Richard Wolff: The Beginning of the End?
The empire falls back.
Richard Wolff and I discuss the ways in which American foreign policy, and the attack on Venezuela in particular, reveal a system in decline. The “veneer” of international law is being stripped away, exposing a global power struggling to maintain dominance by doubling down on fossil fuels and old-world colonial tactics.
What we’re seeing is the inevitable collision between a capitalist system that demands infinite growth and the hard reality of a finite and increasingly resistant world.
SELECTED QUOTES
Richard Wolff:
“A system becomes dangerous when it shifts from developing human capacity to holding it back.”
“This is a declaration that the United States intends to behave exactly like the empires that produced world war.”
“This is a system now committing itself... to holding back the transition that the whole rest of the world thinks is crucial for technological advancement.”
Richard Eskow:
“At least when power drops the pretense, we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Infinite growth in a finite world is not just irrational—it’s lethal.”
“What we’re seeing is the political economy reaching its limits.”
TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)
Richard Eskow: Let’s go to the obvious, since you and I generally talk big picture and you know, the historical sweep of what’s going on with capitalism, with imperialism. Well, we have a lot to talk about, my friend, because the US has taken it upon itself under Lord Donald Trump to run Venezuela.
And in addition, Mr. Trump has re expressed his interest in acquiring, by wealth or by stealth or by force, Greenland. He’s also sent out warning signals to a couple other Latin American countries too, like Honduras. And it is, as is usual with this president, it is almost like I always used to say about Yiddish, words in Yiddish mean their English equivalent, but more so.
It seems to me that Donald Trump, in many ways is an aberration. But in many ways. he seems to me a representative of American globalism, imperialism, capitalism. He’s only atypical in that he’s “more so.” And this to me is evidence of that. But what’s your, before we get into it, what’s your, what’s your 50,000-foot takeaway from all of this?
Richard Wolff: Okay, well, let me pick up on one thought you had because I like it and I, I think, excuse me, it leads in well. On the one hand, there is nothing new. I noticed that Jeffrey Sachs gave a really good speech to the Security Council. He was invited to do it as they discussed the issue of Venezuela.
And he pointed out, I believe his number was 47 efforts by the United States to achieve regime change in Latin America between the end of World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then that may have been globally, I don’t remember, and then a whole bunch in the last 30 years.
In other words, the United States interfering in another society to rearrange what it was doing is in no way new. That it is in fact very old and very bipartisan in the United States. Number two, the heaviest burden of sanctions imposed on Venezuela over the last many years were those imposed by Barack Obama. Just for the record.
And much of the economic suffering and political turmoil in Venezuela flows directly from the sanctions imposed by the United States. And of course, all the COVID activity which we now know is what enabled them to do what they did the other day, and I presume has been going on for decades in that country, as in virtually every other.
So my first reaction is there’s nothing new here. The only thing that has changed, but it is important is the rationale. Throughout the Cold War, the rationale was fighting socialism and communism. How much that had anything to do with anything is Mysterious to me. I’m being polite. I think it was mostly invented.
It had very little to do with anything. They didn’t worry about leftist groups unless there was an interference in some profit-making project they had underway. And if there was an interference, they didn’t care whether it was socialists or Marxists who did it. That was the convenient. That was the convenient ideological gloss.
Did Mr. Trump use that one? Actually, he didn’t. Clearly there are people around him like Rubio, for whom getting rid of a friend of Cuba has all kinds of importance because of who these people are. But what is striking to me is that is what was said by Stephen Miller. Now, I understand this is a dim bulb, but sometimes the dim bulb throws the light where it needs to go.
And he was good because he said we don’t literally, I don’t remember the exact words, but this is close. All that stuff about, you know, law and order and mutual. None of that counts. Everything comes down to strength and position. We have the strength and position to do what we did in Venezuela, and we will be doing it again.
Okay, I find that an interesting move. Not because of it. Whether it’s true or not, I mean, I’m not interested. I think it’s always been the case that that has played a major role. Mr. Smith, you know, this fellow isn’t smart enough and doesn’t know enough history to be able to say it, so he thinks it’s something new.
