Richard D. Wolff

Your list is excellent. Stock prices reflect supplies and demands for stocks and those supplies and demands can be and are affected by many, many variables. In recent years, for example, mergers and stock buybacks (when companies buy their own stocks and so retire them from circulation) have sharply reduced shares available for buyers with resulting price increases. Likewise massive injection of new money into the US economy by the FED since 2008 has boosted demands. Foreigners, frightened by deteriorating conditions for global capitalism, move their money into US stock markets so long as that seems safe. Such moves can and do raise stock prices (and thus the Dow industrial average) even though they have little or nothing to do with production, growth, efficiency or anything else about the production of goods and services.

To answer this requires defining what one means by "socialism." If, as often happens, socialism refers to the extent of governmental intervention in an otherwise private capitalist economy, then almost all countries have "some socialism." In the list of countries you mention, only the degree/extent of such government intervention varies and that variation mostly depends on the specific history, politics and culture of each country.

However, if by socialism is meant a fundamentally different organization - at the micro level - of enterprises/workplaces, the answer to your question would be very different. In none of the countries your email mentions, has there been a large-scale transformation of workplaces from the top-down, hierarchical capitalist model (corporations with shareholders, boards of directors, mass of employees) to the radically other worker-cooperative model where all the basic enterprise decisions are made democratically by all the workers interacting with the democratically determined interests of the residential communities and customers that interact with such enterprises. That kind of socialism is what is emerging in the 21st century and will challenge all the countries you mention and indeed many more.

This issue keeps returning to discussion. I suspect it reflects a basic and still unresolved tension. On the one hand, socialism carries negative baggage but also the positive heroic history of now centuries of criticism and struggle against capitalism. On the other hand, a new term risks losing the positive and not only the negative dimensions of "socialism." So here is a thought. Bernie Sanders got millions of Americans to accept "socialism" after half a century of endless demonization of the term. He did this by stressing a qualifying adjective "democratic" and placing it always in front of "socialism." Might we then similarly start using "cooperative socialism"?

Will do, but a word on the current immigration debate. In fact, immigration, like all such major events/processes has both good and bad effects on both the countries left and the countries arrived at. The debate over the pluses and minuses never ends because they are infinite in number and take many years to play out. The debate is by nature chiefly a distraction from the actual problem upsetting so many, namely the dysfunction of our economic system. However, left-over Cold War taboos make that too difficult for usual politicians, journalists and academics to confront, so debating immigration is the displacement.

Many such initiatives are being taken by all sorts of people these days. Time will tell which get support. For me what is key, however, is whether a program for basic change will emerge to galvanize people and focus their energies. Without that, people will wonder whether another massive effort is worthwhile when even if it succeeds against Trump will then face how many more Trumps emerging from the same system in which inequality breeds the billionaires who must buy/corrupt the govt to protect their billions and then the whole sad story of the last few years would repeat itself. Only if that problem is addressed will the sustained effort of oppositional people be tapped and the long sought progress be achieved.

After 1945, the US entered into a Cold War that was waged overwhelmingly by an ideological kind of battle. Any criticism of capitalism was portrayed as treason. Students could not find teachers willing to teach Marx's ideas or other critical traditions. Over time, knowledge of critical economic theories simply vanished within the general population and among academics, journalists, and politicians. Until 2008, as capitalism seemed to be healthy and growing, this cultivated ignorance bothered only a very few people. But since 2008, as capitalism's failings and injustices strike more and more people's lives, an interest in critical approaches revives. For particular reasons, I found graduate school in economics to be a time when the arguments for the superiority of capitalism struck me as seriously inadequate. Once launched in that direction, I followed my interests, encountered and read critical theories and theorists, and so arrived at a critical perspective. The 2008 crash brought me then the audience I had unknowingly been preparing to address for most of my life before that.

