This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
“These are levels of craziness that are part of the decline I suspect of all empires when they consume themselves,” Professor Richard Wolff says of America’s current situation in the outset of Donald Trump’s second term. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the history and rationale behind the decisions made by Trump and how it relates to the decline of the US empire.
From tariffs to deregulation, Wolff says it is all erratic, uncoordinated and unpredictable, which are tangible signs of America’s decay. “You cannot tell people what a tariff will do. The reason is a tariff sets off a whole series of reactions. You can’t know them in advance. [People and governments] will all respond, but how they do it, it’s like knowing in advance the chess move: you have some probabilities, maybe, but you never know,” Wolff tells Hedges.
Wolff explains how historic economic suffering has led to the protections and regulations Trump is now dismantling.
China and the expanding BRICS bloc also represent a growing challenge to U.S. global hegemony—a strategic shift that has significantly influenced the Trump administration’s policies and reflects today’s unique geopolitical tensions. Wolff says, “The United States is different now from what it has been for a century, because we really have an economic competitor.”
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Diego Ramos
Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript: Diego Ramos
Chris Hedges: The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, will be marked by developments that are intimately familiar. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system will begin to consume the structures that sustain it. It will prey upon, in the name of austerity and government efficiency, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens.
It will, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries will mechanize their workplaces. This will trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that will, at first, be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes decline or remain stagnant.
Politics in the late stages of capitalism will become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations and oligarchs. But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx warned, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. Capitalism would then turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend.
It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature. The final stages of capitalism, as Marx grasped, is not capitalism at all. Corporations gobble down government expenditures, in essence taxpayer money, like pigs at a trough. Then the system crashes.
Joining me to discuss our late-stage capitalism and what it means for us and the global community is Professor Richard Wolff. Professor Wolff a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. He has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah and the University of Paris.
So let’s talk about late stage capitalism, the hollowing out of state institutions, DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] and what the capitalists in the short term, of course, are going to make lots of money, but what it’s going to do to the rest of us.
Richard D. Wolff: Well, I think your opening, Chris, as often your openings are, is wonderfully comprehensive. It leaves me kind of amazed at how much more I can provide in the way of specifics and concreteness. I won’t be departing. I think you’ve captured it really very, very well. But let me drive some of the points home.
Part of what you’re watching with the Trump administration can be, and in my judgment ought to be, understood as a war on the working class at home, but also abroad. What is being done—let me start at the opposite end—what is being done in Europe is remarkable. A deal that came out of World War II in which the United States would defeat new enemy, the Soviet Union, barely a few months after being the great ally, it became overnight the great enemy, showing a kind of flexibility which is at once astonishing, but also impressive in terms of meeting your own needs and rearranging the pieces on the board that you’re playing with. The deal that was made was the following.
We, United States, we have two big worries right now. Number one, the New Deal. An awful lot of money was taxed or borrowed from rich corporations and the wealthy people to provide a remarkable array of mass services, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, the social security system, government employment. This had to be rolled back.
As you know very well, our last 50 years are the story of the rollback of that New Deal. But it also required smashing the socialists and communists who had created that New Deal with their alliance for a while with the Democratic Party. All of that had to be undone and was undone. The second great anxiety at the end of the war was that we would fall back into a depression.
Let’s remember it was only the war that finally got us out of the horrible collapse of capitalism, the worst in its history, from 1929 to 1940-41. And only by taking the remaining many, many millions of people, putting—I’m going to be simple now—putting half of them in uniform and the other half making the uniforms, we were able… and then the great worry, and it was very serious, at the end of the war, 1945, what would now happen?
We would demobilize all these people out of the military, out of producing for the military. What would prevent us from slipping back? You can see the government did extraordinary things, the GI Bill, to take all those soldiers and instead of having them go into the unemployment, stick them in the university where the government would pay for it, the housing program, the highway program, all of them.
But what people don’t recognize was that there was another part of this, and that was the international part with Europe. The problem was Europe had the same depression history as this country did, and during that time, as in the United States, socialist and communist parties became much stronger than they had ever been in Europe. So at the end of the war you had the worry about slipping back, but you had an even bigger one, that you had very strong socialist and communist parties who had led the movement of the 1930s to get social services, which were much more generous in Europe than they were in this country.