It isn’t new, but it is ominous. And it’s ominous in this way. The worst war produced by modern capitalism, which has produced many, was World War I. And at the end of World War I, the level of mutual destruction of a dozen countries around the world, mostly in Europe, was so horrific that people understood, without being able to say it, that capitalism and war were a very volatile and dangerous combination and that the human race had to take institutional steps to try to prevent that from happening again.
And so we had the formation of the League of Nations when Germany and Japan and Italy wanted to have freedom, to expand because of the way capitalism works. This expansion, the irrationality that you don’t ask, well, what should be increased and what should be smaller. No, no, no, no, no. That logic doesn’t work.
In capitalism, you are successful if you are growing, and you are failing if you’re stagnant. Look at the words we have. Can you imagine someone whose attitude towards the human body was as long as your arms are getting longer, everything is good. What? Yes, your cells have to reproduce yourself, but other parts of your body should stay exactly the way they are.
Otherwise your nose will, you know, look like Pinocchio. And you don’t really want that. Capitalism’s Iraq. We all have to grow with the end result that we are pushed into irrational outcomes. Germany, Italy and Japan had to grow and so they had to expand. But the other capitalist countries who also lived under this stupid logic didn’t want that.
They wanted to expand, had their own idea where they wanted to expand. So we had another World War II. We broke the late League of Nations because people, you know, Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, the Japanese invaded China in 1931, know Italy took over Ethiopia. They violated the whole idea of the League of Nations.
So we had the Second World War and we, we came out of that shaking our heads in disbelief that we could have had two such wars in, in a few years of time, first half of the 20th century. So we created the United Nations. And the whole point is you don’t do what Japan did in 31 and you.
And if you do do it, you try in every way to rationalize it as an act of self-defense is not questioning the large. Even Russia. I don’t mind saying this and may trouble some of your audience. I don’t know even Russia, whose motives are dubious and whose leader. I’m not endorsing them, but Russia can make a claim that what happened in Ukraine threatens them.
That’s plausible. Is it the real reason? I don’t know. Could be. Could maybe not be, but it’s an argument. It’s on their border. Okay, I get it. United States and Venezuela has nothing. The claim about drugs is so bogus that even in the act they hardly did that anymore. You know, it’s an afterthought.
They’re not threatened by Venezuela. No way is Venezuela a threat. Not by drugs, not by military, nothing. They want it because, well, the empire is in trouble. And anything that you can do that looks like it might forestall a further decline of the empire will be grabbed at. And I think that that’s what’s going on.
But that as Mr. Miller not smart enough to get. Choosing to rationalize it by everything about force and is a declaration to the rest of the world that the United States intends to behave exactly the way the Japanese, the Germans and the Italians said in the interwar period. We’re not doing this anymore.
Richard Eskow: You know, I don’t challenge anything you’ve said, but let me offer context that may dismay either you or some members of the audience. It is possible, in my view, that what you just Explained. What you just described is a positive development in history. And let me tell you what I mean by that.
We start with an anecdote, okay? When I was graduate school age, not in graduate school per se, but I had a number of friends from Venezuela, actually leftists, people who had been part of the revolutionary movement there, and several of whom are now well-respected economists. But one of the things. And then I spent some time in Venezuela in the early late 70s, I think.
Beautiful country and so on. I love the people of the country, but one of the things that they said to me really struck me at the time. I remember the woman who said this, I’ll leave her name out of it, but she said, you know, we in the South American left, and she had networks with the, you know, the Allende people who had already been overthrown and so on.
We would much rather deal with Henry Kissinger, a known war criminal. There was someone like Warren Christopher, who was Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, because if we go to Warren Christopher and say, this is what we’re thinking of doing, and she’s speaking as a former advisor to the Allende government in Chile, which was overthrown by the US if we go to somebody like that and say we’re going to do X, Y and Z, we’ll get all this gobbledygook about human rights and then they’ll kill us.
If we go to Henry Kissinger, war criminal, and say we’re going to do X, Y and Z, he’ll say, if you do that, I will kill you. And we find that better for our purposes than the pretense, which is just adds fog. Now, we just had the Biden administration, you know, the masters of double talk, and when it came to invoking international law for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was a violation, international, international law, then utterly dismissing it and all our international institutions to defend a genocide in Gaza.
So not to mention an occupation that’s illegal to begin with. So, you know, Trump’s lese majeste, you know this well, we’re going to take it because we want it. We they took our oil, meaning they stopped us from taking their oil. But same difference to him going to take it back. Cuba, we’re looking at that.
