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Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

An Argument for A New Labor Party

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Democracy at Work

Politics, News, Government

4.82.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The left-wing surge of the U.S. working class during the Great Depression of the 1930s compelled the Democratic Party to prioritize serving the working class more than it had before or would again. It was called the New Deal. In response, the US employer class, angry that taxes on corporations and the rich were used to fund government programs for the people, turned to the Republican Party after World War II ended in 1945 and directed it to roll back the New Deal, reducing or eliminating all it had accomplished. Because the New Deal made the great mistake of leaving profits in the hands of employers, the employers used those profits to provide Republicans with the means to defeat the Democrats and roll back the New Deal. In response, the Democrats sought funding, finding it in the hands of many donors who had supported the Republicans. For many years, the U.S. was led by one party or the other: the GOP rolled back the New Deal faster, while the Democrats did so more slowly—one ruling class, two parties to serve it. The 2008 Great Recession ended the cozy system, as both parties had to protect the privileges of the corporations and the rich, even as the US empire and economy declined. As the mass of people suffered and neither the GOP nor the Democrats stopped it, people became desperate and elected Trump out of rage and hysteria. He did not and will not solve the fundamental problems any more than his predecessors did. For that, a genuinely new and different political party is needed — one that puts the American Working People First, the American majority. The program concludes with suggestions on how such a new party could truly transform the country and address its most pressing problems.

 

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

0:26.6

dimensions of our lives and those of our children.

0:30.6

I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

0:33.6

Now that we're heading back into the autumn, I want to let you know about the events that

0:39.4

we have developed and the new items that might interest you. Most of these are available

0:45.7

on our website, Democracy at Work.Info, so please remember to go there for the details. If

0:53.2

there's additional information, I will give it to you now.

0:57.0

First I want to tell you, and I'm very proud of this, that Democracy at Work is now partnering

1:02.7

with the Left Forum, which has been around for many, many years. And one of the things

1:07.8

we're doing with the Left Forum is something called the Left Education

1:13.1

Project.

1:14.7

It's a series of activities that I think will interest many of you.

1:20.7

The first one is a class, four sessions, four Mondays in a row starting September 15th. It's available to anyone anywhere in the world

1:30.3

who can connect to us via the internet, which is what allows us to do this sort of thing.

1:36.3

This is a four-session course called Understanding Capitalism, and it's designed for academics, activists, and just concerned citizens anywhere in the

1:48.9

world. The teachers are three of us, myself, Professor Clara Mattei from the University of Tulsa

1:58.4

in Oklahoma, and Professor Sharam Azar from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

2:06.4

All three of us will be presenting this material to you. I really urge you to think about

2:13.4

registering, but you would need to go to the website in order to do that.

2:19.4

And in this case, the website is that of the Left Forum.

2:23.5

And here it is so that you can sign up if you're interested.

2:27.8

Leftforum.org, leftforum.org slash LEP for Left Education Project.

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