Plus the socialists and communists provided the militants who were the anti-fascist resistance. So they were popular, they were strong. [Former French president Charles] De Gaulle’s first government after ‘45 had to have Communist Party people in the cabinet. For Italy, the second biggest party in the 20 years after the war was the Italian Communist Party. And I could go on. And they all had the Soviet Union literally a few hours by train from them. So their capitalist classes were even more freaked out about what was going on.
Then the alliance with the Soviet Union, it was all too much. So what the United States did is cut a deal. We will solve our economic problem by putting Keynesianism on steroids. The government is going to come in and do what? Save us from the Soviet menace, build up the military industrial, and say to the Europeans, we’ll take care of it.
We’ll provide you with the defense umbrella, we will divide you with all the support and all you have to do is make sure you crush the socialists and communists at home and you are a good bulwark against the Soviet Union. And to that end, here’s what we’re going to do. You won’t have to cover defense. We’re taking care of that with our domestic Keynesian, military Keynesianism.
And you’re going to take the money you would have had to spend to provide the social services that will allow you to compete with what the Russians are offering their people, and had been already for quite a while at that time. So you’re going to compete with them, and then we’re going to take our National Endowment for Democracy, our CIA, and all the rest, and make sure the right politicians willing to commit to this deal sit at the top of the government in France, in Germany, in Britain, and we all know the story of all the money and the sloshing that was done. That was it.
That was the way we were going to destroy the socialists and communists inside and weaken or destroy, if we could, the one outside, and all of it justifying the massive government spending. But the problem is all of that was paid for, to touch on your point, by debt. The United States does not like to fight wars with taxes. It likes to fight wars with money borrowed, because if you tax the people, the opposition to the war would be much bigger and arise much sooner. So you can’t do that. You borrow the money.
Here’s the irony. The Europeans were major lenders for a while to the United States to fund the Keynesianism that protected them from having to use their money for their own defense. The ironies of how this all fit together are a charming story that’s never quite been put down on paper. What we have now is the collapse of that deal. It’s very important historically, and I know you do the history too, Chris, something we have in common, which I think is part of whatever effect we have.
The story, it fits together, our situation coming out of World War II and working out this way for another lease on life with lots of domestic government spending. But the problem is so much of it was done on debt. And so much of it was done without understanding the special moment. The United States had no competitor coming out of World War II.
Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, they were all destroyed. We came out king of the hill. Our economy was in better shape coming out of the war than it was going in, and no one else could say that. And the result was a very bizarre, unique, special moment that could not possibly last. I think historians will look back, be rather impressed it lasted as long as it did.
But in any case, it is now over. You can’t do it. The United States lost the war in Vietnam. It lost it in Iraq. It’s losing it in Ukraine. I mean, look at it. And these are among the poorest countries on earth to which the US is losing. And the Europeans are left in a way… one almost has to sympathize. They’re irrelevant. They’ve become the literal opposite of what they were three or four centuries ago—the center of the universe, the apogee of culture, the colonial master, all of that. It’s all gone. Europe is a footnote. Living in a world of fantasy where being unable to stop the Russians with the United States, they actually think that they’re going to do it without the United States.
These are levels of craziness that are part of the decline I suspect of all empires when they consume themselves. Last point. I am particularly struck with this crazy business of attacking federal employees in the name of efficiency. That is so laughable that one has to kind of take a deep breath because it’s sort of overwhelming what you get here.
Two and a half million civilian employees of the federal government versus five million working for state government and 15 million working for the local government. If you care to damn about efficiency, whatever that exactly means, your obvious targets would be local and state, but they can’t get at those, so they go after the federal.
That’s not a decision of efficiency. That’s a decision of where can we make a public performance. And they’re making a public performance. It ruins the lives of those people. It destroys whatever function these agencies often had. It drives people entering the labor force, which is a larger number than those leaving the federal.
They’re all going to go into the private sector where they’re going to bid down wages at the same time that they can’t control the inflation, you’re ripping up your working class more and more and more as if there were no end to this process. These are the desperate behaviors of a dying empire. There’s really no other framework that I can think of that makes sense of this.