Honduras, we’re looking at that. We’re going to get Greenland because too many Russian boats around there. At least we know what we’re dealing with. And at least. And people are clutching their hands here or pearls or whatever here in Washington, D.C. saying, well, you know, the president of Denmark said that’s the end of NATO if Trump seizes Greenland.
And I don’t want Trump to seize Greenland, but. And NATO doesn’t sound bad to me, it shouldn’t. Has no reason to exist for the last 30 years. And I wasn’t sure of the reason beforehand. So, you know, I’m not defending it, but I’m saying that perhaps, you know, the old wine is in a new bottle where it says wine on the front.
So, you know, what, what it is. Do you get what I’m driving at?
Richard Wolff: Yes, I happen to agree with you, although my reasoning is a little different. Here’s my reasoning. It is progressive in a sense, not so much because it pulls away the veneer, as you put, you know, to summarize your point. It’s because it pulls away the veneer. But in a historical context, that’s what makes it a positive.
What I mean is we Americans don’t understand this. They really don’t. We are in an era of anti-colonialism. It took three or four hundred years, roughly from the 16th, 17th to the 20th century to build up the colonial empires. The British, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and I’m sure the Russian.
I’ve left somehow the Persian. And for at least the last century, 75 years, at the very minimum, the world has been dominated in terms of the mentality of the vast majority of people that breaking out of colonialism is human liberation. And part of it, whether it’s the Indians breaking out of the British Empire or the Vietnamese out of the French or Southwest Africa out of the German, and I could go on, it’s anti colonialism.
That’s the dominant ethos of our time. And what the United States does by making a cold, obvious colonial grab is unbelievably tone deaf about the world in which it exists. It’s a little bit like Israel being basically unable to understand why its effort at a settler colonialism is two centuries out of date.
You can’t do that anymore because if you do, the whole world will hate you. Because it isn’t what England did in Australia or New Zealand or Canada or the U.S. this is. You can’t do that now and the whole world turns against you. The Americans are. The Americans took a step in the direction of the Israelis by what they did.
And that. No one is going to miss that. Only in America will that not be understood. There’s a second thing too. I would want to say this Miller, the dim bulb they talked about, I think it was him and maybe somebody else. Spheres of influence we were supposed to believe that the United States has a sphere of influence in Latin America.
But that’s not accurate. That’s an attempt to play a game, to say, well, as they did in that December, whatever national security statement, sort of give the world the idea, well, you know, we’re retreating. We’re only bad guys in our own backyard. We recognize limits, but they don’t. For example, for the last 48 hours, I have been watching, as I’m sure you have, and others, the United States intervene in a ship in the North Sea.
A ship that was in. In Venezuela doesn’t in fact, have any oil on it, but it might, might be involved in some sort of shipping that might have Venezuelan oil in the past or maybe even planned in the future. Then where’s your sphere of influence? Either it’s in Latin America, but if it’s in Latin America, you can’t do stuff like that on the open sea in another part of the world.
And then later this morning, I discover that Lindsey Graham’s proposal has now been endorsed by Mr. Trump. And I quote the royal “we.” “We” are going to punish the leaders of India, I believe it was India, Brazil and China, because they keep buying oil from Russia. But that’s the behavior of someone who thinks their sphere of influence encompasses that.
In other words, the sphere of influence isn’t a sphere of influence. It’s a demand to control the whole world. The basic trade and interactions, all Asia, Europe. What’s the sphere of influence? I mean, this.
Richard Eskow: Well, and excuse me, but last I looked, Palestine was not in Latin America. So. No, I understand what you’re saying. Of course, first of all, in terms of the sort of overtness that I was talking about, we don’t disagree. I think they’re expressing sentiments that are widely hated around the world and increasingly here at home.
That, to me is part of the plus of it all, is that as people see what it is, I think the resistance, external and internal, will grow greater over time than it even is. I think in terms of the spheres of influence, I mean, it’s nonsensical. By that logic, I suppose they should let China dominate India and Pakistan, which they’re certainly not going to do, and on and on and on.
