Economies around the world were shocked and damaged over the course of 2022. Global capitalism had been brewing conflicts among the major powers for some time as their relative strengths and vulnerabilities shifted. US capitalism and its empire are widely perceived as waning. Europe’s role as a US ally and indeed its economic future became correspondingly riskier as a result.

Professor Richard Wolff discusses the powerful economic partnership of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). “They are the engine of the world economy in a way that was once said of Western Europe, North America and Japan. The engine, the powerhouse, the growth mobile, all of that. That’s moved, friends. And it’s moved in large part to the BRICS.”

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires decide alone and unaccountably how to spend hundreds of billions. The decisions of a few hundred bring economic development to some regions, industries, and enterprises and lead to the economic decline of other regions. The many millions of people affected by those spending decisions are excluded from participating in making them.

In this month’s lecture for Democracy At Work, Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will discuss China’s economic growth since the revolution of 1949, China’s economic model in the context of the globalized economy, the differences between China’s economic system, socialism and capitalism, and increased rivalry with the United States, what many describe as a ‘new Cold War.’

Our current debates about our society’s problems and prospects need to refocus beyond the different adjectives for a common noun they qualify. It is time to expose and challenge capitalism’s core: that employer-employee organization of enterprises, private and state. We need to drop the taboo on debating how we ought to organize the workplaces where most adults spend most of their lives.

The key question revolves around progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party. Do enough of them have the needed clarity of understanding, courage to act, and wisdom to see their deficit in terms of strong organization? Can those who do seize the opportunity to ride a return of class politics into US society? Will they effectively resist both major parties’ efforts to silence and destroy them?

Why do governments compensate for private capitalism’s failures in the military but compensate so much less in the medical industries? And when governments do compensate in the latter, why so differently, varying from much in some countries to little to almost nothing in others? Neoliberalism’s ideological power, varying from country to country, provides an answer.

​In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash that any number of possible triggers could unleash. The trigger this time was not the dot-com meltdown of 2000 or the sub-prime meltdown of 2008-9; it was a virus. And of course, mainstream ideology requires focusing on the trigger, not the vulnerability.