On March 3rd, 2010, the Graduate Program for International Affairs at the New School hosted a screening of Capitalism Hits the Fan. Here you can watch as Professor Wolff answers some questions from the audience after a screening of his film.

 

The nation state is once again proving its special usefulness as a vehicle for managing capitalist crisis.  Partly, this follows from the renewal of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies.  Other key dimensions of state usefulness include its more direct provision of financial guarantees to private enterprises and its over-priced purchase of "toxic" assets (those that have suffered drastic losses) from their private owners.

  Of the roughly 56 million homes in the US today with mortgages, one in seven is "delinquent." That is over 7 million homes more than 30 days behind in mortgage payments.  Those homeowners face foreclosure procedures likely leading to evictions.  Very high (and still rising) unemployment levels guarantee rising mortgage delinquencies.   Mass media and political statements about government and banks helping people avoid foreclosures ("mortgage modification") are often misleading.  Relatively few have been helped and the help has been too little.

  Global capitalism imploded in 2007.

  From the National Radio Project:   "It’s a time of economic transition, and systems that may have seemed stable over the past few decades are proving to be far from it. But how did we get here? And how can we learn from the past, to build a more fair and just system in the future? While many politicians and pundits claim that no one saw the current economic collapse coming, in fact, we had plenty of warning, depending on who we listened to.

The gap between annual incomes of the top 10 per cent of US citizens and what the other 90 per cent gets has been widening sharply for the last 30 years.  The nation's economic development has been increasingly divisive.  Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, a leading expert, summarizes the facts on his website, from which the graph below is gratefully taken.   This graph shows how the top 10 per cent of income earners in the US took home, after the 1970s, an ever more outsized share of the total national income.

2010 marks year #3 of this crisis in global capitalism. This is a systemic crisis with extreme symptoms in different places at different times: now Icelandic banks, then US homeowners being foreclosed, now Mexico losing emigrants’ remittances, then Greece’s government bonds, and so on. Capitalist hegemony cannot admit or deal with the disease of capitalism as a system. Instead, the focus shifts from symptom to symptom to press local institutions to shift the costs of crisis onto workers. Capitalism’s systemic crisis is no mystery.

The stunning win of a Republican novice in the Massachusetts Senate race to replace Ted Kennedy is well known.  It is being interpreted as a sign of Obama's fading popularity and also as a sign that the US electorate wants more right-of-center policy.  To show the flaw in thinking that right-wing answers to the economic crisis are the only popular option, consider the results of the January 26, 2010 referendum in Oregon.   That referendum's 1.2 million voters decisively passed Measures 66 and 67 by margins of over 53 to 46.