Chris Hedges: Well, aren’t they trying to essentially destroy government agencies like the Postal Service, for instance, education, because they privatize it. They make money off it.
Richard D. Wolff: They live in a world, look, I’m part of, I’ve been a professor of economics all my life. I grew up in that framework. I had to learn all of that. I had to teach it often. They live in a framework governed by the theory of economics, their theory, which says that, and I mean this as blunt and as religious-sounding in the negative sense of the term, as I can make it.
They live in a world in which whatever the private sector does is efficient, more so than any other way of getting the job done. And anything that you can do to reduce the economic footprint of the government, thereby shifting the work over to the private sector, will be an increase in efficiency from which all of us will benefit.
They actually believe that. It’s like listening to a plantation owner in Louisiana in 1832 explaining how and why master and slave is the best possible arrangement for the human race to accomplish what it needs to produce. It’s just, it’s so obvious, it’s just beyond needing to be explained. Yeah, you have these people, it’s a small business mentality.
I can do it. I’m doing it real well. If only the government rules and regulations weren’t there, and if all the bad people that intervene in the free market, which is our modern religious icon, well then, yeah, they actually, to the degree that they are governed by any theoretical awareness at all, it is a simple-minded version of that simplistic mantra, which you and I know, I went to the fanciest schools this country has, and that’s what they taught us.
Chris Hedges: But it’s dynamiting the very foundations that makes a capitalist system work. I mean, the infrastructure’s collapsing. You don’t educate your population. We still see what a privatized social service, postal service has done in England. It’s a mess. It doesn’t work. I mean, from that introduction, aren’t they, perhaps unwittingly, aren’t they actually destroying the very structures that makes the accumulation of wealth in the long term possible?
Richard D. Wolff: Here’s the way I understand it. They had that ideology that private sector is the efficient… They’ve been believing that for 200 years, if not longer. You know, it has many names. Liberalism, neoliberalism, laissez-faire, lots of language for the same basic idea. But they were always, and this is the way I understand it, they were always counteracted to some extent by sort of practical men and women who said to them, wait a minute, yeah maybe, but if we don’t solve this problem real quick and the only agency that’s going to do that is the government, we are going to be in deep trouble.
You know, we turn to the government to run the military when we’re attacked because the private isn’t quite… and then they will make a break. They will do what Roosevelt ended up doing in the 1930s. They’ll intervene in the labor market. There’s a minimum wage. We don’t care what market forces are. You don’t go below that. And I want to remind people even the conservatives had those.
When the inflation was unmanageable in 1971, [Richard] Nixon goes on the radio and television, 15th of August 1971, and says I am freezing all wages and prices in the United States. As of tomorrow morning, if you raise your price, Mr. Businessman, we’re going to come, we’re going to arrest you, and you’re going to jail. Whoa. Okay, this is a kind of recognition. If you have the space, what we have now is a population increasingly persuaded, right up to the top, that there is no space.
You can’t afford the apparent solution of the government. You’ve got to do something. And the only thing they can think of, given the narrowness of our education, is that fantasy. They’re going to save America by going backwards. What in the world is that? Go back to what? Whatever it is that got you here. I mean, it’s nuts. And what they’re doing is they’re living out fantasy.
I would guess in other empires, as they declined, they began to appeal to their gods, to their fetishes, to their fantasies, because they had nothing practically workable left. We are borrowed up to here with our $35 trillion of national debt. It’s way above our national GDP, which is not supposed to be. That used to be considered a no-no line.
Our European allies don’t do it as badly as we do it, although they’re about to. Look at the Germans. There’s a losing of your mind. Mr. [Friedrich] Mertz is about-to-become chancellor there. He ran a campaign on preserving the German commitment to no government borrowing. Within days of the election, he completely reverses himself and now champions biggest debt expansion in German history to build a military.
