Film Sessions "Does Capitalism Actually Reduce Poverty?" with Professor Richard Wolff

 

Editor's note: in the week since we've last talked, I published a medium-length essay on the dark side of Twitter's business model, a "fun" episode of No Fugazi about the 1998 liberal propaganda film The Siege, and a more serious podcast about the fallout from Trump's Chicken Coup and the chud rush at Capitol Hill. As you might imagine then, when I finally stumbled out of the editing room Saturday morning my brain was basically a jumbo Slurpee; so today we're going to return to the roots of the Film Sessions project and focus on short, informative but not particularly challenging video from those darned Gravel Teens again.  

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In light of the fact that one would hope a six minute video addressing the simple question, "does capitalism actually reduce poverty" will largely be able to speak for itself, I'd like to start off by focusing on my reasons for choosing this particular video to share today. 

First and foremost, I picked today's video because I'm a longtime fan of Professor Richard D. Wolff's work and indeed, I'm actually a little bit surprised it's taken us nine whole film sessions to get back to a video he helped create. I first encountered Wolff myself way back in 2013, during two lengthy interview discussions on the Bill Moyers Show entitled "Richard Wolff on Fighting for Economic Justice and Fair Wages" and "Richard Wolff on Capitalism's Destructive Power" respectively. It was ultimately however his July 2013 Guardian article about the capitalist gutting of my hometown, Detroit, Michigan, that transformed me into a full blown Wolff-stan. Of course, back then I was still rather suspicious of this "socialism and Marxism stuff," but very excited about Wolff's idea that the labor class should rise up and overthrow the rich; thanks reactionary American education system!

So just who is Richard Wolff? Well in 2012, the New York Times rather backhandedly called him "probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist" in a magazine article that nevertheless admitted Wolff had warned them about the impending financial meltdown, and the excruciatingly slow recovery that would ensue under neoliberal austerity policies, before either had even happened yet:

The key word here is of course "prominent," but perhaps unsurprisingly considering the New York Times' longstanding role in selling neofedualism and forever wars, while helping to cement and protect ruling class power, the word hardly does Wolff's contribution to our discourse much justice. Over the past ten or so years, professor Wolff has lead the pack among left wing academics embracing the power of the internet to argue class politics and socialist economic positions in plain and accessible language, literally anywhere, anytime they'll let him on camera. In addition to his scholarly pursuits and the books he's written, Wolff's work includes a cornucopia of online videos, countless interviews and numerous debates; it is quite frankly pretty hard to crawl Left Wing Youtube for very long without running into a video featuring Wolff. 

Personally, I sincerely believe that without his trailblazing work, we might not have seen folks like the equally excellent Mark Blyth take a similar path to public prominence, for example; and on that line of argument alone, Wolff has more than earned his place at the discussion table. All of which isn't of course to say that I agree with everything Wolff says, but it's certainly fair to say that I do agree with the overwhelming majority of it and if we're going to keep featuring Left Wing videos from Youtube in this space, Richard Wolff is going to come up a lot - so now is as good a time as any for us to meet him and get some background on his work.

My second reason for choosing this video comes out of a recent Mastodon discussion in which I (gently) critiqued the Youtube left's approach to combating the reactionary Death Star that is PragerU; a borderline fascist propaganda outfit that recently published (then removed) a video that sought to defend statues of Confederate general Robert E. Lee based on the argument that slavery wasn't necessarily a bad thing. In that discussion, I pointed out the futility of addressing PragerU propaganda videos one by one, without addressing the underlying "common sense" assumptions this propaganda seeks to take advantage of; but I didn't provide an example of how to tackle the problem correctly - and today's video from the Gravel Institute is a pretty good guideline for what I feel is the right way to "take down" PragerU. 

So what's the secret sauce? Well, you can keep your arguments short and to the point, while backing them with some snazzy animations, but the difference here is really more about content than style. If you want to beat PragerU, you can start by ignoring everything vampire sh*tlord Denis Prager says on the surface and instead go after the nonsensical, pro-bourgeoisie ideals that give the ridiculous things he says the appearance of credibility to the uninformed. In this video, professor Wolff goes hard after the idea that capitalism reduces poverty by pointing out the staggering flaws in how the right, and capitalists as a whole choose to define poverty in the first place - namely as an income of less than $1.90 a day; a figure based on literally nothing and bearing no real connection to the standard of living, or even the cost of survival, for any given person on earth. In fact, as Wolff's discussion highlights, when you use numbers based on reality and remove the accomplishments of socialist programs in China, capitalism has largely increased and maintained global poverty; which will probably not come as a huge surprise to children of the modern neoliberal order reading this today. 

Overall, and given the limits of a six minute Youtube video, I think you could do a lot worse than Wolff's discussion "Does Capitalism Actually Reduce Poverty?" from the Gravel Institute; check it out below:

Additional Resources

The Gravel Institute Youtube Channel

Richard D. Wolff Youtube Channel

 Democracy at Work Youtube Channel

Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

5 Myths About Global Poverty

Poverty Has Always Accompanied Capitalism

Richard D. Wolff (.com)

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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