“…[~2:30]… I wanna go further because I think the issues at stake for working people go far beyond an improvement in wages, working conditions and so on, important and valuable as those are. And let me explain my point of view with an example. There’s is a movement in this country called the tea party and it goes back to something that happened way back in colonial times when folks in Boston, Mass were angry at the taxes imposed on the tea business by the king of England who was the technical leader of the United States at that time since we were still a British colony. Those folks were protesting what a leader that they didn’t like. But the tea party, dumping the tea in the harbor in Boston went on to become something much more important. People began to realize that they didn’t want to be in the position of asking for more or better deals from somebody else. They wanted to be in charge of their own economic wellbeing. And we went on, as a nation, to revolution against being a part of the British Empire and to become independent. We fought a revolutionary war and we declared our independence because we wanted to be in charge of our own economic destiny. Let me take a second example of where I’m going, slavery. Sure, in the period of slavery in the United States in the southern states, there were many efforts by slaves and others to improve the conditions of slaves: to get them better fed; to get them better housed; to get them better clothes; to save their families from being ripped apart in the slave market and so on. But at a certain point both slaves and those interested in their situation decided that the issue wasn’t appropriately framed as getting a better deal from the master, just like the colonist decided the issue wasn’t just getting a better or lower tax from King George. The issue was: not being a slave, not being a colonial; breaking free of a system that was unacceptable so that you’d be in more charge of your own economic wellbeing as a community. So the issue became not a better deal for the slave; the issue became: let’s end slavery. We can and should have a different system just like the colonists did. And I want to argue that we too face the same kind of situation. That the needs of American working men and women go beyond a better deal and become a question of a better system…”Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist, proposes socialists models of economic organization as the solution to the inequities and disequilibrium in the current economy. As an economist, he limits his line of sight to the realm of 'the production and consumption of goods and services' only so far as it pertains to human activity.
But, as anyone who has read my series of essays on Econology understands, economies cannot be isolated from their environment. The health of one is directly linked to the robustness of the other.
What's interesting about this examination of the American Revolution and the Civil War is how each conflict is an economic revolution (in addition to armed warfare). The American Revolution overthrew the yoke of taxation by a distant 'kingly' overlord; the Civil War overthrew the yoke of slavery of African Americans in the Confederate south. Both resulted in a massive reorganization of the economy. In many respects, the FDR's New Deal staved off another economic revolution (thereby saving capitalism) by installing some social checks on the excesses of capitalism that resulted in the Great Depression.
The excesses of capitalism which lead up to the Great Recession and ongoing debt crisis in the European Union and Puerto Rico have yet to be checked. The ongoing economic stresses of this inaction and the looming threats of environmental catastrophe on many fronts (climate change, water shortage, pollution...) places ever increasing pressure on the economic/geopolitical system to respond. But regardless of the response of policy makers, economic revolution will occur... the question is whether by force (armed revolt); by movement (geopolitical revolution); by environment (forced adaptation to degraded environment). The choice is up to us, as voters, as consumers and as workers.
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