Who’s he gonna fight? The Russians? That’s a joke. The Chinese? That’s a bigger joke. The United States? Perhaps the biggest joke of all? What? The only people he could use that for are the other Europeans. And I think somewhere we’ve seen that picture before. These are behaviors that people like you and me and others in the media are going to have a harder and harder time nailing down because they are the desperate acts of a declining empire that doesn’t know where to turn.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the tariffs, the tax cut, they’ve proposed more tax cuts. How is that all going to play out economically? Can they leave the military industrial complex alone because there’s a bill in Congress pushed by the Republicans to increase military spending by $100 billion over the next decade. So if they’re not going to touch the military, which consumes half of all discretionary spending,
I don’t see how they’re going to save that much money, first of all. And second of all, with these economic policies that cater to the oligarchic class, what are going to be the ramifications of that economically?
Richard D. Wolff: Well, I think what you’re seeing in part, let’s start with the tariffs, there’s something that’s important about the tariffs that doesn’t get the attention it ought to. If I read American politics correctly, then for at least the last hundred years, the Republican Party’s major mantra has been either we’re going to cut your taxes or we’re not going to raise your taxes. We are the anti-tax party.
And they go to every part of the population they can to sell that story. A tariff is a tax. That’s all it is. It’s a tax on imported objects that are produced elsewhere and sold here. In the early days of American history, these were called import duties because that’s what they are. Calling them a tariff…
Chris Hedges: Didn’t we start a revolution over that? [Laughing]
Richard D. Wolff: Yes, among other things. That’s right. Because we weren’t allowed to… King George III made that decision. That’s right. So here we have an anti-tax party whose major economic weapon, as of Mr. Trump, is a tariff. It’s kind of a remote—there’s more evidence that something is really breaking down because they have to become advocates of the very thing they claimed, in principle, they were against.
Very bizarre. And the same people out of whose mouth on the 4th of July comes anti-tax BS are now telling you about what a wonderful weapon the tariff is. The reason Mr. Trump uses it, by the way, is that Congress gave the president a lot of leeway about doing that. And so he can do it and he can play the role Mr. Trump likes to play, the angry god with his weapons, and he couldn’t do that with many other weapons because they have to go through the Congress or through various procedures other than him just spouting off on Truth Social, how he’s going to do this or that, do it today, cancel it tomorrow, all this bizarre theatric. He’s doing it because he can do it with that. There is no principle behind it. Number one.
Number two. You cannot know—and by the way, tariffs are very old. There’s nothing new. Countries have been throwing tariffs against each other for centuries. Why do I tell you this? Because it’s an immense literature. I’ve had to teach courses in international economics. That’s where that literature is. The students spend three weeks going through articles and books, etc., etc. All right, so here’s what we know.
We know that a tariff cannot, you cannot tell people what a tariff will do. The reason is a tariff sets off a whole series of reactions. You can’t know them in advance. In other words, everyone affected by a tariff has to make a choice about how they’re going to respond. They will all respond, but how they do it, it’s like knowing in advance the chess move.
You have some probabilities, maybe, but you never know. The genius is the one who adjusts. So when Mr. Trump tells you the tariffs will do X, this is snake oil. This is nonsense. He doesn’t know what that’s going to do. In his first statements about the tariff, he thought, he kept saying it, the Chinese will pay the tariff. He had to have his advisors, some of whom I know, to explain to him and he couldn’t get it.
No, the tariff is paid by Americans to the American government. The Chinese don’t pay any of it. You can imagine a reaction in China that might—yes, you can, but there’s no reason to assume it. For example, one response to a tariff is a retaliatory tariff. Okay, you can’t know in advance whether they will do that.
And you can’t know in advance what products of yours they will impose a tariff. Again, they don’t have to do it across everything. Europe is busy taxing bourbon whiskey, and so are the Chinese, for obvious political reasons because it impacts Mr. Trump’s economic base. But we don’t know. If Canada cannot sell its electricity into the United States, well then they’re going to sell it to China.
Is that really an advantage? The answer is no. Is that a possibility? Yes! In other words, the minute you understand what’s going on, all you have for Mr. Trump and his associates is blather. What looks good on the evening news, we’re going to do this, and it’s going to have that result.
That’s exactly what he can’t do. Nobody can do that. And even a passing awareness, if you’re not a paid huckster, is you would say, well, this is going to hurt the relationship. It’s going to lead to a lot of rethinking and choices among optional—and how they all add up and impact on us. I mean, the only honest answer is I don’t know.