But to me, you know, I want to tie it back to where we started and where you started in terms of the logic of capitalism and the need for infinite expansion, because we exist, of course, on a finite planet with finite resources. One of the reasons we have these space fantasies floating around among our billionaires and so on, is in an attempt to either distract us or fool themselves from the finite nature of the resources we have so they can keep playing what they’re playing at.
But for the us, it seems to me the obvious thing to do, or reaching limits. Limits here, limits there, economic limits and structural limits and environmental limits, like, okay, well, then let’s grab Venezuela’s oil. That’ll put it off for a little while. Let’s grab Gaza’s real estate. That’ll put it off for a little while.
And so to me, and I mean, this is really your ballpark more than mine. But to me, it seems like it’s an inevitable, you know, the political economy. Right. It’s just an inevitable outgrowth. And people say, well, you hear the experts say it’s going to be good for America if we X, Y, Z.
Well, which America? Which Americans? For the people who are profiting off the current system, sure. But for the vast majority, not so much. It seems to me that this is almost highlighting and will at some point certainly highlight that we can’t go on with a system based on infinite growth in a finite world without facing it.
And even this stuff’s gonna run out. Even if we succeed at all of it, it’s gonna run out someday. It’s gonna just heighten the contradictions, as somebody said. So what are your thoughts on that?
Richard Wolff: No, I, I, I, I love what you’re doing here. You know, there’s a, a message that is taught often in economics courses early on, and the teacher will explain to the students that economics is a Greek word or has its origin in the Greek language. And where it refers to managing the household.
Economic. I forget how it breaks down, but economics would be, if you understood the Greek, managing a household. And a man. Imagine a household in which the production of things had to always be bigger. It would be lunacy, right? The room where we have our laundry has to get bigger. Of course it doesn’t.
You know, you want some things to get bigger. Let’s say the patio or the yard where you can sit outside. And that’s important. We want to make a bigger yard so we can all sit together that. But then let’s make something else smaller so we have the space. The rational thing is to not have everybody going out there making whatever they’re responsible for.
Larger. You know, every new technology is installed if it’s profitable, but it has other consequences than profit. For example, if it renders large numbers of people unemployed, that’s a problem. What are you going to do about that? Pretend it isn’t there? The answer is yes. That’s how economics works. I’m only worried about one thing you said, okay?
And that is yes, there are people who are going to be upset by the way Mr. Miller talks and the, and the brazenness of all of this and the suffering that will be imposed on Venezuela now, which will make whatever they had under Mr. Maduro look like child’s play, etc. Etc. And that is that the American people include an awful lot of people who will be adjusted in their mentality, who will be brought into a notion that all of this is necessary, that all of this is simply the America first, that what everybody else in the world is doing is more or less the same, we’re just better at it.
Something like that. That kind of mentality, you might call it a MAGA mentality, will be what Mr. Trump’s. You know, you can see it in that tragic case in Minnesota with ice, where it’s crystal clear to me and to millions of others that the killing of that young woman was not justified or necessary.
But from the President on down, his acolytes are already explaining to us that she, this woman was, I quote Now, Mr. Johnson, the head of the House of Representatives, weaponizing her automobile. Therefore, the officer who shot her was shooting her in self-defense. An unarmed woman and a supposedly well-trained police officer.
You know, it’s the same story. He came at me with a knife, even though we can’t find a knife. Oh, I see, Officer, you shot him in the back. He couldn’t have been coming at you. Well, but I thought I saw. Now we know where we are, and we know where we are here too.
This is a country that is going to have to, given the path it’s chosen, is going to have to do one unspeakable thing after another. And it’s going to have to have the Millers of this world come forward and blather out something they took five minutes to concoct in the PR office around the corner.
And it’s. That’s a very, very dangerous thing. This country is splitting apart and what this President is doing, he is simply forging ahead. His base is shrinking every week. The polls show it, the feeling in the country shows it. But it’s full speed ahead because he really doesn’t know what else to do.
And his life has taught him always to double down on what, no matter what goes wrong. Okay? That’s why only something like an explosion of new horrors from the Epstein scandal that can bring him down. But the rest of it is he’s on automatic.
Richard Eskow: Oh, I don’t think he’ll be brought down. And if I gave the impression that because they’re becoming more overt, it’s going to be a walk in the park, I miscommunicated because it’s certainly not my belief. But, you know, the world of biology, I can’t think of any examples of anything in the world of biology that’s designed to grow indefinitely, that doesn’t wind up lethal.
