Richard Wolff has only a short time to talk before he's off to give another speech. Then there's another, later the same day. The last year has been "heady," says Mr. Wolff, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In just the past few months, he's been interviewed by the BBC twice and the Turkish press, and appeared on countless talk-radio shows. He stars in an Al Gore-style documentary -- Capitalism Hits the Fan -- making the university campus circuit. In November, he's off to lecture in Brussels, then Berlin. "I'm in a whirlwind."
Since the 1980s, Mr. Wolff, though a graduate of America's finest universities, has quietly toiled away, promoting a model of Marxism.
Nothing like the discredited Chinese or Soviet versions, he hastens to say, but rather a kind of complex of commercial-industrial kibbutzes, with shared profits and decentralized management -- largely unnoticed. This last recession changed that. Suddenly, he says, audiences are growing, open to his arguments that "the human race can do better than capitalism" with its roller-coaster vagaries that seem not to end, no matter what regulations governments install. "It's been lean for the last 25 years, until about 14 months ago, and then everything changed. I do two to three interviews a week. Sometimes more," he says. "It's very nice. It's a little exhausting."
That a man who not just critiques capitalism -- who doesn't?-- but argues it should be dismantled and replaced should be so popular in the fall of 2009 is a curious thing. Certainly, this time last year, it seemed natural for the Washington Post to feature a story entitled "The End of American Capitalism?", that a Reuters columnist would posit that "capitalism as we know it is on its deathbed" and that, no surprise, leaders of Iran and Venezuela both crowed about "the end of capitalism." A year ago, after the jolting collapse of Lehman Brothers, many were quite convinced our economy was in a death spiral worse than that of the Great Depression. But now? Retail sales and home sales are at least stabilizing, the Dow Jones index is up nearly 50% from its spring trough, and the U. S. unemployment rate, while an unsightly 9.7%, has not yet reached even 1982 levels, let alone the miserable 25% rate of the '30s. Virtually every economist believes the recession, which started in December 2007, ended this summer. Capitalism did not, as some predicted, come close to ruining the world.
Yet, calls to cast off the system don't just persist, but are popular. Leftist filmmaker Michael Moore this week unveiled his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, in which he calls the system "evil," demanding a revolution uproot it. A feature film based on Naomi Klein's bestselling anti-free-market polemic, The Shock Doctrine, comes out next week. And after the Toronto Star last week gave over its opinion page to his essay -- "Marx and his ideas rise from the dustbin of history" -- York University's political scientist and paleo-Marxist Leo Panitch, like Mr. Wolff, suddenly finds himself fielding calls from intrigued interviewers.
For Mr. Wolff, the riddle's answer lies in the fact that U. S. home foreclosures and unemployment rates -- two economic metrics that hit most directly home--continue to climb, whatever steadying there may be of the gross domestic product. It is also, he notes, far more acceptable to publicly question capitalism than in past decades when the threat of Soviet-style Communism loomed large. "I think we are now far enough away from the kind of simplemindednesses of the Cold War, in which everybody who says anything critical of capitalism is presumed to be an agent of Moscow, Beijing or something else," he says.
While it's true that what seemed like public hysteria over the collapse of capitalism has ebbed, what the relatively short but deep recession contributed to was a social anxiety about the way our economy operates, says Christine Monnier, a sociologist at the College of DuPage, outside Chicago. Quite different from a moral panic, which passes once the alleged perpetrators -- say, closet Communists in the McCarthy era -- are singled out and stopped, the meltdown offered a less clear cut moral narrative, with no readily identifiable villains or obvious remedy. "We know we're supposed to take action, but it's not clear against what and it's not clear what effect we expect that we can say, 'OK, we've succeeded in ending something,' " she says. "And that basically leaves everybody in conditions of uncertainty." While many of us have some notion of some of the broad factors that were fuel for an economic inferno -- too much liquidity combined with irresponsible lending and borrowing -- the finer details elude most. "Just like we don't really 'see' climate change, most people do not really understand the financial crisis. Who understands credit default swaps and financial derivatives except for insiders? But the consequences are, of course, very real and devastating."
And so anxiety lingers, as we are all too cognizant that this may, and likely will, happen again. "I'm not saying [people have] given up on their infatuation with capitalism as a system -- hardly. But they're in a state of disarray," Mr. Wolff says.
"They try to come up with explanations for what happened, for believable reasons why we wouldn't have to worry about this happening again and again. But it's a self-confidence that isn't there and it creates the space for folks like me."