Chris Hedges: But isn’t ostensibly, aren’t tariffs being imposed on the Canadians and others, one, to kickstart American manufacturing and two, fill the gap of the tax cuts? Is that the ostensible reason for the tariffs?
Richard D. Wolff: Yes, that’s the kind of thing you say, but that implies the pretense that you know that the line of causation will go from your tariff to that decision. For example, an automaker removing or relocating the assembly plant from Mexico into Texas or something like that. Yeah, but here’s the problem. It is very expensive to move production facilities. They take years to establish and they take almost as much time to relocate.
And it is very expensive. No one, no businessman or woman I have ever talked to about this would ever make a decision because country A imposes a tariff. Even more so if that country were to behave in such a way as to say the tariff is temporary.
The tariff is… why? Because who knew? You know, be crazy. Spend billions, move your Ford plant from Oaxaca to Cincinnati, and then at the end of three years discover that the rationale is gone because this crazy president has decided to go bother somebody else with a tariff. You’re then out a fortune of money, and then you really lose, because if you come to the United States, which he always neglects to tell you, you have to pay a lot more money in wages on top of the cost of the move.
The intrinsic cost that an accountant in a multinational corporation will sit down and tell the CEO, this is what this is going to cost you. And that’s one of the reasons the CEOs are very unhappy. I monitor a CEO program at Yale. The way Yale panders to CEOs, it brings them there, puts them in the lovely old colonial building, wines and dines them and sends them off on their way, and lo and behold, contributions come to Yale a few months later.
But in any case, it’s a nice sounding board. I like to pay attention. They are all afraid of saying anything publicly because Mr. Trump is punitive, but with the protection of anonymity, whoop! What they are willing to say to their friends and cohorts at Yale about they are very, they don’t want any of this. They don’t want the uncertainty above all else. They can’t make decisions. And so, by the way, that’s one of the reasons we see worries now about recession.
That’s not about anything other than there’s such a massive realization in the corporate sector that we have no idea what this clown is going to do next, we can’t decide to build a factory, let alone to move one, because we can’t figure out where that ought to be. And making a mistake in this environment is deadly. By the way, that introduces another dimension that we haven’t spoken about, but which at some point, and maybe on a different occasion, the United States is different now, Chris, from what it has been for a century, because we really have an economic competitor.
We never had that, as per your own remark at the beginning. The Soviet Union may have been a military problem, but it was never an economic problem. It was much too small, much too backward, much too weak, and that’s through all the way until it collapsed in 1989. It just wasn’t.
China is, it already is, and not to speak of the population, not to speak of the BRICS alliance it has erected, I mean everything is now qualified by the fact that we, the U.S., have something we did not have before, which is an entire competitive totality. China and the BRICS are over, if you add them up, are over 50% of the world’s population. The United States is four and a half percent.
You’ve got to keep this somewhere in your head, what we are talking about here. If you add up the GDP of the G7, the US, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, it’s about 27%, 28% of the world’s output. If you add up China and the BRICS, it’s 35%. It’s already a bigger economic unit than we are.
Every country in Asia, Africa, Latin America, thinking about building a railroad or borrowing money or expanding its medical care, they used to go to New York or Washington or London and get the help they… they still go. They still propose. But as soon as that’s done, they send the same team to Beijing or New Delhi or Sao Paulo, and they’re bargaining. Who’s going to give me the better deal? And they’re in a better position than we are to do that.
Which is why the railroads of Africa are being built by the Chinese and the ports in Latin America and so on. It’s relentless. The decline of this empire and the rise—I don’t know if it’s going to be a Chinese empire, I don’t know if maybe their commitment to multilateralism or nationalism is genuine or not, how can I know? But the decline of this one, unmistakable unless you need to deny it, which you and I know is the air we breathe in this country.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about the SWIFT, the world’s reserve currency, the dollar. Alfred McCoy argues that’s the final endpoint of the American empire. If that happens, that the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, the empire is impossible to sustain because the Chinese and others won’t buy our debt, which is what treasury bonds are. Do you agree and do you see that coming?
Richard D. Wolff: I do not agree, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful. Let me explain.
