The Emerging New World Economy: A New Empire, a Multipolar World, or a Post-Capitalist System
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Democracy at Work
4.8 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Four key changes drive a new world economy emerging from the old. First is capitalism's transition from neoliberal, globalizing to nationalistic capitalism. This includes the shift of capitalism's center from western Europe and the US to Asia and the global south and also includes the deepening economic inequality inside most nations. Second is the end of the stale, old debate between private and state capitalism (misnamed as capitalism vs socialism) in favor of private + state capitalism hybrids. Third is the post-peak decline of the US empire. Fourth is the urgent question of what comes next: a new empire, a multipolar world, or a new post-capitalist system that replaces employer-employee workplace organizations (private and public) with democratically run worker cooperative organizations.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic |
| 0:16.8 | dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. |
| 0:23.2 | Today's program has a particular style to it. I want to talk with you about the emerging new |
| 0:31.1 | world economic order. I do that because enough of the outlines of that new order, enough of the profiles of the key |
| 0:41.7 | players, are now clear that we can take a step back from the daily and weekly events we |
| 0:48.2 | normally analyze to look at the larger picture for a moment. I almost said darker picture. It isn't all dark, |
| 0:56.6 | but it is larger. It's an overview, if you like, of what's happening in the world, |
| 1:02.4 | and I mean it to inform our understanding of all the details that we'll be talking about |
| 1:09.7 | in the future programs that we will be developing. |
| 1:13.6 | And the way I'm going to do this today is organize it around four major developments |
| 1:19.9 | that are happening at the same time, interacting with one another, but together give us a clear sense of where this new world economic |
| 1:31.5 | order is coming. |
| 1:34.0 | Okay, we begin. |
| 1:36.3 | Over the last 30, 40, 50 years, depending on how you count, we have been involved in what is |
| 1:43.6 | called neoliberal capitalism, or if you like, |
| 1:48.6 | global capitalism. And here's really all that that meant, that coming out of the Great Depression |
| 1:56.3 | in World War II, private-led capitalism had a new chance to rebuild after the war, to try to recoup |
| 2:06.8 | after the Great Depression, and to have another growth spurt, which it did. By the 1970s, |
| 2:14.9 | that growth spurt was beginning to have a problem keeping going. |
| 2:19.9 | Not unusual in the history of capitalism as a system. |
| 2:23.8 | It is growth spurt driven. |
| 2:28.1 | But after the 1970s, the growth spurt took an unusual form, where before capitalism had spurted from New |
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