In this week's episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff discusses how Marx's class analysis presents a solution to today's inequality and the challenges to overcoming it we have faced throughout history. In short, since the early existence of human society, people lived in tribes, clans, and villages that exhibited equality of wealth, income, and political power among their members. As modern history began to unfold, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism evolved as society as we know it took shape. In each of those three systems, huge inequalities separated people into masters vs slaves, lords vs serfs, and employers vs employees. Exploited and oppressed slaves, serfs, and employees opposed the inequalities of those systems but were unable to overcome them despite repeated efforts (revolutions). Marx questioned why modern societies failed to install and sustain systems of egalitarian wealth and power distribution (democracy). His answer lay in the understanding that class differences within the organization of production produce inequalities and sustain them. Overcoming those inequalities thus requires ending the class divisions within the organization of production and instead organizing in favor of a worker-cooperative structured method of production.
The d@w Team Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff is a DemocracyatWork.info Inc. production. We make it a point to provide the show free of ads and rely on viewer support to continue doing so.
You can support our work by joining our Patreon community:
https://www.patreon.com/democracyatwork Or you can go to our website: https://www.democracyatwork.info/donate
Every donation counts and helps us provide a larger audience with the information they need to better understand the events around the world they can't get anywhere else.
We want to thank our devoted community of supporters who help make this show and others we produce possible each week.1:01
We kindly ask you to also support the work we do by encouraging others to subscribe to our YouTube channel and website: www.democracyatwork.info