The history of capitalism has always produced people who fetishize one or another aspect. It is a system, and it’s as important in the reproduction of that system that the production of goods and services happens in certain ways, that the exchange in markets happen and that money as the lubricant plays the appropriate role. All of those things are necessary.
Money, the US dollar, very important. But the system, like all systems, has within it the capacity to adjust if one or another—it’s a little bit like doctors explain, if you lose your left arm—it turns out your right arm can do all kinds of things and your body will kind of adjust. Yes, you will always know you don’t have a left arm, but you will be amazed at what your right arm can do, or your left eye, or your right eye, or different parts of you. It’s that way.
So it used to be thought that the great evil of capitalism was the banker, or the people with the money. Well, they are important, but they are not the beginning and the end any more than anybody else. No other part is. It’s a system. So here’s the way I understand it. Part of the decline of the empire is a diminution in all of the signs of empire. You know, the sign of the British Empire was that the pound sterling was the global currency. We now know that the British Empire is a vague fading memory because nobody cares about the British pound sterling. The British barely do, and nobody else.
Chris Hedges: But Rick, when they dropped the pound sterling in the 50s as the world’s reserve currency, Great Britain did go into a recession, a pretty deep recession. I mean, economically it suffered.
Richard D. Wolff: Yes, but Britain’s decline is a century old. Britain’s decline starts in the 19th century, you know, and then it’s wiped out in World War I and again in World War II. And it’s giving away bits and pieces of its empire as it goes. You know, at the end of World War II, you know, it’s very famous at Bretton Woods [Conference], when all the victorious countries got together up there in the woods in New Hampshire to decide on the monetary system.
The British, led by [John Maynard] Keynes, at that point the greatest economist in the world, they thought they could reconstruct the pound sterling universe. And Harry Dexter White, the American equivalent, said to them, looked at them and laughed. He said, you know, that’s over for you. The dollar is going to… everybody nodded because they all kind of understood without much argument that they were part of that process.
I think the US dollar is shrinking. There’s easy ways to show it. You know, if you look 40 years ago, then central banks around the world kept dollars and gold as their basic two reserves to back up their own currencies. And the dollar was often 70, 75, 80, even up above that, percent of those reserves. A little bit of gold, lots of dollars, good as gold.
Today that number, it’s variously estimated, no one knows exactly for sure, but it’s in the 40 to 50 percent rate. So that’s a very dramatic drop. It’s telling you that for the rest of the world something very big has changed from what it was in 1945 to now. I mean, it’s so big and it’s so everywhere and you can see what they’re replacing it with.
At first it was the euros, then it was the euros and the yen, now it’s the euros, the yen and the yuan from China. It’s like a subtext translating what we’re talking about as a decline. So I see it more as a steady erosion.
One of the major projects of the BRIC nations, which you can see when you study their reports when they meet, is to replace the dollar. There is no question that they’re interested in doing that. They are already doing it. The decision of Saudi Arabia doesn’t get all that much attention here, but they are now willing to sell their oil for a whole variety of currencies before they insisted on the dollar.
Each of these decisions by itself is limited. But when you add them up, yes, then it’s bye-bye the dollar. But we are still a very rich country. We are still a very important part. I don’t want to overstate it. I’m saying it’s dying. I’m not saying it’s dead. We are not Britain. We are doing what Britain did. We are following a lot more than people willing to admit. But we are still several decades before what they have gone through.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the ramifications of what’s happening now, the stripping down of the bureaucratic state, the destruction of social programs, which is going to further immiserate the poor, Head Start and stuff like that. What do you see coming? And the kind of chaos. I mean, tariffs one day, then the next day we don’t have tariffs. I mean, you can’t figure out where this guy’s going. So what do you see, you know, the future, where are we headed economically? Politically, of course, we’re becoming fascist, but economically.
Richard D. Wolff: Yes. Well, in economics, that’s also underway. If by fascism you mean, and you know it’s a very contentious term and people define it differently and all that, but if by classical fascism you mean a kind of merging of the corporate leadership and the governmental apparatus into a situation where the government is the military enforcement of the rules of capitalism.
Chris Hedges: Well I look at it like [Karl] Polanyi. You know that you first you get a mafia economy and then you get a mafia state.