Without an obvious, real scapegoat to blame and punish, some might take the lesson that capitalism itself is the culprit. Those who have been saying such things for decades are surely more than happy to help persuade us of it.
And so there is a patent fashionability to these critiques, which helps spur them along, even in the face of nascent recovery. This is, unquestionably, Ms. Klein and Mr. Moore's moment; anti-capitalists though they may claim to be, there are publishers, film distributors and bank accounts to feed, and they cannot be eager to end the feast early. University economics departments are already being aggressively reshaped, Mr. Wolff says, to include more capitalist-critical professors, while professors, once followers of Milton Friedman, reinvent themselves to remain relevant to a market of students more persuaded by The Shock Doctrine and Michael Moore than by Alan Greenspan. If
the capitalist system hasn't quite sold the rope for its own hanging, as Marx once predicted, it may have sold the lash for its whipping.
Even as economic metrics stabilize, anti-capitalists are adapting to changing market trends adroitly, beginning to focus less on the once-predicted catastrophic failure of current economic models -- for, whatever the carnage in credit-thirsty sectors, the fact is most corporations remain healthy, going concerns -- and more on issues of inequality and the gap between the super-wealthy and the rest of us. "The richest 1%, where is it written that they get to have 95%, that they get to equal the 95% in terms of the financial wealth? That is absolutely obscene. It's immoral," Mr. Moore fulminated during Wednesday's CBC interview. "Without huge popular pressure for structural reform, the crisis will prove to have been nothing more than a very wrenching adjustment. The result will be even greater inequality than before the crisis," Ms. Klein wrote in The Progressive magazine last month.
They may have found a powerful new selling feature. Recent surveys that have tried to gauge Americans' opinions about capitalism reveal either a public terribly confused about it, or remarkably perceptive about differences between its theory and its American manifestation. In the dark days of December 2008, as General Motors careened toward bankruptcy, a poll by Rasmussen Reports found 70% of voters endorsed a "free market" over any economy steered by government. A subsequent poll, just months later, found only 53% endorsing "capitalism" over socialism, while a third, around the same time, found that two out of three Americans believe government and big business collude in ways that hurt consumers and investors. "The fact that a 'free-market economy' attracts substantially more support than 'capitalism' may suggest some skepticism about whether capitalism in the United States today relies on free markets," said pollster Scott Rasmussen, trying to square the results. Americans seem to believe in free markets; they're just not sure they're getting them.
They may also suspect that, as appealing as something less hierarchical and more egalitarian may sound, the evidence a system like that could function, let alone better our current model, is hazy. Whatever its faults, most are aware that the current system, applied globally, has lifted masses out of poverty with staggering fleetness, says Will Wilkinson, research fellow at the U. S.-based Cato Institute, a free-market oriented think-tank, who studies happiness and inequality. (A Goldman Sachs study last year found that, worldwide, the proportion of people subsisting on less than US$3 a day, adjusted for inflation, dropped from half the world's population in the 1970s to just 17% by 2000. Most in the large, middle class, he says, probably also know that, however meager their income looks relative to CEOs like Blackstone Group's Stephen Schwarzman, paid US$700-million last year, or Oracle's Larry Ellison, at US$550-million, their lives are pretty decent. There may be debate over how to redistribute those incomes to maximize everyone's happiness, he says. But studies indicate that the freer the markets -- even when coupled with massive income redistribution efforts, as in, say, Denmark-- the happier people are.
"The Michael Moores, the Naomi Kleins, they have these vague ideas about economic democracy and certain kinds of participatory economic structures, but the evidence for those kinds of things isn't good," Mr. Wilkinson says. Ms. Klein, for one, regularly waxes romantic over the impromptu civic engagement that sprung up on the anxious streets of Buenos Aires -- "a whiff of utopia" as a New Yorker profile last year put it, "when the political system had virtually disintegrated" from currency collapse. It was the "most inspiring thing I've ever seen," she swooned, of these people gathering to figure out how to feed their families. "She likes this idea of people having to get together and collectively determine their fate. It's kind of the economic version of the way certain kinds of conservatives become wistful for the sense of patriotic solidarity that occurs during war: 'Let's get the spirit of 9/12 back,'" Mr. Wilkinson says.
Those with suddenly voguish anti-capitalist agendas may welcome, even egg on this confusion, this questioning of the system, he says. "But it's the spirit of crisis and fear. And I don't think that's something that a decent person wants to sustain."
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