Good evening. Welcome to Jacobin's Mayday live stream. My name is Paul Prescott. I'm a contributing editor with Jacobin magazine and I'll be with you all tonight.

Today is International Workers' Day, a day to celebrate and memorialize the working class from around the world. In many countries today, you will see huge mass demonstrations by unions and labor parties to mark the occasion.

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So we have a great guest today to talk about the current state of capitalism, what it means for labor organizing today.

So I'm really excited to introduce Professor Richard Wolf, who is professor of economics narratives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting professor in a graduate program in international affairs at the new school.

He's also founder of Democracy at Work and author of countless works. So welcome, Professor Wolf, glad to have you.

Thank you, Paul. I'm very glad to be here.

So first question, I kind of want to zoom out a little bit. You know, I think it's easy for labor organizers, whether it's rectified workers in their unions or people work on staff for unions to kind of get lost in the weeds of our particular fights against particular employers.

So kind of broadly, I want to ask you why is it important for labor organizers to know about how our capitalist economy functions at a fundamental level and how should this knowledge inform our organizing?

Well, it's a great question. And you know, we could spend God knows how much time going into all of its facets.

I'm assuming you want to try to get to the core, and I'm going to try to respond in that spirit.

The economic literacy of the American people is really poor. It's not the fault of people. It has nothing to do with being smart enough, the American people are more than smart enough to understand.

But it has to do with a systematic ignorance making. It's the only way I can think of to say it of our school system, of our media, of our business and political leaders.

We constantly tell a fantastic story about what's going on that makes it impossible for interested, perfectly capable average human beings to understand what's going on, to get a grasp on it, to understand their own position in it.

The only way that I can imagine breaking the hold of the incredible nonsense, and I'm going to give you some examples in a minute, the only way to do that is if the labor movement, because no one else has quite the motivation and quite the organization and quite the history to bring to this.

So the labor movement is in an extraordinarily good position to do something about the confusion, the misdirection, the lack of teaching, the lack of education, that the working class needs to better its own situation.

You know, when labor unions were stronger in America, and in other parts of the world where the labor unions are stronger than they are here, as for example, in much of Western Europe, they devoted a great deal of time to workers' schools, to producing really good analytical literature, having workshops, having summer encampments where people can learn.

They put a lot of emphasis, we don't do that in this country anywhere near the way many of them do, and it shows.

And so I would argue that the labor movement needs to learn more about how American capitalism works, largely in order to guide its strategic decisions, for sure, where to concentrate your effort, how to present an argument.

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