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Donald Trump: the last symptom of a system that is about to collapse


In another interesting interview with Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff explains why the Trump presidency is the last resort of a system that is about to collapse:

Finally, if everybody tries to save themselves (protection), we have a historical example: after the Great Depression that happened in Europe. And most people believe that it was a large part of what led to WWII after WWI, rather than a much saner collective effort. But capitalism doesn't go for collective efforts, it tends to destroy itself by its own mechanisms.

There has to be a movement from below. Otherwise, there is no counter force that can take us in another direction.

So, absent that counter force we are going to see this system spinning out of control and destroying itself in the very way its critics have for so long foreseen it well might.

When Trump announced his big tariffs on China, we saw the stock market dropped 700 points in a day. That's a sign of the anxiety, the danger, even in the minds of capitalists, about where this is going. If we hadn't been a country with two or three decades of a middle class - working class paid really well - maybe we could have gotten away with this. But in a society that has celebrated its capacity to do what it now fails to do, you have an explosive situation.

Everything is done to avoid asking the question to what degree the system we have in place - capitalism is its name - is the problem. It's the Russians, it's the immigrants, it's the tariffs, it's anything else, even the pornstar, to distract us from the debate we need to have had that we haven't had for a half a century, which puts us in a very bad place. We've given a free pass to a capitalist system because we've been afraid to debate it. And when you give a free pass to any institution you create the conditions for it to rot, right behind the facade.

The Trump presidency is the last gasp, it's letting it all hang out. A system that's gonna do whatever it can, take advantage of this moment, grab it all before it disappears. In France, it was said 'Après moi, le déluge' (after me the catastrophe). The storm will break.

Comments

  1. joshuapowell612/8/18 08:48

    Thank you for this blog, I've enjoyed ''on contact with Chris Hedges'' for some time now and believe it to be an enlightening show. This episode was definitely one of their best.

    ReplyDelete
  2. skidder27/1/19 23:25

    10 or 11 million poor immigrants of questionable legal status? It's 25 million and they are here ILLEGALLY. You just got done ranting about how the unemployment numbers are rigged to show a low unemployment rate and then you pooh-pooh the idea that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens. That's 25 MILLION! That's probably 10 million jobs that could be recovered for Americans right there. Let's try to be more consistent with our arguments.

    ReplyDelete

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