called war on drugs. Because having been born and raised in the United States, here's what I know. There's been a war on drugs for at least 60 to 70 years that I'm aware of most of my life.

1:50:38And I am as able to purchase those drugs with a short walk from where I live today as I was 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 25 years ago. So that war on drugs is one colossal failure. What's then the point? I think the point is to rev up the MAGA base. It's like a cheerlead. We're prepared to kill. We are prepared to kill people we designate as bad persons. Oh, to quote our president, bad hombres. That's his attempt at Spanish. Okay, we're going to kill them. We're not going to waste time. It's like a bad Western movie. We're not going to waste time with habeas corpus, with the Magna Carta, with traditions of law in and out of the United States.

1:51:38No, no, no. We're not going to have that. By the way, consistent with what Exeth, Miller, and other high officials have been saying in other contexts, I think a decision to move towards a civil war and to do so with blunt extrajudicial violence is already made and has been made at the highest levels of this government. And I think it's a testimony and evidence for how much worse the crisis is than even people like Michael and me aver as we make our economic assessments. Well, I can't disagree with what Richard said. I think a police state will emerge if there's no policy alternative put before the people.

1:52:31And what's needed is an economic doctrine and a policy to divide alternative policies and essentially to say there is an alternative. My father was a political prisoner, a strike leader and union organizer in Minneapolis. And the Minneapolis 17 were the first socialists that were put in prison under the Smith Act the day before Pearl Harbor in 1941. They were convicted for having socialist books on their shelves. So I've already seen that. The attorney general under Roosevelt said it was the only thing that he was ashamed of for having done, but he did it because the Democratic Party needed to maintain its control of the labor unions without the labor unions having a socialist policy such as the Minneapolis 17.

1:53:33Minneapolis was the only Trotskyist city in the world, I think, during the 1930s. So, yes, I've seen all of this. The question is, how do you revive the discussion that people have been being put in jail for for almost, well, for 80 years? Well, I guess that's a long discussion for a future occasion. Well, we've got about 10 minutes or so left before I know Michael has to go to an appointment. So I just wanted to ask if either of you had any closing thoughts that you wanted to share before we wrap up. Well, I can offer one.

1:54:24The history of the world gives us many examples of the rise, the evolution, and the eventual passing of empires. the Roman the Greek the Ottoman the Persian and I could go on and in their declines these empires always face a choice and I think that choice is available to the United States today I do think the United States, excuse me, is a great empire. It became so in the 20th century as the two world wars extinguished all the old empires and passed them as a kind of inheritance on to the United States.

1:55:29I do think the United States has evolved since then, since 1945, or if you like, since the Great Depression. But I do think it has passed its peak, and it is now in decline. The rise of China, for me, is a very powerful pointer in that direction. the inability to prevail quickly over Iran, both a year ago in June of 2025 and now again, is another sign. The rise of the BRICS is another sign. The rise of socialist alternative here inside the United States is yet another. But it therefore, in my view, faces a choice, same choice as all the other empires face in their declines. I don't think a decline is avoidable.

1:56:33It hasn't been avoided by every other empire in the history of the world, which makes it unreasonable to accept that the United States would somehow evade or avoid it. So what is the choice? The choice on the one hand is to deny it, to live in that denial, to see every sign of your decline, not as a sign of decline, but as a challenge to your authority and power that you need to use every mechanism available to destroy. I think Mr. Trump, who seems to lack filters of the sort that hold other politicians back, keeps telling us this when he makes remarks like, I'm going to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age, or I'm going to obliterate Iranian civilization.

1:57:40Yes, these are hyperboles, but they also tell you something about how a situation is being viewed. But the choice is there. The alternative to denial and viewing everything as a challenge to be met by overwhelming force is to sit down with the alternative, which could either be an emerging new empire. In our case, that would be China. Or to assemble, to be part of the assembly of a multi-national global governance project that would be premised on peace. and in which the United States, along with China and all the others, would have to work out a live and let live approach to cohabiting this planet.

1:58:44I don't say that it isn't difficult to do what I just said, But I do ask everyone to consider what the alternative is.

1:59:02Iran is only one little country. Its ability to stymie the United States, to bring the United States to the point that in the last three days was a headline that we have, I could you not, run out of missiles or certain classes of missiles. We are facing a century of bitter defeats. We have been given the forewarning. The U.S. lost in Vietnam. It lost in Afghanistan. It lost in Iraq. It's losing in Iran. These are hints, and they are going to cost us dearly. Compared to that, would it the wiser choice be to sit down with Xi Jinping rather than to threaten him? To sit down with the leadership in Iran rather than to continuously threaten them?

2:00:17how much more of the latter response are we going to see? If I could use a parallel, history means that what you could have done 100 years ago, you probably can't now. What you could have done 50 years ago. You probably can now. And if you don't understand that, if you don't interrogate the new conditions, you are likely to find yourself going down a dead end that is horrific. Europe was able to undertake settler colonialisms in North America, in Australia, in South Africa, in New Zealand. But it had to do that two or three centuries ago. Israel is trying to do settler colonialism in Palestine now.

2:01:26And that's why it's ended up as a genocide, because you can't do that now. They don't want to face it. They are into denial, and it is taking them in directions that will plague the Israelis for the foreseeable future, even as it has made their victims on a global scale into heroes and heroines. And that kind of future faces us if we don't understand what the real choice now is and make the right choice. Well, I don't see either the United States or Europe voluntarily joining a better world order. I think both of them are going to fight to the last because that's their mentality. I think we will see a new international economic order develop because for the first time since the 1950s, when there were first attempts at this with the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, for the first time, there's a critical mass.

2:02:39There is an alternative, and the alternative has been posed by China and now joined by Russia and Iran. And this is probably going to be designed and proposed over the coming year is we see it forced to develop an alternative by the crisis that Trump's oil war against Russia and Iran, I guess Venezuela too, you could say, have caused. I think that this alternative is the direction in which world history will be progressing, but I think it's going to leave the United States and Europe behind. And reading the speeches of President Putin and the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, I think that they've given up on Europe and America.

2:03:36And I think most countries are going to find it's easier to do it alone. And the Americans are so locked in to neoliberalism, they're just going to ignore. They're going to fight against all of this. and be left behind. The two of you are an absolutely excellent and complimentary duo. And I'm always so happy to get the opportunity to speak to you individually. But when I get both of you together, it's an even better treat. So again, thank you so much for joining me and Mishka and the podcat today. Okay. I'm very glad to see that your dog while finding some of what we said worthwhile to sleep through.

2:04:25The rest of it, he got up and seemed to be paying attention. All right. Thank you very much, Robinson. Appreciation for you doing this and trying to get these kinds of conversations and ideas out to a larger public. We've leaned the groundwork for what I hope will be a long, ongoing discussion. Absolutely.

2:05:18with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com. Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. I'm Gwen Washington from Snap Judgment, the storytelling podcast from KQED. Imagine, an iconic piece of paradise overrun by one of the most horrific fires in recent memory. Everyone flees, everyone, except one person who decides to fight the flames alone. the moment when nature institutions and technology fail at the exact same time that's all systems down and new snap judgment miniseries from kqed tap to listen now