That masses of people demand and act on their democratic rights to protest and change their government is an enormous positive not only for Romania but for all the world to see (since it is badly needed in many other countries). While the effort to stop corruption - so obviously exposed in this Romania situation - is important and valuable, for it to succeed it needs to answer a key question: why is governmental corruption so widespread and endemic a problem in modern societies? If that question is not raised and answered, we will endlessly repeat our suffering from corruption and simply explode into mass actions such as those now in Romania again and again. Here, then, is my answer to that question: the capitalist economic system generates such ongoing inequality that it drives the minority of the rich to seek to buy and thereby control the political system to protect their wealth. There lies the core of why corruption is so endemic.

While there are some technical problems with this specific number, most of the other numbers about global inequality point clearly to the huge and growing inequality that, with a few, very temporary exceptions, has been capitalism's product now for centuries. In 2014 Thomas Piketty published a volume that explained why as well as reviewed the key statistics which he (and his colleague Emanuel Saez at UC-Berkeley) have been developing for decades. For me all this points to and supports one basic line of criticism of capitalism. I would present it this way. The French revolution that ushered capitalism into modern European history had three slogans: liberte, egalite and fraternite. That is, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was to bring the world those three basic values. One reason Marxbecame a critic of capitalism was because he saw that while capitalism had indeed replaced feudalism as the dominant economic sysatem in mid-nineteenth century Europe, it had NOT brought with it equality. Inequality, fostered and worsened by capitalism as a long-term structural tendency, is a profound critique of capitalism; It was and it is today, perhaps more than ever now. And Oxfam keeps producing the data and analysis to prove it.

My point there was to highlight that international trade (what carries/profits those companies) had taken a tremendous hit since 2008....as further evidence that the so-called "recovery" was an ideologically and politically promoted misreading of an economic crisis that has cut far more deeply into contemporary global capitalism and lasted far longer (thereby worsening the damage) than anyone foresaw. The decline of mass purchasing power in the advanced countries of western Europe, north America and Japan has badly affected not just those areas but also the newly emerging capitalist industrial powers of China, India, Brazil and so on. The way to see it is in the shipping/trading companies who bear a big part of these "bad effects." There is nothing secret about all this. The problem is the denial or desire of mass media and political leaders to distract the public from what this means by focusing instead on whatever "good economic news" there is. In almost all circumstances, the economy displays both good and bad economic data. the uneven development of economies guarantees that. So the question is how to interpret an always complex or mixed bag of news. But the advertising mentality fixes instead on what sells and so media and political leaders fix our attention on what makes them look best.

Unemployment is a basic irrationality that is and always has been intrinsic to capitalism. Neither slavery nor feudalism nor other systems exhibited it. Unemployment exists because employment depends on capitalists' ability to profit from it; if profit opportunities dictate unemployment it happens. In a worker coop economy, the blatant irrationality of unemployment would likely be more widely grasped. Unemployed people continue to eat, dress, inhabit dwellings, etc.; in short they consume while not also producing. The society is unambiguously better off if such folk were kept employed to share their output with the output of others that they consume. The likely ways to achieve no unemployment would be (1) to reduce the work hours of the employed and thereby absorb the unemployed, (2) poll the population to see what needs to be done and employ the unemployed to do that, and so on. Since profits need not and would not be the bottom line, the basic driver of a worker coop-based economic system, profits would not dictate behavior and thus the result of unemployment. In direct response to your question, if unemployed who already consume are employed, there is a net addition to output so that the employed need not and would not suffer any loss of benefits or wages from ending unemployment as indicated.

To Benjamin Helgert: I would be very grateful if you could send us a translation as you suggest. Not only would that help to educate me, but I would then prepare a segment for my weekly radio and TV program, 'Economic Update," that now is broadcast on 75 radio stations and TV stations in New York and san Francisco areas reaching 1.5 million people weekly. Let me thank you in advance.

The article's argument that Obama's "recovery" was largely a matter of hyping a poor, slow, limping economy after 2008 is mostly correct. The logic of the article overemphasizes the problem of inflation. Simply put, an inflation can, under certain circumstances, work as well to deepen inequality as the absence of inflation. The willingness of the rest of the world's rich to lend to the US government played an important role here too, as did other factors. The fuller story of how and why the US and world economies have taken so long to recover so little is more complex than the article admits, but the critique of Obama and "recovery" is good.