I mean, cancer is designed to grow indefinitely. It kills the host. Crabgrass grows indefinitely, kills the lawn. At some point, it’s going to be catastrophic. And I should also be clear that one of the reasons why I value these conversations that you and I have is that I think as the crisis, I used to say, as when the crisis arrives, I think it’s here, but as it increases, as it intensifies, I think it could go either way.
I mean, I think it could go in this country. It could go towards a very totalitarian outcome where people lash out in fear and fury and confusion. I think there are elements of that happening already. I think this government is a reflection of that. Or I think it could play out in terms of a re fluorescence of, you know, truly enlightened, communal, cooperative left thinking.
And I think, you know, that’s why I think conversations like these are so important. But one thing I do not think will last. And you know, history may not absolve me on this, but one thing I do not think will last is the kind of centrist concession, consensus that was going on for a long time.
You know, neoliberalism, that kind of thing, that, oh, we just need a little more austerity. And as the Democrats would put it, everybody has to compete on any level playing field. Well, first of all, it ain’t never level. Secondly, why are we competing? You know, I mean, there’s only one prize and a whole lot of players that’s, that’s not going to work out.
So I think that consensus is, is dying. And I think it’s incumbent on us to encourage those voices that, those forms of thinking that model something better. But I did not mean to suggest that I think we’re like out of the woods because people like Steven Miller.
Richard Wolff: I really did understand that. I’m just worried, I guess I’m very worried about how big of an audience he will be able to hold on to as, as the excrement hits the cooling equipment. You know, I have been depressed in my life more than a few times by the capacity of the human mind to adjust to its circumstances, no matter how grim they get.
If there’s a final thing I could offer, it’s a quote from Marx. It’s pretty well known, and what Marx said is that every economic system that the world has seen starts out by recommending itself to people so that it gets adopted because it can and it will develop what Marx called the forces of production, the quality of life, the quality of goods and services better than the system it’s replacing.
So when capitalism emerges in Europe from feudalism, it champions, you know, machines rather than people, the growth in productivity and all of that science, you know, the study, so we can be more productive. And then Marx makes this incredible point based on his studies. He says what makes a system disappear is when it goes from being the agent of progressive change into a fetter that’s holding it back.
When upon a new system emerges, it says, go with us because we won’t hold it back. So with that in mind, here’s what struck me over the last three or four days. Mr. Trump officially withdrew the United States from something like 60 or 70 international organizations. And the two examples given in the press were climate organizations and organizations devoted to gender equality.
And then I realized, oil. He’s trying to keep the world on oil as part of what’s for the Venezuela, because we got a big hold on oil and we can maintain our big power in part because we can control the oil, but that the world has to use oil and that therefore anything and everything having to do with the wind or the sun or the other sources of energy have to be.
So the Chinese make the event, you know, the efficient electric vehicle the Chinese developed, the solar panels. They’ve run away with those industries. The United States will never catch up on them. They know that Ford recently announced it’s not even producing electric trucks the way it had committed itself. Well, Marx might be sitting there smiling and would say to us, look, this is a system now committing itself in its largest member, the United States, to holding back the transition that the whole rest of the world thinks is crucial for technological advancement.
Stop burning fossil fuel. So this is the system now associated. This is Luddite behavior. And, you know, and the fund that’s made of Luddites should be made fun of here and will be and will be, right?
Richard Eskow: But we also, in addition, Trump is declaring control over oil because China is controlling the majority of the rare earths and other minerals needed for electronic vehicles, batteries and digital technology and so on. So in a way, he’s got to double down on the technology, the fuel technology of the past because he doesn’t have access to the mineral technology of the future.
We could go on like this forever. But I think the thread here is one we’ve been talking about for a long time, which is the unsustainability of a system based on constant expansion. And I guess I’ll close with a quote from Aimee Césaire, who said, a civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization. That’s my closing thought. Yours?
Richard Wolff: No, I. I can’t do any better than that. I think what we’re doing is we’re teasing out. Because the mass media repress it, basically, we’re teasing out the messages inherent in what’s going on that the dominant culture does not want to think about.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: And that’s what we should be doing.
Richard Eskow: Absolutely.