Richard D. Wolff: Yes, okay. Yeah, I think all of that is very much underway. I think the symbolism—I mean, I should qualify. My mother was born in Berlin. My parents are Europeans. And my parents became refugees from fascism in Europe, and that’s how I got born in Ohio. I’m a product of what I’m about to talk about, so it’s close to me.
The symbolism of Mr. Trump having behind him a row of billionaire oligarchs, you know [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Jeff] Bezos and [Elon] Musk and all the others.
My first reaction, Chris, this is so stupid. Why do I think that? Because it is the fascist story laid out in a symbolism you couldn’t possibly miss if you know anything about that history. Not the Supreme Court, not big politicians, not Nobel Prize winners, or whatever he might have assembled behind him. He chose the biggest, richest corporate oligarch he could find and dress them up and put them there, each with their appropriate partner. Staggering. I mean, just staggering.
Now, economics. Everything I see is an act of desperation. It has nothing to do with any coherent plan. That means—I want to be careful, I’m a mathematician—this is the equivalent—I won’t use a math metaphor, I’ll use a football metaphor. Mr. Trump is heaving the so-called Hail Mary pass down the field. Right? For everybody who might not know, it’s when you’re so desperate, you’re about to lose the game, you tell all your players to run down the field, maybe towards the left or the right, then you heave the ball over there and you hope that as it bounces around, the different hands reaching up to get it, it will actually come down by accident in one of your team members rather than the other one.
And you miraculously— could Mr. Trump’s assemblage of nonsense get you an outcome he would be happy with? Yes. It has exactly the same chance as the Hail Mary Pass, because everything he’s doing is chaotic. It’s so difficult to talk about this sensibly, given the unsenselessness. Most of the regulations we have in the federal government come as a result of years of struggle by impacted people who could not rely on the private sector, demand[ing] action which could only be done by the government.
After Upton Sinclair teaches us about the meat business and people die left and right from food poisoning from the meat, we have a Food and Drug Administration because, of course, we have to make sure that the profit motive, which has nice outcomes sometimes, has awful outcomes just as often. And if we don’t police that, we’re going to get the awful right alongside the good. And that’s unbearable.
So every one of these things has that history behind it, more or less. The business community blocks it, delays it, postpones it, and then having lost that battle, takes credit for it when it’s done. It’s like my friend Deirdre McCloskey, an economist you probably know. She loves to go around and say, isn’t capitalism wonderful because we have a higher standard of living now than people did 200 years ago.
I love this. Every one of the things she points at was opposed, delayed, blocked by the capitalists. They fought it tooth and nail, and then they have the clever PR, once they’ve been defeated and we have it, to take credit for it. And now the final indignity. Having taken credit for it for 20 years, they’re going to smash it in the name of efficiency.
The irony here, you have to take a breath. This is what you get in the last gasp of an economy. You get crazy stuff. So now we’re going to deregulate. We will have one scandal after another. Look at the scandal, today’s paper was full of people being deported from the United States who have no reason to be deported. The government has to say that was a glitch or this was a mistake or that one attended a funeral of a leader.
Come on, that’s not what this is about. Is it really? That’s what you’re doing? And so people will now have a story to tell how incompetent, how inappropriate, how dangerous these deregulations… So my guess, we’re creating the opportunity for someone on the left side, using the word left very broadly, to come in, hopefully not a demagogue, to ride across all of the mess-ups that are coming down the pike and put the finger on Mr. Trump and MAGA and push them back into the margins from whence they came.
Look, Mr. Trump rode the dissatisfaction of a declining empire, a population that could not face that its empire was over, and so were willing to blame [Joe] Biden, for God’s sake. What a joke, right? But he was able to ride that. And the people who come after him, they will ride the same process and blame him with the same minimum justification. He’s not the author of this. He is right, as he himself said.
His opening remark, I could go—I remember from years ago—I could go out on Fifth Avenue, he said, and shoot someone and nothing would happen to me because somehow right now what comes out of my mouth isn’t the nonsense it always was thought to be. It is incredible wisdom.
Chris Hedges: Great. Thanks, Rick. I want to thank Sofia [Menemenlis], Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.