Richard D Wolff— US Political Dysfunction and Capitalism's Withdrawal

After 200 years of concentrating its centers in western Europe, north America, and Japan, capitalism is moving most of its centers elsewhere and especially to China, India, Brazil and so on. This movement poses immense problems of transition at both poles. The classic problems of early, rapid capitalist industrialization are obvious daily in the new centers. What we learn about early capitalism when we read Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky and Jack London, we see now again in the new centers.

What the October 2013 shutdown of the US government teaches us are new lessons about what is happening to the increasingly abandoned old centers of capitalism. Similar lessons flow from the long, painful economic crises now besetting western Europe and Japan. In simplest terms, these old centers of capitalism are suffering the effects of capitalism’s withdrawal.

Truthout
US Political Dysfunction and Capitalism's Withdrawal
Richard D Wolff | Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

See also:

The Superrich Don't Need Our Middle Class Infrastructure — The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program